This was one of my favorites this year, though for context I have a lot of time logged in Slay the Spire and various mobile roguelikes so I might be a bit biased because I really enjoy these kind of games. :) The UI works great. I didn't feel like I experienced information overload, I like that there are hotkeys to quickly assign dice or read the most important information and love the descriptions of the characters you go up against. The music and sounds go well together, though I think it'd be cool if we had separate volume controls for music and sounds. I too would love to see this game expanded further because I think there's a lot of potential for more dice types and perhaps enemies with special attacks of some kind. To end though this is a great example to show that some genres can be made accessible for blind players just by making them work with a screen reader, something you did really well here!
Play game
Ladybud Roll's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun gameplay | #5 | 4.042 | 4.042 |
| Creativity | #8 | 4.167 | 4.167 |
| Overall | #9 | 3.861 | 3.861 |
| Sound design | #15 | 3.375 | 3.375 |
Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Super fun! Love the complex mechanic you were able to make out of a few simple dice rolls! The music is quite catchy too :). Unfortunately could not get my screen reader to work with it (linux).
I never would have guessed that a relatively simple dice game could have drawn me in so much but here we are! There's something very satisfying about allocating just enough dice for defense and then using the rest to push back and break through the opponent's shield. Or even going all out because you can JUST scrape together enough damage for this to be the final turn
This took me by surprise, this is a really good one
Very cool and original concept, I've never played anything quite like it. The art style is cute and fits the retro gameplay. The connection of ladybugs and dice both having spots is a clever detail, even if I was too dull to realize it until the ending screen when I "earned my spots". I liked the attention to detail with accessibility, such as having descriptions of Ladybud and the enemies, an option to use a more legible font, and even saying "another X damage" when the same number happens twice in a row to sound more natural.
The mechanics of picking dice packs and breaking dice added some nice strategy to the gameplay. The battles were pretty entertaining at first, but started to feel repetitive as you faced tougher enemies. I would have liked more challenge, too. I hope you keep developing it and adding more variety to the battles, there's a ton of potential here!
One technical issue is that there wasn't any TTS output when using Windows Narrator and Firefox. I don't know enough about Narrator to guess the cause, but it would be worth trying to fix. I tried again with NVDA and it worked perfectly.
Overall, very nice game! Great work!
Wow, I absolutely loved this. I don't tink it was too verbose, as I have my screen reader going quite fast. Perhaps in the future there could be options to make things less verbose for those who would like that though. I did not find the information overwhelming, and I enjoyed the 8-bit sound design.
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!
The controls are simple and there are options to manage music and volumes: it's very useful for this type of video game!
I enjoyed this! The gameplay loop was fun. I wish the enemies had some more attacks they could do. This would be a great game to keep working on!
Cute design, and the sound effects reminded me of old arcade cabinets. I think the concept is really cool, and the dice mechanics really worked wonderfully. I kind of had a hard time figuring out what to do, but overall great product!
I think there is quite a lot of information for a screen reader, the game is fun but really needs perseverance/10 to be played without screen.
Though, the colors choice seems to create nice contrast most of the time for players with lower vision.
Regarding the game itself, it was fun and had really good mechanics with the various dice abilities when you get and destroy them.
Sound design was really good too!
Great execution. The screen reader support seemed carefully considered and worked wonderfully for me with NVDA. Overall I found it rather easy and didn’t take any damage until the centipede. While I could certainly see it being expanded with more dice and effects, I’d personally enjoy more variety in the audio, such as unique sounds or music for each opponent to give them more flavor. Nice work!
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.