I'm glad I played this before the ratings closed! The gameplay was very fun. Never though an rts could be made accessible for blind players. The level sizes were nice as to not overwhelm the players mental map capacity while having fairly decent callouts of each space from the screen reader (NVDA). I am a sucker for these types of games and with the charm of the voice acting on top of it made this easily one of my top choices for this jam. The only nitpick I have is kinda a fault of the genre and that's there is still just a lot of information missing audibly like number of troops heading towards you or your opponents towers, and the amount of information you have to take in and store mentally is a lot, which again is just the nature of an rts, so if you could streamline that even more, I would be very interested in seeing how you'd achieve that!
Thanks for sharing your game and great work!
Mech Mind Games
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Thank you for trying out the game! And I do plan on going back to at least finish the intended gameplay mechanics to make it a fuller experience and make updates based off the feedback. I do like the idea of using a combination of in-game sound scape with some sort of call out mechanic. Maybe agent sense breaker could have voice lines like "I sense an enemy northwest of my current location."
That way the callout still feels organic and helps give solid direction to the player.
Thanks again for the feedback!
This was a very unique entry. The story was fun and charming while the audio itself felt like an actual fantasy world thanks to the soundscape and voice acting. The only real nitpick I had with this game is using the sound cues in the world, I thought I was directly on something and would o to interact but nothing would happen. So a bit of trial and error to finally getting interactions to work. Maybe more leniency on interactions or maybe snap to key areas may be more intuitive? Not sure if others struggled with this, but I know I did.
Other than that, thanks for the fun story and sharing your game!
Not entirely sure. I work a day job as a mechanical engineer and have a family so time is always a factor lol. I would love to address all the issues people brought up in the comments and make this current version the best version of itself, but only time will tell if it would be worth pursing this game past that point.
I really enjoyed this game but for whatever reason, I could not attack the experiments. Not sure what I was doing wrong. I had no issue with navigating through the levels. (I did have to keep checking the map/player location callout, but that's just my lack of experience keeping that mental image in my head.
I really wanted to progress past the experiment though to see the rest of the game but no button combo worked to kill it (even after getting the key with stun gun)
I would love to hear how you get past this point to keep playing. I feel like a learned a lot about menu navigation from this game giving the number keys the options to help keep information organized is so functionally smart.
Thanks for sharing your game, looking forward to trying again it if it's further developed.
A local multiplayer game is great for the creativeness. The execution is where things breakdown a bit but not in a catastrophic way. The readouts can really break the local player competitiveness of the game. Also the Army alphabet was kinda throwing me off. I was just expecting the letter. lol
The game ultimately boiled down to luck though, which normally isn't all that fun in the long run. Some player control that can help with the outcome of the game is very much needed. The way I see this game, is it's a fantastic starting block to something that could really turn into a fun and competitive local multiplayer game with the right tweaks.
I like what you did here, so thanks for sharing your game!
The main gameplay was the star of the show for this game. Playing with just a screen recorder was definitely a bit overwhelming. I stumbled may way through fights though. It's just a lot of information to retain which I'm not use to having to do.
I started playing by sight eventually which worked really well in this case. Made understanding the information of your status and the opponent much easier.
I made it to the lady beetle and it just seemed impossible to beat. They were getting like 13 block and 7 attack every round, so eventually just widdled my health to nothing with not much I could do about it. Maybe some balancing could help here cause it felt like I was playing pretty optimally. (maybe just bad luck of the dice rolls though)
I'm not really sure what to offer as a potential solution for the information overload other than the player needs to get good or somehow reduce the mechanics complexity a bit to streamline the gameplay for fully blind.
The visuals are actually very well done, and the audio itself is okay (general lack of in-game sounds to help sell what was going on). The screen reader (NVDA) worked like a charm with this game.
Overall, great work, thanks for sharing!
This was a really great take on a racing game that still remains accessible. The vehicle sounds really sold the experience. I thought I would give a few laps a solid try, and ended up finding that not braking at all ended up being my fastest lap time xD I know this was a very short time frame worked on for this project so what you have here was a fantastic start to something that could be polished into something much bigger.
Nice work on this and thanks for sharing!
