iOS Game for the Mobility Impaired

Ask any 14 year old boy “would you rather spend 4 hours doing homework or 4 hours playing video games?” and the choice would be unanimous. Most 14 year old boys play video games. A lot! Whether it is hours on Fortnight or a quick game of Jetpack Joyride, games are certainly preferred over hard work.

But for me, the choice is not mine to make. Three years ago when I was 11, I was having some horrible headaches and bouts of vomiting. I was eventually diagnosed with medulloblastoma, a cancerous brain tumor. Ironically, my diagnosis came just 11 days after I shaved my head to raise funds for St. Baldrick’s to find a cure for childhood cancer. The treatments, including radiation and chemo, left me paralyzed from the neck down, ventilator dependent and unable to talk or swallow. This has made it seemingly impossible to do two of my favorite things – eat and play video games.

With all my rehab therapies, doctor appointments, and school work, there’s not much downtime.  When I do have time, I have found there are few to no options for someone like me with very restricted movement to play video games.

Gaming can be incredibly empowering for young people with mobility impairments! Simply being able to have fun and do things other kids do is really valuable to kids like me. It is both entertaining and allows me to waste hours playing games while avoiding homework (sorry mom!).

With few options out there, I decided to partner with a friend of mine to build the first of what we hope will be many games for the iOS platform that are controlled by your eyes and other facial movements instead of a joystick or other hand control.

For our first game we chose Breakout, not because it was built by Steve Wozniak aided by Steve Jobs of Apple fame, but because it’s a fun, addicting and fairly simple game where the player moves a paddle left and right, projecting a ball to break a layer of bricks at the top third of the screen. A ball travels across the screen, bouncing off the top and side walls. When a brick is hit, the ball bounces away and the brick is destroyed. Because the game has only left and right movements, it will be a good place to start figuring out programming with facial recognition and eye movement controls.

Please consider helping us raise the money to build our first game. If we exceed our goal, we can even start working on games 2 and 3 (think PacMan and Super Mario).