Themis Games and Wordvoyance, Hello World!
Welcome to Themis Games, a place dedicated to bringing people together through the magic of interactive entertainment. We endeavor to specialize in creating games that everyone can play, with zero compromises. Our launch title, Wordvoyance, is a multiplayer crossword puzzle game with inspiration gleaned from Scrabble, Words With Friends, and other games of its kind but with an important difference: Wordvoyance has been specifically designed to enable both blind and sighted players to play together.
We’ve been making games for a long time, since the dawn of smartphones, having begun our careers solving complex usability issues in the service of making our own word and puzzle games for iOS, Android, and the web. That’s why when we received an email from a blind gentleman asking us to make a game like Wordvoyance, it caught our attention.
It was a heartwarming prospect that we could be the ones to make it possible once again for him to enjoy games with his family and friends, but it had additional importance to me personally as a designer. At this point in my career, I like to claim I’m a usability expert. However, I had only ever scratched the surface of accessibility design up until that point. To me, Wordvoyance is a capstone challenge - one that has (apparently) never been done before at any useful scale, and which would put everything I’d ever learned up to the test of brutal, empirical examination.
And here it is! Months of work later, Wordvoyance is everything I hoped it would be. If you’re already a fan of this kind of game, you will be able to jump right in dragging tiles and forming words like riding a bike. If you’re blind however, you will also find that Wordvoyance is playable through iOS VoiceOver, Android TalkBack, or mouse and keyboard complete with industry-standard support for screen readers.
Even better, this is all playable with a standard web browser. You can pick up your games where you left off using any phone, tablet, or computer that happens to be nearby. There are no apps to download nor extra software to install - just log in and resume playing.
At this moment we are busy squashing any remaining bugs and implementing features suggested to us by our testers. If you’ve joined us in this beta stage of development, welcome and thank you for giving us a try! We are happy and eager to receive every bit of constructive feedback you have to give us.
Stay tuned to this blog for updates on the game, as well as deep dives into its development regarding the challenges of usability and accessibility design. I have SO MUCH to say on this topic, so please write in with suggestions for those topics which most interest you.