Playability Podcast

Episode 1: Lauren Woolsey and Catherine Stippell

Run time: 8 minutes, 50 seconds

Episode recorded by Lauren Woolsey.

Playability is produced by Mike Risley.

Transcript auto-generated by YouTube and edited by Lauren Woolsey.

00:08 Lauren Woolsey
Hello and welcome to Playability, where we hold conversations at the crossroads of gameplay and accessibility.  I'm your host Lauren Woolsey and I'm here today with Catherine Stippell, the designer of one of the most anticipated games of the summer: Nyctophobia. What is this game's backstory?

00:26 Catherine Stippell
So Nyctophobia the word means fear of the dark, and the way you play it is all but one player plays the game with the blindfold on with blackout glasses so they can't see the board. And that came about because I have an uncle that's blind and I wanted to play games more easily with him and more accessible for him so I decided one day I was just gonna make a game that everyone was blind so it didn't matter.

00:48 Lauren Woolsey
I'm glad you've already brought up accessibility it's one of the key topics we focus on here at playability. What does accessibility mean to you?

00:56 Catherine Stippell
I think when we're playing games with him like there's always has to be some sort of [alteration] to the game that he's playing so that he can play and I think that detract some of the fun and the ease that he can just jump right into games so I think accessibility is just being able to enjoy the game that everyone else is playing in a way.
01:15 Lauren Woolsey
Yeah, making the game work for everyone and this takes on that idea in a new way for sure. You've described the blindfolded players, which is certainly a memorable aspect of the game, but what would you say is the primary mechanisms or mechanism that players use during Nyctophobia?

01:30 Catherine Stippell
It’s tactile, if that can be its own mechanism, and then it's cooperative, too.

01:35 Lauren Woolsey
I am a fan of cooperative games for sure and this is a really innovative example of them. With the inspiration behind the game, we've already heard a bit about how your biggest goal was to make this accessible to the blind community, but what other decisions did you make in the game design process with different forms of accessibility in mind? Were there any other things that came up?

01:54 Catherine Stippell
Well, since you're playing the game blind you don't have to focus on any color blind issues because no one can see so it doesn't matter! In my prototype versions, I've had all of the different player pieces coated with different tactile tops, so you could tell your piece apart when you're feeling but also I had put in colors on top so that the one sided player could quickly look at the colors. But in the actual published version that's coming out, it's all just black and white color scheme so all that color has just gone away and it doesn't really have an impact on gameplay so that that was partially some other accessibility stuff.

02:31 Lauren Woolsey
Ah right, you mentioned the prototypes, and I remember seeing this game and meeting you at Unpub a year or two ago. It was already one of the more memorable prototypes at that convention I don't even know if I got a chance to play because the table was always full! (Catherine: yeah) I'm sure what you brought at that point was somewhere in the middle of development from inception all the way to production. Can you go through with us the major steps you took in the development, especially of the board?

02:58 Catherine Stippell
So the physical board, it's a 3D board so when players move across the board they're not gonna fall over things like that. So the very first physical prototype I made was out of cardboard with holes ripped in it and then it moved up to wood. And wood was an interesting thing to playtest with because I had to make sure everything was sanded down really well so no one was getting splinters while they were playing because that wouldn't be fun for anyone and then we updated it. I learned how to make 3D models so I was able to get access to 3D printers and been able to update the board that way and in terms of just like the actual board itself that's what the stages have gone through.

03:41 Lauren Woolsey
That's a cool journey into materials that many game designers never have to make. Now that the game's complete, what would you say is your favorite part of Nyctophobia?

03:51 Catherine Stippell
I like--it's sort of a weird part because it's not really exactly part of the game--but at the end of the game, whether you've won or lost and all the players take off their blindfold glasses and see the board for the first time and everyone just replayed the game in their head like ‘oh this was the dead end I got caught in’ or ‘here was when we met up’ or ‘here's when I got attacked the first time’ and like just the recollection of the game that just went down with a totally different perspective, it has been one of the really cool moments.

