As a Deaf gamer, and a person interested in game design, I have had some rather negative experiences back in the Unreal 2/3 days with the community in general. I once purchased an instructional DVD series on the Unreal engine, and lo and behold, it wasn’t even subtitled. I complained on their forums, and got pretty much shouted out of there. I gave up on ever trying to accomplish any kind of programming, and moved on to being an illustrator.
Ever since, I’ve been more on the writing (not programming. Just brainstorms, etc…) side of things when it comes to game design. Now, of late, I’d been getting frustrated with the WW2 genre (War Thunder, I’m looking at you), and have been getting a bit itchy about it. So I spitballed my thoughts onto a game design brainstorm document, and I have something that I think I could probably get somewhere with.
And here is where my deafness once again gets in the way. Videos. Most of the content I’ve seen surrounding UE4 are videos with no transcribed captions at all. I know there’s a wiki, but there’s a limit to what reading can do, as opposed to seeing it in action.
I’d like to ask if there is honestly any real degree of accessibility in learning UE4 at all. There are a lot of things I’d like to figure out, but I haven’t the confidence - nor the patience - to really go through with it unless I can actually nail the bullet points I need to accomplish.
We have an effort underway to transcribe all of our video tutorials so they should have subtitles in the future if they don’t already. It’s definitely something we are aware of and want to do as much as possible to make our learning resources accessible to everyone.
I would appreciate that a lot. Though, to be honest, I have very little confidence in my skills as a game programmer. There is, however, ONE game I would like to have made, but I cannot do it by myself. I even wrote up a comprehensive brainstorm document that includes a hard look at the business model for it. :\
The problem? I have no idea how I could ever pitch this game. When I talked to some other folks in the publisher business, they said, “what about this other game?” - and I just roll my eyes, because they’re only looking at the superficial surface of those “other games”, and not realizing just how deeply flawed they really are.
My problem with “this other game”, is that the developers are tinged with bias, mistreat the community, and ultimately, their very game design actually implicitly abuses anyone that doesn’t choose the factions the developer favors.
But that’s a subject for another thread, another day.
