Access Escape - A Shuttle Shambles

Access Escape as a London based escape room company who create "blind-friendly" escape room experiences. From physical escape rooms that can only be played in the dark, to auditory puzzle games and hosted Zoom experiences.

In late 2019 / early 2020, I joined the team to create a short, 15 - 20 minute text-only puzzle game called "A Shuttle Shambles".

Just a normal day on the Central Space Centre. That is until a mayday comes in from Captain Sami! Something has gone terribly wrong and they need your help. Do you have what it takes to remotely assist the repair then guide them safely to Earth? It's up to you now.

The Challenge

The challenge was to create an experience that would be equally fun for both blind and sighted people. Sighted players would experience the game as a series of emails back and forth, and those using a screen reader would be able to play 'auditorily'. As such, there was an additional challenge to make the puzzles screen reader friendly. External knowledge was allowed, so long as it could be easily Googled and that the answer would be presented within the top results without ambiguity.

Due to the text-only nature of this experience, the majority of the game development process took place in plain text spreadsheets, and was extensively tested throughout on Alexa and Siri devices.