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Hi @redonihunter. Thanks for the correction about jams vs games on this site.

Your discussion of how to make games accessible when their core mechanic relies on ability is interesting. If you did provide options that "nerfed" your gameplay, does that stop someone enjoying the experience of playing it? I actually don't know. You the developer not cannot easily make judgements on the enjoyment that someone may get from playing it. But at least they can experience the game in some way. Take your example of a blind person and an oil painting or visual-based game. The accessibility is being able to give the person a description of it so that they have at least some frame of reference in which to understand it or talk about it with others. They're not left out. With my latest game, despite being a timer-based game, able people were asking for a slower or non-timed experience. Ability may not even come into it!

Of course there are problems if you bring people of different abilities together in some way, like high score tables or multiplayer, but there can be mitigations. But as you say, they take time and effort, which is difficult for the small developer. We do what we can, but it's important that we try to do it.

There are tools for checking some of these things. Colour blindness, contrast levels and text sizes/clarity can all be assessed just from screenshots with simulator tools. Designers usually have studied this a lot so that they avoid problems right from the start before it becomes expensive to correct. You'll often hear things like taking a mobile-first approach, because it's deemed to be one of the lowest common denominators with the simplest kinds of interaction and smallest screen real-estate. 

This site is worth a read, just for awareness of things, https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/.

Nice work, difficult to keep enough ammo. Very strong audio.

I think this site is not good for it because  it's mostly it can be devs producing games in jams, where the time limit means there's little time for accessibility implementation.

And in a way, that's part of the problem - that it's so time-consuming that devs often can't do it. There need to be better ways for devs to feel able to support a11y, extra tools for engines and the like. It's unfortunate that in some cases I'm seeing the engines themselves not providing key features.

What I would love to see for game jams is that after the submission deadline, there's some way for devs to add in missing a11y features. But when devs are more practiced with it, they would probably be able to do it as they went because they would know the implementation patterns. Particularly where in some cases, the a11y feature is actually the absence of a game mechanic, or is a handy feature for testing, and hence feature-flagging those mechanics straight away means you only need to provide the mechanism to set the flag. I would love to see more discussion about good practice like this.

Can be tricky to keep on with it. I've been doing some of the simulation fixes so far, mainly involving looking back at my rushed code thinking "what the hell was I doing, and how does it manage to work?"!

Thanks so much :) Yeah, adding that tutorial is necessary. With trying to replicate the original I had to avoid the cues of modern games, and hence some things are not very obvious as a result. I am working on it so may get an update out sometime after the jam voting ends.

Thanks! 2 player is on my mind, too. I am able to swap out the AI for a controller easily, but there's various bits of UI that need to change too to support it.

That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve with this, exposing this fun combat puzzler. I had planned for a guide in the game, but it was going to be unlikely for the jam. And yes, I can make the circuit designs easier/more difficult quite easily, but I lacked the time to do the UI. The AI is also bit of an idiot at the moment, but the intelligence is pluggable.

Great to see a Love2D entry. Simple and fun take. I couldn't get the hang of the drifting, but with the normal oversteer on the turn, that was enough to carve a weird route round the maze. I thought the maze size was good. Good suspenseful tune too, and the little car noise is a great touch

Simply a ton of fun! Gorgeous graphics and excellent simple and fast gameplay, with a good balance of difficulty. When I went in to play a 2nd time, there was a crash, which is a known issue in Unreal on windows https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/shipping-build-crashes-with-dx12-and-raytracin..., I just deleted the upipelinecache file and was up and running again.

Very simple and fun idea. Good music, cool models and graphics. But yeah, the camera handling needs work.

This is very atmospheric, that feeling of being very exposed, and you panic if you see or hear the robots close by. I still haven't found a way out of it. Played a few times, and I'd really like to get to the end, but unfortunately, it does make me seasick. I think with having to do so much twisting and turning to see what's going on and building up a mental map of the labyrinth, the swaying makes me dizzy. But other FPS' like ROTT2 did that to me too, just getting old, I guess!

Great fun idea. The cat can get stuck to walls a bit easily, though. Found this through gamedev.tv discord

Don't worry, jams are like this, and experience will tell you what you need to concentrate on. You did better than me in that you at least had the game functional! Unfortunately, you can't resubmit for this jam. Well done.

A very good effort if you're only 12! Great idea, and the blocks look really good. It is a bit challenging to play without more guidance as to how it works, and fixing a few bugs.

I think you have the makings of quite a good engine

All fair comment, thanks. Not played with post-process filters, but seeing El-Dee's game, I can see it does add to the feel so I'll have a look into that.