This is incredible feedback! Thanks for playing through and writing out such a detailed review. I would love to polish this experience up (been tinkering around a bit with the feedback I have been receiving and the positives I noticed from other entries. The funny thing about the pause screen was we had the line "quit game" voiced and in the game project, just forgot to attach it to the UI when pausing *facepalm*
This was a great story that gives you a moment to think and feel about the characters. The gameplay was mostly intuitive with the only real issue being that it was a bit difficult to know where I was or when something was interactable. I spammed the action button to find doors and the items to pick up.
Also the end of the game would have been nice to be moved to a credits scene or end screen just so you actually know the game is over. I researched the rooms thinking I missed something.
This was a fun short romp of a story and was good for a jam entry. One nitpick I have about the audio is the mixing and leveling is really off without tweaking the volume sliders. It may help to bring your audio into audacity and normalize the volumes. Typically voices are normalized to around -6db while music is around -16 to -20db and sound effects range between -11 to -15db. Playing around with this values can help unify the audio of your game and help keep the balancing nice. (it's also fairly fast to do once you learn how to do it.)
Overall, this was a good time, thanks for sharing your game!
The story was pretty fun and it was short (about 5 minutes) which is perfect for a jam game. You had a lot of nice flavor text (and with this type of game, I would have definitely liked to have more!) The puzzles (if you want to consider them puzzles) weren't really much in terms of challenge but they did make sense for the games story. Maybe some options that were obviously bad ideas that could cause an immediate failure state would have been fun!
Nice work with your game overall and thanks for sharing it!
This is a great start to something more. The current version was understandable from the beginning to end while playing completely blind. I do have some nitpicks, such as not knowing exactly what resources I currently have, maybe a button to check bullets, food and water respectively.
Also when passing a house, it would be nice if the character stopped "moving" and a long press or short press would determine if you went in to search or not. This would give the player a chance to listen to their inventory and decide if they should risk going into the house.
Another thing that would be nice is a more clear indicator of progress and how much time is left. Again another button combo could be used (I know you are doing a 1 button game, so maybe short press, long press, double tap, triple tap ect.. could be used) Or maybe this info could be shared at each time you reach a new house, "Man!, I made it about halfway to the camp but I only have 2 minutes left to get there, let's see, I have 1 water, 1 food, and 4 bullets left". With one sentence and you have all your info!
I think this game has a lot of potential, so please don't see my feedback as negative, I hope it can help you make the game feel more fun and fair to the player!
Great work and thanks for sharing your game.
Fun music puzzle. Definitely struggled when all pieces played at the same time so having the option to mute each channel was nice, although it would have been great to not have to pause and go through the menu. just a mute button on each channel would have been swell.
The interface was also very overwhelming at first while trying to play blind. I was also using gamepad. Some actions just were not very intuitive. Such as moving a tile. Once I have the tile selected, I would like to move it without having to reselect it. Clearer indicators as to when an action has finished would have been nice, such as finalizing a move or when you swap, the piece could auto play so you don't have to go through the hassle of trying to select the play button or remember shortcuts.
This was a fun time with some minor headaches, so overall great work and thanks for sharing your game!
This is very much a trial and error game. gb studio games have limitations in what type of information it can provide, but some sort of indicator to know which direction to at least head towards would have been a great start. Also the level size may not seem large, but when it's trial and error, even just having the 8x8 grid you start off with is at minimum 64 spaces the goal could be. and with the path being around 10 moves away, the number of tries starts to become astronomical.
I know some people enjoy these type of punishing grinds, for me personally, I don't quite enjoy them. But I can understand why people do. I do agree with you that adding a sound to the death traps would take away from the game, but at least have a sound effect play when you move letting you know if you are getting closer or further away from the goal would be great!
The graphics were nice, so well done here. The audio did work fine but it was a tad harsh on the ears.
Overall, I think this has the ability to be a fun maze game if some of the small life improvements are included.
Thanks for sharing your game!
Solid start to a simple gameplay loop. I played the half deck and was able to start and play through the game blind. Some more confirmation on what card I played would have been awesome instead of just a positive or negative sound cue. I also noticed the game would store inputs so if you accidentally pressed a direction twice you would instantly play through 2 rounds. The voice reader also held lines like selecting a deck of cards if you somewhat quickly switched through them, the voice line would lag behind on what you actually had selected.
