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Making Games Accessible

Hosted by Ericbomb, shiftBacktick, Patricia
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A jam submission

THE OMEGA REACHView game page

Reach for the stars, gather their instruments, and curate the best collection in the universe
Submitted by shiftBacktick — 1 day, 3 hours before the deadline
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Play synth

THE OMEGA REACH's itch.io page

What was your goal for the project this month?
My goal for the v1.2.0 update of THE OMEGA REACH was to continue making progress toward its Steam release following its submission to Games for Blind Gamers 5. Over the past month, I've added dozens of new features, enhancements, and fixes. Most importantly, this update brings a major expansion to its optional dungeon, with fourteen new tiles, two new floors, and many new mechanics. I recommend reading the devlog for this release, which includes the Steam reveal trailer and an interview with Unsyted Radio about the project.

https://shiftbacktick.itch.io/the-omega-reach/devlog/1610028/v120-cellar-expansion-steam-reveal-and-more

What type of project was this?

Continuing a project!

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Comments

Peter DrakeSubmitted37 days ago(+1)

Very pretty visual particle effects and sounds.

I didn't know that you could save state between sessions in a WebGL game. Nifty!

Maybe it's just a question of genre preference, but I found it cryptic. I was surprised that even the "helping hand" tutorial mode didn't explain what the controls were -- it just told me to push some buttons and explore. It took me quite a while to find them.

When I pressed a slash or apostrophe, some kind of search bar appeared at the bottom of the screen. I don't know if this is part of the game, itch, my browser, or my OS.

Submitted
YachtSinkers!
Reply
shiftBacktickDeveloper37 days ago (2 edits)

Thanks for playing and for the feedback! I can see how the project can come off as cryptic, esoteric, or uninviting. That’s part of its core identity, and I apologize if that is a point of frustration.

My philosophy toward game design is that failure is the best part. At some point, game designers have to let players off the rails, make mistakes, and fail, because failure is integral to learning. The first and only test of THE OMEGA REACH is to ask players to navigate to The Reach and then activate it. After that, it should gradually become more intuitive as you keep playing.

There is most likely a change (or ten million) that could improve its intuitiveness. That’s why I’m considering feedback like yours—and still a year away from the full release. I’ll look into that and let you know.

I imagine that the search bar is related to your browser or device. However, I’ll double-check that too.

Cheers!

Reply
shiftBacktickDeveloper37 days ago (3 edits) (+1)

Also, the project uses IndexedDB for persisting the session. At first, I used localStorage in my projects, but I found it quite limiting when wanting to store bigger or more complex data structures. However, both strategies are viable. Especially, if you just want to store a JSON-encoded representation of your game’s state—and it’s smaller than a few megabytes—then localStorage is a much simpler way to accomplish that. Seriously, it’s the difference between just calling localStorage.setItem(), versus ensuring a database exists, creating it if not, and connecting to it, before you can set that item.

I’m not proud of this source code, but it’s pretty loadbearing: https://github.com/nicross/the-omega-reach/blob/main/src/js/app/storage/api.js

Reply
PatriciaJam HostSubmitted41 days ago(+1)

I didn’t get to find everything that was new in the game. I did find that there were some cool rooms to check out in the museum (the emporium and reliquary) and I am quite curious to see how those work out. The emporium must feel really exciting. Because auctions are exciting. I wonder how I market the museum or specific instruments to other people, to get people to want to buy them? Or am I buying things in the emporium? Or both? We’ll see.

One thing this playthrough made me think about was how fun it would be to be able to record some music? Or maybe give a concert for my museum visitors, like an event per day maximum. Although there aren’t actually any days here. Maybe it could played by me or it could be a recording that you played, or you coded that is musically interesting but also technically possible to perform for us, players.

I was happy to play it with the keyboard. I don’t think I’d ever played something as melodic as I did today, so that was fun. I hope I can do more melodic things in the future. Suddenly the keyboard felt more interesting than the joysticks, which was my preferred input method in version 1.0 (or whichever it was back in February).

Great demo, excited to see the rest!

Submitted
Necromancer Nonsense: UX Review
Reply
shiftBacktickDeveloper41 days ago (1 edit)

Thank you for covering the project and chatting with me in your stream today! I’m happy that you found an instrument that you liked. I’ve fixed the typo that you found. And I enjoy how the new rooms have activated your imagination. I won’t spoil it, but my vision for the emporium is like a final recital.

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