Taking Video Out of the Game: A Game Developer’s Guide to Total Blind Accessibility by Cole Brandon

Author:Cole, Brandon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: 2025-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 12

Navigation and Traversal

DOI: 10.1201/9781003433750-14

LOTS OF GAMES TODAY are built in worlds players can explore, sometimes to their heart’s content. Some worlds are enormous constructs of epic proportions, known as open worlds. They are going to have their very own chapter later. For now, we’re going to cover the basics of helping a blind person navigate your world, as, once again, there are multiple ways to approach this. No matter what, though, unless your game contains no navigation at all, such as an interactive experience like As Dusk Falls or Stray Gods, the blind player is going to need help with this. Let’s discuss how you can make this happen.

The style of navigation you use depends on the types of navigation required and, in some cases, the complexity of your game. The larger and more complex your game world, the more complex it will be to provide true navigation assistance. Of course, even a small but complex world presents its own challenges, such as a platformer. We’re going to talk about all these things, don’t worry.

I’m going to start with a fairly complex example because it’s one that exists right now, and thus it’s something you can reference for yourself. I’m going to start with, you guessed it, The Last of Us Parts 1 and 2. How do we navigate through this game’s world? Allow me to explain.

The navigation assist system of The Last of Us was an enormous and complex effort. The short version is that when you press L3, an audio cue plays in the direction of your objective, and the camera turns to face it. So, pressing L3 while pushing forward will get you where you’re going, the audio cue helping to signify when you’ve taken a turn just 58so you, the player, know when that happens. However, under the hood, it is much, much more complex than that. Every single time the player presses L3, a ray is cast from the player to the next hand-crafted point, whether that’s a wall, or a doorway, or even just a reasonable distance from the player. Yes, you read that right. The maps for The Last of Us Part II, and then the Part I remake, were marked up for navigational assistance by hand. This is because there’s an inherent problem with only using the camera method. That problem is that your objective may be, and in fact almost always is, on the other side of at least one wall or barrier of some kind. Using a method that only turns the camera and points toward your objective is almost assuredly going to inevitably guide your player into a bunch of walls sooner or later, even though it might appear to work for a little bit.

Let me give you a painful example of this. Marvel’s Spiderman: Miles Morales on PS5 has a navigational assistance feature. Pretty cool, right? In fact, I was able to complete the entire introduction to the game on my own without sighted assistance. After the

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