Overall, good start with potential to add new mechanics like different deck setups, abilities like switching cards with the opponent, or other shenanigans. Thanks for sharing your game!
Pretty solid puzzles with the only exception being the wavy lines bit. Definitely trial and errored that portion of the game. I did try using NVDA to play through but it would repeat the wrong lines a lot. So I used the built in browser reader which worked very well, which is nice since no 3rd party software is needed for the accessibility of this game!
The sounds were fairly harsh so polishing the sounds would have been great here. (I struggled with that in my game too, ran out of time to really clean up the audio for the gameplay portion)
Overall, nice work and thanks for sharing!
The concept was great. This is a very basic intro level that I can see being expanded upon. I am using NVDA screen and I did struggle getting it to work well at first. I was using the built in jump to function which it did detect the main menu options, but it would only label the the boxes as a generic name, which made it difficult to know what the option was for. Using the mouse and hovering over text, I was able to fumble through the options and get the game started. (I am not use to using screen readers so the fact I got into the game was a bit of a miracle lol)
The game itself has a lot of promise. The audio feedback worked well, and the visual cues worked well when I blurred my vision, so it seems playable across any spectrum of vision impairment!
Good work and thanks for sharing your work. It would have been cool to see more levels added with the creature moving to different spaces after X amount of time.
Thank you for trying the game and giving feedback! You make good points about lack of audio during the game. I was very worried about overwhelming the player with sounds that I definitely held back too much in this regard. It's good to know that I could have added more or utilized the sound scape better.
Thank you for the feedback! I initially had footstep sounds for the player, but once I implemented the horizontal and vertical sound cues for guards, it felt like a blender of noise so I pulled the footsteps. I do wish I would have just used 3D sound scape for footsteps of the player and the guards instead of trying to indicate their position like I did.
And I didn't even consider haptic feedback. This would have been great for walking into walls and even feeling your own footsteps. Definitely taking this into consideration.
A game of chicken is such a cool concept! I honestly could not for the life of me tell what was actually going on. I was using my xbox controller, and the south facing gamepad button would make a meow sound, hitting start would allow me to join a game. during the countdown i'd press a button but never could tell if I made a sound or not. And no idea if I won.
Mainly just couldn't decipher what was happening. I read through the instructions as well and logically it makes sense, but in practice it was very hard to tell what was happening, at least for me. I might give it another go tomorrow since it is kinda late here, so maybe I'm just tired lol.
I love the concept and the animal sounds are a nice touch.
This was such a surreal gameplay experience. The audio was so well done here. I don't have a screen reader installed so this game was impossible to play blind, but that's more of a me issue since I don't have the appropriate software to test.
From a visual standpoint, this is so trippy and cool, especially the driving section. This part of the game was fun driving around with my eyes closed although I didn't have a screen reader I had no idea where I was going while doing that. The best part is this was fully playable and looked visually awesome even for a non visually impaired person. Kind of weird to think inclusiveness in the opposite direction here lol but this is all around a great packaged game.
The trading aspect of the game was a believable enough reason to continue playing although the driving section really was the star of the show to me.
Overall, the driving was fun, the trading aspect fell a little short (I think mainly due to the uncertainty of whether or not i'd be able to sell goods at specific locations (My memory isn't good enough to remember which port would buy or sell what, at least in such a short time span). Honestly I could play a full game based around the driving portion alone.
Thanks for sharing your game and can't wait to see more of what you do!
Cool idea here. I liked the idea of trying to remember the cells and keeping track of the total number of 1 and 0's. The only real gripe I have with the gameplay portion is the controls. Pretty unintuitive to me. I think using a selection method like left and right on keyboard or gamepad to select cell along with up and down selecting whether that cell is a 1 or 0 would have streamlined that process allowing the player to solely focus on the gameplay aspect instead of mental strain for controls.
Attempting to play blind I was able to make it into the game, but I did struggle quite a bit with keeping track of what was said for each cell. especially since underscore was being used instead of the word empty, which is what made me open my eyes since I hade no idea what that meant.