Unfortunately, yeah, I ran out of time so didn't get as far as having the beasties come after you, not even inflicting pain, but I left the models that I created in the rooms. This will probably be no. 1 thing to fix after the voting ends. At least you provided some things for us to hack at in this jam!

Lots of Doom nostalgia, I kept expecting roars in the distance and nasty hordes coming to get me! Nicely done. It took a few attempts, but I just couldn't seem to get past getting the red key, there's a door off the main courtyard, but it isn't colour-coded and won't open.

This is pretty dang cool! I haven't played GnG, so dunno if there's anything missing on that count. But everything works well, except the bat disappeared when I added to a later part of the level - maybe it fell off a ledge or something, but it looked really amusing. The only issue I found was that it took me a while to work out how to scroll the view along in the editor, because I couldn't see the slider background.

Hey Hutch, thanks for playing. It's not possible to leave. You only need to get back to the entrance hall and it's done. If you pressed esc when the menu came up, that was a bug and you shouldn't be to continue to walk around. I didn't have time to put in an outside, or do the storyline, and a whole lot of other stuff!

Ha ha! Love the spooky camera angles, great effect.

Thanks, snacks.. I really liked your submission too. I'm still thinking on where I could go with improving this, beyond just the bug fixes, so might be a watch this space!

I can confirm there's an axe in it!

I think I only found it because it was advertised on the GameDev.TV discord.

Superb take on the PickAxePete cover. It is such an odd character to have marketing a game, obviously they changed it pretty sharpish. But he feels quite fresh on modern eyes. I wanted to capture him in my game by playing on him being kind of desperate, pathetic and a bit inept, but also wily, somehow always close to the prize.

Jump is ever so slightly underpowered, which makes it a fair challenge. But it's a well polished game. Well done!

Enjoyed the jokes. The game engine could possibly do with a bit of streamlining for the user. It's not my cup of tea as a game mechanic so I just mashed Z till it was over! Is there anything after the shop?

Don't worry, people of all skill levels do jams. I've only done one jam before, so still pretty fresh myself. I toyed with joining this one, but I've been a bit strapped for time. Doing such a short time jam is a big challenge if you're starting out. Worth checking out ones that are a little longer so you can start to build up some libraries and shortcuts. But knowing how manic a short one is at least gives you a feel for them. Happy jamming!

Gameplay is like snake but without the snake! But you did go fully into interpreting the theme differently (tries to think how many games she's played in the last few days that scale the player/enemy up/down for x scenario!)

Should we call it a sandbox, or a litter? Very tricky to control, but ultimately there's nothing to do.

Yeah, like others say, I had no idea what I was doing, but it was fun blasting stuff, and the vehicle was particularly crazy and super weird to control! Great sound effects.

For some reason, I couldn't get gathering to work properly. I think I was telling a team to go get something and it would appear on the alchemy screen, but the number of them was 0. I guess there's something I was missing about the gathering? You should improve the feedback on user actions, even if it's just say "confirmed". Took me a while to realise what things on the screen did things, like that there's a menu on the top banner. But, that was a lot of UI to put together in such a short time, and it looks and sounds good.

Translation is: "race against time and hit enemies before you explode. Free yourself from the curse of the yokai."

I couldn't get past the big pit, the jump doesn't seem powerful enough for the distance. The change of scale is a bit weird, you don't notice it changing till you restart and you're really small - though I don't what actually caused it. But that, at least, is a good effect.

That is a whopper download size, I think your distribution settings need some tweaking (looked like a third of it was textures). As for the game... well, I didn't really get to it because it kept crashing the tutorial screens just when the block goes through the square (it's less bad if you pause between clicks, race condition when the next scene is loading, maybe?). The music was nice, though.

Great idea with the resizing platforms. I managed to disappear the 2nd robot, must've crushed it raising it up to the 2nd platform.. oops! I wasn't as much of a fan of the background music, but did appreciate that you got the jump sound to harmonize! I would rather make the background music myself, but it's very difficult when you're strapped for time.

It's okay. Your game theme fit description makes me think it's supposed to have a zoom feature, but I didn't find one, except for switching to the underwater scene, maybe I was misunderstanding the meaning? That would certainly be an interesting challenging twist, but it sounds like the art took more than the gameplay this time. And the art is okay, though some form of colour, even if partial hints, would make it stand out a lot more.

I needed to keep reloading the page to play, which got annoying very quickly, because the game is so quick. However, once you do it, it's finished all too quickly.

This is excellent.. well on theme, great playability (nice touch with the posters reminding you of the keys as you go), nice mix of challenging and just-think-it-through puzzles. Great effort.

Good gameplay, and clean presentation. Managed to break the glass, but couldn't seem to satisfy the 2nd mission.