Create your production plan

In this tutorial, you’ll use accessibility guidelines to create a production plan for your game. You’ll also identify key resources to help you throughout design and development.

There’s no one way to create a design document for a project, and many people prefer a more flexible approach. We’ll guide you through the plan for Out of Circulation and suggest a range of options for planning, but the exact approach you choose will be up to you. Whatever approach you take, it’s critical that you include accessibility considerations in your production plan.

There are lots of different approaches and tools that you can use to plan a project — here’s what we used to plan Out of Circulation.

Our approach

Project milestones are checkpoints you can use to measure your progress on a project. These checkpoints consist of a set of requirements to meet and tasks that you need to complete. We chose this approach for Out of Circulation because of the flexibility and the ease with which you can integrate regular user testing into a milestone approach.

Out of Circulation had four production milestones:

• The first milestone was a minimum viable product prototype for Out of Circulation that included basic versions of the most important game features and interactions.
• The next two milestones included both refinement work for the existing features and some additional features.
• The final milestone focused on fixing issues and visually polishing the vertical slice. It did not include any new features.

Our planning tools

Some creators prefer to plan in a tool with project tracking and/or kanban functionality, like Trello, Favro, Airtable, or Notion. This can make it easier to adjust things flexibly and use the plan for all project tracking. Other creators prefer written documents or spreadsheets.

The production plan for Out of Circulation was created in Favro because this is the primary project tracking tool used by our team. We also created supplementary documents (mostly spreadsheets) when more detail was required, as our team finds these useful for live remote collaboration.

The best planning tool is one that you’ll actually use — anything that works well for you and the people you’re collaborating with is totally fine.

In the previous tutorial, you prioritized the features for your game. Now you’re going to define the first milestone for your game: a minimum viable prototype. This should include prototype versions of the core systems and critical player actions necessary for your game.

Remember, you can record your milestone plan in any tool that works for you. You can also start in a basic document and move your plan into a tool at a later stage.

To plan your first milestone:

1. Review the prioritized features for your game in your game design document.

2. Identify any dependencies or connections that you’re currently aware of between the features and/or systems.

For example, Out of Circulation has a conversation system that is critical to the core gameplay experience. The player perceives and interacts with this system through the conversation interface for the game. This dependency between the two systems meant that our first milestone needed a prototype implementation of both the conversation system and the user interface.

3. Decide the features for your first milestone. These should be the highest priority features and any critical dependencies for those features.

Tip: Keep the scope of this first milestone as focused as you can. If you have a lot of core features and the list feels overwhelming, you can group them into separate milestones to help you organize your work and time more effectively.

Now that you’ve got a list of the features for your milestone, it’s time to add related accessibility guidelines to your plan. These will help you to refine clear requirements for your milestone.

To identify accessibility requirements for your first milestone:

1. If you received accessibility-related feedback on your game design document, start by listing any feedback connected to the features for your first milestone.

2. Go to the Game Accessibility Guidelines and review the list of guidelines available. You might prefer to download the spreadsheet checklist available on the site, as you can filter this by category and complexity level and customize it to meet your needs.

Note: You can also use the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines (XAGs), if you prefer.

3. In the previous tutorial, you identified accessibility categories associated with each feature. Use this now to guide you as you go through the guideline list and identify guidelines that relate to your first milestone features.

There are two approaches you can take for this:

• You can start with all the beginner guidelines, and then progress to the intermediate and advanced guidelines.
• You can work through the guidelines by topic.

The Game Accessibility Guidelines are leveled based on reach (the number of people who benefit), impact (the difference made to those people), and value (the cost to implement the guideline).

You might not be able to meet all guidelines that relate to your game’s features, and that’s OK. Prioritize the basic guidelines and identify intermediate and advanced guidelines that feel appropriate for both your game project and your experience level. Read through all the guidelines now, even if they feel beyond the scope of your project. This will be useful when you come to the design and development stage of production.

4. Record the relevant guidelines for your milestone and include any questions or thoughts that you have as you review them. You could add these details to your design document, record them in your planning tool, or track them using a spreadsheet.

