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Mastergammler6 days ago

I’ve managed to finishe the score based round with little problems, after adjust the sounds in the sound library quite a bit, but in survival mode i can not get past boss 2. It’s incredible hard to know where the bullets are coming from, and how i have to dodge them. This is made even harder because my character doesn’t have any footstep sounds, so i’m missing crucial player feedback here. It’s very irritating to be moving without making a sound.

As i see it, i have 4 directional movement (without turning) but there is no indication of what’s behind of me? So it always feels a bit of stumbling around in the map, trying to follow the enemies footsteps (which were way to silent) to get to shoot them.

Generally the sounds don’t feel very clear. The bullet alarm, hit sounds for yourself and the enemy all have soo much sustain, that they keep masking each other and it’s hard to know what is what. The hit sounds for yourself and the enemy also sound quite similar (in style) so it’s not clear if i hit him, or he hit me. I think these could all be much shorter sounds, which would improve the clarity a lot.

As for the bullets, i don’t find the alarm to be particularly helpfull, it more clutters the sound space. I’m not even sure if it is directional? I never knew how to dodge these ones, i always tried to move to the side, but it didn’t seem to be working. I find the positioning of the bullets to be way to ambiguous, especially for a “bullet hell” game. I would really encourage the usage of the doppler effect with 3d audio here, since it is one of the most readable effects for distance assesment, especially for fast moving objects like bullets. This would give me the opportunity to hear it coming and dodge it appropriately, what the core of the bullet hell is, right?

You have a very satisfying victory sound, but a loose/death sound is missing, the game just kind of stops and enter returns you to the menu, which is a bit akward.

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Ericbomb6 days ago

Thank you for the awesome feedback! I do have some questions though!

The sustaining bit I just 100% agree with, the sound guy wanted to show off, and I was like... sure let's see how pretty it sounds! But does make it all bleed together, compared to short blips of all different keys.

But I am curious, what information do you think the foot steps would add? I understand it's common feedback, but when we had player footsteps it didn't add any information, since it would just say "is moving", which if you are holding keys and not hearing impact, means you are moving. 


 I did think about breaking the arena into 9 pieces, and each of those pieces have a different sound when stepping on it so you get feedback on where you are in the arena. Or stepping on the path of a boss give feedback because you step in "oil". Maybe I should have added that simply because we are so used to hearing foot steps.

As for bullet thing, this gets into an interesting bit. Having all the bullets make sound positionally  in a bullet hell would always lead to just an overwhelming useless wall of sound. If a wall of bullets were approaching from above, your brain would just go "Lots of noises." So I didn't like that much at all.

The "idea" behind the bullet alarm was:

1.Boss sound was the direction all bullets come from, so you should always know the direction shots were coming from

2. Alarm was saying you were in danger. So in theory moving diagonally and away from the boss sound whenever you hear alarm should let you  dodge most things once you get an idea of the bullet pattern. 


Since I couldn't find another traditional top down bullet hell/heaven audio game, I kind of had to guess. I did find ShiftBackTick (who is a friend and part of the Game for Blind Gamers Dev discord) made one for a jam, but it wasn't traditionally styled. So I'm still debating if there was a better way.


But I 100% understand it probably has insane developer difficulty. Because the people who played it were me (I knew what movement would dodge the sound from each boss. Couldn't remove that sadly.) , my sound guy, then blind players from the discord. Adding the score mode was my "I have no idea how to balance this in a short period of time" so I'm glad it let you try it a bit more!


If I were to continue working on this, I honestly probably would need to have it setup where I can get a recording of how people react to different audio, without them being able to see so I can get a better idea of how people are doing, and try out different audio setups. 

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Mastergammler4 days ago

Yes, the “you are moving” feedback is quite crucial, at the very last for game feel. I want to know, that if i press something, that something is happening. If you omit it, you’re basically saying: “I know you can’t see or hear anything happening, but trust me, you are moving!” Which is very strange. It also just feels strange, because in the real world, everything makes a sound, so having something happen, without making a sound, is very wired.