04:19 Lauren Woolsey
Watching that seems very rewarding in terms of playing this with anyone visually impaired I've assumed you've played with your uncle quite a bit since was the big inspiration for the game itself. (Catherine: yeah) Have you been able to play with anyone else who is blind?

04:33 Catherine Stippell
We’ve always been trying to get friends that my uncle has in the blind community but I'm also a college student so I'm only home half of the year or so so it's hard to match up our schedules together but we're still trying to get some more blind people to play it out.

04:48 Lauren Woolsey
It’s impressive that you've been able to make such a phenomenal game while you're in school I look forward to all of your future designs! Now, since you have spent more time thinking about this perspective than a lot of other designers I'd like to ask you: if you had to give advice to publishers that are making a wide range of games, if you had to tell them something that would help make them more accessible for the blind or visually impaired, what steps would you suggest that they take or at least start to think about during game development?

05:20 Catherine Stippell
Um, I think just, well you have like, not everyone is completely blind so you can do things with font sizes and making sure that's proper and good so that you can see it across a table and things like that I think there’s not--like I made a game that's completely blind that you can play--but I think just like even in terms of just making pieces feel different sizes like different money denominations you can easily make the ones small and the tens really big and things like that are really simple or just being aware of sizes in the actual physical components to represent amounts.

05:54 Lauren Woolsey
Yeah, those do seem like fairly simple changes, especially with currencies and games which would benefit a whole wide range of players so as long as publishers have a better awareness of these topics and a better understanding of and focus on accessibility those should be fairly doable. (Catherine: yeah) I'm curious what other games are you working on right now since Nyctophobia is now a reality?

06:20 Catherine Stippell
I have a small dexterity-esque game called Foliage where all the players are caterpillars is floating on a leaf in the wind so it's a spatial game and you're trying to move your leaf around the board to try and eat leaves to become the most beautiful butterfly at the end.

06:34 Lauren Woolsey
Sounds fun! Have you thought about these topics of accessibility and inclusion as you've been developing that game?

06:41 Catherine Stippell
Yeah so my prototype artwork I have is all fall colored theme so with fall colors though I have a lot of reds and greens and I know with red-green color blindness I've been aware of making sure color coding or double coding things with different shapes so that you can still notify I'm using this portion of the card because of the shape. I've had a lot of awareness of that. 

07:08 Lauren Woolsey
Recently it does seem to be a much wider push throughout the gaming community to double code colored components that affect gameplay, though there are still plenty of games coming out that haven't done that. yeah we're planning to have a whole episode of playability on colorblindness in the future, I'm really excited for that conversation so stay tuned. Bringing it back to Nyctophobia as we wrap up: this episode is going to air shortly after Gen Con and Nyctophobia should be available for purchase. Where will our listeners be able to get a copy of your game?

07:38 Catherine Stippell
Yeah there's actually two versions of Nyctophobia coming out. You have Nyctophobia: The Hunted which is like your normal friendly local game store release type of thing, and then you have Nyctophobia: The Vampire Encounter which is going to be a target exclusive, so you can get it at a target then.

07:53 Lauren Woolsey
Will those two versions contain different scenarios where having both would let you get a fuller experience of the game or will there be a whole lot of overlap?

08:02 Catherine Stippell
Yeah so they're different enough but they're also compatible together, I guess, yeah.

08:08 Lauren Woolsey
I think a lot of people are going to be excited that Nyctophobia is now available. I'm pretty sure you had a demo at origins?

08:15 Catherine Stippell
Yeah, Pandasaurus was demoing over it Origins yeah.

08:18 Lauren Woolsey
Thank you again to Catherine Stippell for coming on Playability to talk about Nyctophobia with us. For more information about Nyctophobia, please see the “About This Episode” section on our website at Playabilitypod.com. If you have any questions or comments, please email us at playabilitypod@gmail.com and find us on major social media platforms as @playabilitypod. Thanks for listening, and I hope this episode helps you play with a new perspective! [Music to end]