#accessibility in videogames

[antivancathedral]

Okay I understand people feeling a little babied by being told what options are the romance options but personally as the most socially awkward most autistic motherfucker in the world, I'm very glad it did.

I already have trouble understanding how my own tone comes across to others in real life. I've often being accused of treating people like theyre stupid when teaching the something, even though to me I'm just trying to be as clear as possible so no misunderstandings are had. It's very difficult for me to tell the tone of how a character will say something, especially with nothing but a line of text that most often doesn't match the dialogue at all (which can't be helped, because most times the dialogue is too long to fit).

As someone who already replays conversations several times to find the most "in character" responses for my Rook, flavor indicators are crucial for me. I'm not here to play a Telltale "Glass him" game every time I talk to my companions.

I don't really see what the problem with this is either. The previous games used colors/icons to tell you what flavor of response each option is, yeah? Didn't only Origins give you the exact phrase you would say due to the protagonist not being voiced, thus eliminating the need for dialogue wheel icons?

I understand not wanting to be babied and I get poking fun at the het cis gamer dudes for needing to be told they're flirting with a man, but this is an accessibility feature. Maybe that's not something you need but other people (like me) very much do. And I don't think anyone who has ever talked to another person can say it's particularly comfortable to have someone think you're flirting with them when you really, truly and honestly were not.

[smithsibsceo]

zane and kai bonded in the early seasons by discovering new music together. both didnt really have a great access to it growing up (there was an only an old radio or maybe a scratchy vinyl player in ignacia's library and zane's village had no electricity) so they mainly grew up hearing their respective villages' traditional live music. Hearing those 'end-of-2012-mashup' compilations changed both of their lives

[totalstupidityaddict]

do you want to play Slay the Princess but are put off by the possibility of gore?

I have just the thing for you — I've made an interactive google slides page to let you know what might be coming up in the game, so you can be warned of things you might not want to see and avoid them without constantly spoiling everything that could possibly happen in the entire game.

You can find it here and at the link above!

I made this on my own, so I might have missed some mistakes — please let me know if you find any! I want the game to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible

I am capable of making a high-contrast version for those with visual difficulties — please let me know if that's something the people want!

[bananonbinary]

somewhat kicking a bees nest here, but hear me out-

"homemade and handcrafted goods should cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars" is why attaching a monetary value to esoteric concepts like "time" and "skill" (and, you know, "a human being") is a bad system.

now, before the pitchforks come out, i am not bitching because i want a handcrafted quilt for $20. i do recognize that it would be unbelievably unfair to the quilter. but like...doesn't that sound obscene? that we live in a system where things that used to be pretty mundane are now only available to the upper class, or the creator just fucking dies? where in order for someone to make anything artistic, they need to be independently wealthy or ONLY cater to wealthy people?

again, i am not suggesting that artists should sell me their shit at a horrific loss. im not really suggesting any solution at all here, we're between a bit of a rock and a hard place. but it feels really inherently fucked up to me that the only options are "Artists taken advantage of" and "only rich people get art."

anyways, UBI huh

[lgbtransgirl]

So videogame difficulty

Hard should not just mean "easier to be killed, harder to kill". Personally I think it should be that certain enemies use better AI, more advanced tactics, actively respond to things you do (such as buff & debuffs) and have expanded move sets.

It makes the harder difficulty actually more difficult rather than time consuming.

HOWEVER

I know some people prefer it as it is, so I propose a solution.

Normal: Standard gameplay. No easy mode (will explain more)

Hard: Suggestions above

Arcade: Just like an old arcade game that pads out it's length by being artificially difficult, enemies have more HP and hit harder. Also you get less stuff. Type of shit you expect from dark souls or OG arcade cabinets

IN ADDITION

I think accessibility options should be in every game. Color blind modes, modes to display sound triggers on screen in some way for hearing impaired people, longer timing windows including I-frames, etc.

Some of these would genuinely make the game easier for people, especially if you can do more than toggle on and off (say a % increase or even decrease for higher difficulty for I-frames)

[bogkeep]

deltarune ch4 spoilers

i think i tried my hand at the gerson boss battle for At Least two hours before i finally googled it to see if i was at least CLOSE to beating him (my efforts had gotten me about halfway at best), and only then found out he was the Secret Boss of the chapter. for some reason i had an easier time unlocking the Secret Boss Battle than finding the next path of the main plot, and while it was clearly implied that getting the axe wasn't Mandatory i REALLY WANTED TO GET IT................ FOR SUSIE................. i just had not expected to actually run into the Hard Boss Battle Encounter hahaha. and maybe i'll try it again in the future! maybe i will get that axe someday.............

