Man, every year the games you put out tempt me to make my own blind accessible real-time action game. This is great proof that blind games don't have to be simple, turn or text based games.
I loved the art style, the options between rounds, and I thought the music and theme was great overall.
Some immediate thoughts:
- I think, like others mentioned, the sound scape was a tad noisy, and would have benefitted from sound effects that were clearly friendly noises vs enemy noises. Turning down the music just a little by default might also help here.
- I think it would help to give the ally orbs a more friendly sound, and something to make it clear if they are in front of you (and the fact that they are always moving forward).
- I couldn't quite figure out how to use the sonar. I feel like the map was useful, but I wonder if something more immediate and direct would have been useful - a button to tell you what are the next 4 things in front of you, and one thing behind you, with distance, would have been perfect.
- I wonder if it also would have been worthwhile to make the enemy distance noise a bit farther out (rather than making it only ping when you are right next to them).
- I ended up not going to the other lanes (and it doesn't look like that stopped me from progressing for the first couple of levels at least?)
- Enemies don't have an audio tell before they attack (just on their attack) - maybe that wasn't super impactful, but I think a grunt here or something could help players know that they are about to swing
- I'm not sure I totally understand the purpose of having the health not reset when you are knocked out - knowing that you need to heal feels like an extra step that doesn't add a whole lot
- Having other abilities is neat, but without a specific audio tell, I'm not totally sure how much it adds, I wonder if having a charged or quick-succession attack on spacebar would have been just-as-good, with less overhead / learning.
- I'm not sure how useful this would be, but I imagine the font might be challenging for low vision players - it seems like there were quite a few different ones being used, and an option here to use a more accessible one might be useful (for both sighted and low-vision players!)
Sorry, I realize that probably feels like a lot of nits, but I actually really really enjoyed this game, and it's crazy impressive that you got this together and helped make the jam run as smoothly as you did. This is one of the few games that I might actually pull up post jam and play more of. Congrats on putting something awesome together, and thank you for everything you do to make this whole jam happen.