2021-04-14 18:27:38

So I just posted the topic about game devs looking for help from blind devs, but, that's the message I got from games producer: So we had a quick talk about it and we don't really think it's possible for us for the time being. Maybe in the future, if we had some additional financing from a dedicated project, it would be possible. But for now our internal studio, Jutsu Games, is probably too small to tackle such topic. We are probably talking about hundreds of hours of work in here, even with external help, and we don't have enough resources to focus on such a huge task.

But I will write down your Discord name and if this topic ever comes again in our internal development, I will allow myself to come back to you.
To be honest I am so so so mad, but there is nothing I can do. I did what I can, let's forget it for now.

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2021-04-14 19:06:41

Wait, what the fuck? First they say they are interested in making 911 operator accessible, then they say they'll make 112 operator accessible (with help) and then they say it's not possible? Are you fucking kidding me?
This is the exact fucking reason why I don't trust game studios when they say something about accessibility.
Fucking pisses me off!

Greetings and happy gaming, Julian

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2021-04-14 19:13:22

hundreds of work hours? Doubt it.

2021-04-14 19:19:48

Agreed. They might have to put in some work, but not that much.

Greetings and happy gaming, Julian

If you say you never lie, you're a liar.
Oh, and #freeGCW

2021-04-14 19:48:30

@2 Maybe chalm down a little? They will definitely not work with us when they see such a reaction.

We are pleased, that you made it through the final challenge, where we pretended we were going to murder you. We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Place the device on the ground, then lay on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party. Assume the party submission position or you will miss the party.

2021-04-14 20:01:56

Yeah, it is definitely disheartening and A bit frustrating. However, Being angry and cursing isn’t going to solve anything. Didn’t they just say they were going to consider accessibility, not 100% add it? Or am I missing something?

2021-04-14 20:13:19

I believe the first two topics about this should be closed to avoid confusion.

2021-04-14 20:15:09

@2, no point in getting that angry over it. If they were going to help us, cursing them is not a good way to keep them on our side. Hope nobody outside of the blind community sees that.

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2021-04-14 20:33:44

Where's my oh shit, here we go again meme at...

If it's a small studio they may not have the funding or manpower to put accessibility in. That's a fact of life. It isn't free in terms of funding or time to make a game accessible, even more so to slap accessibility in after the fact. The company's made up its mind, but they did say if they ever talk about it...they'll reach out. Which is something.

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2021-04-14 20:41:47

So now I have to apologize for getting a little pissed about another empty promise? Seriously?
Okay, the cursing might have been unnecessary, but such things really piss me off.

Greetings and happy gaming, Julian

If you say you never lie, you're a liar.
Oh, and #freeGCW

2021-04-14 20:42:49

@9: Yeah, that is true. From what I’ve seen of it, it is not a big or main stream game.

2021-04-14 20:45:10

@11:

Oh I don't know. It had a run of being popular with big Youtube streamers and those vids still get views even nowadays. I had one show up in my recommended feed the other day that I'd watched before. Sure it's not as popular as, say, Minecraft, but you absolutely still got videos being made on it but it's by no means a tiny little obscure game

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2021-04-14 20:45:34

I don't know much about these games but you realize that hundreds of hours is actually an entirely reasonable estimate for this kind of work?  As a programmer, it frustrates me to watch you all explode because a studio said "we're interested", looked into what it would take, and then said "we don't have the money".  If you want to get mad about this stuff, start by figuring out how to get the money, then get mad when you go to people and say here's $20000 and they still come back and say no.

At the end of the day goodwill doesn't put food on the table, and diverting to work on accessibility is going to take someone off working on things that do in fact put food on the table.  They probably actually still want to do it but you have to prioritize your product features.  And before everyone is like "but accessibility would be so easy", no it probably isn't.  If they draw their Ui with OpenGL they'll have to make everything self-voicing, and if they don't they'll have to go make every dialog accessible, and at the end of the day that can literally turn into implementing alternatives to individual events or whatever.  And then once it's done they have to take on the burden of keeping it working forever.

