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You’re very welcome! Please let us know when you’ve made more progress.

Nice submission! On my first play, I cackled when the music suddenly changed and you said Welcome to your first choice! Expectedly, I chose the wrong first choice, sending me back to the menu screen. While there, I noticed that this was created with RPG Maker, which is super cool to me, because RPG Maker 2000 was my first game engine!

So I tried a more well-mannered second attempt. I appreciate how the third question subverted my expectations: you think this is a game about being understanding and asking deep questions like you’re also a therapist, but sometimes thoughtful questions might backfire!

I agree that the audio is far too quiet and could use some mixing, but I have a sound interface and was able to crank it up to play. My only other criticism is how the voice acting is too slow for my liking, so I lose attention quickly and have no way to repeat it when I miss an important detail. Yet, I understand how this is actually pretty naturalistic.

I think RPG Maker is a great engine, and from about 80 hours of making a small project in RPG Maker MZ myself, I believe there are ways to make its text boxes accessible to screen readers, which you could still fully voice yourself when they display. This might be the best of both worlds. If implemented properly, it would let folks skip past dialog too—like the tutorial and other paths in repeated playthroughs.

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!)

Nice submission! I don’t have a lot of normal music on my computer, so it was really unique experience of plugging in a variety of things from ambient and jazz to grindcore and metalcore. The most consistent ones were obviously those with not a lot of moving parts and unchanging time signatures played to a click track. Because that’s typically more popular music with loud production, it would have been nice to have a slider to reduce the music volume. I did manage to clear a few at lower difficulties with the visuals turned on, and observing the patterns along with the music had me very curious about what’s going on behind the scenes, but I don’t know how possible it would be for me without seeing the screen. Did you have a good track for testing while developing this? Maybe something royalty-free to include with the download?

Great submission! It’s well-executed and doesn’t hold your hand. The description on the title screen made me feel as if I was there. The sound design and action are gripping, and the radar and target tracking are extremely helpful in navigating the chaos.

Truthfully, I’ve only experienced a fraction of the content. I had to play on easy. The farthest I got was to the end of round three. Not once did I have enough gold to try any other weapons. But I can see the depth here for more skilled players.

I appreciated when I realized that I could turn on NVDA to get my preferred voice and speech rate. The menus were robust and let me tweak a lot of things. By the end, I even remapped all of the controls to play it comfortably with my Xbox controller. I liked being able to move and turn and look like a standard FPS game, scrolling through the radar targets with the bumpers, holding left trigger to aim, and firing with the right one.

My only true gripes? Maybe the volume sliders should be logarithmic rather than linear—I had to turn the music down to 0.025 to fully appreciate the rest of the sounds. When I spent a lot of time pausing and jumping between the game and its (very comprehensive) manual, I found that the application was hijacking my mouse for seemingly no reason—thankfully I can navigate fine with my screen reader? And I might try giving the machines different pitches or jingles to more easily tell them apart.

Nice submission! The overall presentation is ear candy, from the opening titles, to all the vocal effects and finer audio details that immersed me.

I had to restart this a few times, because it wasn’t recognizing the arrow keys when my Xbox controller was plugged in on Windows 10. Once moving around, I had difficulty with localizing some sounds and determining whether they were behind me—a little lowpass filtering or gain attenuation can go a long way, and I think you could enable full movement if you further refined the directionality, like with other parameter changes or introducing more layers of sounds! I personally wished the hacking minigame was more of a memory game than a rhythm game—if nailing the timings is part of the intended difficulty, then you may consider an accessibility setting that makes them more lenient.

I fear that I’ve shot the clown too! 🙃

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 thinking about that. I might have been going overboard and started thinking in terms of one of those dream every-games? I’ve seen plenty that try to accomplish that and fall flat due to lack of vision or cohesion. And you’re right that I want the opposite of that!

