Category: Blog

  • Getting Started with Videogames

    Getting Started with Videogames

    I’ve recently started a new role with RNIB Scotland as a Community Connection Coordinator – not an easy role during a pandemic – and my team are eager to make use of my game development and accessibility knowledge. As a result I’ll be producing a series of blog posts for NIB Scotland on the videogaming options available to blind and visually impaired people. The first of these can be found here.

    In this article I discuss the options available for PC and smart device users and the communities that can give information and support. It’s aimed at an audience who will most likely have zero experience playing videogames, and as such is quite basic.

    The long term goal for these blog posts is to encourage people in the Scottish VI community to consider playing videogames and setting up gaming peer support groups to assist with this. This is all dependant on the Covid-19 lock-down state being lifted and as such there’s no time-frame for this as yet. Still, I remain hopeful.

  • Audiogames, Audiogame Jam and Playing Videogames Without Sight

    Audiogames, Audiogame Jam and Playing Videogames Without Sight

    Videogames are software applications designed for interactive entertainment. They are available for home computers, dedicated games consoles, smartphones and tablets, and are an increasingly significant part of modern culture. They are also in most cases inaccessible to those with sight loss due to game designs that require the player to react to visual elements and on-screen feedback.

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  • Audiogame Jam Post-Mortem

    Audiogame Jam Post-Mortem

     

    Audiogame Jam 2016 logo

    Audiogame Jam is a game jam event that ran between August 26th and September 5th 2016. The challenge was to make games playable in audio only so that those people with limited or no sight would be able to play them It was run to raise money for the Royal National Institute of Blind People, a charity that provides support and services to people with sight loss across the UK. RNIB are a charity that have provided me with a great deal of support since my sight loss through macular degeneration, and Audiogame Jam is my attempt to pay back some of that help through fund-raising,

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  • Pro Motion 6.5

    Pro Motion 6.5

    Pro Motion run anim

    I recently bought Pro Motion 6.5, a piece of software designed to allow the creation of pixel art. It’s quite good but has an interface that’s very unintuitive for someone used to Photoshop and GIMP. The online tutorial videos for it are also quite good if you can handle the terrible audio quality.

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