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Valencia Tales: Strings & Stone's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Game for Blind Gamers Judge Ranking | #1 | n/a | n/a |
| Fun | #2 | 4.077 | 4.077 |
| Overall | #2 | 4.256 | 4.256 |
| Polish | #3 | 4.269 | 4.269 |
| Creativity | #3 | 4.423 | 4.423 |
Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Excellent submission!
It’s a labor of love with ambition and heart. The sound and music is immersive. The dungeons are a treat to explore and vanquish. Yet, it’s all happening on a blank screen. And that’s all thanks to this creative team and their willingness to collaborate with our great community.
In the current build, I got stuck at the monster by Valencia and the tree. I got distracted and missed what to do next, so I just tried the bow a few times to no avail. Thankfully, the debug menu let me progress skip and briefly preview the later content. I gave myself bombs, ventured the mines killing bats and skeletons and pigs, and found some room with an enigmatic timed puzzle—that’s a nice place to stop for the night, thanks!
The Divining Rod is an excellent navigational system that had me constantly brainstorming while playing. Occasionally it gets tiring and would be easier to toggle with a button rather than needing to hold any trigger. And for getting unstuck from more complicated obstacles, a button to teleport to the target might be a nice feature.
Sincerely, I beg you to give this project a visual identity! Please work with an artist who can help you bring this to the mainstream. I don’t even care if it’s just a bunch of particles or billboards! That’s the only thing limiting its potential in my mind.
Please keep iterating on this. We’ll play every update!
Congrats on the amazing submission here!
Everything here is so good, from the sound scape and music, to the controls for aiming and moving. It's clear a lot of thought and care went into this, and it certainly paid off!
Admittedly, I struggled a lot getting that third chicken, and I struggled to get to all the places in the village (even after having been to each spot once before). I wonder if there's a better village layout that would make it easier to not get turned around and lost as much. Potentially this was an issue of turning around too quickly, and I wonder if an audio affordance for turning would help?
I thought the controls on a controller were pretty intuitive, at least, as someone who has played a lot of Zelda games with target locking, it made sense right away. I think the dojo was really useful too as a way to learn how to use the rod.
I'm not sure if this is because I was on a browser or on Mac OS X, but sometimes when I switched focus out of the window, and tried to go back to the game, the TTS voice just completely stopped working (even when I hard reset the game). Additionally, for some reason, when I was in the dojo and using the divining rod, it didn't pick up that I was targeting the dojo master (after spamming left trigger it finally worked in browser). I ended up downloading the game for Windows and that worked fine. (Note I tested this again on Windows browser, Edge, and I'm still seeing this issue).
I'll echo Patricia's comments that I think the introductory pre-game dialog was a little much (especially when there are so many games to get through for this jam). I think a lot of that content would be better placed on the itch.io page, so players who start the game can get right into it.
All in all, this was an amazing entry, and I hope you and others game developers learn a lot from what's here!
Thank you so much for the kind words and concrete feedback! We've been discussing a lot of these issues already, but it's great to be reminded of what's still left to do on the backburner. I had tried adding audio cues for rotating your head, but couldn't land on anything that I liked in the jam timeframe. Do you have any examples of games that you remember handling this well that you could recommend for us to study? There is also another setting that you might find useful here, if you ever return to the game:
This used to be enabled by default, but someone reported that it made it more difficult to use echolocation, so it's now defaulted off. It's a wordy setting, but what it means is that as you turn your head, any sounds that you're looking directly at will be louder, and sounds will drop in volume as you turn away, and be the most quiet when they're directly behind you. I find it much easier to navigate this way, but it seems to be a personal preference (and one that we need to document much better, haha). Our itch page is already getting long, but more collapsible menus should help us keep it organized as we add more information.
Thanks for the heads-up about weird behavior on Mac. We don't have one we can use for testing, but since everything was built in Godot, we should be able to create a native Mac build for the game in the future, and can hopefully just retire the browser version since I think it causes more problems than it's worth at this point.