So seriously.  Don't get mad, get disappointed, and start thinking of ways to fund this work.  In my opinion you only have the right to get mad about not having accessibility in games if you also found a sustainable way to pay for it.  There are systemic problems that could make it easier for programmers in that position, but again--you only have the right to get mad about them if you found a way to pay for it.  If people are turning down your money and you actually got enough together to do it, that's a different story.  By all means bash then.  But until that point you aren't owed anything and acting like you are just gives all of us a bad name.

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2021-04-14 21:03:25

@Camlorn:

In before the 'but CVAA' posts...and Goodwill's a shitty thrift store. I've seen the Corporate Caskets episode /sarcasm

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2021-04-14 22:09:59

I kind of wonder if the entire thing was a scam. Honestly, how much is involved in making something accessible? I have seen single app developers make games accessible, so the studio being too small seems like a lousy excuse.

2021-04-14 22:31:49

@15: A scam? Really? They didn’t even ask us to pay for anything. They also didn’t even ask for our social security number or our ZIP Code LOL.
also as Camlorn said earlier, it really does take a really long time to code in things that can help with accessibility. I am not trying to defend the game or explain why they can’t make it accessible, just trying to look at it realistically.

2021-04-15 00:04:11

Really sad. I hope they don't see this topic, because you just gave them 0 motivation, and that applies to any small studio.

2021-04-15 00:33:54

This is like when people review bombed Galactic Colonies with 1 star because it wasn't immediately accessible. I'm surprised the same thing hasn't happened to Kilta. This reminds me of how it's normalized to be an asshole to someone you have a crush on (or at least used to be) because that's just how people express that they like you, right? Just like that, this seems very counterintuitive to me. You can't just demand for something to be accessible, as Camlorn said that actually could take hundreds of man hours. Accessibility is literally a foundational part of games because so many libraries aren't just plug-and-play accessible, let alone if you design your own GUI like lots of games do.

2021-04-15 00:35:07

I mean.  If you use exactly the right gui framework and exactly the right coding patterns and you also implemented keyboard/gamepad support and not only mouse and you get in touch with the people who can tell you about tolk, and you do all of this early in your project and decide for accessibility at the beginning, it's not hard.  But if any one of those things goes wrong you're screwed and it takes a lot of effort to undo mistakes and get into a position where you can even do it.  Either you have really talented devs, you have devs who are willing to put in effort as a labor of love, or you have modders like Say the Spire where it takes literally months even though he basically had the game's source code and was building on top of a vibrant modding community.

But how this normally works out is-you don't care about beautiful abstractions.  You don't write from the ground up but start from something that lets you write your game 10x faster, e.g. unity, where it's not accessible at all out of the box.  You go write your one-off game event and you're not going "huh, how can I share this code", you're going "nothing else in my game is at all like this, I'll just hack it together".  And for games, that's a perfectly fine coding strategy most of the time.  But it does mean that unless you got every last thing I listed right from day one, plus the additional thing called "most of the GUI code is shared", it can literally mean going through the game and adding code to each event or whatever to make it talk.

And that's before we consider things that might not be adaptable without rewriting them to have an alternate mode, for example color-based puzzles that might now need to be entirely rethought for sound.

I'm a professional programmer.  I think the fastest turnaround I've seen in my career on a feature that isn't like "add one button to a dialog" is a couple weeks across multiple people on the team.  Programmers make $50/hour.  A single programmer for a week needs to be paid $2000 to compete at the market rate.  Accessibility will take several weeks and involve multiple people.  My $20000 figure is considered cheap--it's what a small business pays for their small business e-commerce site for example. A game studio like this is probably running at below market rate, so their costs are lower, but it also shaves off what they can afford to lose in overhead--that is, if you're making $50 and your monthly living budget is $20 then working below market rate at $40 to help the blind people isn't a bad sell, but unless this game is staggeringly popular they're probably only doing $25/hour at best and at least in the U.S. most places that's really close to the wire as it is, so "here's something that doesn't make you money and also you can never stop doing it because it'll just stay with you forever every time you do a new thing" is borderline crippling for the company.

