Assistive Systems Project Plugin

The dynamic platforming assistance is for developers to include the ability to have assistive systems that can be used by players of all levels for certain situations. The developer can choose to use the dynamic system that will detect and place platforms for the user during the game. That can have specific required situations to spawn them in. Otherwise the developers can manually place these systems in the world that will give more control over when and where these systems are utilised.

This system is intended for lower difficulties or to add a dynamic difficulty to the game, giving the player the assistance if they need or want it. The situations of which this should be available to the player would be if they have attempted the jump and failed a certain number of times. Giving them another option of assistance if they need it instead of them quitting the game or getting stuck.

The audio to text system was developed to further the accessibility used by games. Currently the major accessibility feature is subtitles for dialogue, but sounds are a key feature for game design. The audio to text system turns sounds into a readable format using location based text display of the sound. To keep the design minimalistic but also functional 5 zones of importance were created representing 36 degrees of the players forward 180 degrees.

This allowed for a non-obtrusive accessibility feature to give no additional advantage over normal gameplay just expanding the accessibility of this normal gameplay. Meaning that it makes games more inclusive and as with subtitles would be toggle-able in the settings. This sound system uses a component attached to the player to get the cameras forward direction using a dot product to gather the rotation between the sound and the forward vector of the player. This is then stored and the display then sorts through all relevant stored sounds do display sounds of the most importance.

As with standard hearing the sounds that are the loudest are the most distinguishable and therefore they have a higher priority. As with other systems this was designed with modularity in mind. Allowing the developer to modify the visual aspects of this system using the menu or modify the commented code directly.

The danger detection system is the main part of the project this is what does all of the dynamic work. It consists of a component attached to the player, every second 5 AI are spawned. They each run a unique environmental querying systems based on the players position. Gathering data on where there will likely be danger in the environment.

The AI have their tick speed increased by 10 times. This means that they are able to traverse the environment in 1 second that would usually take them 10 seconds. Although this increases computation the requirements are minor. It is built to detect danger in the environment, like for the jump assistance systems and also enemies by accessing whether the enemy has an enemy component attached. This enemy component is what alerts the AI that it is an enemy. Relaying this data back to the players control component. This then checks to see what to do with this information.

By default the player is given the ability to see where the enemy AI will travel to next through the use of enemy foretelling. This assistive system is an example of what can be used with the relevant information provided by the AI danger detection. This allows for this systems to be implemented in fully dynamic environments including procedural maps to assess the environment during gameplay.