Without diving into the source code, there are tens of thousands of unique instrument names. But I could see some connections that could be made to group them already as you say. Something I wanted to explore but didn’t have time for is trying to tie certain instrument quirks to the specific types of planets and moons that you find them on. For example: terran worlds could produce certain types of instruments, often of legendary status, so you might collect 10 of them to unlock a special room or unique instrument as an achievement.

Cheers!

Examples for minigames: a greenhouse which lets you plant and harvest things, a workshop for crafting new instruments, or an arena with a deckbuilding aspect from instruments you collect or craft. They would need to be carefully constructed and synergized with the existing areas, so you’re spending an equal amount of time exploring the universe as your internal world. One way to do that is for there to be secondary resources, which are unique to the reach and the cellar, but both necessary for some crafting system that has multiple tiers of refinement and uses. But there might also be a third one specifically for transforming one into another, as a way to respect your time and interests. Is this the perfect premise for those things? Not within the original vision released here, but possibly as a grander rework.

Thanks for the big laugh!

That’s a fair point about being able to optimize the fun out of it. When playing it nonstop for three straight weeks, I found myself decreasing the timer for hold interactions, and eventually keeping them off in the settings, so I could quickly test all of the procedural aspects. I wondered if it might backfire, but I ultimately kept things quick to respect your time.

I’ve been thinking about the unfinished basement all week. Two things I’d change: double the number of tiles you can reveal in one run, and introduce a skill component to the “combat” so death is more avoidable. I’d also like to expand it with some set pieces and story elements to give it purpose. Maybe the ground level should get a few more rooms with extra minigames and loop around in a non-Euclidean way too.

We’ll see if I have the desire to turn this into a full project. Frankly, I’m overwhelmed by it right now. It must have hit the front page or something, because it got over 500 views today.

It’s so good to hear from you again! Thanks for playing!

Absolutely! Time is our most valuable resource as players. If a fail state is important, then lives like that would work pretty well. But to be clear, the current arcade-like approach of immediate and permanent death is fun too!

I caught it too, if that helps. It did take a few loops to find the correct channel at the exact time, but the name was indeed said. This was maybe the main reason behind my initial feedback and wanting more agency with scanning through the audio tracks.

Nice submission! I found it to be a more of a test of my internal metronome than my reflexes, but it was a nice challenge nonetheless. There are many opportunities for improving this with sound design, and I think the other suggestions here would push it in the right direction. But as-is, it’s functional and well-executed. The only thing I’m really noticing is how it might be helpful to announce the speed aloud when the text changes on the bottom of the screen (but it’s sort of obvious once things get moving).

If I had to do it, I would probably have a synth for each enemy, which has some modulation and filtering to it that intensifies as they circle around you and enter your crosshairs. Maybe make it musical and change it up every round with different scales or chords? But there’s really no wrong way to do it—they could be fighter jets against your anti-aircraft gun or bleeps against your bloops too.

Something else I might consider is the left and right controls applying some thrust rather than abruptly changing velocity. Imagine trying to match their speeds instead of finding the perfect timing? It would fundamentally change the game, but could be a fun experiment?

Great work with this one! I always enjoy your submissions to our jam, and Wrong-O truly delivered the laughs. I loved being congratulated for zero points on my no-correct-answers attempt—unless I missed it, there could be some fun flavor text for that. In the future, it may save you some headaches to specifically call out the issue and workarounds with your games not receiving focus with NVDA in your game description, or provide an executable to download if possible. However, I understand it might be outside of your control, and might be suitable for the Construct issue queue.

I agree! Nice work, Christian!

And your skills are totally fine. Ten games from now, you’ll look back at this and see just how far you’ve come. Take your passion and what you’ve learned from this to the next project, and you’ll get where you want to be eventually.

