itch.io

That's super strange! I did test it with Narrator on Edge, and that appears to work fine, but yeah, also seeing the same issue with Firefox where it doesn't read off any of the text. I'll try to do more testing, thanks for bringing this up!

Wow - I'm stunned. I just listend to the new version, and I'm immediately blown away by how amazing the new audio version is. I really enjoyed the possible dice results (not just success and failure, but like, really neat ways to think about what the results could mean), and the subtle music in the background really set the tone!

I think this also does a really great job of explaining how people should interface with this kind of thing. Great job on the new edition 👏

I have a linux device, but haven't tried working with any screen reader there - it should work with any screen reader that works with your browser, but let me know which one you are using, and I'll give it a try on my own machine!

It totally could have been that I misheard the instructions, but I had tried making the espresso first, and then putting the ice cream in - in retrospect (since I've made them before in real life) I probably had that backwards, but there wasn't a clear affordance in the tutorial that that is what was wrong (if that's what I messed up) - rapidly pressing space for the ice cream just failed when I had the cup of espresso.

I guess, at least for the tutorial, having some sort of feedback on what I was doing wrong would be good - but that's definitely beyond the scope of a normal game jam. 

Note: When I went to run the game again just now, I discovered the pause menu with all the descriptions of drinks and machines - that is a super nice touch (even if it wouldn't have helped in this scenario 😅).

Great job on the submission! I really loved this game, and it was super fun to play. The Voice Acting all around was great, and while this genre of game isn't usually my go to, I really enjoyed it, especially when it got to the frothing on the second set of customers. I think you did a really good job with the tutorials and guiding players along (admittedly, I had some struggles getting the ice cream for the afagato, but everything else was really smooth). 

Good job on the submission! The controls were intuitive, and the sounds were great. Like others, I felt like it was very easy to run into a wall, and I wonder if there could be more affordances to avoid that when moving left and right. Otherwise the game was pretty good, and definitely could see it being expanded to something more.

Great submission!

Like others, I found myself spamming at certain parts to find areas / items, but I did love the fact that the audio cues were very much "part of the scenery". I also immediately lowered the volume, and like others found that the speech rate didn't seem to be impacted by the options. 

Overall, movement and interactions here were pretty straight-forward, the story was good, and while this is similar in nature to a lot of the other "explore and find things" type of games, I do appreciate how it all came together.

I really enjoyed the Voice Acting and atmosphere here! 

Like others I was stuck after getting the crystal and couldn't find my way back to the druid, so having some better audio cues for each area could help players know what areas they have and haven't been yet.

I also struggled with the movement controls - I tried keyboard and couldn't totally tell what was going on, but then when I plugged a mouse in and put on headphones I had better luck.

Overall great job on the submission, I'd love to see this develop more, and potentially a sequel in a future Jam!

I don't play a ton of RTS games, so I really appreciate the tutorials, otherwise the main campaign would have totally kicked my butt 😅 - they were useful to get a feel of the game and try different areas out. 

I tried it out with NVDA on, and my sense (as a sighted user) was that there was a lot going on and to keep up with , and I don't know that I would have been very successful had I not been looking at the screen (but that might be a biased take).

I agree with other comments that it was very chatty when on a structure, and saying just the updates may have been useful. Alternatively, having more distinct sound effects, and dedicated hotkeys to get the current health / units / threat / etc could have been useful.

Overall, there was definitely a lot of great stuff here, and the game itself was really enjoyable. Admittedly I'm always worried about building real-time experiences (instead of turn based ones), but seeing this honestly makes me inspired to try my hand at it, and see what else could be done in this space.

I'm not as familiar with solo-journaling TTRPGs, but have played a good number of indie TTRPGs, so take any feedback here with that in mind.

As others have mentioned, I don't know that there is quite enough here to really constitute a game. For me, having more thematic elements, more detailed prompts, and (probably most importantly for me) having some kind of card-draw / dice-roll / rules would have been really valuable.

I think, if there was any concern that those tools wouldn't be accessible, you could always point to online tools to do that (like https://www.random.org/playing-cards/ or https://www.random.org/dice/).