Apart from that, it is also important to let me evaluate walking distance. I can now build a map, depending if i hear one, two, or three footstep impacts, on how far i have walked. Even thou this might not be exact, it still gives me some feedback for evaluation.

You said, that in order to dodge bullets you just need to make a step to the side. I always tried this but it never seemed to be working. The reason might be, that i’m walking too much. If i have footsteps sounds, i could now determine: If i hear one footstep, then i have walked enough, if i hear two footsteps, then i’m already in path of the next bullet.

As for directional bullet sounds, i don’t think this would lead necessary to problems, if you have a proper volume by distance curve. You ofc also might need to scale down the amount of bullets you have for the purpose of a audio game. If you would have 16 bullets in visual bullet hell, maybe here you do only 4 or 6, and i think this would be fine. But one would have to try, to know for sure ^^

I like the idea with the 9 quadrants, so you can get a better feel of the arena, that sounds interesting. Maybe 9 is a bit much thou, 4 might be sufficient. With those you could have a bit more fine-grained info where the boss is in relation to yourself.

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Ericbomb4 days ago

Hmm yeah the movement thing makes sense, just difficult when I'm already trying to stuff so much data via audio that putting in a "Is moving noise" felt unhelpful, but adding in information about your movements based on which quadrant you are in would help give a feeling of movement/speed to player that you feel is missing and give important info. Could also modify the sound of the boss as they move around terrain! So you could quickly figure out "oh I'm on metal, they are on wood, so they are diagonally across from me and moving in pattern (x) because they were on gravel a second ago"

Yeah I wouldn't really be able to do "walls" of bullets if I did that, it'd become pretty solid sound of "There are bullets!" for a bullet hell. Despite how hard it is currently, if you could see the amount of bullets they are putting out you'd think this was a pretty sad bullet hell with how few bullets there are. While I could do "dodge one bullet at a time" that's pretty common for audio games and was hoping to go more bullet hell. "Figure out what pitch means collision/on target" is a game I've played in far too many audio jam games and not always a huge fan of! I've yet to find one with more than 3 enemies/bullets at once not be audio mush with it being really hard to tell which one is actually closest/lined up (But granted, I am no blind gamer, so perhaps its just experience)


I could combine the ideas though! Have it be that a bullet audio is significantly different if it is on direct collision course, but it still be directional, but all bullets  could have audio. So that way if a bullet is coming directly at you from the right and is on a collision course, you'll hear it in your right ear (instead of in stereo currently), but if you go down below it it'll get a very different sound, but still audible, but be higher pitched, then lower pitch if you are above it. Same if it's coming directly below you, it'll be lower pitched. 


I think I like that as that would actually allow you to be like "Okay, I know a bullet is coming from my right that will collide with me because I hear the alarm in my right ear, and I hear high pitch tones as well from the right, meaning that bullets are above me and to to the right and if I don't move I'll get hit, so I need to go down and to the left"


Thank you for feedback! It's always a struggle to balance audio games for me since I have so much more info than anyone else.  So figuring out what is actually fair and feels good is always hard.  It's part of why I've moved more into turn based stuff for most of my other accessible projects, but I really wanted to try something new for this jam and try to lab out how a different genre would work.

So I really appreciate not only your initial feedback, but expanding on it when I asked follow up questions! Most folks won't leave a nearly as in depth comment as your first, so elaborating your perspective after I expressed my perspective/goals of those mechanics is super appreciated! I do think I'll make some changes to try and implement these!

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Mastergammler3 days ago

Yea sure, i mean that’s what a jam is all about, exploring new ideas and trying things, right?

In my last project (called “ABAS”) i just stumbled upon the fact, that dodging bullets with doppler effect felt incredibly fun. But i only had one bullet firing at you at a time, so it might not work as well in a bullet hell game.

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