Anon said,

This is truly awesome and seriously cool – look at his reaction time for the implementation!

This wouldn’t work for all situations, of course, but some people/companies wouldn’t react in a year…

Fumarole said,

That’s superb enough to once again reaffirm my faith in humanity.

LateWhiteRabbit said,

This is great to see. Legend of Grimrock looks better every time I see it, and the development team looks to be one deserving of support.

I’ve always believed game developers should be more accommodating to gamers with disabilities, especially when it often takes so little effort to do so.

Left-handed controls for the 10% of the population that is left-handed.

Allowing ALL keys to be rebound so players like HarpoonIPA can set up controls that work comfortably with their specialty gaming devices.

Including color-blind modes if your game depends on color codes to relay information.

Including subtitles for all dialogue and cutscenes for deaf gamers.

None of those things takes very long to implement, but unfortunately a lot of developers don’t take the time to do so. Sadly this is usually not due to time or money constraints, or being mean, but simply because game developers never consciously think of or consider disabled gamers when planning a game.

I don’t consider left-handed people as having a disability, but because my best friend was left-handed I often watched him struggle to do things or adapt to controls in games that were created with only right-handed gamers in mind. Though he’s dead now, because of him I whenever I am designing controls or setting up a key-binding system I always make the conscious effort to support left-handed players.

Likewise, I became cognizant of the difficulties the deaf encounter in games after becoming friends with a deaf co-worker. It is amazing in this day and age all the things a major game can forget to subtitle. It’s not always just dialogue. If an alarm is blaring or a loud explosion just occurred off-screen, those are things that need to be subtitled as well.

Sometimes game developers just need to be reminded that disabled player’s exist – most developers are more than happy to design accessibility once they are reminded the need is there.

Avalon said,

Great stuff!

Imagine you ask a triple-lame publisher/developer to add arrows back to your game because you’re disabled. They would just smile, yawn and ignorantly go back to polishing up their shiny graphics or dumb down their game so that even the most imbecile person on the planet is able to play it.

trudodyr said,

I was set on buying Grimrock anyway, but now I’ll also get the fuzzy feeling that I’ll support a bunch of greatly dedicated guys.

Xian said,

Ruber, I would guess that he could play the game smoothly since he said that he played Dungeon Master on the ST/Amiga. If I can remember back 25 years ago when I played it on the ST, DM was played entirely with the mouse and didn’t have any keyboard controls. Remakes such as Return to Chaos added those later.

I was really impressed at the turnaround time that they implemented this feature, and even more so that they would go to those lengths at the request of a single user.

LoG was on my must buy list already, but I want to show my support for the developers even more now.

skavenhorde said,

This game was one on my lists to buy, but a little later on down the road. It just jumped to day one purchase.

Forever and a Year Ago Linkage said,

[…] Why Indies Rock – Example #488 – Aside from the coolness of accepting the feature request, check the timestamps on the discussion in this post. […]