Nomination for Outstanding Production

Nomination for Outstanding Production - LEVY

I am nominating the following students for their work on "LEVY" for the Outstanding Production award:

Current students:

Dan St.Germain: UI designer, artist, audio engineer, audio description
Alex Lambright: Writer

Alumni:

Taylor Andersen-Barkely: narrative designer, sound designer, audio describer.
Kira Foglesong: producer, creative director, art director, lead artist, audio engineer.
Will Bennet: lead programmer

Reasons why this production rocks:

Audio description and accessibility in media:

This small group of game designers set out to create a video game that was accessible to hearing-impaired, vision-impaired, as well as mobility-impaired players. To make the game accessible to vision-impaired players, the team did something no one else had done before (as far as the research has shown): bringing Audio Description to video games! Subtitles and visual UI components were added to make the game more accessible to hearing-impaired players, and mechanics were simple enough to be used by players with mobility impairments.

While accessibility is a hot topic these days, this team was perhaps the first game design team to ever include Audio Description in a video game. They have presented this work internationally, and the team has been invited to give a presentation on this game at the 2018 East Coast Games Conference later this Spring.

Character & Environment Design:

Kira Foglesong conducted an immense amount of work researching interior design, fashion design, and architectural design from 4 different countries at the turn of the 19th Century in order to create the environments and characters for this video game.

User-Interface Design:

Dan St. Germain designed the user-interface system in this game. This sophisticated and intriguing UI element was designed to show the floor one was on, the floor that called the elevator, the time of day, and the health of the player. It was stylistically designed to fit the elevator theme as well as fit in with the turn-of-the-century aesthetic nature of the game.