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Welcome to this screencast.
I will hereby introduce Flore, in English Flora, a game intended for visually deficient
children. It was created for the DeViNT day. This event, whose name stands for “Visual
Deficiency and New Technologies†, is organized by the French engineering school
Polytech’Nice-Sophia. All third year computing students have to create a software,
usually a game, for this day. This is our production.
Please keep in mind that this game is not considered as complete, and that it will be
improved if it is to be distributed. The encoding problems you will see are only caused by compilation
setup, and are not to be seen everywhere.
Flore puts the player in charge of saving endangered species; in order to complete a
level, the player has to attract a given set of animals on the screen, so they can eventually
be moved to natural reserves. The player’s means of action is to entice animals to come
by growing their favorite plants. The main menu offers four choices:
- play the game - play a tutorial
- change options - quit
Mouse and keyboard are usable alike, but I will use the keyboard only for this presentation,
since most visually deficient people have this behavior. You’ll notice that all
of the options are read aloud. As of today, the Polytech’Nice’s speech synthesis
software SIVOX functions only with Windows, but it should be easily portable.
Let’s start by taking a quick look at the tutorial.
Here is the game interface. To complete a level, the player has to attract the animals
shown at the top. On the right are the available seeds for him to plant. The main panel represents
the playground. The game is played by firstly selecting one of the empty holes, symbolized
by black circles. This is done using the left and right arrows. Once a hole is selected,
a seed has to be chosen, then planted. This is done using the up and down arrows, then
pushing the “enter†key. Once the seed is planted, the hole changes shape, and
the player now has to water the seed, by holding the “space†key. Once the plant
is grown, insects begin to appear on the screen. However, these are not the ones I was supposed
to attract. I would therefore have to grow the other seed to complete the level.
I will now show the main options and how they allow for all the different kinds of visual
deficiency. One may here change the size of the font,
the creatures, the plants and the playground elements. But one interesting option is the
“Theme†option. All graphical elements may have different versions. Let’s
try the “high contrast†theme.
You’ll notice how the holes and sun increased in size after I shifted the “playground
elements size†option from 5 to 8. More importantly, notice how almost all the graphical
elements have much more outlined shapes.
I will now present how elements are made from a technical point of view, so you get a better
idea about how easy it is to expand the game. All elements are stored in the “resourcesâ€
folder. Elements of the game are insects, plants, but missions too. And every element
is very easily modifiable, since it is simply described by an XML file!
Let’s take the “mimosa†plant, for example. Here is its description file.
You’ll notice that our game is also ready for internationalization. We believe
the values are quite self-explanatory, and therefore very easy to modify. You can see
here how images, or assets, are provided; themes are just a matter of setting the “typeâ€
attribute, so accommodating the game to a new kind of deficiency is just a matter of
creating the corresponding images and adding a few lines to the elements. Here are the
images themselves, in folders named after their themes.
If you wanted to add a new level, you’d only have to create a new folder, and put
your mission description in it. Here is a mission description example. As usual, everything
is quite clear: name, description, hints… All the new plants and animals you’d
need would just have to be dropped in the elements folder.
I am Matti Schneider and this was Flore, a game for visually deficient children. Thanks
for watching!