And we could not agree more about the tutorial needing more refining. Earlier on, we had a much more minimal introduction, and too many people could not figure out how to play the game at all without one-on-one help. I think we probably over-corrected in the other direction out of fear that players would abandon the game without understanding it at all, and misjudge our entry, but this could still use a lot more work to be streamlined, plus become even more immersive like the tutorial in Impulse Response. If you do ever play again, you'll be happy to notice that you can skip the tutorial and/or opening cutscene right away, since you already know how to play.
We're very interested in how far people are getting in the game, especially since there are so many other jam entries that deserve your attention. Valencia Tales is structured like a very minimalistic Zelda game -- after you leave the Village, there is an inciting incident, a dungeon, a boss, and an epilogue. If you'd like to quickly jump to later portions of the game so you can sample more, there are a few teleports in the pause menu:
There are also a few entries in the Debug menu for unlocking the bow and bombs, if you just want to play around with them without going through the entire story, and to turn on Debug Visuals if you'd like to see the level geometry and navigate more quickly by sight.
Thanks again for playing!
Maybe if we had access to a compass, this would help? Along with paths to follow? For exammple, maybe we can hear stone paths or dirt paths that connect each house, instead of just grass. If he hear we’re walking in the path, maybe we can follow better and learn the layout of the city. If we’re walking on grass we know we’re far off town and maybe going into the forest. But in town you’d always have stone/dirth paths?
Interesting ideas! We had been discussing a compass feature for the Divining Rod a lot early on, and this came up again from jaogwal. It seems worth exploring again. Thank you!
Yeah, definitely heard on the "tuning for everyone is really hard". I definitely agonized over that one for this jam a lot 😅.
I would have definitely spent more time if I didn't have all the other games to get through, but I'll let you know I got to the end of the first cinematic (where you get the mine key). I will say, I'm glad I stayed around to that point, because the atmosphere definitely hits when you get to that point - it makes it really feel like a AAA game.
I can finally exhale, knowing that you experienced the cinematic ❤️. We love Toasty and LBR!
Great game. Bit of a learning curve - the tutorials have a lot of information to take in, which can be tiring and taxxing - but I agree that they are great mechanics, and also a great tutorial. And it’s great at least as a starting point to be a standard for more blind-accessible first person games.
I do have some ideas to improve on it. For starters, I think I might make some of tutorial sentences shorter. Most are a good length, but as you start getting tired, it gets harder to follow long sentences, and it’s always a bit taxxing to follow long sentences anyway.
Another thing I’d love to suggest is in the dojo… these are minor frustrations, by the way, this is miles into being a good game, which it already is… anyway, it was frustrating to have the old man interrupting my process of experimentation by talking to me every 5 seconds. I would like to have more time to look around and experiment with the controls before being interrupted by him. I heard his advice and this is time to experiment a bit with it, and he interrupt too quickly and too many times, I guess. It’s something I’d like to see fine-tuned, maybe at least 10 seconds of interval or 15 between his tips.
I think another thing to think about for improvement would be options to toggle on and off the use of the divining rod (aka chicken finder) and the lock on feature by just pressing those buttons instead of having to hold them down. This would be very helpful for players with motor disabilities and would be a big improvement. I also have found a person in the wild, recently, who struggled with the bow and arrow mechanics in Zelda, because he had motor impairments, and he had ideas to make the mechanic more accessible for him, so I’ll try to find him and forward him again back here. Maybe he’ll have good thoughts to share with you as well.
I’d love to see more improvement with some sound design, as well, like candy sounds for bumping into certain types of walls. Like a different sound when I bump into a bed different from bumping into a wooden wall. It’s a thought - something to maybe explore, for more immersion.
I’d also love to see this being totally screen-reader compatible, and at the same time, see voice acting added to it. Having both options to change between would be great because it’d make it more accessible for people who need or want to to use braille displays, and total screen reader compatibility will allow them to follow the text like that; whereas voice acting will make the game more rich for everyone who had good hearing. These are improvements I’m suggesting that I save for games that are so well-built that these are the next steps, instead of the next step being needing a tutorial because I can’t even play.
I think I have even more thoughts - I might have jumped into some bugs? I can’t enter “my house”? I also couldn’t exit the bakery without having the “lock on” feature active. And also I think the sound EQ is not great for me. I had some trouble, and I have a lot of noise sensitivities, so the harsh differences between some menu sounds like the back button and other things, like the TTS voice, were uncomfortable, and also I have to be very focused to actually hear the TTS well, even after putting it on the maximum volume.
