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In 1995, Jackbox Games published You Don't Know Jack, a game based on the 90s knowledge quiz show in the United States. It quickly became a party darling and was loved by blind and visually impaired players for its natural accessibility features. The game didn't have detailed and complex accessibility menus, but a game that could read everything out aloud meant that you didn't need to see the screen to participate, and there were no obstacles that could not be overcome.
Last year, the developer launched the eighth installment of its longevity series, Jack's Box's Party Game Pack, which brings players games like Drawful Animate, The Wheel of Enormous Proportions, Poll Mine, and more. As Party Pack 9 enters development, they will continue to focus on creating accessible gaming experiences that facilitate different types of players with disabilities.
Some of these features include subtitles for deaf and hearing-impaired players, reducing physical or cognitive fatigue by extending or canceling time limits, adjusting the sensitivity of multiple input devices, and more. Mike Bilder, CEO of Jackbox Games, and Evan Jacover, CTO, joined us in discussing the need for these settings and the importance of communicating with the player community and listening to feedback as these features are developed.
Jacover told Fanbyte, "When we were doing The Party Game Pack, a couple of people [blind and visually impaired] provided some feedback, mostly about how our controllers worked, about our phone-based controllers."
Engineer Alex Swan is particularly interested in solving these problems. He experimented with features such as screen-reading software on input devices such as mobile phones, combined with the advice of community consultants, and finally provided a solution for many types of disabled players to play "Party Game Pack". Developers and consultants have a high passion for this, and this enthusiasm has always influenced the development of Jackbox Games.
▲ "Drawful Animate", sand sculpture animation version of "You Draw I Guess"
"A lot of it is pushed by the community first, and then we understand the needs of the community, like how to modify these games to make [accessibility] work, and when they need to be modified," Bilder said, "Honestly, not every game can do that, but if we just tweak it a little bit, then we're going to do it and then try to add new features to make the game more accessible."
In addition to listening to the opinions and suggestions of people with disabilities, Jackbox Games will also bring in multiple groups of players to try out new games and test accessibility features. While the pandemic has changed the testing process, preventing Jackbox Games from inviting players to the studio, players with disabilities are still highly involved in the development and testing process to ensure that it's fun and playable – not only interesting enough, but also taking care of the tester's specific circumstances. However, trial plays sometimes do not lead to new ideas, especially if new works are produced every year.
The Wheel of Enormous Proportions
"Honestly, one of the challenges we face is that we're going to launch a new generation of Party Game Packs every year, which has a tight schedule, and a lot of mini-games are not completed at the same level, even until the end of development," Bilder says. When tested, the game may still be a framework that contains only the main features or features that may be used."
Sometimes accessibility features are added after the release, as exemplified by the color blindness setup of the Trivia Murder Party (a game first added to Party Pack 3). Among the many mini-games of the "Knowledge Quiz Murder Party", there is a mini-game that requires the player to find items of a specific color. After a colorblind player criticized its lack of accessibility, the studio began figuring out how to maintain the difficulty while providing convenience to colorblind players.
"It led to a deep, intense discussion within the team," says Jacover, "and our team was very engaged in discussing this issue, and we did our research and tried to understand, trying to find the most appropriate approach in this situation." Do you want to write the color directly? Or is there some color that is more suitable for colorblind players to recognize? We were still little white, but then we taught ourselves a lot of things."
One solution is to add a new mode and use a colorblind-friendly color scheme. Once such features are added, subsequent games can inherit these accessibility features that have already been done, and add new settings and options on this basis.
Bider says, "Some of the simple features are basically standard on subsequent products, such as subtitles. I expect that any game we make will be like this in the future."
▲Poll Mine
Any one accessibility feature can require years of trial and error. After years of ongoing support for players with disabilities, Jackbox Games hopes to bring past successes to new games and build on that. Released this fall, Jack's Box Party Game Pack 9 will include all the accessibility features that have been available in the past, with new options added to it. While developers are reluctant to reveal the specifics of Party Game Pack 9, Jacover says the team is actively working to ensure that the new game includes the accessibility features it deserves.
"We're still in development, and it's hard to say what features Party Pack 9 will eventually include, but I can give you an example of a game with both text and drawing questions, and I heard the development team say that it will include an option without drawing problems for more people to play with," Jacover said.
Features that have long been discussed by developers about what to do to achieve the best results are now standard in the Party Game Pack series, such as subtitles and color blindness settings. In addition, as new accessibility innovations and concepts emerge, players with disabilities feed directly back to Jackbox to ensure their voices are heard and that their criticisms make a difference. As Bilder explains, giving players choices and letting them choose the accessibility features they want is key to creating a good experience.
"As time goes on, you may have seen that we will have more and more features in the game. Our mindset on this matter has also changed. Now we want to hand over more and more things to users. We want to make the best game experience, the most interesting scoring method, the best timer and so on as the default, but we also provide players with a variety of options to set up the game and enjoy the game the way they want."
Translated | Wang Yi
Edit | Tony