After Jordan and Adam played a prototype of the platforming section of the game in semester 1, I noticed two things:

1. The overall difficulty of the game was quite high
   • Requiring a lot of “sight-reading” and hand-eye coordination
2. They were quite uncomfortable with the key binds of the game
   • Using WASD is a very FPS game keybind
   • Using the mouse with the cursor active is quite misleading with the grapple
   • The inability to use a controller heavily effect those who weren’t

Accessibility research

Due to this playtest, we had a conversation about accessibility in our game and I brought up the “assist mode” in Celeste, which gives the player the ability to:

1. Slow the game speed
2. Provide infinite stamina
3. Allow for mor air dashes
4. etc.

However, the developers explicitly state that the ‘difficulty is essential to the game experience’, which I believe is a great thing as develops hold the right to explain how their game should be experienced:

But allowing the opportunity to make the game easier for those who need it a great decision (Calling it assist mode vs easy mode is also a respectful choice). If there is enough time at the end of development, I will definitely look into implementing something like this.

Accessibility features

Controller Support

Thanks to Unity’s Input system, I can create an input action asset and assign multiple actions to one bind:

Then, I have a seperate Input Manager gameobject that reads these inputs:

I, then, replace the input readings in my player controller script with these input in my Input Manager script:

Rebinding Functionality

Another thing I can implement in the game right now is the ability to change binds, and have controller functionality. For this, I used the following YouTube tutorials:

Setting up the UI

In order to change the key binds, the player needs to have an interactable UI.

Importing TextMeshPro

TextMeshPro is a set of Unity tools for 2D or 3D text:

Which I can then use to add text to a UI canvas and to buttons (TMP stands for TextMeshPro):

Creating a menu script

This script need to contain the method to open and close the menu and the sections within the menu

Controlling the UI

Because I am adding controller support, I need a way for the player to navigate the UI (As there is no mouse cursor for the controller). However, thanks to Unity’s Event System, I can call a SetSelectedGameObject() method to select a button regardless of the input method:

Which allows me to bind inputs using Unity’s Input System to navigate the UI: