itch.io

I might have to hold off on playing this game. I am not a fan of balloons bursting and it makes me feel very stressed and tense. This is practically a horror game for me.

I loved that you made this a two-player game, and I also want to compliment about how this game has a narrative and story to it, even if it’s just a little game. I can easily visualize and imagine that I’m playing with a sibling some kind of “the floor is lava” game (where balloons can’t touch the floor). It’s a fun game to play in real life with balls, but also balloons, if they don’t pop when reaching the ground. But yeah, I am a bit scared to have enough resilience to figure out the game here.

The rest of my feedback is I must confess I didn’t understand very well how to play the game. I think the tension created by the balloon squeaky sounds in the menu, while the instructions were playing, made me unable to focus on them very much, because I was scared. I think this probably didn’t help with me understanding the game. And even how to set up the sounds.

I’m sorry I didn’t play your game properly, but to each their own! I do hope you can get some feedback from other players. Good job once again! Pretty cool you submitted these two games, and especially a multiplayer game! Those are so rare for blind players. So I hope you can continue to experiment with these kind of games! You’re threading the path for a lot of people!

That was a well-done minigame! It’s quite simple and effective, though I think the immersion/goals/narrative/challenge didn’t feel very enticing for me. I think if this had some kind of narrative attached to it, it would become better. Like, even just having a highscore, or maybe we’re a monkey and bananas are falling from the sky, and they fall either in front of me, on the left of me, or on the right of me. If I’m not fast enough another monkey will grab it. This for example would be essentially the same mechanics, but have a narrative with it that would make it immediately more fun and exciting.

I felt that the third level was too hard for me. I got to level 8, but I think the time / “too slow” penalization is too unforgiving. It made me have to try to press buttons faster, but that gave me just maybe under a second to process where the sound came from. Further, people who are unable to have these reflexes for physical disability reasons, or assistive technologies, any other reason, for them it might be physically impossible to even play it. So I think that would also be taken into account.

Lastly, I want to say that I really loved how we could pick our own sound to catch. I found most sounds painful for my ears, but this gave me an opportunity that many games don’t: to choose the sound that was the most pleasing for me! Which was sound 5. Sound number 7 was also not painful, and I think it was the last one that felt fun but wasn’t comfortable enough for me to pick it.

I think the game could improve with some few ideas:

• Narrative and setting (like I mentioned);
• A time setting to let us choose how much time we have to press a key before it’s game over for being too slow;
• A leaderboard - maybe being able to compete with other people, and see how was the best player in the world!
• Not ‘game overing’ if we miss to catch a sound. Just lower our score. I get that these are different kinds of game, so it’s up to you, of course. But for example if the goal were to get to at least [X] points, we could have to play all levels to try to get it; and maybe we could still lose; but it wouldn’t just make us lose because we took 0.5 seconds to react once. It’s less unforgiving while it could still be extremely challenging, depending on the punctuation it allows.

I’m wonder also what’s the maximum amount of points we can get per level. I figured it was 65, because that was my maximum. But I wonder if that’s actually correct or if that was still my reflexes.

Good job! Curious about your other entry, as well.

Hi TurtleCatStudio!

I tried the prototype, so here are some thoughts:

• The water sounds are lovely. They’re beautiful and fresh.

• However, I don’t exactly understand why is this a navigation mode, as it seems probably like a natural part of the world’s sound design. I would think this would be part of the gameplay for every player, if we’s navigating near water? And maybe checkpoints would always be at “south” of where the water is muffled. Because if this is meant to be simply a naviation mode setting, wouldn’t it work strangely if we’re inside a house, for example?

• Unless this is a prototype of an idea, and you’re thinking of doing the same kind of thing for other locations. I just don’t really know how it would work in a house. Because what do you follow in a house that could have this sort of constant background sound, but also has a static placement. And would be muffly when we are near a checkpoint.

Navigation-wise:

• I will admit I had a lot of trouble to understand how to navigate. The water is really cool and I could feel when it was muffled or loud next to me. But I couldn’t understand the tip about moving south of the muffled water to find the checkpoint. Because I did get under muffled water (I assume behind a waterfall?) and then pressed the down arrow a few times, but didn’t find the checkpoint.

• I’m also having a bit visualizing the world, especially also since I can’t her my own footsteps. For example, if I could hear my footsteps and also water near, I could follow the river, most likely, by staying near it and with dynamic sound. In this case, I couldn’t hear my own footsteps, so I could always be in the water, for all I know. I didn’t totally understand the setting.

• I got to a checkpoint (mostly by accident) once. I heard the “YAY!!” but I thought I didn’t understand how I got there. It’s confusing in a game when you achieve a goal but don’t understand how. It feels great when you feel you did it consciously, but confusing when you don’t.

So I think that the game’s sound design could have a navigation mode, for sure, but I also think that it should also rely on the world’s natural “sound design”. Footsteps, things around us, and maybe also logical checkpoint and movement (for example, splashy sounds if I’m walking over water; and not being about to water over such flowing water as strong as this river’s flow).

I think this has great potential and I love the coziness of the river’s sounds. They really are lovely. I think exploring these thoughts could help with making it better, and I hope you can do it! I want to see more!

As for examples, I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but you can also get inspired by games with great sound design to make a world feel alive.

There’s also my (Work in Progress) game, Where the Wind Sings, that had a goal of allowing for open world exploration. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to the point where we implemented all the sounds. They were in the plans, even some were coded, but not all, and they didn’t get in any build. In any case, here’s a link: https://patriciamendes.itch.io/where-the-wind-sings

Hi there!

I appreciate that you appreciated the feedback! Haha. I’m just going to clarify a couple of misunderstandings.

Actually, there is a way to review instructions! It was mentioned both in the game description page and during the tutorial phase in-game: “In case you want to restart from the tutorial phase, click and hold the mouse left button for 10 seconds between mosquito spawns (keep pressed after hearing your stats).” We apologize if it wasn’t emphasized enough! We will update this part in the description with bold font.

I should have called this “replay instructions”. In any case, I’m referring to replaying a specific message, and not the whole tutorial. Say I heard well instructions 1 to 4, but at the 5th, my bell rang, someone called, or I simply zoned out ou didn’t understand a word well. I would like to be able to press a key to listen to it again. Just the 5th (the one that just played), not every single one.

Further, the bit about holding for 10 seconds might be a lot to ask for people with arthritis, tendinitis and the like. Maybe you could add some alternatives, like swiping (that would work for the phone), holding for less time (there’s no gameplay reason to hold down a mouse key, so 2-3 seconds might suffice, if complemented by a pop-up to confirm the action), or double or triple clicks. This is still not the best for mobility difficulties, but at least it adds some alternatives, or works as brainstorming.

Either way, tracking a mouse pointer without a continuous radar sound is very difficult for a blind player on desktop, and keyboard-only play would completely alter how the game flows and feels.

The radar seems like a great idea. I also think sometimes I clicked and didn’t hear the swishing. I don’t know if that’s a cooldown or a bug, but it also made me unable to check my cursor’s location whenever I needed to.

The “gulp” sound effect happens when a mosquito lands on you—it drains your blood and then vanishes if you don’t “Mosquash” it with a quick double-click anywhere on the screen!

Interesting. I think because the sound was so… human… it didn’t even cross my mind it’d be the mosquito drinking our blood. I wonder if there’s another way to convey this. Perhaps the mosquito flying and buzzing and getting suddenly louder to land on us, then abruptly stopping, and then some kind of prickling sound, and then high-pitch water flow or slurping. Not the swallowing sound, though.

I’m not sure! Those are some ideas.

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!

Hi! A short and well-scoped game.

I don’t have many thoughts to share. I would say that it’s a nice little experience that is an achievement of your goal. So I hope it was nice to learn about Godot accessibility. I’m wondering if you’ve ever made a blind-accessible game before?

I think it could be improved, if you were to explore that, by doing some tweaks:

1. It was a beepy sound design. I’m sure you share the same thoughts, but I actually came in expecting to feel immersed in a forest setting, by the trees rustling with the wind, maybe some birds, and definitely some feeling of exploration when I hear and track critters among bushes. Instead, the beep sounds didn’t bring that to life. But I think it’s some that can be added in post without too much trouble!
2. There was a visual bug: the game UI wasn’t responsive to the game display size/settings (?), and I also couldn’t put the embedded game in fullscreen. Fortunately, I don’t need that to play the game. But it might be something to look into so sighted players know everything is working.
3. The mechanics are quite simple, so I think you did what you hoped to do. I definitely would love to see a future game that continues exploring this idea but bringing some more challenge, immersiveness with stereo, in-context rich sounds.

