Posted July 15, 2022 by AlchemicalWorks
#gamedev #indiedev #rpg #ui #ux #accessibility
Hey everyone,
in the last patch I introduced some features that can help playing BattleJuice Alchemist despite difficulties with manual dexterity. Today I pushed patch 0.20401 to the public branch of the Steam playtest and I would like to talk a bit about the features helping out with visual accessibility.
I did not realize it at first and thought everything was fine with my flask UI, one of the most crtitcal UIs in the game.
That was until I checked screenshots with the help of Coblis, an online color blindness simulator. It is a great tool to get an impression of how people with different color vision handicaps perceive images. The most severe deficiency is monochromacy/achromatopsia, which means total color blindness. So let's take a look at that UI again:
Monochromacy and achromatopsia basically make the game unplayable. This also affects items within the inventory, wich you can see by looking at nine different flasks:
To fix this problem I added icons to all flasks and the UI. I categorized flasks into three groups by adding different basic outer icon shapes for resource flasks (drop), defensive flasks (shield) and offensive flasks (spiky circle/explosion) and a unique icon for each flask to unmistakably identify it. Here is the result:
Beside that, I made changes to UI elements in other places and hope the game is more accessible to quite a few people now.
In other news, I fixed bugs, overhauled item's affixes and worked on other mechanics. And to end with an exciting moving image, I overhauled the teleportation affix. I love not having to search for a town's entrance.
As always, if you want to read the full patch notes or just want to say hi, stop by on our Discord. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!
Alain