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Design: Accessibility in Kart Games
The Fish Folk games take inspiration from family-friendly games and party games, and accessibility is one of their core pillars. Not just in making it easy to get your mother or sibling to play, but also your cousin with less hand coordination or your friend with their broken controller.
Mario Kart 8 (Deluxe) has made incredible strides in this direction for an eastern game, and it's undoubtedly one of the reasons behind its 60 million copies sold (as of 2024). By using the sideways Joy-Con it can even be played with one hand! There's a lot to be learned from the game, and the foundation it lays can be built upon as well.
Mario Kart 8 has only a handful of required inputs to play: Steer, Accelerate, Brake, Jump and Use Item. That's it. The game also includes a button to look behind you (to better aim items or dodge Bullet Bills), and of course the pause button. This has a few implications:
- The game can support control schemes with less buttons, like a Gamecube controller, a Wii Remote or a sideways Joy-Con. If it had input remapping like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, that'd also be made easier by having less options to move around.
- The game can add repeated/redundant bindings to bigger controlers like a standard Nintendo Switch Pro Controller (so, drift is both right shoulder and right trigger, etc). There's a bigger chance a broken controller can still play the game, and people can choose which of the redundant bindings they find more comfortable to use for whatever reason.
One of the most common control accessibility features in games is probably the "hold or toggle" setting for a given action [1]. Games may require the player to hold a certain button for extended periods of time, and while it's easy to see how that could be straining to players' hands, some may have actual limitations preventing them from holding buttons down for too long. For that reason, some games give you the option to press that action once to set it as held, and press it again to set it as released, "toggling" it on or off.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe doesn't require precise throttle control like racing simulators so it's very common that players spend the entire race holding the A button. For the above reasons, it could quickly get tiresome to hold what's essentially a non-choice, and that's why being able to toggle Auto Accelerate in the pause menu is great. It also helps younger players better focus on just the steering and item usage as that might already be too overwhelming.
As for Steering Assist, it wants to help players who don't know enough about cornering, don't quite have the finesse / coordination to steer the kart using the joystick or motion controls, and can't get out of off-road. In summary, the toggle makes your kart collide with invisible walls at the edges of the drivable road so that you don't go off-road, while preserving most of your speed in these collisions. It also just slightly steers you away from the outer edge of a corner, without straight up driving for you. With so many game engines offering some sort of collision layer system, although hard to implement, it is certainly possible, and very welcome!