[real-eyes] Re: Fw: interesting story] Meet The Fifth-Grader Who Made A Video Game For His Blind Grandmother
- From: "anjie cook" <acook1734@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 5 May 2012 21:58:42 -0500
Reggie, is there a way that you can get a copy of this game? If there is, I
would be very interested in getting a copy. Please let me know. Thank you,
Anjie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Reginald George" <adapt@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <nutkc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2012 3:01 PM
Subject: [real-eyes] Fw: interesting story] Meet The Fifth-Grader Who Made A
Video Game For His Blind Grandmother
> Video games are for having fun. They're for escaping. They're for
> pretending to be somebody you're not, for machine-gunning through alien
> mines or hopping between cartoon chasms. They're for zombie shooting and
> portal opening and cube collecting.
> But sometimes they're something else. Sometimes, as ten-year-old Dylan
> Viale has already discovered, video games are for sharing part of your
> life with somebody you love.
> Dylan is a fifth-grader at Hidden Valley Elementary in Martinez,
> California. Like most fifth-graders, he loves video games. Unlike most
> fifth-graders, he figured out how to make one. Using the free starter
> version of a game design application called GameMaker, Dylan learned how
> to program, design, and even build rudimentary prototypes to make his
> own computer game.
> He designed it all for his grandmother, Sherry, with whom he shares a
> special bond. The two spend a lot of time walking dogs, going to the
> movies, and barbecuing with the family. Recently, Sherry took Dylan and
> his brother out to a Lego event in San Francisco where they all helped
> build a giant Lego Yoda Santa.
> But Sherry has been blind for decades. Without sight, she doesn't get a
> lot out of Dylan's favorite pastime: playing video games. She can't
> enjoy the titles he loves like Need for Speed and Plants vs. Zombies. So
> he decided to make a new game. Just for her.
> "[Dylan] wanted to figure out a way that he could share his love for
> video games with her," Dylan's father, Dino Viale, told me in a phone
> interview. "He thought, 'How can I create something she can enjoy?'"
> So he downloaded GameMaker and started grinding through its tutorials.
> He read about basic design concepts, learning the ideas behind terms
> like objects and sprites. He figured out how to create a world that
> people could play in.
> Meet The Fifth-Grader Who Made A Video Game For His Blind Grandmother
> Screenshot from Quacky's Quest, the blind-friendly video game designed
> by ten-year-old Dylan Viale. Dylan created a visual layout before
> turning out the lights and plunging it into darkness.
> Scrawling layouts and designs on notebooks during his free time, Dylan
> came up with Quacky's Quest, a game that puts you in the waddling shoes
> of an oddly-proportioned duck. Quacky was sort of a Viale family inside
> joke. Dino came up with the cartoon years ago, when he was in elementary
> school, and has spent decades using the goofy illustration to add his
> own personal touch to letters and notes. For Dylan, the duck was
> inheritance.
> As Quacky, your goal would be to weave through a series of mazes and
> find a primitive MacGuffin called the Golden Egg. Dylan decided that
> maze-crawling would be the best way for a blind person to feel
> challenged without getting too overwhelmed by a fast pace or
> indecipherable mechanics. And he realized that without visuals, the
> sound design would have to be impeccable.
> "Sound was the greatest tool for [Dylan's] grandmother to navigate
> through the game," Dino said. "He had to figure out how to associate
> each move through the maze with sound cues for whether you were doing
> something correctly or incorrectly."
> The solution was to use collectible objects not unlike Pac-Man's
> pellets. Dylan sprinkled diamonds across each correct pathway, then set
> up a script so collecting each shiny jewel would play a "cha-ching"
> sound. If you made contact with a wall, you'd hear a deep, unpleasant
> noise.
> To spice things up a bit, Dylan also added spiders. Go the wrong way
> down one passage, and you'd start hearing nasty spider noises as they
> crawled under your feet. Go too far and you'd set off dynamite. Boom.
> Then, like all video game developers, Dylan faced his biggest challenge
> yet: other people. He brought the game to his grandmother for
> playtesting, and found that it had a serious flaw. Once she collected
> the diamonds, she had no more point of reference. If she got confused in
> the maze and started getting lost, she would have no way of knowing when
> she was accidentally backtracking.
> "It's much different when you're looking at it," Dino said. "Silence was
> her enemy. She had no idea what Quacky was doing."
> Meet The Fifth-Grader Who Made A Video Game For His Blind Grandmother
> Quacky, the protagonist of Quacky's Quest and a character that has been
> used on notes and letters within the Viale family for years now.
> Illustration by Dylan Viale.
> Baffled, Dylan took to the GameMaker message boards to ask for help. He
> browsed through FAQs and blogs and flipped through endless questions and
> answers until he finally figured out a solution. He would set up scripts
> to drop boulders behind Quacky as he progressed through each maze.
> "If you tried to go backwards, it would make the negative sound of
> hitting a boulder or a wall," Dino said. "Once that happened, [Sherry]
> was really able to fly through the maze quite quickly."
> After a month of development, Dylan finished Quacky's Quest. He put it
> through rigorous playtesting using family and friends as subjects. And
> he entered it in the Hidden Valley Elementary School science fair.
> It won first place.
> "This kinda opened up Dylan's eyes to the possibility [of becoming a
> game designer]," Dino said. "Of course, he's always said he wants to be
> a policeman or construction worker or garbage truck driver... I'm really
> emphasizing the fact that he should definitely look into it and see if
> he enjoys it as much as he has so far."
> What was particularly interesting about Quacky's Quest, Dino notes, is
> that the people who scored best were people who had never played video
> games before. Experienced gamers couldn't finish the mazes nearly as
> quickly.
> "They weren't as in touch with the sound," he said. "They didn't rely on
> the sound as much as a blind person would, or even a person who wasn't
> familiar with gaming."
> Still, everybody wants to play it. Since the science fair, Dino says
> Dylan's friends and classmates have been pestering him non-stop for
> copies of the game. So Dino gave his son a stackful of discs and let him
> print Quacky's Quest to hand out to everyone at school. They can't see a
> thing in the game, but that's part of the charm. It's part of the
> experience. No matter who you are or how well you can see, you have to
> play Quacky's Quest the same way. Maybe that's what makes it special.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
> A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
> http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
>
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