[games_access] Looking for Feedback regarding a Game Engine For Accessible Games

[Franco Eusébio Garcia]

Hello,

My name is Franco Eusébio Garcia. I am a Masters Student at the Federal
University of São Carlos, Brazil. English is not my mother language, so I
apologize for any grammar or spelling errors.

In the last few years, I have been studying game accessibility projects. I
think it is very rewarding to enable people to play, as digital games are a
hobby of mine since I was a kid.

Last year, I have started working with Universal Design and found
Universally-Accessible Games (UA-Games). As a software engineer, I been
trying to find a flexible way to provide run-time tailoring to the game.
I have combined different existing approaches in the Game Development
Literature trying to achieve a method that isolates the game logic from the
game interaction. These approaches include implementation strategies
created for conventional and accessible games.

My method allows implement the game such as described by the Unified Design
(a framework do design UA-Games). The game logic and, thus the entire game
simulation, is free from physical-level interactions.
As the game logic does not have any mention to any IO, it is possible to
specialize the game interaction to suit user interaction needs.

I have been implementing a game engine (UGE) that, although currently
immature and proof of concept, illustrates the potential of the chosen
approaches. Instead of “code once, deploy everywhere” trend, my engine
motto could be something like “code once, enable everyone”.
Unfortunately, it is not automatic, as achieving good game accessibility is
a hard problem.
However, the engine is becoming interesting - the combination of the
approaches have potential to allow games to reach many of “Best
Practice” of Includification (<http://gameaccessibility.org/>), for
instance.

For a quick, illustrated description of UGE approach, please refer to UGE
in a Nutshell at  (PowerPoint)
<https://github.com/francogarcia/uge/raw/master/doc/UGE%20in%20a%20Nutshell.pptx>
or (PDF) at
<https://github.com/francogarcia/uge-evaluation/raw/master/Support%20Material/UGE%20-%20UGE%20in%20a%20Nutshell.pdf>.

I am looking for feedback to improve it and have an opinion regarding my
architectural choices and their utilities and interest to programmers and
designers. The prototypes are very raw at the moment.
They are also proof of concept and illustrate how the profiles are
customizable and that specializing the game for one disability can improve
the game for other profiles as well. As the engine is data and
event-driven, it promotes code and implementation reuse.
The player profiles are XML resources, which allow changing many aspects of
the game interaction without modifying the code.

To avoid repeating myself (and making this message even longer :), I sent a
description at:
<http://www.gamedev.net/topic/655200-looking-for-feedback-regarding-a-game-engine-for-accessible-games/>.
Should you be interested in checking it out and providing feedback, it
would be great as it would allow me improve it.

Should you have any questions or comments, please email me at
<franco.garcia at dc.ufscar.br> or reply to this message.

Kind regards,
Franco
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