THE 2006 DONATIONCODER.COM ACCESSIBILITY GAME PROGRAMMING CONTEST RESULTS

Congratulations!

First off, our sincere congratulations to all the winners! Accessibility presents a huge challenge to a game designer, and we had quite an amazing diversity of genres from the finalists, and innovation in so many different areas -- from storyline/writing to game play variety. There is a lot of room for improvement here, and the authors may have discovered that making an accessible game is harder than it sounds, especially for programmers who have never considered the issue of accessibility. But the spirit and creativity behind each of the games was wonderful and the IGDA Game Accessibility SIG will be happy to work with any of the authors who are interested in taking their games to the next level and making them even more accessible. - Michelle Hinn, Chair of the IGDA's Game Accessibility SIG.

About The Prizes

First of all we have to say a huge thank you to the sponsors of this unusual contest. There are many excellent game development websites, and we appreciate that the sponsors of this contest were willing to support the non-traditional focus of this contest and bring a little light to the issue of accessible gaming. Keeping with the spirit of this contest we asked each of the entrants to rate their preferred prizes and we tried extremely hard to find a way to get everyone who entered something they would be happy with - we hope that we've succeeded in that. We've highlighted one game as the top contest winner, and then presented the rest of the collection in no particular order.

Download and Try For Yourself!

On behalf of the authors we invite you to download and play these games. If you enjoy them, please consider making a small donation to the authors to support their continued development! Your donations make a difference.

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	December 2006 31 A Dark and Deadly Path A Dark and Deadly Path is a super tiny little audio game engine (can be used to make audio-only one switch games too). This was an unofficial entry into the contest that was not eligible to win any prizes, as it was written by one of the organizers (mouser). It works like the old Dragon's Lair LaserDisc game [1], or like those "choose your own adventure games [2], but is audio only and involves no graphics.  An author narrates a story/game is an audio story where the reader/play must make choices along the way by pressing a key on the keyboard. The choices may have to be made rapidly in quick succession within a narrow  time window which can add an element of panic to the story - and make it a particularly appropriate device for suspense stories. Audio files are normal .mp3 files that an author records with standard software.  The game script is an .xml file with a format to be described in a separate file. Download: Here. This entry was not eligible to win any prizes. posted by mouser (permalink) (read 12 comments)