A lot can happen in four days.
For School of Media Professor David Evans, four days was all it took for his game The Vale: Shadow of the Crown to receive nods from the Canadian Indie Game Awards, the Canadian Game Awards and Canada’s equivalent of the Oscars, the Canadian Screen Awards.
“We won Best Innovation and Best Audio at the Indie Games, and then at the [Canadian Game Awards] we won Best Audio,” said Evans, who teaches the third-year capstone course for NC’s Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Game Design program. He’s also the Founder and Gaming Director for Falling Squirrel Inc., a St. Catharines-based independent video game studio. “We also won a Canadian Screen Award for Best Narrative in a Game … and that’s the only prize for games.”
The Canadian Indie Game Awards, announced this year on April 7, celebrate independent studios and developers, while the Canadian Game Awards recognize the outstanding work of those who’ve made Canada a leader in interactive entertainment.
It’s not the first time a game that Evans has worked on has been recognized with an award, but it’s the first time one of his games has been recognized with such prestigious awards—and most of them came as a surprise.
“That week was the first time we’d won major Canadian awards,” he said. “We didn’t think we’d win anything [at the Canadian Game Awards]. I was actually at a comedy festival, sitting in an audience watching comedians and … we ended up winning all of these awards while [my wife] was watching the show on her phone.”
The Vale: Shadow of the Crown was originally intended to be a game that was inexpensive to make because it relied mostly on narrative instead of graphics. It was the first time Evans had made a game that way.
“Obviously, there are different ways of reducing expenses in game development, but a big one would be if you removed all the visuals from the game and relied entirely on audio” he said. “[That] did also play to some of the strengths of doing this, basically, alone or having to bring on people with only a limited amount of time.
“I’m not an artist, so I end up doing a lot of voice-over direction; I feel fairly confident that I can get good performances from actors [and] I can find good actors. I thought we’d make a sort of interactive radio play scenario.”
A game for all
The Vale: Shadow of the Crown is a fantasy-based action-adventure game. Players become the character Alex, a blind woman who’s second in line of succession to a recently deceased king and has been hidden for years. On the king’s orders during his final days, players are relocated to a town on the outskirts of the kingdom but on their way a roaming gang attacks their caravan and they are left for dead. Alone and forced to fend for themselves in the wild, they have only audio cues to interact with the world around them—including exploration and combat.
Because of the nature of the game and his choice of protagonist, Evans said he considered developing the game with the help of the blind community, but it wasn’t until he started working on the project that he connected with people from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB).
“It was sort of back of mind from the very beginning. Within a few months, I decided to reach out to the CNIB and get a feeler for anyone who was interested in this,” he said. “Obviously, there were a number of people interested in something like this.
“That’s how I got involved with the blind community.”
Evans said it was a pleasant surprise to learn the blind community was very familiar with the genre, and could therefore give him a unique perspective on the game’s development.
“Although it’s accessible and quite enjoyed by the [visually impaired], at the end of the day, we kind of made a game for sighted players with the assistance of the blind community,” he said.
Critics of the game have described it as “an incredibly well-made experience for all kinds of players” and “a compelling and unique video game experience.”
“So much of what The Vale does feels like a reinvention of the video game wheel, and not always out of simple necessity,” wrote one reviewer identified as TheGamer. “I think the developers at Falling Squirrel are visionaries, and I can’t wait to see what they do next with everything they’ve learned about game design while making The Vale.”
“The Vale offers a unique and touching experience in which sighted players will learn the unique abilities of blind people and how they ‘see’ the world,” wrote another reviewer. “Just as the princess encourages her companion to help as many people as they can, the game itself encourages mainstream games to make themselves more accessible to people who need assistance.”
Evans said what he enjoyed most about making The Vale was coming up with an experience that made the game more intimate because the player has to rely on audio to interact with the world around them.
It’s nothing new to the blind community, but it’s a different experience for gamers who are used to relying primarily on visuals.
“The different elements of the game are very much about empowering the player to of course be a great swordsman—or princess—but also be a confident person with a disability, and that’s what most people with disabilities are: they confidently go about their daily lives,” Evans said. “That’s not terribly novel for them, but for you to play as a character that can confidently walk around the space—through a small town—is kind of novel and interesting. Things become very real and immersive when you don’t have visuals that tend to take you out of the experience.”
Members of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television were similarly pleased with The Vale’s uniqueness, choosing it as the top contender in the Video Game Narrative Category for the 2022 Canadian Screen Awards, which were handed out on April 10.
“David Evans’ The Vale expertly views the art of digital storytelling through an accessibility lens, and is one of the most unique and ambitious video games we have come across,” said Marko Balaban, the Academy’s Director of Programming and Awards. “It is incredibly well-deserving of the 2022 Canadian Screen Award for Best Video Game Narrative, and we can’t wait to see what David creates next.”
Evans is currently working on two unannounced titles: one is a sci-fi narrative-based game that’s expected to be released in about two years; the other is a prototype that will be similar to The Vale in terms of the type of [medieval] world and the type of combat, but it will include visuals.
He expects to announce the titles at the end of the year.