And that’s about it.

Thanks for submitting your game!

So, I’ve played this and here are some thoughts:

• At first I found it a little funny. Silly and simple. But then some things caught my attention.

1. I didn’t have an option to recap an instruction. So if I can’t hear it well, I’ll miss it. It needs a recap button - maybe the right mouse button for mouse-input.
2. In the game itself, I didn’t know where my mouse was located. The only times I did know was when I would click and hear the net swishing, and then I had an idea about its distance from me. In other moments, I can’t really connect my mouse movement to the mosquito, which makes it harder to actually aim at it.
3. There is no way to play with a keyboard. Some, half, most (?) blind users may not have a mouse to play with. They also may not have a touchpad. This would make the game unplayable for them. It would be good to find an alternative.

Lastly, the other big thing I noticed that made me stop was: feeling increasingly more disgusted by the sound effect of swallowing a mosquito. The more times I heard it, the less resilience I felt to keep going. I think finding another alternative for a sound effect of the mosquito reaching us would be more friendly for anyone who feels too sick from this effect. It doesn’t have to be swalling it.

In any game, I wouldn’t recommend the game for people with insect-phobia. I think you could do this for catching butterflies to trigger less people, as an alternative. If that’s something you think about.

Hi there! Can you please edit the submission to fill out about what your goals and progress were for this jam? Basically, the work you did for the jam. Thank you!

Nice spin on the theme. You made me curious.

I thought the problem was more about the pitch and pleasantness of the sound than the volume; these are all about volume, right?

I haven’t tried it yet though! That looks promising and I appreciate the effort towards the accessibility. Thanks for the update!

I’d love to know when the sounds are fixed, because I got the game recommended to me but I am also very sound sensitive, so I’d prefer to hold off on playing until then. Would you let me know? :)

Dearests,

During this jam I played and rated 100 games. In 100 games, I found two accidentally almost fully blind-accessible games. Those were:

• My Time at the Lighthouse: where the sound cues are rich enough that you can beat it with eyes closed;
• Ham Stern: Hamster Detective: made with ren’py, all the text can be self-voice; only the crime scene assets need labeling to be completely playable.

If I found these two in 100, that’s a pretty good rate. With 3.5k games, there’s a high likelihood there more games with such rich audio that they can be played by blind gamers. Please help me find them! :)

Okay! I had written a longer comment but accidentally closed the page. Now that it’s morning and I have a little bit more energy, I can write a bit more. The reason I recommended you this jam is because your game is almost fully blind-accessible, but still not totally, but it’s just so close it’s worth making the little adjustments. From what I recall (I didn’t make a fully diagnosis haha), everything seems to be read out by the self-voicing TTS when we activate it (I press V or Ctrl+V? when I start). Likewise, we can also use the keyboard to move around pretty nicely (most blind players can’t use a mouse). What is still missing is labels in the crime room. When you move the focus between the items in the room, they aren’t read out loud because they are simply drawings. I’m not sure how ren’py works, but there should be some option to set an invisible label in the code to state what each item in the room is, thus making the game playable by blind players.

It would also be nice if you could add some narration lines throughout the game, or integrated audiodescription by the hamster detective itself. When it’s raining at the start you can say “in a rainy night, blablabla”, and when getting in the room, a general description of it - it is after all very messy, and that standing desk is amazingly funny (that could it be described when Hamster is talking about it instead, if you want); and when talking about June Iper, a description that she’s a hamster with a propeller hat. So that blind players know what is on the screen.

There’s another game in the jam that is accidentally accessible, and once again almost fully so, but it’s playable when you know the rules. It’s My time at the lighthouse. There’s a blind gamer somewhere in the server that has also played through it, and I would love to say that this game jam made two blind-accessible games - almost accidentally up to “100%” accessible. I would be proud and excited to see yours to get there.

And of course, keep this in mind in other games. But it would be great to see this one get updated with these last few details. Please let me know if you do it and I’ll share it with my other blind friends.