You mention on the page description that "the JPG version has fancier & more aesthetic formatting" - I think, given the nature of the jam, it would have been valuable to port that, either describing the nature of that content in the PDF, or replicating the space / star-like scenery in the audio recording (with sound-effects / ambiance). 

Perhaps you could even use accessible fonts and high contrast lettering to make sure that the content is as-readable-as-possible for those with some amounts of low vision! 

The solo-journaling scene feels (at least to me) relatively young and certainly niche, so I would hate for this to turn off would-be enthusiast of the genre. I think there's probably a space for it in this kind of jam, but needs a bit more development, and some clear affordances for a visually impaired audience, and that needs to be the primary offering for that experience, rather than a substitute.

I sincerely hope this doesn't come across as mean-spirited, and hope you continue to participate in these jams - this is my second year participating, and I learned so so much from the feedback that I received in the first one. I do hope that you and others take this feedback, learn, and help teach others how to build accessible-first experiences!

Great job on the submission! I really enjoyed the first fight, and the voice acting was great all around. I also super appreciate all the sound-effects that really made it feel like a boxing match!

The gameplay was intuitive, and I enjoyed the way that the game let you block to get a feel for the opponent and push forward. 

Wow, what an amazing entry - I love the microgames, the aesthetic, the graphics, and the music.

I think for this jam in particular, it would've been cool to see a bunch of audio-focused micro-games (like the radio tuning one), but maybe that's something you can build on here, or for the next jam!

This was clearly polished, great job on the submission.

Great submission - my one big piece of feedback here would be, it wasn't totally obvious in the game what a success or miss was - or if what I was pressing was being registered at all - some kind of indicator, either when it was totally off, or correctly on would be valuable!

I appreciate the voice acting, but agreed that it was a little hard to process, and may have been worthwhile to reduce some of the post-processing there.

Either way, I got a sort of beat-saber type vibe with the electronic music, and it was very good to listen to, even if I couldn't get a very  high score 😅

This is the kind of game that I always wanted to make growing up, and always felt kinda daunting - it's so cool to see a text based RPG come to life, and this was no exception! Great job on the submission 👏

Like other players, I really enjoyed the voice acting, but got stuck with the navigation. For me, it wasn't totally obvious even after getting the room descriptions how to move around, and how to inspect the room. Audio cues that included "player" didn't totally make sense for me, and I struggled to get a sense of where I was - admittedly I'm not totally used to navigation-by-audio, so if this is more intuitive for other folks, I totally understand!

There isn't quite enough text read out while playing this for me to believe this would be playable without vision. Some of the numbers were not read, and there was no clear indication when you completed the puzzle if it was done correctly or incorrectly. There was also no indication that you were back to the main menu on failing. 

I'm not totally sure I understood how to play this game, given that it says the key that was pressed, and you have to be playing with other people (who could just hear that), so maybe there is something I'm missing. The audio used to say or announce what was happening was really challenging to understand (not sure if maybe that was the point). 

Good job on the submission - my game got stuck on round 5 using a half deck, but otherwise appeared to work as expected. 

I agree with other comments that it should read what card you played, and more clearly indicate that you got a point. Additionally, there was a lot of text read between rounds that could probably be tightened up (after the first round we know what the keys to press are, so you don't need to repeat it).

This was amazing in every way - I loved the pixelated art style, the music and sound effects, the voice recordings, the enemy designs, the story, everything! This was so fun to play, and really came together.

I couldn't quite handle the final dragon (the purple attacks were a tad too quick for me to handle 😅). As others mentioned, giving more time or audio cues for these inbetween purple attacks would be good. Additionally I was caught off-guard that there was no instruction to "press any key to continue" between screens (but I was able to see that, so it wasn't an issue).

Overall this game was fun, and it was clear a lot of work went into this. Great job on the submission!

I laughed out loud at the abrupt end. This was great, and fun, and I loved it.

Great job on the jam, thanks for creating a small delighful experience.

This was really well executed and clearly shows a ton of work - great job on the submission.

Like others, I had trouble knowing exactly where my allies were, and ended up turning on the visual cue by the 3rd battle. Even then, the targeting was a little challenging. Potentially better isolating the audio per-direction would help, but I understand that it's totally a hard problem to solve.

Either way, I loved the characters, story, and dialog here. Great job again.

