Welcome to the course

Accessibility in games

Explore the vertical slice

Set your learning goal

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. 

What is inclusive design?

Inclusive design in practice

Digital accessibility

Accessibility standards and guidelines

Investigate accessibility in games

Choose and craft your concept

Consider your target players

Create a game design document

Create your production plan

Explore Out of Circulation

Player movement

Camera system

Conversation system

User interfaces (UI)

Audio

Important information

Complete a project retrospective

Continue your learning journey

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

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

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

Before you begin

What is a vertical slice?

Next steps

Practical Game Accessibility: Case study

The case study for this course is Out of Circulation, a very small playable section of a point-and-click narrative adventure game. In this tutorial, you’ll play through the case study and record your initial impressions.

OutOfCirculation_v1_Windows.zip

OutOfCirculation_v1_Mac.zip

Out of Circulation is the case study for this course. It’s a very small playable section of a point-and-click narrative adventure game. 

In this tutorial, you’ll play a build (executable file) of Out of Circulation and note down your initial impressions from a player perspective. Later in this course you’ll learn about how Out of Circulation was developed and have many opportunities to explore and extend what we created.

This learning experience assumes that you are already familiar with the Unity Editor. If you’re new to Unity, the Unity Essentials learning pathway has been designed to help you get set up and ready to create in the Unity Editor. 

To get the right file to play through the example on your computer:

1.  Download the correct build for your platform from the Tutorial Materials:

Note: To open the macOS build for the first time, you’ll need to select and hold (or right-click) the executable file and then select Open.

2.  Choose a suitable location on your computer and unzip the folder there. The executable file Out of Circulation is what you will use to launch the game.Set up the Out of Circulation Unity project

You won’t use this until a little later in the course, but you can download the Out of Circulation assets now to save yourself time later.

Set up the Out of Circulation Unity project

1. Install Unity 2022.3 LTS, if you haven’t already done so.

2.  Create and save a new Unity project using the 3D Core template. 

3.  Open the Practical Game Accessibility: Case study project in the Asset Store.

4. Download and import the assets into your Unity project.

Now that you’ve reviewed key information about the course itself, you’re almost ready to explore the course case study: Out of Circulation. Small, playable sections of games like the one that we have created as the course case study are sometimes called a vertical slice. 

A vertical slice is a small portion of a game that demonstrates the major systems, features, and art of an entire game.

Vertical slices are sometimes used to demonstrate game projects to potential funders or publishers. They can also be useful for technical demonstrations and case studies to support learning experiences (like this one!). 

As a vertical slice, Out of Circulation has the systems, aesthetic design, and final polish to help you explore accessibility, without the file size or overwhelming scope of an entire game.

A trio of characters are framed in the center of an image: a short goldfish with a friendly expression, a tall salamander in a confident pose, and a frog gazing intently at a potion bottle. Behind them all, a neon sign identifies a building as The Library.

We made Out of Circulation a point-and-click narrative adventure game because this type of game involves a lot of different accessibility considerations for you to explore throughout this course.

Play through the game build that you downloaded. This should take you between five and twenty minutes. Record your first impressions so that you can compare them to your future observations when you evaluate the game build later in the course.

As you explore and work through the vertical slice, consider:

Your initial impressions of the experience overall.

What you notice in relation to the accessibility of the experience, if anything.

Questions that you’d like to ask the team that made the experience.


You’ll have the opportunity to explore and experiment in the Unity project for Out of Circulation in Design and development.

Select (mouse) or use WASD controls / Arrow keys (keyboard) to move to a location.

Select (mouse) or use the Spacebar (keyboard) to quick-approach an interactable object.

Select (mouse) or use the Spacebar (keyboard) to interact with a character / object.


Important: You can also remap these default controls in the game settings menu.

Now you’ve explored the vertical slice for the first time, you’re ready to plan your personal learning journey. In the next tutorial, you’ll reflect on your personal goal for this course and set up a development log that works for you.

Explore the vertical slice

1. Overview

2. Before you begin

3. What is a vertical slice?

4. Explore Out of Circulation

5. Next steps

Complete this tutorial