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A jam submission

Sunless RockView game page

A blind accessible tower defense game where you defend your home.
Submitted by Ericbomb — 3 hours, 16 minutes before the deadline
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Sunless Rock's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Use of Diversifiers#14.1584.714
Audio#63.6544.143
Use of Theme#64.0324.571
Gameplay#73.7804.286
Narrative#113.2763.714
Fun#123.5284.000
Art#152.6463.000

Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Was this created as a solo or team effort?

Solo

Did you use diversifiers?

Pride Flag Colours
Accessibility Rules
Sustainability

I allow my game to be used for promotion material.

Yes

you may use my game for any future promotions.

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Comments

Submitted

Really cool! I love how this is accessible to both blind and deaf players, it would be great to see more games like this!

Submitted

Really loved the idea of making a blind and deaf accessible tower defence game, which at the same time proved to be interesting and engaging to everyone. It was interesting to understand the topology of the map and the path of the enemies. Would be curious to hear about the experience blind and deaf people have with this game!

Developer(+1)

Oh I know some blind folks have and they said they have a similar experience! It's hard but interesting, also me adding what I call a "pity" mechanic where you keep your stuff after a restart is basically the only way people complete the game.

I generally make audio games, but I thought I'd challenge myself and try to make a game that gives a similar experience to all players regardless of sight/hearing. But as a result a lot of my testers are blind. 

Submitted

Have you ever played a tower defense game without seeing maps and enemies? How about one with accessibility for deaf and blind players? I think every game developer has to play Sunless Rock to get inspiration on game accessibility design.

Developer

Oh that's so kind of you to say! 

I'm not the best audio game developer around, but I hope to encourage other people to think about how to make their games accessible for others. I hope you enjoyed it!

Submitted

Managed to get to the day one of peace! It was a really interesting experience, I felt lost at first but after I figured out what path the enemies follow it was getting a lot clearer. Story of the chief engineer was also nice!

Developer

Oh that's so cool to hear! I honestly wondered if anyone would beat the game cause I know it's a bit longer for a game jam, I'm glad you enjoyed it! Thank you so much for playing!

Submitted

What a really cool game! I found adjusting to it fairly intuitive. Really neat narrative with great worldbuilding. Not sure if it was intentional but resetting the wave does let you keep the towers and money you accumilated so sometimes when I was short on cash I just repeatedly failed the wave to get more. Not complaining though! it let me see the story to its end

Developer

Yep it was on purpose! I was very concerned about the difficulty curve, so I figured I'd make it so that anyone who wanted too could use continues and you'd get an advantage from it.  But if you wanted to try and do it with no continues you could! Honestly don't even know if it's possible to do it without continues, difficulty curve and all that. 

I'm glad you liked the story! I honestly spent way too long thinking of how to make a tower defense game make sense, like I was even thinking of writing journals you could access from the point of the view from the villain's, but that seemed over kill for a jam. 

Submitted

Ok this was definitely interesting! I’m terrible at it, but for my first time playing a game “blind”, that’s to be expected. The options around the TTS were really thoughtful, especially changing the speed, and the only bit of information missing I would agree is the state of the core (unless I also missed that, hah).

Our old raiding team in WoW used to run with a blind healer and while this isn’t the same at all it is intriguing to get a tiny glimpse into the sort of experience he was having, so thank you for that!

Developer

I'm glad you liked it!

And yeah I forgot to make it possible to find out how much health the core has, whoops.

Developer

OH also I will say if you want a more full featured experience, you can play The Vale: Shadow of the Crown. It was the biggest and most high quality audio game that the community has ever really had. 

Submitted

Wow, that was such a cool experience! At first I was a bit overwhelmed , but after a short ajusting period it was really fun to mentally map out the level based on the audio feedback. Maybe some audio indicators about the state of the battle would also be cool (like how far the enemies are away from the core) would be cool (I hope I haven't missed it), since I was mostly relying on visuals for that.

There seems an encoding issue with some of the text: on my system, the text-to-speach reads " ' " characters as "Euro trademark", so "I'm" became "I Euro trademark m" which made following the narration a bit difficult :D

Anyway, awesome work!

Developer

There is a slight humming with how close they are! But yeah it's hard to tell over the sound of the battle.

And thank you! I'll look into that, the TTS DLL I use for game maker is one I made myself to make audio games, so it can be a little buggy at time.