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War of the Waygates's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #6 | 4.190 | 4.190 |
| Game for Blind Gamers Judge Ranking | #9 | n/a | n/a |
| Overall | #9 | 3.587 | 3.587 |
| Polish | #10 | 3.286 | 3.286 |
| Fun | #10 | 3.286 | 3.286 |
Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Nice submission! The assets looked great, the attacks and their sounds were satisfying, and the sound menu and tutorials were very robust.
Thanks for the false sense of security in the first several levels of the campaign—I got completely obliterated once the enemies were at full strength. The power-ups and narratives between each level were a great touch! However, after that first death, you’ve pretty much soft-locked yourself without any health, so it’s easier to simply restart the level. But then you need to wait for everyone to get back to the frontlines, so maybe by this stage in the campaign it makes sense to start the level with things spawned in the middle of the action?
On the accessibility front, I couldn’t get NVDA to say anything other than in the current build, but it worked perfectly with Narrator. At times the audio was quite busy, which I suppose could be to encourage me to look around the map? The music slaps, but I wished there was a slider for that. For the allies specifically, I had difficulty at times determining whether I was in front or behind them—specifically I might make the frontmost one sound louder and more special.
This is a great concept that’s worth pursuing. The foundation is solid, but some things need tweaking. You’ve already let us know that you’d like to keep working on this, so please keep us updated.
Thanks for hosting!
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:
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.
Oh thank you so much!
And those aren't nits, they are feedback that really help!
I didn't get as much time on it as I wanted too to work on this given how ambitious it was, and as a result I didn't get as much play testing/feedback in, cause I didn't have like a build with all core features until uhh 6 hours before. Compared to Necromancer Nonsense which I would have been happy to submit a week and a half early, so the last week was just playing it and having other folks play it and trying out different thing.
So important reminder on how important a beta period is! So I think you're right on basically all of these!
1. Yeah I think having some sort of audio theme for all friendly vs enemy things would have been nice. That was a big part of why you only got ally orbs, so you only have to recognize the one sound. But I think it fell into the mess. Gotta think how to clean it up.
2. Good point! I say you wanna be behind it, but in the chaos of the game it's probably hard to tell right away.
3. So the sonar "should" be what you're asking for, but maybe it's not working intuitively. It gives you little pings based on what is in front of you, but with a delay based on how far away they are. Idea being it's like a real rardar, where it's based on how long it takes for sound to hit the thing then get back to you. Maybe this is just a tutorial thing, or maybe I can print results of radar to log to make it more obvious what it did? Probably both!
4. So the enemy distance noise is game saying "You are in range of attack", assuming you mean the danger thing. IDK if that ended up being all that help though except for the tower.
5. Yeahhh idea was you'd need to bounce between the other lanes, protecting the lane you weren't on, then jumping back to push your other lane because the lane you weren't on would be destroyed if you didn't. I guess moba like? But I reallllly struggled with balance. Anytime I got the enemies pushing right, players died too fast. If I weakened the defenses, then it felt like there was no time to do anything on the other lane. I really need to decide how long I want a game to last, then time out "Okay if I push like I expect a player to do, it takes me X time to push a lane. So I need the other lane to fall in less time than that if the player doesn't intervene" and buff/weaken things to make that happen. I keep thinking I should add some sort of "pressure" unit called flankers that are extra units that only spawn on the lane you aren't on, and the longer you aren't on that lane the faster they spawn. That might be easier than trying to perfectly balance a level.
Or opposite, where there is a "hunter" character that spawns on the players lane if they spend too long on it.
6. Ahhh so many noises to balance. You are totally right, I just gotta figure out how I need to clean up the sound scape in general. Maybe I just need to get more into having very distinct audio pings for things that play as well as the pretty stuff that cuts through since players have full control of audio levels, they can always lower them if not wanted. Or tie all "advanced accessibility" alerts to one thing.
7. Idea was I didn't want player to be able to body block for forever. I made the player rather tanky, so didn't want it to be like "respawn, step in front of gate, kill a few things, die, repeat" and instead be you need to stay safe for a second and heal. Having the enemy get something beneficial, or a longer respawn timer, probably does this just fine though.
8.Hmm there are audio tells when abilities come off cool down, but as part of balance I will admit they didn't have the impact I wanted. But again, audio sound scape crowding was a problem.
