Post-Sprint Postcard #002
Greetings! It’s been a busy couple of weeks over here as we dove into accessibility, mobile, development, and machine learning.
Gaming Accessibility Conference
Something that was immediately clear to us about our core concept—customizable connections between digital worlds—was that enhancing the accessibility of digital spaces is a natural cornerstone. That being the case, attending the 2022 Gaming Accessibility Conference was a great primer/refresher/update for all of us. One of the single most important things to seek out—as a tech company, as a developer, as a social media manager, as a human—is perspectives other than your own, and GAConf does an amazing job highlighting and advocating for accessibility in gaming by giving a platform to myriad perspectives, from CEOs to QA specialists to players.
All of the conference’s panels and presentations are available in full on YouTube, as is content from the past four years of conferences. There’s truly something for everyone to enjoy and learn from, whether you’re a player, an indie dev, a studio employee, a QA person, a social media manager, an accessibility advocate, or just a curious human. Here are a few of our favorites.
First, Giori Politi of Lo-Fi People gives a detailed look at the development and mechanics of Blind Drive, an arcade-style action game that’s playable without ever looking at a video screen:
Next, Cari Watterton describes the process of making Puny Astronaut’s puzzle exploration game, Skye Tales, more accessible:
Last but definitely not least, Barrington Campbell of Kagai Games talks about the importance of play to making meaningful connections:
Hackathon
The devs spent a heady Friday cobbling together a working mobile version of the Kaipod app, which now works on Android and iOS. Check out some previews, all generated live by Kaipod itself:
Android
iOS
We enjoyed the energy of this project so much that we’re strongly considering making Friday Hackathons a regular thing.
UX Improvements
Our devs have been making strides in optimizing the video-to-feed pipeline of Replay recordings, speeding up the time it takes from first experiencing a moment, to then saving and sharing it.
It’s easier than ever to optimize your content’s petting-to-not-petting ratio.
It’s also important to us that users have maximum control over what they’re sharing to their feed, and to that end our latest iteration on the Save Replay interface now features granular incrementation by both seconds and frames of video. Timing is everything!
Digging into Machine Learning
A couple of our devs have a background and interest in machine learning, and we’ve been exploring several possible integrations of ML into Kaipod.
One thing we’ve enjoyed playing with is ML and object detection, and we’re excited to use it to connect universes and tell stories in novel ways. Here, our AI has detected something from footage of a recorded replay and taken a stab at guessing what it is:
They’re trying their best, ok
In the current release of Kaipod, the AI looks at any image or video created in the app and creates an “inventory,” a list of its guesses about the objects within. They’re sometimes right, usually wrong, and almost always funny.
By bridging the boundary between image and text, we want to empower our users to tell more imaginative and accessible stories.
New Look
We’ve also updated our logo with something that we feel better represents Kaimerra’s energy and attitude. Dynamism and adaptability are very important to us, and we want both our projects and our branding to be reflective of that.
Thanks for reading! We can’t wait to show you what’s in the works.
High fives,
Kaimerra.