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Cane Race's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #24 | 2.391 | 2.391 |
| Polish | #24 | 2.087 | 2.087 |
| Overall | #24 | 2.406 | 2.406 |
| Creativity | #25 | 2.739 | 2.739 |
Ranked from 23 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Hi FluffyMaster!,
Not sure if you checked your email, but you should have received one from itch/our jam. We have some prizes available for the jam participants, so make sure to claim a game key if you’d like one. Make sure to take a look and fill the form soon!
eThanks for the info, I received the email, but I'm not interested in the prizes as I play audiogames rarely these days..
Good job! I could survive a couple of times, but the sound of crashing too much for me
Ok, thanks for the info.
This is a interesting concept for a endless runner game, i did like it, but i just died a few times and i fealkt the sounds were a bit quiet. Also i noticed i couldn't tell how close i was to be hit by a cane or if i jumped over something, i think that could be improved more.
Hi. I fixed the stereo sound now, I accidentily chose 3 sounds for left, right and center instead of panning one sound to the left and right.
It's fixed now.
Nice submission! My highest score was 42 and I ended with 14 coins. I enjoyed the variety of sounds, and how visceral some of them get when you lose.
When I noticed that it was an HTML game, I opened up the source code so I could skim it later. It helped me confirm some assumptions that I made while I played. For example, I could tell by the sound and lack of boundaries that the lanes cycle around a cylinder (modulus 3). I really liked this design decision because I never felt trapped as the game got going; instead, my losses were purely by my mistakes. And the math for that and how you handle panning is cleverly simple in your code!
My biggest snag is how coins are treated like obstacles, but they don’t have a sound to help me catch them. Perhaps a sound makes them too easy to collect, but there would still be skill in navigating the obstacles to reach them! If the randomness is intentional, then I might have put coins behind their own timer separate from the obstacles, so acquiring them feels a little more regular.
Overall, congrats on this solid start with your first game! Keep iterating and keep us updated on your progress. With a bit more polish, it can be great.
Thanks for the great feedback. I taught myself JS and HTML, so yeah, gonna fix the panning logic and the other stuff you said.
To be clear, I think your panning logic sounded great to me!
I noticed that you’re using Howler, so you may have less control over the sounds as you would with the Web Audio API, but there are some things you might consider to make it smoother. For example, there is a version of each sound for each channel (left, right, and center) and they stop and start whenever the player changes lanes. I would try to keep them playing, associating each obstacle with a new sound instance of the centered version, and change the pan of the instance itself when changing lanes. (Maybe you’ll need to tweak other parameters like volume and filtering too.)
The nice thing about this approach is how it would allow you to have four or five lanes instead. There’s more continuity! That could open a lot more possibilities in your game design. (This is based on a second read of your code, but you know it much better than me!)
Hello,
I've updated the game now to only use one sound for center, left and right and to pan this sound accordingly to the left and right, that fixed the volumes as well as well as the not hearing the canes and skateboards on the left and right properly. The sounds of not hearing the coins before picking them up is intentional since you only should hear when you collected coins. I'm more used to mainstream online games I guess, even if I'm blind since birth I played a game on a german website where you flew with a UFO and you collected stars and dodged commets and you only heard the "ding" sound of the stars when you collected them, so maybe that's why I'm used to such things and had this idea in mind as well.
Thanks for the update! And no worries, there’s no need to justify your design. The UFO game sounds like a pretty cool piece of your game’s DNA!
As you continue on your game development journey, one of the most important skills you’ll be practicing is how to process feedback. You’re going to get a lot of feedback like mine, which comes from a place that doesn’t fully understand your game like you do. As someone who makes pretty weird things, I encounter it every day, and find that a lot of it is mostly matters of taste. (Or bugs!) And here you succeeded in filtering what everyone is saying, incorporated whatever you found fitting, and released an update today. Congrats for your first update for your first game!
Thank you for the tips.
My best score so far is 41.
There is a lot I like about this game. I really like that you keep the coins after a game over. That’s a really good idea because if you add a shop later like you plan to do it will make the game feel like you are always progressing.
