A really fun idea, also great to see an audiogame with graphics.
However, a little hard to tell sound wise which thing is what, since the soundscape can get a wee bit busy.
I do wonder how much the game was tested without graphics.
Still, love the creative concept here, and I suspect a degree of practice will help with this one.
So my only play tester was Unsytedvoices who is blind (probably know him, so maybe uneeded to say since he's so active in community)! He said he really got a hang of it once the Sonar and map was working and M key opened map directly, since he could ping sonar and if he wasn't sure what it meant jump back to the map and get an understanding. Then he also said the ability to go and lower things you felt like was drowning things out using the AudioIndex/learn sounds menu was really helpful. But I wish I had gotten more play testers, because Unsyted got pretty good at the game, so by the end was he doing well because I made the accessibility much better, or just he'd spent a couple hours on it and I explained things to him that didn't make it into the tutorial? Probably both. But that means I have no idea how long it takes with the current setup to go from "new game" to "Feeling comfortable" for a blind player. I'd love to get that down to like 5 minutes, I don't think it's there yet. If it's 20 minutes, eh, fine, not bad, not good. If it's an hour? More? Blech, bad.
If you have any suggestions on what to add/modify, to get that "time to feeling comfortable in game" down, do let me know! I always try less commonly made genres as I wanna encourage other sighted devs to make what they find fun and not panic run towards "safe" genre of games (Rhythm/text). But if they aren't actually accessible, probably just reinforces the feeling of staying on safe games! So any specifics is super helpful.
Maybe just need to make it so can access the audio library from in level... hmm.. also debated adding a practice mode where you can run around invincible so you can just like stand in a place listening to get an idea of what is happening and not be worried about dying. Not sure if you think that'd help, or if maybe just need first few levels to be less chaotic! Having multiple torches firing projectiles and enemies all in range probably is a lot. If I was super cool I probably could also add a control to globally increase/decrease your listening range. So like if you're in a tighter battle you can lower down to only really hearing what is right next to you, but if you're trying to get vibes, can expand it to most of the floor? Not sure if that'd actually be helpful, or just be annoying cause you'd get ambushed by arrows whenever you shorten the listening range.
Maybe need to make the arrows have a warning box and move a little slower....
Sorry now I'm brain storming in response!
But thank you for the feedback! I'll keep trying stuff!