I am way too exhausted to play more games, but I’m looking at your screenshots and gifs, yand I love so much how the artstyle matches instruction books for laundry machines and the like. It makes me very curious.

Thanks I did now! I will say the music is really good, and I love the rythm game stuff, but it was really overwhelming. A lot of commands to learn, and I didn’t earn a single star at the end of the tutorial. I will add that even with the tutorial, I thought I had to use the left/right arrow when it was showing that icon, and even to do the impossibly weird task of holding the arrow and moving the mouse in that direction.

When it added the “hold Q and space while moving the mouse in that direction”, I was really overwhelmed. The game became even harder. I don’t think I can distinguish that one from the regular scratch. And then when playing, I hadn’t developed the intuition to know what to do when each thing shows up, and my muscle memory also hadn’t been developed.

It seems great, but even with the tutorial it’s a very steep learning curve. For a week-long jam, that’s a lot already. For a full game, it’s incomplete because it is requiring too much from the player at first try. I think it would really be better if the tutorial moved at a slower pace or even better if there were several tutorial levels that introduce new concept on top of older ones.

The controls don’t seem to be working, at least in the browser build on Chrome. It did seem like it would be fun.

Edit: Ok, tapping was really really mashing it very very fast. It was hard! This guys sure gets bored quickly. Nice idea and a funny one, though without much of a narrative arch to it.

Ah, I felt this was just an endless game. I might continue playing, then!

And if you continue working on this, I hope we can also have more characters and diversity in the news to fiddle with (at least in my first 3-4 prompts, this Senator was there in half of them or more). I love the concept and the implementation is fun, so keep it up. :)

Grammar: Abysmal! Higher ups’ opinion: Absolutely incredible! I love the game. I did notice that if I don’t fulfill the goal, sometimes I still get really good ratings (e.g. the goal is to make Senator Longwood the hero, but my phrase was “Study insists puppies hate dogs” and still had a good score and no mention about Senator Longwood”, which make sme think it doesn’t matter that much).

I also don’t seem to see continuity from a mini-game to another, or any kind of highscore or total score. It would be cool if we had to make some amount of money at the end of the day to survive, and have some sort of connected narrative.

Lastly, I’d like to see some accessibility added to the game, like: better contrast and readability for the buttons, and an option to not have the newspaper rotating like that, because it makes my eyes feel dizzy. Or a safer animation that doesn’t make all that spinny spinny.

Lovely take on the “spin to win” theme. Are you thinking of developing more on this? It would be so great to see more!

Really good game! Excellent writing, good art. I only disliked that I had to pixel hunt for the remaining clue - I wish it could have been a bit less small. Otherwise, really nice job. I’d like to know if you think of continuing to develop on it! If you continue this saga, I invite you to check out the Making Games Accessible jam that’s going on this July. Keep making great detective games with this really cute art and nice writing!

Truly weird.

The art is great, both in the game page and in the game itself, but the gameplay is very hard. I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong or if it’s just requiring a very high speed and reflexes to press wASD repeatedly very quickly. I was trying to click them in a “circle” to make the lasso spin and gain momentum, as cowboys do? But it didn’t really work.

Only being able to spin in one direction is a bit unnerving, given a little lack of aim means I have to give it a full 360º spin to try and get that one again. The setting is pretty, the sound effects are a bit unalive and general 8-bit. It’s great to have the difficult settings. I would appreciate it if they increased our aim or added a bit of auto-aim.

Gently, I can see the same mistakes are being done in this comment, so I think it wasn’t intentional in the game. It would be a good idea to get a proofreader next time, as clear and correct language is important to make a game clear and enjoyable, and not some extra thing one can just ignore. If it’s not your native language, it’s super understandable. And I’m sure you’ll also do better in time! It’s a matter of practicing.

Regarding the spinner, I’m not sure what’s wrong, since I tried to take the spinner from several points. I may have missed it in the dialogue, though, because as I mentioned it was hard to follow and required much more cognitive effort than if it had been written without any errors. I think it would help if you’d let us take the spinner from the front, as well, and provide an outline for assets that can be picked up when we can pick them up. This will signal to us a clear cue about its interactivity.

Maybe I’ll try again later to grab the spinner and see what the game has to give past the start! Good job and good luck in future projects!