I may have more feedback in my VOD.
But I wanna say also that I loved having the chickens in my arms, it was sooooo fun!! I think the story is also very promising and I hope this continues to grow and improve. Thanks for the GREAT submission!
VOD for a few days: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2718827191
Thank you for all the feedback! We will definitely check out the VOD and dig into the issues you mentioned! And having even better sound design and voice acting for the NPCs would be a dream, so you're not alone in those requests. Glad you had fun with the chickens!
I liked a lot! the sounds the type of adventure, how you manage the tutorial, the voice all great. I feel that I can learn very much from this game to improve mine. Thank you! The only thing I would like to say, but it's just because the way I play, I sometimes forget how are the controls. I mean, with which key I do this or that, so I appreciate a little text in the description to refresh this. I was stuck in the chicken challenge because I couldn't remember what key I should press when I feel was near them, so I tried every one but it didn't work, maybe was a combo or something.
This is a great idea! Right now, the controls are documented on our itch.io page, but that doesn't make it easy to read them while you're playing. We should definitely put this in a menu so that you can check them during the game, and ideally, we should also let you change the controls in that same menu to whatever you prefer.
Sorry you had trouble with the chickens. If you get close enough to them, you'll want to press spacebar to pick them up (or A on an Xbox controller, Cross on a Playstation controller). If you use the same button again, you can place them back down on the ground or into the chicken pen if you're close enough.
Also, if you've only seen the Village so far, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that there's even more to the game outside of it. The game has a story arc and ending. If you give the game another shot, you don't actually need to find all of the chickens, just make sure you talk to Rosemary in the Bakery to get your journey to leave the Village started! There is an entire Zelda-style dungeon to explore and a final boss fight that we would love to make sure you experience, so please let me know if you run into any trouble and would like advice. Best of luck!
Also, this was very heartening to hear, so thank you! Are you already in the Discord? Feel free to ask for help or advice any time!
6 stars across the board.
...
Actually, 5.9 stars. It would be better if I could read signs without having to bump into them.
I am fully ready to turn the Divining Rod into a telescope. Maybe we can have a crossover with Omega Reach :-).
Just kidding, this is a really good idea! I wonder if you'd find it more intuitive to try to "interact" with a sign from a distance, or use our "scene description" function from a distance in order to read it (f on the keyboard, L1 / Left Bumper on controllers). My guess is normal "interact," and just increase the range to where we think you should be able to read from.
And thank you so much again for all of your early and ongoing testing and feedback in the Discord -- from one ogwal to another!
ogwals unite!
What’s an ogwal?
is an og but wal
I feel like I’m watching a secret handshake happen in front of me and not getting it lol
jaogwal.itch.io :-)
Strings and stone? Alliteration? Well surely 5/5 game right there! But more seriously, I really love the divining rod system! People making systems that can go into other games to help make them accessible is always a dream, and the divining rod system ported into a lot of top down games would just make them accessible (once you know, all the hard work of tagging objects with descriptions and ya know.... but point stands!) So wonderful work, thank you so much for the effort and care!
I'm curious, was there another game that had the divining rod system? Since I might steal it one day, I wanna know who I would be robbing.
Thank you kindly, fellow alliteration admirer! You may have more reasons to enjoy the dungeon boss when you encounter it!
As for the navigational design, we started with a completely blank slate and just asked ourselves "how would we design a Zelda-like game from the ground up specifically for blind gamers?" Everything I prototyped, I would make sure that I tested with my eyes closed until it actually felt useful and natural. Given that we're aiming for a Zelda-like fantasy world, it was convenient to put all of this functionality into a named magic item and teach players how to use it, the same as we would teach them how to fire a bow or swing a sword. Then, I gave an early prototype to testers in the Discord server, and kept iterating on all of the functionality based on their feedback for most of the jam. We had blind testers, sighted testers, and proper accessibility consultants. They had plenty of stellar feedback and ideas from the very start, and we were still tweaking and adding features to the Divining Rod right up to the jam deadline. We are still continuing to receive more fantastic ideas for how to make it even better every day! We hope to keep polishing it, and figure out how to make it reusable for other games targeting blind accessibility.