It makes me wonder if using a sound cue with the left most cell being a deeper tone while gradually getting higher as you move right, with the number being said as a cell is selected would have help streamline the process reducing that mental workload of holding info while waiting for the speech and awkward controls.
Overall I loved the concept of this and would really like to see a revamped polished version of this game! Thanks for sharing your game.
This was a really fun concept. An rpg experience almost act as the central hub as the party.
The characters were fairly well written with some solid performances.
As for the gameplay, the mechanics have a strong base and learning new spells with unique effects was a nice touch. Playing with speakers however made this a tough experience since the audio mixing wasn't really strong enough to help differentiate who you were facing. Also targeting was a fairly big challenge. I think you could helped reduce that struggle by avoiding having the 2 party members from overlapping. Seeing the visual cues helped understand how the game mechanics were working, and possibly would have made more sense to have enemies and part members snap to the 8 different directions instead of moving between points. And the archer would move away from enemies, while the tank moves towards enemies. Avoiding the targeting issue all together.
The amount of sounds towards the end did start become overwhelming to the ears as there was a lot of dialog and enemy sounds and your own casting sounds. Which further muddied the audio. Since your party is priority in this game, maybe a slight volume ducking system when they speak could have further helped.
This was actually a fairly long experience with a lot of voice acting, which was fairly well executed. You guys should be proud of what you did and thanks for sharing your work!
This was a great idea with great voice acting! I know it's been mentioned, but not having a way to relisten to an order makes a cozy game turn into a stressful memory and hearing test. Especially since the the audio seemed to have an odd mixing/leveling so some of the voices seem too quite or a bit muddy to completely follow. Making not having the reminder for order even more stressful lol.
The main gameplay played very well in itself. Using the espresso machine, selecting the cups and delivering them to the register all worked well. I personally enjoy using a gamepad over keyboard controls so having a option between both would have been great. I also believe the ctrl key for discarding was a bit out o place. Just a very minor nitpick there though.
Overall, fantastic voice acting with solid enough gameplay. More polish and more mechanics could be a full release type of game. Especially if you did add the chit chat function with customers.
Possible Bug Report:
also not sure if this was a bug or not, but towards the end of my play session it sounded like a customer came in but I switched over to the espresso machine and no order was given and nothing was happening. I would have restarted but the intro is a bit of a time sink to make it back through. So I never got to the second day or got to make food. (Not sure if that was actually implemented or not.)
At first I tried playing with my eyes closed an was immediately stuck on the first screen since nothing indicated to press a button to start the game. So I navigated a bit with my eyes open and once in gameplay tried playing with my eyes closed.
The voice lines for the directions from the creatures is a bit too distorted and muddy to make out what they are saying clearly. The main voice lines were a it muddy too. Look up how to use a noise reduction, compressor, eq filtering and normalize for audacity (or whatever program you use) That will elevate the audio to a brand new level!
Due to these issues I thought maybe this game was more meant for visual impairments other than complete blindness so I played squinted to give myself blurry vision. The large text, big characters and large direction indicators are a nice touch for this type of accessibility. The music was also a good choice. The victory sound was a bit loud compared to the rest of the game.
The gameplay itself was fantastic. simon says with timing bundled with a solid motivation/theming is a good start and adding in the twists of additional timings, blocking, and inversing the inputs occasionally made for a fun challenge. Only slight complaint I could give to gameplay is at first the window to respond for your button presses is very short which learning the game makes it feel a bit unfair to get smacked so quickly in the face lol. Also the difficulty spike on the boss having twice the amount of directions to remember on top of all the other gimmicks was a bit of struggle. Possibly increasing the directions slowly as you move towards the big boss could have helped with prepping the user for that.
Those are very minor things, so thanks for sharing this project. Very well done and you should be proud of what you pulled off here!
At first I tried playing with my eyes closed an was immediately stuck on the first screen since nothing indicated to press a button to start the game. So I navigated a bit with my eyes open and once in gameplay tried playing with my eyes closed.
The voice lines for the directions from the creatures is a bit too distorted and muddy to make out what they are saying clearly. The main voice lines were a it muddy too. Look up how to use a noise reduction, compressor, eq filtering and normalize for audacity (or whatever program you use) That will elevate the audio to a brand new level!
