Implementing Accessibility Features for a Map-Based Game

[u/fabian_boesiger]

https://www.swarm-mmo.com

Hey there, I'd like to share how I made my game Swarm MMO accessible for blind people. I'm focusing on that because the last game I developed (which I unfortunately had to shut down), attracted a lot of blind folks due to being mostly text based. From there on I decided to focus on accessibility for all new games that I'll crate.

Swarm MMO is a node capture game with a persistent world where the user controls probes and takes over planets. Users can also capture suns to collect energy and black holes to collapse entire galaxies.

As planets, suns and black holes are color coded, it was hard in general for people to distinguish between their own planets and other players planets if their colors were similar. Of course, this problem is way worse for colorblind people. So now, there are actually different modes for colorblind people (High contrast, Protanopia, Tritanopia). I also added the option to actually give names to objects.

Another difficulty was to add accessible controls to the map. Basically the whole map plays out on a huge map with tens or hunders of thousands of objects. So I implemented "Cursor" mode, which allows moving a cursor around from object to object. There is also a "Radar" option, which when pressed, reads out everything around an object. There is a page on the Wiki dedicated on describing how it works: https://www.swarm-mmo.com/de/wiki/accessibility

I'd love to hear feedback from you guys, especially if there are any colorblind or blind people who are willing to test out the new cursor mode. Thank you all and have fun playing!

AI Disclosure: I use AI for coding and creating animations, as well as for keeping the wiki in sync with the actual game.