ANYWAY the point is i regret nothing because the battle theme is such a banger. i mean the entire deltarune soundtrack is back to back certified bangers (how is every overworld theme so gooooood). but the banjo parts? that's banjo, right, or at least a similar instrument. banjos are essential for a tortoise themed soundtrack. i just really love it when there's banjo

[coolmagoloraskblog]

(oh snap! it's UT! from Undertale! He found the box!)

(also "sunny eyes" is his nickname for this blog's magolor)

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

Ive seenyou mention wuxia a few times now and i wonder what that is. Would you mind explaining it to me?

not the most qualified person to explain this as i'm not, in fact, from china; but i've read a couple of wuxia so here goes:

wuxia is a genre of fiction from china specifically, about martial artists in ancient china. i don't think a specific time period is like required? obviously some dynasties are more popular but idk how it goes in that front. it just has to be Not Today and probably Too Long Ago. like pre industral revolution i think. again idk if that's a requirement, but most i've seen are from around the same relative murky pre-electricity era.

xianxia is a subgenre of wuxia that's specifically more fantasy-like, and it's not just martial arts, but also spiritual powers and cultivation (which i have no fucking clue how to explain without two hours and three tangents other than chinese magic system. if you've ever heard of chi/qi as an energy, it appears there). so like- genshin is by all accounts a xianxia, it just doesn't use the more common specific xianxia terms like cultivation. some of those are very weird to translate and probably not common for the average non-wuxia reader, so it makes sense why they're going for alternatives.

chongyun and xingqiu and xianyun are very much straight out of a xianxia. xianyun's entire story quest was the closest genshin has gotten to a straight xianxia plot so far. i highly reccomend ashikai's video on unnecessary visions if you want more info on why genshin is a xianxia hahah

cyanide narwhal has some talk of some stuff from xianxia, but that's mostly because well- fucking liyue, that's how it works there. the whole light energy striking down someone who's getting powerful and giving them godhood if they survive the strike is, while not exactly like that, something that happens in some xianxia as well. like the way adepti work in general is just very xianxia. ashikai does a much better job explaining it than i do tbh but yeah

TL;DR: wuxia is chinese martial arts fiction in ancient china, and xianxia is a wuxia subgenre with more magic elements. also genshin is a xianxia

[jellisdraws]

Dragons Dogma 2

[marimomo]

one time in 2010 or so i wrote and posted a detailed how-to guide here on tumblr to help people set up a PSP emulator and play persona 3 portable, hakuouki, and some other otomes games/jrpgs. i was very young, dead broke, and never would have been able to afford these games or a fucking PSP otherwise. i really enjoyed them and just wanted to share them with people like me, who could barely afford to feed and clothe themselves but still wanted to play older games that were prohibitively expensive to access.

i will never forget the 4-5 people who came into my aksbox being nasty and telling me to delete my guide because we need to show financial support for these games in the west, i was the reason why japanese publishers would never have a real market here, they were going to report me, etc. then they went on to tag me on their blogs calling me out, and all their friends harassed me until i deleted my guide. i didn’t just delete my post, i deleted my entire blog too. i felt so humiliated and rejected, like i was this stupid poor little rat who couldn’t afford to—and didn’t deserve to—enjoy the same hobby as these people.

if by any chance you people are still around, i want you to know from the bottom of my heart that you are massive fucking losers. genuinely.

anyway i don’t have the time or patience to write another full guide, but here’s a three-step emulation guide for PSP and others:

download PPSSPP for your platform of choice (PC, mobile, etc.): https://www.ppsspp.org/download/ (or see fantasyanime’s post for a list of other top emulators)

search for and download the ROM of your choice: https://r-roms.github.io/

follow documentation on the PPSSPP site (or other emulator) for your platform to get started

[mysticdragon3md3]

[gay-pidgeons]

theygotta invent a hanging out but for us . erm . doyou like video games

no sorry ive never heard of those before.real answer is Hmmmm i could yeah . i dont do a lot of gamering but i could i just dont have object permanence with them

wait why the fuck is it an inage huh

[maraschinotopped]

cringetober day 30 (videogame). honestly i feel like i didnt go as insane about outcore on here when i first played it as i should have. remedying this by going as hard as possible on this art piece. i love girlies going through the fucking horrors <3

[shinyobservationtree]

I think trying to be realistic in art is like, a creativity killer

[timaeustumbls]

Very upset to find out that the puppet game with the sexy puppet, the puppet game I've been looking forward to for months, is too hard for me to play. I hate the no difficulty-settings thing. I HATE it. My neurological shit means my eye hand coordination is shit, I cannot play these games. I'm missing out on more and more games because people think only difficulty means you really played the fucking game.