Nice submission! It’s a solid start. You should check out Midnight Echoes from our second jam, not only because of the similarities, but in how the levels are designed and introduce progressively harder challenges. That said, I do appreciate its current simplicity a lot. Perhaps I would make one change: when you crash, just land on the ground, and let folks get back up and explore the same level until they get to the exit. I’m pretty sure birds are resilient like that? That would encourage me to explore and experiment with the world and the mechanics. Maybe there could be some secret bugs to eat along the way too?

This is so stupidly fun, thanks for the nice palate cleanse!

Instead of clapping constantly, why not clap the hands when throwing a ball would hit a pin? For extra stupid bonus points, the hands could clap visually too? There are some great ideas here from other jammers, but for what it’s worth, not everything needs to be a game with strict rules and win/loss conditions. Sometimes you just need to throw some bowling balls! And to do that, I’d lean more into the absurdity and make it more physical, more destructive, and filled with sound effects.

That said, I was unable to access the game with a screen reader. This is a huge blocker for folks who can’t see the screen. I would suggest looking into the accessibility tools that are available to you in Godot, and ensuring that the game can be started without seeing it. The simplest solution in my mind is to just remove the startup screen entirely, putting us directly into the game. But you’ll want to have a menu system with accessible labels if you want to support our players.

To get into the game with NVDA, I needed to change focus mode with Insert+Space, hit down arrow once, then Enter or Space.

Nice submission! The cat bits had me laughing out loud!

My biggest challenge was in distinguishing the front/back sounds in the second level, and the solution here could be as simple as filtering the behind sound a lot more. I also may have encountered a bug, where I technically won the last level, but within the last ten seconds, so there was overlapping dialog that seemed I got both endings at the same time?

Those two issues aside, this is a great product for just four days of work. There are some excellent suggestions here that could guide you over the finish line for that last level that you had originally planned.

Nice submission! It’s short, sweet, and possibly about me? While not entirely original, the main mechanic is always fun whenever I encounter it. I would have loved to see a more personal spin on it, like the ability to scrub through the audio tracks at triple-speed with the left and right arrow keys, or maybe some tracks are reversed and you need to change their directions with the R key. This is a good foundation for something much longer if you’d like to explore this concept further—the puzzle is just slightly underbaked.

Thanks for the update! Beware that, at least on Windows with NVDA, the label for the new autoplay choice isn’t read aloud, so the user is presented with yes or no buttons without any context. However, all of the items on the settings screen worked great for me!

By the way, I appreciate you sharing your game design philosophy on the page. I also follow the light approach! Hear a sound? Maybe take a closer look—it won’t bite!

This is a very good idea, and would help ease folks into the full experience, like an invisible tutorial.

Nice submission! I’m glad that I gave this a third try, this time with an Xbox controller. It didn’t click for me at all yesterday with a keyboard, but the analog controls made all the difference—from me dying on every attempt to pretty easily getting to the third level!

There are a few bugs which range from annoying to frustrating. For example, it might just be the web build or a file format issue, but the loop points for the ambient sound during the tutorial produces an ugly clicking sound. But the actual gamebreaking bug here relates to the collision detection: it seems that there is a race condition between moving the player and spawning the next gap (if this was done how I might approach it), so when you score a point, you will also die! Beyond that, it’s actually quite fun once you get the hang of it.

Nice submission! The sound design and voice acting really sold the experience for me, and I enjoyed the easter eggs in the menu narrations.

The gameplay was a little slow in the sense that I would instinctively react to the sounds right away, but my actions were hindered by needing to wait for dialog lines to complete. Even if the slow and contemplative nature of the experience is the point, I bet there is a balance that can be found, to tighten this up without it turning into a pure action/horror game. For example, maybe travel between spots takes some time for your character to get there, or the sounds are more subtle or out in the distance at first so you’re not hearing it before grandpa does.

It’s good! I loved the premise, and the interaction with the guard got a few laughs out of me. I would have loved to see how the engine handles movement between areas of the city, perhaps with more consequential choices hidden up your sleeve.