It's easy to say "this must be easy" but this kind of echoes a conversation me and a lot of experienced devs on here have with newbie audiogame devs, where it sounds like your small game is only going to take a couple days because it's small but you're still at it 2 weeks later.  If you don't have significant programming experience, then whatever you're estimating as the timeline needs to be multiplied by at least 10 times, roughly.  If you're going "well accessibility should only take a week", think more like 8-10, which is probably around what it would be here.

I want to be clear that I want to see more videogame accessibility overall, but at the same time what you all have to understand is this.  When you go to a company and you say "make your thing accessible" they're going to say "and where do we get the money" and that's not actually wrong of them to do, since they have to feed people and want to continue existing as a company.  Games are luxuries.  As much as I don't see the point of The Last of Us 2, they probably spent anywhere from $100000 to $1000000 on doing it.  If you tell your devs "we're making x blind accessible but this means we're paying you less" they'll just walk away, because while they might want to help the blind people they probably don't want to help us at the cost of their retirement, and it's not fair to ask them to do that for a luxury good that we want but don't need.  If I was going to propose a solution to this, it would be to figure out how to get NFB/ACB/AFB/name-your-other-big-blindness-org to fund this work, probably starting with "hey unity, can you offer accessibility tools" or something, or just picking indie games like Slay the Spire and saying "here's $50000, have fun" or whatever else necessary.  Someone like Sony can blink at sinking $100000 into a project like this for example, but most indie studios don't even make that in a year.

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2021-04-15 03:31:41

I am glad that they even thought about it. I think that alone is a step in the right direction. I agree that we would have to offer up money to support such a project.

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2021-04-15 08:07:29

Hi.
I'm glad they even responded regarding to accessibility. We don't know how the game is coded, so we don't know how much work they have to do to add accessibility.
Why create a new topic about this instead of posting in the topic we already have?

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2021-04-15 12:12:50

I think you guys misunderstood my post. I am not specifically angry because they're not planning to add
And I mean, they can't be that small if they managed to pull this kind of game of. As far as I have gathered from let's plays of the game I watched, it's not exactly a small game.accessibility, but because they first said "yeah, with enough people interested, we'll make it accessible", but then a few days later said: "we're not making it accessible because it takes too much time". I am not a programmer, but I think hundreds of work hours to add accessibility are more than exaggerated.

Greetings and happy gaming, Julian

If you say you never lie, you're a liar.
Oh, and #freeGCW

2021-04-15 12:36:21

@22:

I think....and hear me out...I think, maybe just maybe, I'd take the word of somebody who makes a living programming, over your claim hundreds of hours are 'exaggerated'. Read Camlorn's last two posts carefully. And remember these companies are....companies. They are wanting to survive and make money and continue existing. It's all well and good to go to a studio and be all 'make this accessible', but any sane company will look at the costs and go no, that'll bankrupt us so we're passing on that one because it costs entirely too much. End of the day, no business that's not financially secure is going to risk the future of the company.

Don't even start with the 'but audiogame devs'.... because there's no comparison. Camlorn knows how shit works. Outside of the blindie bubble, the real world's all about can my business survive if I do X Y and Z, and then will I get a return and break even or turn a profit on this thing?

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2021-04-15 13:24:40

@23 is correct, I can tell with a game like this can and or could take a lot of hours to add this specially if accessibility was not build into the game from the start of the project. Their is a huge difference from a one man dev team to a company who needs to survive based on profits.

2021-04-15 13:26:15

Honestly, everyone bitching in this topic really doesn't deserve to have games be made accessible.

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