Choose and craft your concept

Consider your target players

Create a game design document

Create your production plan

You’re now ready to plan your game. This is a critical stage of the creative process, especially when you are focusing on accessibility. The preparation, exploration, and scoping that you do in this stage will have a direct impact on your experience when you begin design and development.

In this project, you’ll choose and scope a concept for your game with your target players in mind. You’ll also use accessibility guidelines to help you prepare a plan for production.

Project pre-production

Welcome to the course

Accessibility in games

Explore the vertical slice

Set your learning goal

What is inclusive design?

Inclusive design in practice

Digital accessibility

Accessibility standards and guidelines

Investigate accessibility in games

Explore Out of Circulation

Player movement

Camera system

Conversation system

User interfaces (UI)

Audio

Important information

Complete a project retrospective

Continue your learning journey

In this introductory project, you’ll learn more about the Practical Game Accessibility course and reflect on how you can use this course to achieve your goals as a creator. 

It can be very tempting to work on planning and creating your game straight away. That drive to bring an idea to life is a core part of being a creator, whatever your medium. However, if you take time now to explore the underlying principles of inclusive design and accessibility, you’ll give yourself a strong foundation as you work on your game. The principles are also deeply practical. Your work starts now!

Inclusive design and accessibility

In this project, you’ll explore and extend Out of Circulation as you work on your own game.

The tutorials are in a suggested sequence, but you can explore them in the way that works best for you. Each tutorial contains:

An overview of our work on a specific system or feature, including the impact of user feedback.

Discussion about key decisions that we made and why we made them.

Guidance on how you can explore and extend what we created for Out of Circulation.

Suggestions for ways you can apply what you’ve learned in your own game project. 

Design and development

Production processes don’t end when you finish working on your game.In this final project, you’ll complete a project retrospective and prepare to share your game with a wider audience. You’ll also identify your next steps as a creator who prioritizes accessibility.

Continue your journey

When you make a game, you’re crafting a shared experience. Whether your game is a private gift for one person or a global commercial release, for solo play or many players, it’s an invitation to connect with and respond to your ideas as a creator. When you make your game more accessible, you’re extending that invitation to a wider and more diverse audience.

This course is a practical introduction to accessibility for intermediate creators. As you complete it, you’ll choose a game to create and work on making that game as accessible as possible. 

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to:

Apply an inclusive design approach to your work as a creator

Identify critical accessibility requirements for your projects

Implement accessibility review and feedback cycles throughout development

Design and develop features using an inclusive design approach

Maintain a focus on accessibility while adapting to constraints and emerging project needs

Practical Game Accessibility

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Overview

Identify your target players

Research and connect with your target players

The value of player personas

Create personas for your target users

Next steps

In this tutorial, you’ll focus on your target players. You’ll identify your target players, consider their user needs, and create a user persona to help you through the design and development process.

There’s one key element that every game needs: one or more players. Now that you have your initial idea, it’s time to focus on your target players for the game. If you have no idea who you’re creating your game for, you won’t be able to shape it to meet their needs. 

You’ll be prioritizing the needs of players with disabilities as you do this — addressing barriers that that these players may face will have benefits for every potential player of your game.

Before you can connect with your target players and learn more about them, you need to identify a high level profile of your audience. Make a note of your answers to the following questions:

What sort of players do you think your game might appeal to? Can you break that group into smaller sub-groups (sometimes called user segments)?

What are other comparative games or experiences that they would find useful, engaging, or enjoyable?

Why do your target players enjoy this sort of game?

What might make your target players stop engaging with a game?

Case study example: Target players for Out of Circulation

Here is how we defined the target players for Out of Circulation as though it were only a game:

Elevator pitch: A small vertical slice of a narrative point-and-click adventure game that includes a community-focused mystery.

Target users: Causal players who enjoy narrative games and slice-of-life or cozy mystery stories.

Comparative experiences: Phoenix Wright, Monkey Island, Loop Hero, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, and The Wolf Among Us.

Key enjoyment aspects: An engaging narrative which has a relatively low level of player peril. Self-expression through dialogue choice and other game elements. A casual game experience which includes story reminders and simple player interactions.


Important: Remember that Out of Circulation has two purposes: it is a vertical slice of a game, but it is also a learning tool. 

Now you have a high-level sense of who your target players are, you can begin to connect with potential players to find out more information about them. This doesn’t have to be formal, especially if you’re an individual creator, but it’s an important part of the pre-production process. You might find that your target audience wasn’t who you thought they were, or you might get helpful insights that make you want to take a different approach.

Make sure to record your research in a format that works for you. You might want to include it in your project devlog.

To get feedback from your target players:

1.  If you haven’t already done so, complete Community collaboration for accessible design, a module in Gaming accessibility fundamentals on Microsoft Learn. This module contains guidance on connecting and collaborating with the disability community as you work on your game.

2.  Reach out to people who fit your target player profile to find out what they think about your concept, and make sure that you include players with disabilities. This is the best way to learn more about what your target players actually want. You could try a survey to get quick opinions or organize more involved feedback conversations with individual players.

3.  Explore other resources that relate to your idea and concept. For example, you could review relevant market research or informally evaluate sentiments for similar or comparable experiences using a range of data points (including game reviews and community discussions).


Note: This research is especially useful if you are the primary target audience for your game! Remember, your assumptions as a creator may not be accurate.

One useful tool to help you prioritize accessibility in your design and development process is to define personas for your target players. 

Personas are profiles of fictional users — you can think of them as expanded backstories and context for specific user stories. They include information about the user’s background and interests, motivations, goals, and specific frustrations or barriers they might encounter.

Although personas are fictional players, they should be based on what you know about your target audience. Established studios often have user research specialists to find out more about their target players, but as a hobbyist or emerging creator you can use data to support your personas too. You could even create a persona as a synthesis of two or more actual people that you connected with in your target user group to help ensure that you consider their needs in your design and development process.

Important: Although personas can be a useful tool, especially between user feedback cycles, remember that working with a persona cannot replace collaborating with actual players with disabilities.

Next, you’re going to draft player personas for your game concept using the research that you have completed.

1.  Download and review the example persona for Out of Circulation (.pdf download).

2. Download and review the persona template (.pdf download). Work through and complete the template, using your research to help you. If you can’t complete a section, note down information you’d need to find to help you do so so that you can follow up on it.

3.  Add anything else that feels relevant to your persona — this is a tool for you. We’ve provided you with an example template, but there are lots of different approaches to put together a persona.

4.  Make as many personas as you need to reflect the different types of player that your game will target.

Now that you've considered your target players, you’re ready to get planning. In the next tutorial, you’ll create a design document for your game and start working on your plan for its development.

Consider your target players

1. Overview

2. Identify your target players

3. Research and connect with your target players

4. The value of player personas

5. Create personas for your target users

6. Next steps

Complete this tutorial