HEAVY FOOTSTEPS

Working with the blind and low-vision community, Evans learned a lot about audiogame design. He gives the example of signalling the character’s walk cycle. “Visually, if when a character goes to walk forward or the screen starts to move, you get a sense of that exactly when movement starts. But there’s often not an audio cue attached to that, until the first footfall.” That means there’s no feedback on the player’s input until they’ve already committed to the movement; The Vale needed to let players know the game was responding to their commands instantly. Overall, though, Evans’ biggest realisation was that “I was probably going to over-design”, trying to reinvent basic concepts that the community had accepted long ago.