Overview
Kingslayer was an academic project created with one other person. It is a co-op, multiplayer beat 'em up project where each player must navigate through a dungeon and defeat enemies, eventually defeating a dungeon boss. The game features a "rush mode" bullet time mechanic that allows the player to slow the game down for a small period of time while still feeling a sense of speed and power. It was built in Unity, with a few unique challenges. The first was to design a game that catered to a fictional persona with a disability. Our persona was someone with cerebral palsy who had difficulty with quick, fine-tuned button inputs, but still wanted to feel powerful. The second challenge was to create an Arduino-powered controller that this persona could feasibly use to play the game with success, and then link this controller to Unity and allow it as a viable input. We decided on a controller with a simple one button attack and a few large buttons, rather than requiring complex sequences of button inputs. Development is ongoing, with current focuses being level design and enemy balance.
My Areas of Focus
- Designing a core gameplay experience that is fun and caters to specific accessibility needs
- Designing, building, and programming an accessible Arduino controller
- Designing a sleek UI and aesthetic reminiscent of retro-style games
- Project Management, ensuring that the scope of the project made sense and deliverables were timely and valuable
- Ongoing iterative improvements driven by UX testing feedback
What I Learned
After significant research, I now have a better understanding of existing accessibility hardware and game settings, as well as their current impact on the gaming community. As someone who's passion is around creating fun and engaging experiences for people, I have an appreciation and understanding of how my design choices can directly impact people positively. This project also gave me some much needed experience building an Arduino controller and integrating it into Unity. Currently player 1 uses the Arduino controller, and player 2 uses the keyboard. Designing scripts to both use the input system and the Arduino input was a challenge, with some refactoring of both the Unity scripts and the Arduino file to make integration as seamless as possible and reduce latency.
Current State
The project exists as a playable two-player prototype with functionality for the accessible controller. This project is slated to be released as a publicly available game on Steam in Fall 2026. Because we do not have the capability to mass produce the Arduino controller, the Steam version will consider keyboard inputs for both players, allowing for local or networked multiplayer. A Steam page link will be added below when this happens.