Disclaimer: The author of this game is a good friend of mine who I encouraged to enter the jam.

I haven’t yet played One Finger Death Punch, but this is a pretty faithful audio remake of what I imagine playing that game is like. With positional audio we hear a variety of baddies approach us from either side and then react when they’re close enough to hit. The concept is simple but very well executed. The creature sounds are threatening and the hits are impactful, all building a holistic soundscape with a consistent style. Plus its instructions are fully voiced (which is good because, due to the pandemic, I haven’t heard it in a while).

There are some accessibility issues to consider. For sighted users, there’s a UI that lists our current score and remaining health, but its color contrast is insufficient for folks with low vision. By being drawn to a canvas it’s also inaccessible to folks who use screen readers. But some of this information could be conveyed with sound design. For example, the health system is simply three strikes and you’re out, so it might be helpful to indicate low health through an audio cue like a change in music.

In the PG13 stream they indicated that it was difficult to understand the score announcement at the end. Being sighted I can watch the calculation and make connections to its cues, so it made sense to me after my first play. One way to approach it might be recording dialogue for each increment (e.g. “one” and “five”) and mixing that into those sounds somehow (e.g. a vocoder). Otherwise this might be a good candidate for an aria-live region or the Speech Synthesis API to they could perceive it too.

Thanks for your submission. Good work!

Fun game!