Due to these issues I thought maybe this game was more meant for visual impairments other than complete blindness so I played squinted to give myself blurry vision. The large text, big characters and large direction indicators are a nice touch for this type of accessibility. The music was also a good choice. The victory sound was a bit loud compared to the rest of the game.
The gameplay itself was fantastic. simon says with timing bundled with a solid motivation/theming is a good start and adding in the twists of additional timings, blocking, and inversing the inputs occasionally made for a fun challenge. Only slight complaint I could give to gameplay is at first the window to respond for your button presses is very short which learning the game makes it feel a bit unfair to get smacked so quickly in the face lol. Also the difficulty spike on the boss having twice the amount of directions to remember on top of all the other gimmicks was a bit of struggle. Possibly increasing the directions slowly as you move towards the big boss could have helped with prepping the user for that.
Those are very minor things, so thanks for sharing this project. Very well done and you should be proud of what you pulled off here!
I tried playing this with my eyes closed and no luck on even making it past the main menu. I'm assuming there was a misunderstanding about the theme of the jam. So since it was obvious that blind accessibility wasn't focused on in this game, I'll speak on other aspects.
The main menu looked very well done with nice art and easy to use UI (of course as a visual capable person)
The gameplay itself was a bit confusing. I honestly wasn't sure what my main objective was. I thought I found landmarks to move towards but always ended up dying walking towards anything. I was strafing around a lot so I am sure I bumped into stuff from the side.
The models looked good and seemed cohesive for the story you were going for. The controls seemed smooth and responsive in regards of a standard FPS. It also ran smooth for a webgl build so good work there.
Thanks for sharing your work, and I would have been interested in seeing your interpretation of a fully accessible game for vision impairments.
This was a interesting take on an auto runner. Theming was very strong in your game which worked well. The main menu was incredibly easy to navigate and I liked how you looped the help lines unless shift was pressed. Never even considered that for our game.
The main gameplay was a bit difficult to grasp at first due to the audio being kind of flat. What I mean by this is that when you use sonar, it does fade out a very little amount, but the bounce off is sharp. So if you send out sonar in all 3 lanes at once an the sonar hits in all 3 lanes at different times, it's impossible to tell where the bounce came from.
This might be something that could be fixed by killing the sonar in the lanes you leave so only the sonar in your current lane is active. As for the lane identifier, the pitch difference was very subtle to me so it was hard to differentiate what lane I was in. Maybe instead of a single audio identifier of what lane you are in, possibly a sound of swimming could be used that would change depending on the current lane?
Fyi, I played through with my eyes closed first, and got to the game play. I honestly struggled to understand if I was playing the game right until I opened my eyes. I think some minor tweaks to the gameplay itself would greatly benefit this game! Nice work overall though and thanks for sharing it!
That makes a lot of sense. And it seems like for this game jam, they are more interested in getting developers to think about accessibility more than they care about the competition side of things. I know I learned a lot and even our game could use a good more amount of polishing! The fact you guys did this all in a week is incredible though. You and your brother have a lot of skill and talent so I can't wait to find more of what you guys do!
This is a really good starting point for a rhythm game. I couldn't tell if the game was suppose to end or if I got a bug, but the level after the tutorial just goes quite and nothing happens, so I am assuming I beat it. I like these type of games in general so an more polished experiences would be pretty cool.
As an fyi, I played initially with my eyes closed and was able to make it to the end of level 1, but opened once nothing seemed to be happening.
Great work for a day!
This was a fun take on navigation by audio. The only issue I had was there wasn't a clear indicator of which direction to go, so it felt kind of trial and error to get through the game. The voice acting was a very nice touch. Good work with what you did here!
As an fyi, I played through with my eyes close initially and was able to navigate through the entire game. It was a little difficult for me to remember the different controls at the main menu but nothing critical found.
This is a great start to a simon says style game. I don't have any vision impairments so I am attempting to play all these games with my eyes closed. This game was easily playable. A bit simplistic for me personally but more unique patterns being used or varying patterns during each round could make it more challenging. I did replay it with my eyes open and the character is well done!