A 10-year-old Californian schoolboy has created a computer game for his blind grandmother so they can play together.
Dylan Viale, a fifth-grader at Hidden Valley Elementary in Martinez
He then decided to enter the game in his school science fair - and won first place. He now hopes to become a game designer when he leaves school.
'Dylan wanted to figure out a way that he could share his love for video games with her,' Dylan's father, Dino Viale, told computer game blog Kotaku.
'He thought, "How can I create something she can enjoy?''
He then downloaded GameMaker, a software that lets people write their own games easily.
He decided to create a maze game in which players move Quacky, a duck character that Dylan has drawn since he was in elementary school.
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| Dylan Viale |
As Quacky, the goal is to navigate through a series of mazes and find a Golden Egg. To ensure his grandmother could play, he decided the sounds would be key.
'Sound was the greatest tool for [Dylan's] grandmother to navigate through the game,' Dino said. 'He had to figure out how to associate each move through the maze with sound cues for whether you were doing something correctly or incorrectly.'
The game uses a maze similar to pacman, with each object having a different sounds. When players hit a wall, for instance, they hear a low noise, while jewels produce a ‘cha ching’ sound.
The game also features giant spiders - if player go the wrong way down a passage, they start hearing spider noises.
However, after testing the game with his grandmother, he found it needed more work to ensure she did not go backwards - so he added a feature dropping a boulder behind the duck as it moved around the maze, 'If you tried to go backwards, it would make the negative sound of hitting a boulder or a wall,' Dino said.
'Once that happened, [Sherry] was really able to fly through the maze quite quickly,' he said.
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