itch.io

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!

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).

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.

Oh, certainly! My feedback was meant as "in case you wanted to continue working on it, here are some areas worth exploring." Nothing wrong with putting a bow on it and moving on to the next game!

I played it completely without encountering any bugs. Very nice work, especially if you're still new to coding! I'll agree with some of the other feedback: if you let me run to the right and shoot the musket as quickly as I wanted to, and especially if you let me shoot it as many times as I wanted to, I think it would be even more fun! I also found it a little unintuitive that if I press down multiple times, I still hear a sound effect for movement even though I'm not actually moving. That seems like it might be an easy fix.

I love the concept of bonding with your grandfather on a fishing trip and encountering something particularly dangerous and out of the ordinary to add some drama. If you want to keep developing this further, I think there's a lot of room for being able to choose dialogue options and have the bonding experience be more of a back-and-forth conversation to share memories with your grandfather. Just a thought!

Hi! I've just published a new update for the game: v0.5.6

This fixes a bug during the boss fight where sometimes the boss actually broke right through the wall and became impossible to target anymore. I'm very sorry that you were probably hitting that bug, but it wasn't your fault! If you're interested in trying it again, you can teleport directly to it instead of needing to play through the entire game again first. Just start a new game, pause, and then navigate to Debug > Teleport to boss.

We believe in you, but if you still have trouble, we're also planning on adding an entry to the Hint Totem in that room to skip the boss as well, so players can still experience the epilogue. Best of luck, you've got this!

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!

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!

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:

Settings > Accessibility > Sight-based volume attenuation

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!

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).

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:

Settings > Volumes > Voice Volume
Settings > Volumes > Music > Music Master Volume
Settings > Volumes > Sounds > Sound Effects Master Volume

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!

Thank you for sharing this incredibly personal story. It will undoubtedly inspire others down a similar path of deeper self-discovery. Best of luck navigating the world with this newfound understanding of yourself.

Thank you! This is our very first attempt at making a visual novel, so it's great to get feedback.

There are two distinct endings, and some of the sequences throughout the game change based on your inventory and state of your body (that "dark half of the screen" moment can go a few different ways, or not happen at all :-)). As you might guess, the "leave a message" options change based on your character's marital status, and some of the paths let you leave audio messages instead of text messages.

If you want to play again to see different paths, you can use the settings menu (the gear in the upper right) to crank up the transition speed so you can get through the game faster. :-)

Cheers!