Our Mission

The video game industry, as it currently is, has seen great strides in gameplay accessibility, yet this is still a new conversation to be had: How do we ensure that the games and stories we create are accessible to different audiences? With limited visual resources and this question in mind, the concept for Regale Us was born—a fully accessible game for the visually impaired, where they are the hero in the story they are playing.

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Our work started by researching the market for other currently available titles for the visually impaired, which we quickly discovered was not very expansive. Given that making games specifically catered to a group of people who are often unable to or unwilling to play them isn’t a huge market, this does make sense. However, this encouraged us to reach a middle ground: a game that places the visually impaired and the sighted on the same playing field in hopes of allowing the two groups to connect through the game in a way that would be difficult otherwise. 

 

To properly do this, we greatly limit the possibility space of the game. Instead of the standard 2D or 3D graphics that accompany most games, Regale Us lacks almost any visuals at all, building the world through environmental sound design. At any given time, the words the player can hear out loud are on screen, accompanied by a simple layout that is similar to Spotify with a representative image and play/pause button. When a player reaches a choice, a sound cue will occur and both options will be presented to the player. They must then audibly respond with which they would like to select. By establishing key words that the device will listen to, it will allow the game to pick the choice that they intended to take and continue from there on. A sound cue will indicate an option has been chosen and the player will be able to instantly see the result of their decision, either in the reactions of those around them or the unfurling of the story in the following audio cutscene. In doing this, the interactional gameplay for a visual novel is still present but altered to fit the possibility space within the game. This audio-only format allows those who are sighted to play the game without looking at the screen and immerse themself within the story being told through sound.

 

Without a reason within the narrative, the choice of limiting the possibility space to audio-only is a lot harder to justify and makes it much more difficult for the player to engage with the game. Therefore, in Regale Us you play as Harold: a retired knight turned blind storyteller. Instead of taking players out of the narrative, the lack of visuals serves a narrative purpose of helping players immerse themself within the character they are playing, and respectively Harold’s blindness serves a game purpose of allowing for a believable audio-only format. Past the level of baseline player engagement, Regale Us acknowledges the limitations the format has and plays to its strengths. Besides the environmental sound design of every scene, we utilize several audio cutscenes to establish various characters and build up the world in a way that’s understandable both for the player and Harold himself. Within the script for these scenes, we utilize strategies that are common in audio storytelling, like audio dramas or audio theater, such as having characters use each other’s names often, allowing the player to attach a name to the distinct voices that they hear. Since the player character is blind, it allows us, as the designers, to emphasize sounds that would often go under the radar since he would be accustomed to picking up on things that many others wouldn’t. Furthermore, since the visual limitation is placed not only on the player but the character as well, he will be able to ask questions that would be fielded by the player as well. In this way, Harold becomes a medium for the player in this audio-only space. 

 

Besides Harold himself, how other non-playable characters interact with him will also help to establish the setting and narrative to the player without the use of visuals. Though the only player character is Harold, he is often found with Marius, a friend, fellow knight, and his caretaker, as a duo character archetype. Each one, in their own moments, will act as the id and ego respectively, with situations within the game determining who will serve as which, helping build the characters and their relationship with each other. After a few years together, they have a system in place to assist with Harold’s visual impairment, but Marius often overcompensates, trying too hard to help. As Harold is a very independent and obstinate person, this often causes the two to get into petty squabbles with one another, building out both of their characters and their respective views on Harold’s blindness. 

 

Besides Marius, how other people react to finding out about his blindness and how they choose to treat him afterward will not only show their character but allow Harold to act back accordingly, standing up for himself and defining himself past his visual impairment. These interactions with NPCs act as telling details, pointing out details about the world and most importantly, bringing Harold’s blindness to light in a way that feels believable and not forced. To reinforce the focus on the character-driven narrative, we have opted for a more stock fictive world: a standard realistic medieval setting. Since players will enter Regale Us with prior knowledge of similar settings, it ensures that they are able to situate themself within the game’s environments, which have to be built through the sound alone. This allows the complexity and depth of our characters, specifically Harold, to truly shine through.

 

Ensuring Harold feels like a meaningful and active character within the narrative gains extra importance given his visual impairment. Sighted people have a tendency to look down on those who are visually impaired as a result of their need to rely on others without any ability to repay them (“The Making of Blind Men,” Scott).  Often, this will be reflected in media by the creation of flat characters who are either too heavily reliant on others, giving a sense of complete and utter helplessness or completely independent, possessing superhuman strength as a result of their blindness. Both betray the humanity of the visually impaired, turning them instead into something either sub- or super-human. Our goal with Regale Us is to imbue Harold with the depth of a person, making him independent, but still extremely flawed and understandably dependent on others. We want him to be the hero of the story, but not as a result of his blindness.

 

To do this, we needed to ensure the player felt a sense of agency, and that Harold’s choices have distinctive narrative impacts. This is how we came to the story model of the map of many endings. At its core, Regale Us is an embedded narrative, with the emergent elements coming from the choices the player makes when presented with dialogue or story options. These choices branch out into a map, giving the player a feeling of agency as they explore through the maze and think of the possibility of other routes, intrigued by the idea of a different outcome hidden behind the curtain of their decision. For every choice outside of the mini-stories, a narrative branch is made, acting as a direct lock for other branches of the narrative. The choices within the mini-stories work instead as convergent locks, with each decision pushing the player toward one of two outputs by the end of that oration. By the nature of each of these interactions locking the player from other routes, every scene is a narrative kernel that is imperative to the plot and pushes the story forward. Since the player has to follow their route all the way through, often, players will assign a “real” or “true” ending to either their first ending or the one they enjoyed the most. This invites players to replay the game to see the other endings and look past the curtain of the choices they didn’t make earlier, giving us more space to build out Harold’s character in the process. 

 

In our game Regale Us, we hope to create an audio-narrative that is both proper representation and accessible for the visually impaired by utilizing the player character’s blindness to shape gameplay, immerse the audience within the narrative, and create a universal play experience as well as using a map of many endings narrative structure to give them distinct agency, as they explore the branching story.