A Sneak Peek of Painted Waters for an Incredible Community

August 4, 2021 By Amy Green

On Monday, August 2nd, we were privileged to spend a couple of hours sharing the Playability Initiative with a new group of people through the One Rare Experience program. One Rare Experience is an event for young adults with rare conditions who are trying to improve the experiences for their community of peers.

Anthony DeVergillo, a member of our Playability Initiative community on Facebook, invited us to join him in sharing about accessible video games. Anthony has been working hard this year with Jonah Monaghan to create a digitally remapped controller that will allow more people to play their favorite video games, even if those games don’t support the accessibility adaptations that would welcome players with unique needs. We loved watching them share Overjoyed with the larger community.

And, we were thrilled to share a sneak peek of our progress on Painted Waters, a free one-button game we’re building to serve the SMA community. Since we shared some details we’ve never shared before, we wanted to highlight some of the latest progress on this game with all of you as well.

We are hoping to have a demo of the game for an early access community by the end of 2021, and we are expecting to invite playtesters to try out the game this Fall. 

Here’s a few of the slides we shared with our new friends at One Rare Experience. We hope they help stir a little excitement in our Playability Initiative community as well.

A one button game? It just means more people can play! Because I can look, tap, touch, press, sip, puff, nudge or click, I can play!

Players explore the mysterious world of Painted Waters riding on their trusty walkerdoodles. As they explore, the play games, make music and search for wonders.

Wonders and Treasures can be colleccted and used to adorn the musical gardens of Painted Waters. Some treasures help customize marble-inspired games and toys.

Collect Boomy Poppers to play mini-games within the world, like the 'Tower Tumble' game shown here.

If you’d like to be one of our early playtesters of Painted Waters, be sure to joining our Facebook community at Facebook.com/group/ThePlayabilityInitiative. We will send out our requests for playtesters within that group as well as several groups dedicated to the SMA community.