Accessible Dungeon Designer

Recently, I finished a 7 month long fellowship with Take This Inc. for people building careers on the intersection of mental health and game design. The program was incredible and taught everything from general state of mental health today, to community building, to accessibility.

Special shout-out to Kelli Dunlap and Sarah Hays the program leads who taught us, ran the program, brought us to the GDC, and otherwise made this program an incredible experience.

And the final step of the program was a capstone project, a piece of design, or community building or research that aims to solve an industry problem in the games and mental health space.

For my project I created a virtual board game that teaches mental health accessible design, by giving the player powers based on real accessible design principles, they can build their skill-set, learn the cost of employing accessible principles too late, and have a little bit of pride in making a game more playable to the players or adventurers that pass through it.

And unbelievably, my project won second place!

I’m proud of the work I’ve done on this project and the win was unbelievable with the incredible quality of work from the other fellows, who all deserve a prize for their efforts. Here I would like to thank my mentor Malek Teffaha for his mentorship and help pointing me in the right direction to create a game that can do some real good.

In the coming weeks I hope to play-test the game further, gather some experts, and turn this little board game into something I can share with real people as both an educational resource for students, a workshop for game designers, and a generalized product that can teach whoever wants to learn a little bit about thinking accessibly.

A mock-up of Accessible Dungeon Designer