I especially like listening to the sounds, they are all pleasant and I could honestly listen to them all day. I think the way sounds are used is clever too e.g. by making sounds louder in one ear than the other, which is good for direction although I did find this difficult in practice, probably because I am not used to playing audio games yet. The sound when you walk on a car roof is also nice, and I like that you get four steps. I did manage to avoid getting stunned by jumping which made me feel good. I think you could add some music to the main menu screen, which would make it feel more alive. However, I actually think music during gameplay might be too distracting since the audio cues are so important. The sound effects are already very pleasant to listen to.
I also like that there is a “How to Play” button in the game itself. The instructions are clear and explain the mechanics well, especially the part about the four steps on the car roof and the stun if you fall off. It’s also helpful that the controls are simple and systems like coins, score, and leveling are explained.
One small UI suggestion: the “How to Play” button is very close to the “Play the Game!” button. A little bit of space between them would make the menu easier to navigate. It's not a major issue though.
I noticed when you move left or right it makes a sound to confirm the movement, but I’m not sure if I’m moving. It’s a bit hard to imagine exactly where I am on the street. If there are lanes, maybe the game should not play the movement sound if the player is already at the edge.
Overall, I really like the idea and it was nice to play, it’s actually the kind of style of game I think works really well for blind players. Great job, especially for a first game! I hope you continue to polish this.
Hi. Adding music to the game's main menu when the game is loaded (the main Cane Race site is displayed before getting into a game) I'm adding later, but I'll keep that in mind. Thank you for the great feedback! As for not hitting the edge, in endless runners at least as far as I know, you are running in the direction you are running in until you die by something, so there is no edge sound or hitting the edge. You only have a turning sound when you turn from the center to the left or from the left back to the center with the right arrow, etc. White spacing has been added a few minutes ago, the "play" and "how to play" button and link shouldn't be sticking under each other, meaning there should be some space between them I hope.
While I admit is is pretty difficult for me, a fully sighted person, to quite get the hang of this, I love the idea if you could nail down the audio cues a bit more. I can't speak for someone more used to using audio to navigate, but for me I just couldn't figure out how to avoid the car door at all! HOWEVER- there is a brilliance and elegance to this. It's realistic. If I genuinely lost my sight today, I would be HOPELESS on the sidewalk tomorrow, for sure. :)
Especially knowing this is your first game, I think it's good! But truly, there's good potential here.
Congrats on the submission 🎉
Like others have said, I had a bit of trouble understanding the audio cues and knowing exactly what to do when (and in my three attempts I couldn't get any coins). Perhaps a starting level that slowly introduces obstacles could help introduce players to the different sounds!
Hello! I have played this for a bit. I love subway surfers / endless runner types of games, and so I enjoy playing this but I think something’s weird with the sound? I was running to the right side but then I climbed a car and I heard the sound of the car on the left of the screen. So I’m a bit confused about the lanes and my placement in the screen?
I also would love to see some more work with the sound design, so it can feel like a more rich world. Maybe some music as well. I hope the continued development goes well!
VOD up for a few days: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2713037686
Good for you putting your work out there in a game jam on your first game! Keep it up, you've obviously got the bug!
A nice idea in theory, but a wee bit disappointing in concept.
The idea of endless running with a cane to find obstacles is a good one, and the prospect of jumping around the street and off cars whilst avoiding psycho skateboarders and grabbing coins is crazy enough to be interesting.
However, I was a little disappointed that the soundscape was so minimal, the cane itself didn't play a part in the game (EG warning you of obstacles), and there was neither music nor ambience to really give the game much of an atmosphere, even the coin sound was less pleasing.
Definitely a nice foundation for an idea, but one which perhaps could do with some expantion.
Oh, the sound of different smash and the score system and messages (I recovered from a stun), is funny.
The game itself is a good idea for starting a game like this, but needs more polishing. Keep the good work ^^
Thank you, it's my first game that i ever coded, so yeah. Thanks for the good review.
Your first game!? Congrats for the effort! I know how difficult is to start from absolut zero, hehe (1,5 years of experience with GDevelop for me).
Yeah, and 3 years of application development education at a blind institution didn't really teach me anything cuz the instructors didnt know how to teach java or js to us, so I taught everything myself, from learning how to use Git Hub to how to code in JS. So yeah. And I'm currently teaching myself python.