I'm glad I played this before the ratings closed! The gameplay was very fun. Never though an rts could be made accessible for blind players. The level sizes were nice as to not overwhelm the players mental map capacity while having fairly decent callouts of each space from the screen reader (NVDA). I am a sucker for these types of games and with the charm of the voice acting on top of it made this easily one of my top choices for this jam. The only nitpick I have is kinda a fault of the genre and that's there is still just a lot of information missing audibly like number of troops heading towards you or your opponents towers, and the amount of information you have to take in and store mentally is a lot, which again is just the nature of an rts, so if you could streamline that even more, I would be very interested in seeing how you'd achieve that!
Thanks for sharing your game and great work!
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Necromancer Nonsense's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun gameplay | #1 | 4.459 | 4.588 |
| Creativity | #5 | 4.345 | 4.471 |
| Overall | #5 | 4.211 | 4.333 |
| Sound design | #8 | 3.830 | 3.941 |
Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Oh thank you so much for kind words! Yes I've been talking to a lot of people about how to help make the data streams less overwhelming and what is happening more obvious, watching some blind players steam helped as well.
So I'll for sure see how I do! I do love RTS and always wanted to make one, so went with a sillier approach!
The traditional alignment chart has an important category missing: campy evil. It's a style that I really enjoy and the writing and acting were spot on for it which had me smiling throughout! I made the mistake of going straight to the campaign and got absolutely walloped. Once I explored the tutorial properly things made way more sense and I started having fun turning the tide. I was always a fan of turtling in Command & Conquer so the strategy I was taught here scratched the 'my turn to unleash hell' part of my brain
Love it!
I'm glad you liked it! Also I guess the tutorial does an okay job then if it made so much more sense! I was actually talking to Patricia about how to make everyone actually play the tutorial because people are so used to skipping XD
Cause if you make it required like as first few levels of campaign, people who know what's going on will quit.
Make it optional, people skip and get annoyed! We were talking about it because she's my team mate and she skipped a tutorial level XD
Yeah not sure how far you made it but for sure gotta be very mindful of turtling! The general idea is "If you have more production you can turtle. If you don't, you have to be aggressive". Things like the 3 special buildings can tip the balance used properly where you will out put more power to the field despite having less buildings, but they can also get you killed used poorly.
I don't play a ton of RTS games, so I really appreciate the tutorials, otherwise the main campaign would have totally kicked my butt 😅 - they were useful to get a feel of the game and try different areas out.
I tried it out with NVDA on, and my sense (as a sighted user) was that there was a lot going on and to keep up with , and I don't know that I would have been very successful had I not been looking at the screen (but that might be a biased take).
I agree with other comments that it was very chatty when on a structure, and saying just the updates may have been useful. Alternatively, having more distinct sound effects, and dedicated hotkeys to get the current health / units / threat / etc could have been useful.
Overall, there was definitely a lot of great stuff here, and the game itself was really enjoyable. Admittedly I'm always worried about building real-time experiences (instead of turn based ones), but seeing this honestly makes me inspired to try my hand at it, and see what else could be done in this space.
Excellent submission. I had a lot of fun with this one. The difficulty felt like it spiked around campaign level 4, but I completed it after much persistence. The choices with audio worked well here, especially the soundtrack change while paused. My only complaint is that the live region was way too chatty for me with NVDA. For example, whenever the defenses of a cell changed, everything about it got read aloud. Just the changes would be a huge improvement if possible. Nice work!
Okay so I think I know how I'm gonna fix the UI after talking to people!
First, line by line focus with tab. You can choose to focus on a line and once you do you only get updates about that line. When you move to a new location, it will read out the header line + the focused line. With header line being coordinates+ owner.
Then the current plan is to make what on each line is customizable! So if the default order/groupings/header don't feel right for how someone plays, can move them. Also think that allows toggling on like descriptions of the units it makes, bonuses it gives, weirder stats that only matter to certain buildings, stuff like that.
Then did you do level 5? Patricia said it was a nightmare and I was confused as it was supposed to be easy compared to 4 since you start with a stronger building and with less zombies in path of expansion.
Really fun gameplay, catchy music, charismatic voice acting. I love this game!
Sorry if this is off topic, but I'm having
audio crackling issues with various entries of the jam. ¿Does anyone have the same problem? Apparently this is a godot bug that was fixed in newer versions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1bacgzu/to_anyone_who_has_been_experienc...
I’m bad enough at RTS games in general that playing it with my eyes opened was already hard for me :D
Though, the game is very similar to mushroom wars, which is a recipe for success. I just don’t get how talented you must be to play it while waiting for sound infomation to get to you (what I mean is a huge kudos to blind gamers, you really have it on hard mode ++)
I tried using windows narrator, which did not work at all for me, maybe you could have added more voice over since you started having your story told by voice (great voicing by the way :) ) though that’s a lot of work to add.
Still liked getting my ass kicked :D
Haha yeah windows narrator is the worst. I wouldn't recommend testing with that and instead try NVDA, it's free! Also don't forget blind gamers who game a lot will have their TTS speed set similar to reading speed of sighted gamers. So they can be zooming! But also I put in the ability to give commands while game was paused and to lower game speed since I knew some folks wouldn't like the fast pace. Can you believe this is half speed from what I had it too before my team mates told me to chill out and make the AI less brutal XD
Haha which bit kicked your butt? The tutorials were easy right??... right? And yes I do have a bit more VO from the wonderful voice actor, but ran out of time trying to get the related bits done. So for sure going to at the very least get to the point in development where can get all that in!
Then thank you! I'm glad someone finally recognized what my inspiration was! Well not direct, never played mushroom wars, but I played the flash "Cell" games to death as a kid, and Mushroom wars clearly was inspired by those.
Oh yes I think I'll at least finish the main campaign! I had thoughts of making multiple campaigns, but time is what it is!
Oh are you meaning you'd like a special sound for when sending them to reinforce another owned node? That would make sense! More feedback on the results of player actions makes perfect sense.
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