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A jam submission

The journey to Kepler-186fView game page

A game about managing cryosleep
Submitted by Callum Deery (@CallumDeery2) — 5 days, 19 hours before the deadline
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The journey to Kepler-186f's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Setting, story, characters, and world#143.3893.389
Fun gameplay#182.7222.722
Blind-friendly and good use of audio#222.2782.278

Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

I also have trouble understanding how to actually play, but spend some time exploring the UI.

I like playing maging-type of games, so the cryosleep sounds interesting. would love to try again if there is a post jam update.

(1 edit) (+1)

Interesting idea.

I couldn't figure out how to play it. The voice speaks too slowly and it is unclear where the message about the general situation is and where the description of the buttons is. I would advise you to add support for a screen reader, for example NVDA, to voice the interface buttons. Then there will be two streams of voice information.

Submitted(+2)

wow, a pretty ambitious project for a game jam for blind gamers. I think the game itself might be pretty cool to explore, but even with visuals I was not sure what to do. I think the idea is to allocate your crew according to the challenges, but my crew died pretty fast.
Its a bit unfortunate that the voice over can't keep up with what is happening, and skipping did not work for me, I think.
I want to point out that this is a pretty cool idea, and with some ui/voice over adjustments and maybe balancing, this could be a great game. My advice would be to try to simplify the ui (if possible), which might also help with the voice overs. Maybe you could have a separate statistics and an assignment panel, both without different tabs?
Hope we can see some progress on this after the jam ends :)

(+2)

I wanted to love this game, I really did. It is exactly my thing! But I simply cannot get this to work properly.

The menus are frustrating. Why does getting to the next or previous option always require at least two arrow key presses, frequently more? Tab works better … when it works at all, that is. Regardless of the options, menus seem to freeze, options sometimes don’t select properly, and just generally I never know where I am and whether I’ve changed anything. I am not against using a mouse to play games if that is done accessibly, so I will test with one later to see if it works any better – I misplaced the batteries somewhere – but if that is the intended way for this game to be played, it really should be mentioned somewhere.

The rate at which events happen is far too fast. I am constantly being hit by this disaster or other, and there is at once too much happening and not nearly enough information. Pausing should help in theory, but is it just me, or do the menus suddenly become even less reliable when the game is paused? Even if that was not the case though, a way to set different rates would help a lot.

Given the large volume of speech, it is great that there is a mute option, although if possible, control would be a more natural choice for that than t. But unless I am missing something, once the speech is skipped, that’s it. There is no way to go back through the history and quickly check which events have taken place. Not that I’d even have the time to do that as it is, granted.

So, here’s an honest question for the developer: how much time have you spent actually play-testing your game without looking at it? It is clear you have put in a lot of effort, but was closing your eyes or covering them with a blindfold a part of that at all? Not that doing so would be the best way to check if the game is accessible – presumably you’re sighted, so if anything, you might have trouble with things that would be very easy for us. But in this case, it would’ve been an easy way to spot the obvious issues.

If you decide to continue developing this game, I encourage you to do some research into how other developers have handled large amounts of information in similar kinds of strategy games. I especially recommend checking out the games from Aprone, chiefly Castaways, whose speed settings, message buffers, settings for disabling notifications of kinds of events, shortcuts to check various stats, sound effects, etc. might be good strategies to copy. But really, you should just play all of them, because they’re very good games! And I’m confident yours could be too, once you make it playable.

Submitted(+1)

Theme is really great - it wasn't super obvious what to do / how to awaken people. Some kind of tutorial or explanation would have been awesome. Reading or making more obvious how many people were at each section also would have been nice!

Submitted(+1)

I really like the concept and the pixel art! Nice work!

If you continue working on the game, the top 3 things I would suggest focusing on are:

  1. The TTS lag and backlog issues other reviewers mentioned. This is a showstopper for blind players. One idea  to help address this is to reduce the amount of TTS needed, by using sound effects to communicate different disasters, crew dying, etc. Lo-fi sound effects like with bfxr would fit the pixel art theme perfectly.
  2. Better explanation of the gameplay. I never fully understood what was going on. E.g. what does each part of the ship do? Can I avoid bad events / lessen their impact? Why should I assign more or less crew to each part of the ship? Are the crew dying from disasters or old age? Etc. It doesn't need to be an in-game tutorial, even adding some more explanation on the game page or README would be a big help.
  3. Reducing UI friction. Navigating the UI is central to the gameplay, so it's worth making it flow quickly and naturally. For example, when I open Cryo, it's probably because I want to awaken people and assign them to the tab I have open, right? So there's probably no need to make the player select an assignment on the Cryo screen. Another easy improvement would be hotkeys for selecting the different tabs and for opening Cryo; that would also reduce the need to use TTS to say which tab is selected. There are lots of little ways the UI could be streamlined like that.

Even if the game isn't perfect, the effort and care you put into it really shows! And congratulations on making a complete game that can be played from beginning to end! :D

Developer

thanks for the feedback!

I'm going to do a postmortem write-up and some post jam updates so it's really helpful.

I think I should have also made the pause function clearer, as it definitely helps reduce the TTS desync issues (although definitely doesn't fix them entirely).

Submitted

I really like the concept and most of the mechanics (I feel the FTL vibes :)), I see the immense effort in this game, but it is a bit hard to keep up with the events even with visuals and using a mouse (the list on the Cryo screen does not match the order in main screen, and it also covers the tabs, this threw me off several times). But I have finished with 139 crew remaining. I have increased the TTS speed to 2.1x but it is still reading out the stats of my actions from 6-7 minutes ago, unfortunately I'm not sure how playable would it be without seeing the screen.

Submitted(+2)

Hi! Thanks for your game! I like the setting & the interface is quite clear!

If you want some feedback:

I took me a while to figure out how to associate people to tasks, also I didn't get the consequences of events (storm, comet.). After I understood the gameplay more, I wondered if there were a better approach than simply put the maximum people into each job ?

To improve accessibility, I think that the TTS voice should immediately read what you choose. Because without vision, there's no way to know what menu you currently selected.

Submitted(+1)

It is a very interesting concept, although prompting the stats of the ship so often confused me a little bit. However, the interface is very rich; I was surprised about how much management you have been able fit in a very easy to use menu. It is worth to put a tutorial, so blind people can get the grip quickly, as this is promising.

Developer

Thanks for giving it a go!

I agree it definitely needs better onboarding, (and should probably say what's been damage by each event)