5. Now that you have a clearer sense of the accessibility considerations for your prototype milestone, you may want to set a time frame or goal deadline for your first milestone. This step is optional.

Part of becoming a creator who prioritizes accessibility is gathering your personal collection of useful resources to help you in your work. These resources can help you as you work on design and development, but you may also find them helpful in this initial planning stage.

Accessible Player Experiences (APX) patterns

The AbleGamers Accessible Player Experiences (APX) project aims to help you create more accessible games by design. It includes patterns focused on both access and challenge.

The APX design patterns are tools to help you as you work on your game and include examples of how the patterns are being used in commercial games to help you understand how they can be used in practice.

The Gaming and Disability Player Experience Guide

Microsoft’s Gaming and Disability Player Experience Guide (GADPEG) is a supplemental resource to the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines. You can use this guide to develop your understanding of the barriers that players may experience.

The SpecialEffect DevKit

The SpecialEffect DevKit is a free, video-based resource that focuses on motor accessibility. It explores a range of topics related to player input and gameplay and includes best practice guidance and useful examples of what other creators have done to make their games more accessible.

If you want to find out more about the background of the DevKit and how to get started using it, start with this introductory talk by Bill Donegan, Projects Manager at SpecialEffect.

The Game Accessibility Conference (GAConf) archives

The Game Accessibility Conference (GAConf) has a rich archive of talks, from players sharing their lived experience to creators discussing their work and the lessons that they learned along the way. You can find these videos both on the GAConf website and organized into playlists on the IGDA Game Accessibility Special Interest Group (IGDA GASIG) YouTube account.

Resource compilations

There are many more resources available to help you as you work on the design and development stage of your game. There are two particularly comprehensive resource compilation lists that you can use as a starting point:

• The IGDA’s Game Accessibility Special Interest Group’s compilation of resources for developers and researchers.
• Microsoft Game Dev Docs’ collection of developer accessibility resources.

Gather additional resources

You can also:

• Reach out to your personal creator network and the wider accessibility community, asking creators what resources they have found particularly useful.
• Consider resources beyond the game development community to help you, if you want to learn more about particular aspects of experience accessibility in a more general context.
• Search for things yourself — new community resources are being created and shared all the time! In the future, you may even contribute to them.

The work that you do on your initial milestone is likely to have a significant impact on your later milestones. However, it is useful to plan your later milestones now so that you can develop a comprehensive understanding of the accessibility considerations for your game, including for lower priority features and details.

Repeat the process that you completed for the first prototype milestone, first listing the features and work that you will include in each milestone and then identifying associated accessibility guidelines.

Here are some tips to help you draft your additional milestones:

• Aim for four to five milestones, including your first prototype milestone and a final milestone for polish and finishing touches.
• The work that you complete in each milestone will impact the exact details of the next milestone. You should expect to review and potentially revise your plans regularly as you work on your game.
• If your project is starting to feel overwhelming, remember that you can rescope so that is more manageable.

Remember that there are limitations to guidelines, especially if you treat them as a checklist rather than a starting point. You won’t know what a player’s experience of your game is unless you ask them directly and really listen to the response.

Now that you’ve put together a game design document and a production plan that includes accessibility considerations, you’re ready to reach out and ask for feedback. Be curious and open to feedback on aspects of the game or your plans that you didn’t expect — this is an opportunity to move beyond your assumptions and to learn from the lived experience of players with disabilities.

Some of the questions you might ask when you share your game design document and plans include the following:

• What sort of barriers and issues do you commonly experience with this sort of game/feature/mechanic?
• Which of these barriers have the biggest impact on your experience as a player?
• Can you share any examples of games or other experiences that met your needs really well?

Planning isn’t an activity you complete once and never return to as you work on your game. You’ve created a foundation for the design and development stages of game production that you can return to and adjust flexibly to help keep you organized and on track as you make your game.

In the next project, you’ll explore the Out of Circulation vertical slice in a lot more detail. As you do this, you’ll:

• Learn about its design and development process, including the critical role of user feedback.
• Customize and extend the vertical slice yourself in order to explore accessibility considerations in a practical context.
• Apply what you learn to your own game.