It’s been a while since I’ve last done a dev blog!

Normally I write them for my home game dev studio (we’ll get into that later), but recently I’ve been graciously accepted by Kev, Dana, and co. to work at Illusory World. It’s nice to be back at the helm of one of these! They’re a bit therapeutic for me, especially after a long development cycle.

Anyway, I am Wolf, our studio’s Accessibility Director working sporadically to ensure everyone can enjoy our games. I’ve been in the game development game for a long time—ten years in fact! Even so, it was only a few years ago when I came across something I had only heard of in hushed whispers and behind closed doors—accessibility.

Even though it impacts every piece of media we get our hands on (and, unfortunately, those we cannot), making a game accessible to a wider audience is often a difficult part of the process for studios like ours. It’s not something that can be easily tacked onto at the end of a game release, often requiring work from the very foundation of the game.

But what is it that we do, exactly?

We research, design, program, and test the features and functions of our games to ensure everyone can experience our games to the fullest, especially those who need special accommodations. Things like screen reader support and inverted controls also fall under accessibility. I talk about the specifics in more detail here in my VN;Conference presentation.

Today, I want to focus on the why. Who are we? Why do we need a dedicated department? Why do we enjoy something that, at times, can seem so tedious? What’s the point? Well! I love talking accessibility, so I’ll have to refrain from making a three-hundred-page academic dissertation on the subject. Instead, have some of my ramblings.

Who We Are:

Our department consists of three members: Myself (Wolf, the Director), and our programmers EchoFrost and Sagittaeri. All three of us originally hail from the not-so-distant shores of Watercress, a long-term freeware visual novel studio with over a dozen titles under our belt. Dana and Kev both have written quite a bit for our visual novels, so check them out! We are very proud of our games—

What was I talking about? Right.

About Me:

As Director, my main job is to organize our department and set standards for us to follow. I also manage a lot of the creative writing for our department, alongside more public-facing affairs like this! Over the years, I have done quite a lot of research and “on-the-job training” (aka trial and error) at Watercress and took part in a very helpful disability studies course for my creative writing degree. All it takes is a desire and willingness to learn how to make games playable for everyone!

Our Programmers:

Moving onto the next essential members of our department, both Sagittaeri and EchoFrost program all of the features and fixes for each release (alongside some back-updating for older titles). I cannot stress enough how important their job is—without their hard work, our games would be wholly unavailable to wide swaths of the community. They’re also both veteran game developers, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with them for many, many years.

The How:

The amount of work that goes into accessibility is enough to be a hurdle for many studios out there. It necessarily requires a foundation of knowledge, an accessibility-first mindset, and often a lot of resources and community members that inform the process along the way.

Being in the same room with like-minded people makes it possible to break through the tedium. This year we put the team together solely with the goal of accessibility in mind.

So, what’s the point? Well, the point is you! And us, too! As a disabled dev, I too need accessibility functions to play many games. No one likes paying for a game, loading it up, and realizing they just can’t enjoy it like everyone else. Thankfully, the games industry as a whole has been trending very positively in this regard for a while, and we too must do our part! For the odd developer reading this, we’ll get into the specifics of our process in a later blog post alongside a list of resources.

What’s Next:

Our focus on accessibility isn’t just for our more recent titles. We’re here for the long term—like the rest of the studio, we’re involved in each project in development under Illusory World. While we can’t give an exact timeline at the moment, we’re working towards modernizing our older games with our accessibility goals in mind. In between development cycles, we’re working on transparent communication with the community in the form of dev talks, resources, analysis—the whole shebang.

Expect to see more technical explorations of accessibility in future blogs. I will eventually devote a full post to the closed captioning I worked on for Forged in Ice! Of course, we’re always open to feedback. Accessibility is a community-first endeavor, after all! Please email us at contact@illusoryworld.io and we’ll be sure to take your feedback into account.

Signing Off:

Thank you all for playing our games and reading our blogs! I’m off to work on my art practice for my post-baccalaureate degree. Wish me luck! Have a picture of my fiance’s cat as a parting gift.