The Project
Project Profile
Shard Workshop is a project born in 2011, in Rome, Italy, whose main goal is to take the gaming experience for blind and visually impaired people to the next level.
We believe that creating a videogame or an audiogame (especially a single player one) is like creating a world, with it's own story, geography, fauna, flora, traditions etc. When the player is playing that game he should really feel carried to another world much (and more) like watching an epic film or reading a breath-taking book.
A lot of people think that video (or audio) gaming is a waste of time, or worse. We at Shard Workshop are firmly convinced of the opposite: playing games helps develop the immagination of children, can be a positive competition no less then sport, is a way to meet new friends and stay together and can be a deep experience full of emotions.
The Four Golden Principles
We do our best to follow few guidelines which we really believe in. We really look forward to lengthening this list by adding things learned with the Shard Workshop experience.
- SPECIFIC GAME DESIGN
When it comes to videogame accessibility you'll often hear some videogaming company leader happily saying that their next big title will be accessible to blind users.
Now, while this can sometimes be really good, most of the time it results in a watered-down gaming experience where you can't do a lot of things and the few ones that can be done are incredibly frustrating. The reason behind these problems is that these videogames were designed for sighted gamers and then adapted for blind gamers, and the adaptation is tipically limited to the addition of few audio indicators.
The first golden principle here at Shard Workshop is: design and develop games specifically to be played without sight. Maybe we'll take a few ideas from the videogames world, but game idea and game design are not the same thing! - NEW GAMING EXPERIENCE
Another thing that we noted is that there is something like a diffuse sense of "cheapness" in the audiogames panorama. While there are some little gems here and there, most of the games available are just standard games in digital version e.g. card games, board games etc, or games that require a text to speech software to be played. This either ruins the game atmosphere or, more frequently, doesn't even create one!
For us the gaming experience is both the beautiful atmosphere created in single player games that makes you think you are traveling across another world and the great atmosphere of competition and cooperation in multiplayer games. - COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPARENCY
This is a professional project but we don't want to play the part of the wicked megacorporation of elemental evil that spits out products and grinds money. We want direct contact with our community, we want to know what they think of us and of our games.
We want transparent, honest, straightforward communication, because we are gamers first of all and we share the same passion of our customers. - IT'S DONE WHEN IT'S DONE
That's right, just like Blizzard Entertainment, we believe that a game should be published only when it's finished, not when a calendar say so.
Too often in the gaming scene you see great concepts, great art and great ideas wasted because someone forced an early release, missing the masterpiece. As long as we are independent we will do our best to realease our games only when we feel they are perfect.
Who Is Behind Shard Workshop?
Shard Workshop is a "one man band" founded and entirely managed by Lorenzo "PixelSapiens" Bellincampi, italian 3d artist, composer and avid gamer.
Everything started when Lorenzo and Mario Loreti, visually impaired Italian radio speaker and good friend of Lorenzo, were playing videogames together, Lorenzo describing everything to Mario. The experience was really entertaining and Lorenzo had the idea of making games specifically for the blinds. A few years later that idea was formalized in Shard Workshop, the audiogames (and who knows, maybe, one day, videogames) development project that you all know.
Currently everything is managed by Lorenzo, from the game and audio design to the programming, development and deployment of games, through community management, etc.
If you would like to know more about him and his works, visit his website at lorenzobellincampi.net