9. Me and fonts man. I picked a font, used it in places... oh dang looked unreadable in this menu, okay lemme change it here then go change it elsewhere later... oh crap in another place the new font is unreadable, uhhh new font. Then never actually got around to finding one that was half decent everywhere. So yeah... just right.
So yeah a lot of the feedback is "soundscape and audio balance is off" but you gave good specific issues with it, which is good cause as the dev I'm like "I recognize it's a mess, but my silly brain hears all the alerts fine and knows their purpose, because i made them" so very helpful!
Oh also, don't forget how important it is to prove that a blind accessible games don't need all the bells and whistles. Making a card game that is genuinely fun and also accessible is something I wish more folks would try. Cause countless games on steam would be accessible for just a bit of consideration at the start of development. So games that show case "Hey look, does your game look like this? It does? Cool, you're setting up a screen reader at start of dev and making sure nothing you do breaks it away from being accessible" i love.
Also I'm a sucker for roguelike card games.
This does seem like fun game, but it seems my screen reader doesn't work at all, i get into a debug menu and i noticed nothing gets read with NVDA. I just ran around not knowing what i was supposed to do at all.
That is incredibly strange, screen reader 100% is working and there isn't a debug menu. I tested the windows build and my NVDA works so I'm unsure what's going on.
Can you explain more what opens? Are you running linux or windows build? Would it be possible to send a screen shot of what opens on discord? Just as much information you can provide to help me bug fix.
Hello! I uploaded a new build that undid a UI change. Can you test and see if it works now?
So sorry for that! Hopefully it works now! Do let me know if it works or not!
The game seems really fun! However, Screenreader doesn't work at all. Is it using sapi voices by default? My PC has the Microsoft voices corrupted for some reason, so I only can use NVDA's TTS.
Uhh I'm really confused as someone just reported same thing, screenreader should 100% be working and is working on my machine and previous testers it worked. I'm going to investigate, if you open the console inside the folder then click around the menu, does the console throw any sort of error?
For some reason it started working after opening the game a few times. Everything works fine now! It's really weird.
Hello! I uploaded a new build that undid a UI change. Can you test and see if it works now?
So sorry for that! Hopefully it works now! Do let me know if it works or not!
honestly concept is intrusting, but the problem is, I don't have clue what is going on in the game. it is so difficult to understand what's going on
Oh no! I'm sorry, yeah I'll keep adding stuff.
Could you clarify at all though? I thought the tutorial was pretty good, is the map mode and sonar just not enough? The overview has details on everything happening in game, so is like something missing from there to give context? Does something need to be moved out of there to an easier to reach spot?
Like all the information should be there, so wondering where the loss is! Like does some of the information not make sense?
I think sounds are the problem. many sounds feel same and also if facing an archer, I am unable to understand when should I dodge their attacks. also, it would be great if you give separate Learn Sounds menu where we can learn sounds for every unit, ally and others. also, menu aproach is complicated, is it possible to get important stats faster? like h to anounce health, a to anounce allys's condition
Mmm there is a learn sounds menu, do you mean in the over view tab? Or more details? I call it audio index in the main menu.
And you have lots of allies, they are little units that spawn so there is no easy way to convey that.
But I did make it projectiles from archers now how their own unique warning sound when you are in danger of them! So hopefully that helps?
A really fun idea, also great to see an audiogame with graphics.
However, a little hard to tell sound wise which thing is what, since the soundscape can get a wee bit busy.
I do wonder how much the game was tested without graphics.
Still, love the creative concept here, and I suspect a degree of practice will help with this one.
So my only play tester was Unsytedvoices who is blind (probably know him, so maybe uneeded to say since he's so active in community)! He said he really got a hang of it once the Sonar and map was working and M key opened map directly, since he could ping sonar and if he wasn't sure what it meant jump back to the map and get an understanding. Then he also said the ability to go and lower things you felt like was drowning things out using the AudioIndex/learn sounds menu was really helpful. But I wish I had gotten more play testers, because Unsyted got pretty good at the game, so by the end was he doing well because I made the accessibility much better, or just he'd spent a couple hours on it and I explained things to him that didn't make it into the tutorial? Probably both. But that means I have no idea how long it takes with the current setup to go from "new game" to "Feeling comfortable" for a blind player. I'd love to get that down to like 5 minutes, I don't think it's there yet. If it's 20 minutes, eh, fine, not bad, not good. If it's an hour? More? Blech, bad.