I really enjoyed this submission! I loved the visuals of the blocks, and thought that the keyboard controls were inuitive (although I did use the mouse for a some navigation). Like others, I had trouble, mostly with the accompaniment, but I really enjoyed making progress on the main track. 

If the Check Screen showed how many off I was, then I think that would have helped me know if I was making progress, and be a little more eager to complete the entire track.

Agree with the other comments about Death being a little too punishing - if this was more like super meat boy that instantly started you back to home that would make the loop a little tighter.

Trying to play this blind, I got really stuck on the third level, and I think knowing "generally" where the exit is from the starting place would have been super valuable (is it to the bottom? the right? the top? where I am I starting?).

It would have been really cool as a sighted player to not see the walls or traps until I ran into them - I can look away, but then I would miss out on the visuals here, and they are well done! I also really appreciated the sound effects too - I think the simple 8-bit sounds and aesthetics are great here 😄

Nice submission! This was really well executed, and I liked the mechanic here, and had no trouble getting through the game with audio alone. 

There was a bit of guess work on if I was going to run into anything when switching lanes, and it would have been cool to better utilize stero audio in that case (having the radar give feedback on things to the immediate left or right). 

Nice submission! I really enjoyed the animal packs for different noises. It wasn't totally obvious if / when I lost, and when I got to the end of the game it didn't really let me know how I ranked, which would have been valuable. 

This was really neat! I didn't think that I would get very far, but the gameplay was more intuitive than I thought it would be! The minimal visuals (changing screen color) was super appreciated, and the sound effects were great (if a bit over-the-top) - they were definitely distinctive and let me know what was going on without saying too much. The bells made the game very exciting and I was counting to see how far I had to go 🤣

The only thing that might've been nice would be some indicator that hitting the action button was actually doing something - some kind of small sound notification, even if it was the same for every action - just to know that it had been registered. Additionally, some kind of readout for how far you got and what you ended with (on failure) would be appreciated. 

Great job on this submission, it was fun to play!

Neat little game, this is pretty fun!

This is super impressive! Love how cool this is.

This is super cool, great job!

A downloadable.zip is now available! Inside is an `index.html` file that you can open with your browser (even if you have no internet access) and it should work as expected!

This is really fun! Very good and clear use of audio. For other games, it's harder to get a sense of where things are, but the fact that this is just left-right makes it super easy to play.

We can certainly add that! It'll almost certainly still have to run in an HTML page (that's how the accessible text is presented), but no reason we can't provide that page to run on your local machine 😄 - we'll probably offer that once we've done more polish on the game (there are still a bunch of updates we want to do to the game after the voting period).

Just to clarify, is there any specific reason you want a downloadable version?

The voice acting was amazing, and all the sounds / music was very engrossing. Would have loved an initial description of the map (forest to the bottom right, town to the top-left, etc), but this was super neat and enjoyed hearing and playing!

Really liked the voices and characters here, but also struggled with the tutorial and some of the audio cues - would have been great to have some of the audio sounds in the game also be in the tutorial.

Super fun game, even though I don't play a bunch of audio games, the audio cues for the raindrops were super useful and didn't feel like just a substitute for the visuals. Still had difficulty figuring out exactly where to place the drum, so stronger audio cues would be valuable!

I also was unable to play the game, same error as others

All things considered, I could probably use a less powerful chess opponent 🤣

Thank you! This is our first big project in PICO 8, so we're happy it worked out well!

We leaned a lot here on built in screen readers working with the browser accessibility APIs, which let us avoid a lot of configuration we'd otherwise need to set up 😅

Thank you! There are some things (like the pause menu) that we couldn't quite tap into, but the basic mechanisms here we've made available for other people to build on, and hope that more accessible PICO 8 games can be made in the future!

Thanks for the detailed feedback, it is much appreciated! We've been slowly working on the bugs, and we've since reduced a lot of the verbosity when moving around the different parts of the interface. This is actually our first real game project, and while we both are frontend devs, we don't have a lot of opportunities to do accessibility coding, so learning what is and isn't necessary in this jam has been super valuable!

We're definitely planning on working on this more (we have a whole laundry list of things we'd like to polish up after the jam ends), and we'll be excited to join for accessibility jams in the future!