Cozy and nice. I would like to see the UI refined. The text isn’t very inviting, over the background directly. But I love the way we can see easily how many points we’re adding or retracting from placing the tiles in certain places.

I believe some things that would help would be:

• The tiles we want to place in water should be somewhat greyed out, maybe in black and white or with an overlay of some color (not green), to show we can’t place them there.
• The input controls are a bit finnicky. I think I’ve accidentally placed two tiles at once in the exact same place on accident because I left the mouse button down for half a second. I think the action should be mouse-up and not mouse-down.

It’s pleasing and cute, overwhelming at the very first moment and still a bit intimidating after, but it’s pretty cute and nice overall.

Great ideas!! Thank you :)

Thoughts from an exhausted person:

• Mixing keyboard with mouse, especially a right-hand keyboard button is not ideal. You could have us simply click on the machine to activate it, or have a button to activate it that we click on
• Mixing a right hand key (enter and backspace) with left-hand keys (Q) plus a mouse is also not recommended. Not ergonimic or intuitive.
• Infitine t-shirts falling from the sky
• The tutorial didn’t teach me how to paint the clothes. I recall having someone who asked for colored clothing in the first day, though.
• It would be nice if it dinged and had a visual cue when the washing is done
• I agree that the first day is too long
• I’d like the countdown about customer’s patience to be clearer and with more contrast
• I’d like to be able to grab several shirts at once
• I’d like clothes to be folded in a specific place automatically when they leave a machine, because when I start planning in advance, they all just shoot out and become over each other, which means sometimes i need to take several out of the way to have enough target area to grab the one I want.
• I’d like to see more sound effects.

What a nice rythm game. I just wish the controls were clearer. I was fully expecting the semicricle waves to be played with the spacebar. When that didn’t work, I tried using the mouse. The only cues that were totally clear were the left and right arrows. The colors being the only clear clue about what you’re meant to press are also not very accessible (making something solely color-dependant). I would sayy that this would need work on, but overall this is very nicely done.

This was a nice experience. I love how forgiving it is as well.

I also had to zoom in myself!

This game has really great potential. I absolutely love the concept. I learned how to make coffee with a friend the other day. They love the process of making coffee. It was with him that I learned I need to pour the water in circles. I didn’t learn all the fine little details you were teaching here. It’s so nice to see a game that teaches niche, specialized knowledge in a realistic way.

I want to see this game become brewtastic, I really do. Are you thinking of improving it? Here are some thoughts for that:

• Text shouldn’t be so pixelized.
• Increase color contrast ratio. It’s hard to see and read things properly the way it is right now.
• Let us continue to learn hints from the boss even after we “used” our hint. It’s hard to take everything in just by hearing it a single time.
• I don’t know how to change coffees. I pressed E to change it, but nothing happened.
• You can easily make the whole game mouse accessible. You could also make it keyboard or controller accessible if you wanted to. I think I’ve been writing too many comments these days to write down all the recommendations, but if you’re interested I’ll note them down with more detail.
• I think we should be able to have a help button as we’re making the coffee. Tips might be shorter during the pouring water phase. We could also be in control of pouring the coffee grind, I think. And be able to reset our seconds-counter, or even set a timer.

I want to see this being perfected. Do you think that would be something you’d be interested in doing?

Also, if you like coffee games, check out this masterpiece: Barista.

Oh I was really tired and also need new glasses. I thought the “Continue as guest” one was “Create an account”.

Well, I joined it and played it with a person. It’s a crazy game! It should be strictly first person or if it’s third person we should be able to see where we’re pointing to. It needs some navigation fine tuning. Good job making a game!

Great idea. We don’t want to cause motion sickness on anyone so we’re thinking about that. Sorry about making you dizzy! And good thought about how that makes it a harder challenge.

Ha, weeping angels yes! Yes, we’d like to continue developing on it so thanks for the kind words!

I’m really sorry that the web build broke. I hope you can update this with the real corrected file after the jam!

I didn’t figure out the controls, so I would really appreciate it if you had them in the page description. I only figured out how to throw the ball, with left click (hold, drag and release).

Super creative. Very well done.

I hope you can fix the many typos where the commas have incorrect spacing all around. It made the game much harder to play.