That said, I do think the Divining Rod Lock-On system largely resembles Z-targeting from Ocarina of Time, or the Metroid Prime lock-on system, but both of those were only meant for targeting enemies, not for general navigation. I don't think I've ever seen a game handle sonar quite like this, but it wouldn't surprise me if we weren't the first. I especially have never seen a combination like sonar + lock-on for navigation, but let me know if you ever find any prior art!
If anyone else wants to borrow the Divining Rod mechanics in order to make their own games more accessible, please do! It would always be nice to get a shout-out credit for the inspiration, but that's just an optional "nice to have." The real goal here is to help enable as many games as possible become more accessible!
I think it's the lock-on system that really makes a difference here. Especially when using a gamepad, a lot of people tend to drift to one side so it's real nice that the system eliminates that issue which is a complete non-issue when you can see you're drifting and instinctively correct it. And as you said, while lock systems have always existed for combat, it's real nice and possibly novel having it for general navigation.
Valencia Tales: Strings & Stone so yum yum I could eat it in my tum tum. (I really enjoyed it)
Careful eating those stones, you don't look like a Goron to me! So glad you enjoyed it! ❤️
As a long time, Zelda fan who has not been able to play a Zelda game since skyward sword due to my loss of vision. This is hands-down one of the best games I have played so far this year! Valencia is the perfect love letter to the legend of Zelda.
Thank you for such praise ❤️ and for helping make the game as incredible as it is with all of your feedback and ideas!
This is really good
Thank you so much! Were you able to beat the game? We're trying to get an idea of how far players are getting, and if they understand that there's more story once you leave the Village (and that you're able to leave the Village at all, haha).
This is very well polished and in-depth. I could only progress after randomly pressing space and enter, and that seems to have nothing to do with vision, as I didn't *hear* any instruction either? Anyway, that could just be me. But, once I figured it out: this is fantastic work.
Thank you for saying so! To make sure I understand, do you mean after the voice says "Welcome to Valencia Tales, have you played before?" Now that you understand how the game works, do you think it would be better if that initial line also included "please press space or a controller button to proceed"? It has definitely been a tough balance of trying to understand how much explaining to do in the game, so this is good feedback to hear!
We're also trying to get an idea of how far players are getting in the game. Did you beat it and get all the way to the ending credits? It's absolutely fine if you didn't, we're just curious where people might drop out, or not understand that there's even more content and story once you leave the Village.
This game was so much fun for me to play. You have done a fantastic job to capture the feeling of zelda gmaes that i really missed playing. I was playing with a controller and the controller vibrations for the divining rod was so cool and really helped me out with navigation. I had a ton of fun walking around the village finding chickens and doing tasks for the people of the village. Everything fealt natural to me and i relaly love the music and sounds in the game. I am really looking forward to further development for the dungeon and i can't wait for what you wil do next. Thanks so much for letting me play around with the prototype and seeing how things continues to grow.
Thank you so much! And for all the testing, seriously thank you! You are a champ!
Hi, I'm trying to play on chrome using jaws. a man asked me if I played before but I could do nothing. I read some commands for the keyboard but when I pressed those keys, nothing happened. huge loss for me
Thanks for reaching out! This is our first attempt at an accessible game, so one of the hard decisions we had to make was to only support text-to-speech and not screen readers, because I was having a lot of issues during development. A few weeks ago, I didn't even understand the difference between the two, and that they are separate technologies, so I'm still trying to learn as much as I can.
After you hear my voice ask if you've played before, there is a text-to-speech line that lets you choose your response. If you're not hearing that, I am very sorry, but the entire rest of the game will be broken for you, since text-to-speech is used everywhere. The reason I included a voice to start the game was just in case TTS wasn't working, so players would at least understand that the game had loaded and was running, and they weren't just waiting forever or think the game was entirely broken.
If you're playing on Windows, could you try the native build instead of running it in browser (if you're comfortable with that)? This is the first I've heard of TTS not working in Chrome on Windows, so I'll have to look into that issue more, but thanks for bringing it to our attention!
Hi Kelsey! I know you said you pressed a lot of keys, but just making sure that those keys included the spacebar and enter. TTS could be broken but also wanted to make sure it wasn't an input problem.
