Accessibility settings & ideas

[Toma400]

So, here will be bulk topic for all ideas that will help supporting accessibility for IoA. Everyone are welcome to suggest anything related. Ideas that can be realised will eventually get their own issue card linked from here.

Current ideas:

• Text-to-voice. Not sure how exactly this would be able to help people and how it should be introduced (I assume it could be bundled with hotkeys? And possibly sounds for actions, which would both measure actions done & be just good for immersion for all players?), so I would need heavy research and discussions here
  • Idea: special keybind allowing user to get description of current menu (keybind, so it doesn't start automatically, it could be annoying I think).
• Arachnophobia setting. This setting will benefit heavily if there are "mob categories" in IoA, just like there are undead categories in Minecraft (it can be guided by tag, or metadata within mob qualities). But overall, getting rid of spider-like entities is quite easy based on how every fight could replace spiders with other mobs, or just spiders could be removed from spawn groups in areas containing them.
  Questions for gameplay to ask:
  • What if spiders will be important part of quest/gameplay? There should be rather mob replacement than erasing, as this will also impact balance of the game
  • As main issue with this type of mob is their representation, it could be enough to change their avatar/"weapons"/names instead of erasing them completely - this way we could avoid other issues and just imitate "texturepack" for every mob categorised as spider-like

Remember those ideas mentioned here are only a draft and are topics for discussion on whether they are added, and in what form.

[Toma400]

Good idea how to keep mob representation without actually making it scary: just replace/remove its appearance, I think simply calling something "spider" shouldn't be triggering, their look would be. Needs some research whether I'm right here, but if so, it'd be as simple as putting rule to avoid specific kind of mobs appearing, or having default non-triggering image for them. This could make it much more customisable and easy to implement.