Achromatopsia Simulator

Achromatopsia Simulator was a game developed by me and three others in our Alternative Game Development class during the Summer 2022. The game is an educational game made in Unity, helping teach players what Complete Achromatopsia is and what challenges someone with the condition faces by putting them in a small room and giving them a simple task list that they must complete.

This was a very personal project for me as I have Achromatopsia and have always wanted to create a way for people to understand what I went through on a daily basis. I worked on nearly all aspects of this game including the initial pitch documents, directing, design, modeling, texturing, and the UI.

You can download it for free at https://clothmanz.itch.io/achromatopsia-simulator

Development Breakdown

Achromatopsia Simulator was initially pitched to be a very simple game as I knew going into it, that we had roughly around a month and a half to make the game. I wanted to avoid making the scope of the game too large, so it started as a very simple concept that was mostly a VFX showcase. Below is the original pitch document.

However when we assembled the team, we decided to make it a bit more interactive by giving the player full 360 degree movement and added the task list to make the player not only see what the condition was like, but also experience the struggles it entails. The tasks included took a lot of thinking on how to best represent different aspects of the condition, and I worked alongside other people who had Achromatopsia to come up with different tasks that are hard with it. This here is the breakdown of the tasks that I eventually put together.

Nearly everything in the game was a very collaborative process. I worked very closely with our VFX artist so that we could recreate Achromatopsia as accurately as possible using the tools provided by Unity, making tons of minor tweaks until I thought it looked just right, and then I'd show it to others with Achromatopsia to make sure they found it accurate too. The process of making all the models was incredibly collaborative too. Each of us made several models (I personally made the chair and marker models). Then for texturing, our main artist would make the textures for everything in color, and then I had to manually take each texture, put it into photoshop, set it to grayscale, and then meticulously adjust the contrast, saturation, and brightness in order to make it look like how it actually looks to someone with Achromatopsia. We wanted accuracy and a simple black and white filter didin't do the job. It took a ton of work but I'm very proud of the accuracy of the project.