[brightatmidnight]

The Chaser’s Voyage Starmap for 2024

Hello everyone. Cameron and I are back from our winter break and ready to continue our work on (and hopefully finish up) The Chaser’s Voyage this year. So first, let’s go over what we’ve accomplished last year by looking at the Starmap for the game.

Last year, we revamped the tutorial, we added in a new client type, the aligned cartographer, and we updated client stories to improve randomization and fall more in line with our game’s lore. We also made other client tweaks such as highlighting mentions of factions in the client stories, so that you, the player, can really know which clients are good and which will lead to a horrible death.  Along the way, we made plenty of little updates, including making some UI changes to improve the experience for gamepad users. When we first made this Starmap, we put the biggest obstacles and challenges first, but we didn’t anticipate some unexpected challenges, like prioritizing implementing gamepad support and making a full performance overhaul. Now though, we are happy with how these things have come together and we’re ready to tackle the final parts of The Chaser’s Voyage before launch.

So what are those parts?

They’re the fun little extras that we’ve been dying to get into the game for a long time now. The first is our lore, which takes the form of our Crew Journal. We’ve talked a bit about it before, but to reiterate, it’s pretty much where a bulk of our game universe’s history and character backstories lie. They’ll take the form of various in-universe pieces of media, such as news articles, private messages, or non-voiced character interactions. It’s all extra stuff, but we’ve made a huge effort to ensure that the galaxy you’re flying the Chaser through is a reflection of a consistent world full of other stories to tell or have yet to be told.

With so much lore though, all together it’s the same amount of words as a short novel, one of the first problems we were encountering with the Journal was how it affected the startup loadtime. We actually had all the lore in the game for a while in outdated UI, but since it was inaccessible we removed it for the Early Access builds. Luckily, Cameron seems to have found a promising solution already. At the time of this writing, we are now exploring how we want to present the Crew Journal visually. So, fingers crossed that we’ll be able to get that into an early access build soon.

After that, we’ll only have one more major feature to work on, which is the inclusion of our training mode, the Flight Simulator. This will allow players to create their own scenarios that they can use as practice for the main game. For instance, if pirates chasing you through minefields are always giving you a hard time, you can set the simulator to those same conditions and practice until you master the encounter. You can also adjust your starting health and choose which systems are already damaged upon entering the encounter. The cool thing about implementing this feature is that we already have it in the game, it’s just inaccessible. The reason for that is that is two fold. 1: There are options only intended for our use (to make it easier to capture exactly the footage we want for trailers since so much of our game is determined randomly). And 2: We are planning on overhauling the visuals for the Flight Sim UI, since the ones we have now are fairly bare bones.

After the Flight Sim, it’s a matter of cleaning a few things up, maybe adding some features we didn’t think of at the time, and bug testing before finally launching out of Early Access. Some of these features we’ve already implemented, such as the Voyager+ and Captain+ modes, which lets players play the Ace mode’s encounter randomization on lower difficulties. One of the big things that needs to be cleaned up is our options menu, which is not finalized since we don’t want to set anything in stone while we’re still developing the game and adding new options and setting.

Now, you may have noticed that we also have a “Milestone” between “Phase 1” and “Phase 2”. We wanted to reach a more polished state before we started really using VoxPop’s platform. We are still definitely hoping to collaborate with streamers in order to get the word out there, especially after last year’s updates. Neither Cameron nor I are really into marketing, but we’re determined to do everything we can to make The Chaser’s Voyage succeed.

I have a lot of high hopes for this year. We’re gonna keep working towards making The Chaser’s Voyage really soar and we’re hoping you’ll be with us when this voyage finally takes off!

For more updates on The Chaser’s Voyage, be sure to check back on our blog, follow The Chaser's Voyage and Bright at Midnight on Twitter, or join our Discord! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam.

- Eos//G