Gallery
Pitch Black
A game without visuals
Project Summary
A story of people being in a tough time, regaining what belongs to them. The story progresses through a collection of mini-games, simulation elements, and a dynamic dialogue system in a 2D top-down perspective. The game targets young learners who love to explore stories through interactive gameplay on a computer.
Team
- Ahmed Adel Attaalla Salem – Programmer
- Rakibul Hasan Toor – Game designer
Production Year
2019
Genre
Experimental, Adaptation
Project Type
Semester Project (BA4)
Platforms
PC
My Contributions
Challenges and Learnings
“Pitch Black” is a game to adapt the famous “DooM” in its experimental form to playable for blinds or people with limited visibility.
The game required a change of mechanics and new level structure for this adaptation. Additionally, the game design needs to be designed for blind people brought some extra challenges.
An adaptation requires to understand the experience and emotion that has been experienced by a player. While experimenting a game without visual, it was needed to find inspirations and analyze the existing audiogames and their mechanics.
In the process, the design has to go through some iteration as we didn’t have the experience of being visually disabled. The Control was designed based on the mechanism of ‘white cane,’ which is used by blind people to navigate. The control was designed based on vibration from the controller to mimic the sound based navigation system. Whereas, the shooting mechanics from the original “Doom” had been adapted to melee attack so that the person doesn’t need extra sound cue for crosshair.
Designing level for blind people was also needed through multiple iteration. Primarily, the level required a continuous sound target as the final reach or final door for next level. Additionally, the walls and corridors were needed to be extra wide to provide proper feedback for navigation. Placing of enemies were also followed by the similar rule.
Even though, we had used the same soundtracks for the original “DooM”, it was required to place in a 3D environment. It was also needed to keep in mind that being only audiogame, the sound effects and feedbacks should not be overcrowd each other to create confusions for the player. So,all the extra soundtracks and feedbacks were not used to provide a clean and more intense experience.
In this project, we had conducted multiple playtests to find the issues and analyze the test results to refine the design and level. Playtesting also helped us to set the right direction in each iteration.