Project P.Y.U.M.O.

Note: The game can be played by the sighted. However, owing to the substantial textual information, the partially sighted will need assistance to play. It does not have any audio cues, so, unfortunately, can not be played by the blind.

P.Y.U.M.O. stands for 'Pick Yourself Up and Move On.' The protagonist, Priscilla, has recently had to face some difficult days and now finds herself in a bleak place. Project P.Y.U.M.O. is a chronicle of her efforts to step away from the past and make a fresh star. She must battle exhaustion and plan her finances carefully to transform into a new persona.

This game was a submission to the Access Reset Jam and centres around Accessibility and 'New Beginnings', the two themes of the jam. 

Accessibility

Below are the key accessibility areas focused upon:

Motor:

- The game does away with complex controls and can be played entirely using the left mouse button, with the mouse wheel occasionally coming into play. 

- The single-button control scheme also ensures that user interface can be interacted with in the same way as the gameplay.

Vision:

- No information in the game is colour-based.

- Visual elements such as the HUD, the icons and dialogue text have been kept high-contrast and their foreground and background colour combinations chosen after checking with the WebAIM contrast checker (https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/) for better visibility.

General:

- The game has three difficulty modes so that players can tailor their gameplay experience. The difficulty modes can be set not only at the start, but also while playing the game. All game parameters will be instantly updated to reflect the changed difficulty.

- The difficulty settings are saved in an external file so settings changed in the main menu will be remembered when player starts playing the game.

- Windowed mode can be triggered by hitting Alt+Enter keys together.

Cognitive:

- The game can be started easily just by clicking the ‘Play’ button from the main menu. No complex layers of menu are involved.

- Font and icon size has been kept larger than usual for effective readability. Fonts are simple with minimal stylized formatting.

- The game features an interactive tutorial to help players learn the game mechanics.

- Players can read the tutorial/dialogue texts at their own pace and press a button to advance to the next dialogue.

- A handy summary of the city’s buildings can be accessed anytime so players do not have to retain information about each building.

- Tutorial instruction texts are reinforced by visual cues in the form of pointers, particle effects and mini-map icons.

- No flickering/repetitive patterns are used.

New Beginnings

Starting things over is the central theme of the game. The backstory of Priscilla, the protagonist in Project P.Y.U.M.O. revolves around moving on and starting afresh. The gameplay loop has been designed with this theme in mind. Hence, each action that the player performs affects the protagonist’s progress on their journey of making a new beginning. The idea of beginning anew is a core game theme and every element of the game loop is connected to this idea in one way or the other.

Premade Assets

While I have used the Assetsville Town asset pack from the Unreal Engine marketplace (https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/assetsville-town) to assemble the town and the NPCs, everything else is original.

Unreal Engine’s Metahumans Creator was used to create the protagonist character.

The 2D icons were created by me using Photoshop, and music was created using BeepBox (www.beepbox.co).

All the agencies involved have been credited appropriately in the Credits section of the main menu.