Is this a custom HTML engine of yours? I poked through the code a bit, and that seemed like the case. That’s very cool to me!

The text-to-speech was too slow for my liking. I would recommend adding a way to adjust the rate of the speech utterances.

So that led me to trying it with NVDA. It’s usable, but there are some issues that could probably be resolved with an afternoon of testing. The main issue is that updates to the text aren’t read aloud. You need to tab back to the speech toggle, and then read the text line-by-line with the arrow keys. I would recommend making the .scene__text region focusable with tabindex="0" and .focus() it when its contents are changed, or try using aria-live="polite" on it.

The actual story itself? I got distracted writing this, and should report back later.

Replying to add that the browser build supports up to 500% zoom level (but may overflow on the settings screen with a scrollbar). I should take a look and see if I can add that to the Electron build, if not enabled by default already. Hope that helps!

The group chatted on Discord about this a bit. To document it here, I agree that the tutorials might be excessive. They could be an overcorrection to how I’ve received requests for tutorials in past submissions. In general, I dislike tutorials in games, to the point that I actively omit traditional ones from my main projects, and I think this would be most improved by a toggle which removes them entirely too. My philosophy toward the tutorial was for each unit of text to explain a singular concept when first introduced, but I can see how this approach may be too chatty and could be iterated upon in the future. At least it’s only ten minutes before you’re let completely loose?

That said, I’m glad you enjoyed the overall experience! Cheers!

You will need to use a screen reader to access anything I make. They are web applications and I don’t find it necessary to reinvent that wheel.

Update: Steam keys have been refilled here.

https://discord.gg/hkY8VWjYFf

Hello!

I connected with the organizer of the bundle. It seems that having Steam keys was a mistake on behalf of the platform. My understanding is that the ability to claim them has now been removed from the bundle.

I’m very sorry if you purchased the bundle with the expectation that you would receive Steam keys. If you would like to connect with me on Discord, then I will honor your request for a Steam key in a private message.

I have also requested new keys from Valve. Those are typically reviewed within 1-2 business days. After that, the keys will be available again for purchases of the EP.

Cheers!

Hi! Thanks for letting me know. I was unaware that the No ICE bundle would include Steam keys, as previous bundles have never included these. It will take some time to request more from Valve. I will update this thread when the status of those changes. Thanks for understanding.

Congrats on your first game! I enjoyed the atmosphere and how it didn’t hold my hand until the end. I especially liked the physics of the final puzzle. I don’t recall how I got the third robot, and couldn’t find it again on my second playthrough, so that might need some refining to be harder to miss. In the future, I would recommend choosing higher-contrast colors for your itch page—the black text on red is very difficult to read. Nice work!

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I just wanted to update this old thread for anyone reading.

I think this has been resolved with the Spelunkers subsystem introduced in the Side D expansion. It lets you hold the Move Up and Move Down controls to navigate the current branch of the cave. If you’re in the main branch, then holding Move Down will take you to the artifact at the end, and then holding Move Up will bring you back to the cave opening. If you’re in a child branch of the cave, then it works similarly, but holding Move Up will eventually get you back to the main branch. This feature is optional and can be toggled by upgrading or downgrading the Spelunkers.

It was this thread and subsequent discussion on Discord which led to this cool feature.

Hi! Thanks for letting me know about this embarrassing issue with the demo. I’m uploading v4.1.6 now, which fixes this along with a handful of other features and fixes. Cheers!

Hi! Thanks for sharing why translations would be a great idea, and some good approaches toward managing that.

When I first started developing Periphery Synthetic, I had no idea that it would reach so many folks. So in the early stages of development, I lacked the foresight and experience to plan for internationalization and localization. Therefore, I made some critical mistakes with the user interface, where retrofitting it would be a huge undertaking to get right.

I think one of the first translations should be Simple English.

For now it shares a spot on my roadmap next to controller remapping. I will share more if that becomes closer to reality. Cheers!