If you have any suggestions on what to add/modify, to get that "time to feeling comfortable in game" down, do let me know! I always try less commonly made genres as I wanna encourage other sighted devs to make what they find fun and not panic run towards "safe" genre of games (Rhythm/text). But if they aren't actually accessible, probably just reinforces the feeling of staying on safe games! So any specifics is super helpful.
Maybe just need to make it so can access the audio library from in level... hmm.. also debated adding a practice mode where you can run around invincible so you can just like stand in a place listening to get an idea of what is happening and not be worried about dying. Not sure if you think that'd help, or if maybe just need first few levels to be less chaotic! Having multiple torches firing projectiles and enemies all in range probably is a lot. If I was super cool I probably could also add a control to globally increase/decrease your listening range. So like if you're in a tighter battle you can lower down to only really hearing what is right next to you, but if you're trying to get vibes, can expand it to most of the floor? Not sure if that'd actually be helpful, or just be annoying cause you'd get ambushed by arrows whenever you shorten the listening range.
Maybe need to make the arrows have a warning box and move a little slower....
Sorry now I'm brain storming in response!
But thank you for the feedback! I'll keep trying stuff!
I think practice mode would help
Firstly, I absolutely love the visuals and soundtrack of War of the Waygates. It's vibrant, exciting, and all meshes together really well. The game feels good to play, but I think it is a bit too hard for me. I was very quickly overwhelmed on the first level by the number of ranged enemies, and I don't seem to have a ranged attack of my own to combat them, so I'd just die over and over without making a dent. Even my own units were being killed before they got anywhere near them, so I couldn't use them as shields. The game feels smooth and responsive, I'd just wish for a lower difficulty at least at the start to get into it, especially since I'm going from the tutorial with barely a trickle of melee enemies directly into having 2 gates to monitor and way more ranged enemies than I can handle. Loads of potential here, and I definitely appreciate the thought and effort that went into the sounds, music, and the learn sounds menu.
oh dang it I just realized I accidentally tripled the attack of the archers from what I tested with XD I'm nerfing them back to where they should be if you wanna give them another try!
I'll definitely give it another go! I thought something like that might have been the case ;)
I fixed a bug right before submitting, which was that the attack stat of the archer wasn't being passed correctly to the arrow.
But now that it was, uh.... yeah a lot stronger than when I tested it. I do this every year xD
Hi, I had to give this game a high creativity but low fun/polish rating as the screen reader is super super laggy, I mean 2-3 seconds between when I press a key and getting screen reader feedback, but the idea seems very fun and could be challenging. I also miss a learn sounds menu, not sure if there is one, but the 2 3 second lag makes me not want to browser the menus.
There is a learn sounds menu, and there shouldn't be any lag?
Can you help me out, what do you mean there isn't a learn sound menu? In the main menu if you press down a few you'll get it.
Hmm yes I just tested it, there is 0 lag, and my other play testers have 0 lag as well.
Can you please give more details? Are you using native windows? What screen reader are you using? Do you have a monitor? Since it works on other blind users screens I can only assume it's a computer issue without more context.
Then if you check out the description of the game it does include this:
There are tabs on top, then each tab has a list of sounds and you can modify the audio level of each individually. For audio that is attached to moving things, this is the "loudest" it can be.
I do appreciate you taking time to give feedback, but I do need some more details! the sound menu is there in the main menu, and need some specifics on system so I can determine source of lag.
Hi, I’m sorry, I couldn’t properly check the main menu because of the huge huge lag. Yes I use NVDA, latest version. I will change my rating, since for yourother testers it works fine and the game seems really good, but with this lag I just can’t play, it is too much to use the game properly.
Oh I uploaded a new version, can you test with new version?
Oh this is much better, how’d you do it?
Oh wonderful! Thank you so much for testing again. I'm far less concerned with ratings and more concerned with just making sure my game actually is accessible! Having a 1+ second delay on screen readers is not very accessible to me.
Realized I need to turn off VSYNC in godot, otherwise it will tie updates a second to FPS. If anything makes it so it can't find out what the FPS is (out of date drivers, monitor is off, no monitor, etc.) it'll decide to do an update like once a second (maybe longer on some systems?), which is real bad.
Maybe I can request that part of setting "screen reader always on" is turning off that setting.
Sorry for triple post, but I made a change to the project that makes it more compatible with other systems.
Please download the new version and give another try. Don't forget to give details when you run into bugs though!