Game Jam: A Game For The Blind

Assignment Overview: With this exercise, I plan to have a memory game with cards faced down and the player can hover their mouse over each card, letting them hear each designated number for each card. The whole idea came from the game of “Chess”, it’s a little bit different but kind of the same gist or at least it inspired me to make the game in this sort of format. When I was kid, my older brother and I used to play Chess all the time, we would play the traditional way and we would also play “Grid Chess”. So the idea of “Grid Chess” is what gave me the whole concept of a memory card game that a blind person can be capable of playing on their own. I hope to get the player to map out where all the cards can be located by the numbers, kind of like playing “Zork” and remembering where everything was located, this can really exercise their minds while strategizing their next move.

The Prompt: I chose to create a “Game for the Blind”, I thought this would be a pretty fun challenge to try out and learn more ways of using audio as one of my main components. I also wanted to try and create a game that a blind person can play because I just really wanted to put on a blindfold and see how fun a game with just audio can be.

The Gameplay: The player will be blindfolded; they will need to hover their mouse over the cards to know which number card they are next to (also mapping out how large their card map is). The player can then click on two different number cards to see if they flipped over the same identical fruit picture. When a card gets flipped over, it will notify the player what fruit was chosen. For example, the player hovers over card number 1 and clicks it, the card flips over an apple and the audio will now notify the player with an “Apple” sound clip. Once the player has found all matching fruit cards; the player will be rewarded with a victory song.

What Went Well…: I think for the most part, I got the whole basic mode of the memory card game up and running. I was happy when I saw that my whole game was a good functioning memory game with fruits!

What Went Poorly…: Trying to figure out a code that can play a sound when the player’s mouse hovers over the cards was very confusing. I didn’t think I was going to have trouble with finding an audio code that would allow a sound to be played while hovering over a card. Another thing that I found difficult in this whole process was being able to find number sound clips, I couldn’t find someone or something that would just say the numbers one through eight.

Where Would You Take This Idea Next?: I would really like to have more levels and increase the difficulty as the player progresses through different stages. I also would like to implement the grid number idea to help the player map out what section every card is located at as well. I think to get the feel of a blind person; I would make everything pitch black but keep all the game components the same, that way the players don’t have to wear a blindfold and they can get the idea of how a blind person is playing the game.