I loved this! The divining rod works great, combat was simple but really fun, and honestly the only thing I can say is that I'm sad that I'll have to wait longer to play the full game if you do decide to finish it. I stopped at your dev note telling me to stop if I don't want spoilers, but I don't know if I can really keep my hands to myself for long. haha.
There were a few bugs, for example I managed to get the lock on sound to be stuck a few times by triggering a dialog/menu/etc. while it was playing, and Valencia doesn't despawn from near the mines when *the* cutscene plays (you know the one, major spoilers), but honestly for your first audio game you're doing really well in my opinion. I want more!
The locking on works great, holding R and turning works really well, maybe having a quick 360 scan where it plays sounds from the direction where something is + announcing it for a quick sweep without changing your direction? Maybe a bit more ambience sources to make the world feel more alive? But I'm kinda grasping at straws here. This is cool.
Oh actually, one thing. The quick combat instructions only say the buttons for gamepad, not for keyboard. I poked around until I accidentally discovered that it's z.
You are too kind! So glad you're enjoying it so far, and this is some really great feedback. I was able to replicate the bug about the combat tutorial ignoring that you were on keyboard and deciding to tell you about Playstation controls, so I should have this fixed soon! I'm still looking into the other bugs, and will hopefully have fixes, as well as some critical fixes that block progress in The Mines and let you get to the boss and finish the game. Thanks for hanging in there and letting us get your fresh impressions of playing The Mines as they were intended!
Your idea for more of a burst sonar echo in every direction is so cool, I can't wait to try to prototype that! It's such a fitting ability for the Divining Rod. And I could not agree more, the world could use a lot more ambient sources of audio to bring it to life and help navigation by ear without relying on the Divining Rod so much. It just takes us a long time to find suitable, high-quality sources of audio that fit well into the game, but it's always worthwhile when we do.
Thank you!
The intro was great! Thanks for letting me know xbox controller was an option :). I grabbed my controller, laid on the couch, closed my eyes, and played the game.
Unfortunately there is a bug where the bell sound of the lock repeats rapidly and loudly, so that's a little hard to use haha. It seems kind of a crucial function though. But I started to find my way around and I managed to get all the chickens!
Superbly well made game for the gamejam. It felt cosy with the music and the chimes. The repeating chimes for continue and when you get a choice are really nice. I think it would be even nicer if the first choice is auto focused first and the TTS reads it right away after continuing to the choice. The spatial audio was a little hard to discern for some reason, I could not tell very well where the chicken was located, or where the humming baker was. Might have been me.
Amazing work!
Hey, thank you! I'll ping you on Discord to see if I can understand what's going on with a repeating lock sound. If you were in Sonar Mode and turning your head around a lot, this is expected, because the Village has a lot of targets in it, but that should stop as soon as you release Sonar Mode, so I'm guessing you experienced something else entirely. Is it possible that you had another controller connected to the same PC that was accidentally squeezing its triggers? I've had that happen while debugging. I'm guessing you didn't get to any combat or the dungeon, so I'd love to figure this out so you can experience some of the game post-intro.
That's an interesting point about automatically moving to the first choice prompt. Do you mean that after the last line of dialog is read, the game could just play the chime and advance to the first choice without waiting for a confirmation? That would bypass the ability to repeat the last line of dialogue, but I honestly don't know how often people are using that feature anyway, so this seems like it would be an easy option to add for anyone who wants that behavior. Maybe even have a full auto-advance mode setting for people confident that they won't need any repeats at all, and just want to speed through the story.
For the spatial audio, there's a setting that I disabled last minute because of some negative feedback in the Discord. You may find it more intuitive to navigate if you enable it:
This just means "sounds are louder and more clear when looking directly at something, and more quiet when they're behind you." The earlier versions of the game had this behavior on all the time, but I made it into an option and defaulted it off because one of my testers actually found that it made it more difficult to navigate compared to other games, so it seems like a personal preference. I will admit that when I play the game, I rely very heavily on the Sonar + Lock-On system, so I don't think there are enough ambient audio sources around the environment to navigate purely based on audio.
