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Blackout Protocol VR
GAMEPLAY
First day on the job you get trapped when a a power-out hits. You must bypass the electrical emergency locks on the door to get get out. Blackout Protocol VR is a virtual reality escape-room game. It is designed to be playable by visually-impaired and blind players.
Blackout Protocol VR was designed in collaboration with visually impaired gamers. This game is part of my masters thesis "Blackout Protocol - Designing an Immersive VR Audiogame" for the Game Design and Development program at Aalto University, Espoo, Finland. Read full thesis here.
You may view, copy, edit, or study the source code and the the Unity project for non-commercial purposes and publish non-commercially with attribution https://github.com/solitar86/Blackout-protocol-VR
ROLE & DUTIES
— Lead designer: game design, puzzle design, level design, systems design, narrative design
— Programmer: haptic system, audio system, TTS (text-to-speech) system, game play.
— Accessibility research.
DESIGN CHALLENGES
Audiogames are a niche subgenre of digital games which aim to be entirely playable without visual information.
In a VR game with graphics the illusion of real-life spacial constraints is easily communicated, but an audiogame requires different solutions. Navigation of a virtual space also has different problems to solve when the environment is communicated with audio instead of visuals.
Particularly 3d level design principles go out the window when the player can't see the environment. A new set of principles are needed which I discuss in detail in my full thesis.
Takeaway: accessibility in gaming is design choice and almost anything can be achieved when the will to do so is there.
