Barriers Be Gone
I worked as a level designer on Barriers Be Gone, an escape room-style game with the goal of education about accessibility and the challenges disabled people come across in everyday life. It was a student-made prototype made for the Gamelab class at FIEA, where we worked together to make a game asked of us by our client, Student Accessibility Services.
The Play-Though
The final product was always supposed to be a prototype, and the team was able to deliver that, and more.
The game we were asked to make was a digital companion to the real-life escape room that Student Accessibility Services (SAS) was running at the time. The client provided several documents detailing ideas for puzzles, and ran the real-life escape room for the team to help us understand the goals of the project. The team discussed our goals for the project, and after that, we got to work.
On this project I worked on the design for the puzzles, blockmeshing the space, implementing many of the mechanics and cameras that the programmers made in the levels, and writing and recording the dialogue and for explanations and hint system.
Planning and Design
Early planning for the first puzzle based on physical barriers.
Further planning and layout of the entire playable area of the space station the game would take place in, as well as the contents of room 1 and room 2.
I took the document the client’s provided and got to designing a number of puzzles that exemplified the kind of content they wanted with simple mechanics that anyone could use, regardless of disability. The style of the game would be point-and-click, as mouse dragging or VR aren’t accessible to people with certain disabilities.
In the end I designed three different puzzle rooms, each centered around a different idea and type of puzzle surrounding accessibility. The first room was about physical barriers, especially for those with wheelchairs; the second room was about software and hardware that can be necessary for some people to use certain technologies, and the third room was modeled after distracting and overwhelming stimuli.
I did research on accessibility software and devices, created sketches, maps, and documentation of the flow of puzzles within a room to help communicate to the rest of the team how the mechanics of an area might work.
After planning everything out, I block meshed out the various areas of the game, and where each piece of the puzzles should go. Important parts of the blockmesh were used in
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Blockmeshing
Overhead view of the blockmesh for the entire game.
The central hub of the game, where the final puzzle would take place after completing all three of the other rooms.
Room 1, where most of the mechanics focused on moving objects from place to place to make the area more accessible.
Room 2 focused on accessibility software. Computers lined the room, each with something wrong with them that made them inaccessible. After finding the first passcode, the player would enter it in a locked drawer to get the next piece of software for another computer.
Room 3 focused on turning off noisy devices or broken and disorienting objects, as well as adding more healthy stimuli to the room, working similarly to room 1 mechanically.
Implementation
After the artists went though and set dressed, and the programmers made the mechanics, I went in and implemented most of the mechanics in room 1 and 3, fine tuned some of the implementation of the mechanics in room 2, as well as adding in the points where the camera would be able to jump to in spots that would be intuitive to game play, while also not getting in the way of any puzzles or rendering them impossible. I also added hints in the form of the dog, Sport, anywhere around the level where the player might need help on a specific task and placed treats in visible but hard to spot locations for more specific hints. I also wrote, recorded, and implemented all the voice lines in the game where necessary for education, exposition, or help.
The white planes are where the player can click to jump to the next camera.
What the game looks like during play. The green arrows were placed to guide the player to where they would find the next camera.