Also, one of the chickens is deliberately slightly hidden! Two of them should be very close by to the pen and hopefully easy to locate, but the third requires a little bit of exploration (and maybe talking to an NPC for a hint) to find. But, finding the chickens is purely optional, as is most of the content in the Village. There is another NPC who will give you the Bow, which will let you leave the Village and explore more!
Thanks again for taking the time to play and give detailed feedback. We appreciate it!
The screen reader is very low volume compared to everything else, can barely hear it over the chickens at the start. I got stuck at "press the _ key to hear my name", (i couldn't tell what button it said, either up or r maybe?), but i must've tried every button on my keyboard now, and s i think just replayed it, but i can't get past this point. And pressing "P" has brought up a menu, i thought i clicked volume up but it didn't seem to work, and I am stuck in this menu and can't get out with escape or P. It's a fun sounding story and I would like to continue it!
You're so close to being able to explore the world and actually play the game, of course I'll help!
First and foremost, you will have a much better experience overall if you download one of the native builds for the game, but I know not everyone is comfortable doing that (or maybe you have a Mac, which we don't support). If you want to stick to browser, we've noticed that our game works much better in Chrome than Firefox.
The game defaults to having the TTS voice volume at 80%, so there's a little room to turn that up, but if it still sounds too quiet, the other option is to turn down the music and sound effects volumes to compensate. The best time to do this is as soon as the game starts, when you start hearing my voice. If you pause then, there will be no music or other sound effects playing at all. You should hear the pause menu say "Settings" to let you know that is currently selected in the menu, so you can then press the spacebar to select it, and you should hear "Voice" to let you know you currently have "Voice" selected in the submenu, but can still press up and down to hear the other options before selecting one. You can go back a level in the menu at any time with the X key. When you get to a specific setting, there are a few entries like "Change" and "Get Current Value" and "Reset to Default Value," so you'll want to select "Change" (the first menu entry you encounter) and then use your up and down arrow keys to adjust this and then press space to save the value.
So on a brand new game, changing the voice volume to maximum would look like this: p, space, down, space, space, space, up, up, space, p. Just in case the TTS voice is so low that you can't even hear it to navigate the menus.
Here are the settings I'd suggest adjusting:
Turn the Voice Volume up to max (10), and turn the others down to a level you're comfortable with.
And you're right, when you get to the Dojo, the first button Chili asks you to use is R. If you go too long without hitting the correct button, Chili will interrupt to remind you what you're supposed to be doing. This is the format for the rest of that Divining Rod tutorial: he will explain a concept, and then test to make sure you perform it, but if you take too long (10 seconds, I think?) he will interrupt to remind you again of exactly what he asked you to do.
Good luck, and we hope you give the game another shot. Let us know if you have more trouble or can't find a good volume mix so you can hear TTS, and you can always hop in the Discord to chat faster!
Ah yeah the walkthrough for the menu helps a lot, thanks! I can navigate it just fine now, I didn't understand it at all before!
I downloaded it, is there any way to save? I think I've lost my progress now...
I tried it for a bit now, it's quite good! Interesting mechanics, and good tutorials. Once I got into it a bit the buttons made sense, and the gameplay is cool. Really cool though, it's such a nice actual gameplay and story that's completely blind accessible! And thanks for getting back and writing such a complex reply :)
THANK YOU! We're thrilled that you like it so far!
All of your settings should get saved/loaded in case you spend a lot of time tweaking volume levels or adjusting input settings, but there's no save system for the game progression itself.
However, the game is designed to let you skip a lot of content if you want. If you already learned how to unlock the Bow in the Village, it should be pretty fast to repeat (and I'll probably add a Debug action to the pause menu to let you do it even more quickly today). Almost all of the interactions in the Village are optional, so only hang out there as long as you're having fun. Once you have the Bow, you can leave the Village and explore even more :-).
There used to be Debug options for just teleporting to different places in the game, so that early testers could give feedback on different areas without having to play from scratch every time. Right before the jam deadline, I was stitching all of the areas together, and accidentally broke these teleporters, so I temporarily removed them from the game so they didn't just cause confusion and pain. I'll try to add these back in safely, so you can also just jump directly to the dungeon or to the final boss on repeat plays (or if you get bored, lol).
Thank you so much!!!