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7DRLs / Re: [7DRL 2023] Murder Most Foul (success)
« on: March 15, 2023, 02:52:35 PM »Big fan of the presentation and concept! 👍 Haven't had a chance to dig in yet but looking forward to this weekend.
Nice, hope you enjoy it!
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Nice, hope you enjoy it!
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7DRLs / [7DRL 2023] Murder Most Foul (success)
« on: March 14, 2023, 06:47:37 AM »
Murder Most Foul is my 7DRL entry that casts you as a brilliant detective called to a spooky mansion to investigate a murder.
Playable in the browser at: lonespelunker.itch.io/murder-most-foul
First, the game creates a procedurally-generated murder mystery. Then, you wander around the mansion in standard roguelike fashion, collecting clues, interviewing suspects, analyzing evidence, etc.
Then, you use your "Mind Castle" to track and organize your deductions. All the clues put together should allow you to discover who the murderer is, the weapon they used, the room they committed the murder in, and what their motive was. Make your accusation, and if you're correct, you win!
I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I didn't quite get in as much content as I'd hoped in the seven-day time frame, but that's always the case, and I think I got enough in for it to be satisfying to play multiple times with multiple mysteries. So far, people who have played and commented seem to like it, which is encouraging!
One weird fun fact: The tileset for the game is a bizarre 13x26. It just kinda fell out that way while I was dinking around in Photoshop because I wanted a low-res presentation and I wanted tiles with a "center" pixel. So it started out as 13x13, but then I found I wanted some "tall" tiles like for the back walls and the tall windows. Rather than cobble the walls and windows out of multiple tiles, I just decided to try making each tile double-height, and it seemed to work.
Playable in the browser at: lonespelunker.itch.io/murder-most-foul
First, the game creates a procedurally-generated murder mystery. Then, you wander around the mansion in standard roguelike fashion, collecting clues, interviewing suspects, analyzing evidence, etc.
Then, you use your "Mind Castle" to track and organize your deductions. All the clues put together should allow you to discover who the murderer is, the weapon they used, the room they committed the murder in, and what their motive was. Make your accusation, and if you're correct, you win!
I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I didn't quite get in as much content as I'd hoped in the seven-day time frame, but that's always the case, and I think I got enough in for it to be satisfying to play multiple times with multiple mysteries. So far, people who have played and commented seem to like it, which is encouraging!
One weird fun fact: The tileset for the game is a bizarre 13x26. It just kinda fell out that way while I was dinking around in Photoshop because I wanted a low-res presentation and I wanted tiles with a "center" pixel. So it started out as 13x13, but then I found I wanted some "tall" tiles like for the back walls and the tall windows. Rather than cobble the walls and windows out of multiple tiles, I just decided to try making each tile double-height, and it seemed to work.
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7DRLs / [7DRL 2019] Battle Weary - Success
« on: March 13, 2019, 04:04:40 PM »
Despite some unexpected medical drama with family members, I managed to finish my game Battle Weary, which is a deckbuilder roguelike that was designed from the ground up to be screenreader friendly.
Play the game here.
Deckbuilding
Your character is your deck of cards. You start the game by drawing a hand of four cards. When you encounter an enemy, you can play as many cards out of your hand as you want (attack, defend, and other types of cards) and then discard the rest. Then it is the enemy's turn to play a card. Then you draw another hand of four cards, and the battle continues.
When the enemy manages to hit you, you take a Wound card. And every time you reshuffle your deck to get a new draw pile, you shuffle in an Exhaustion card. If you ever draw a full hand of "deadly" cards like Wounds and Exhaustions, then your hero has fallen and it's game over.
Over time, you can build up your deck to be more powerful by buying new cards from the trainer, the blacksmith, etc., which allows you to delve further and further into the dark forest before having to return to town to get healed (to remove Wound cards) or rest at the inn (to remove Exhaustion) cards.
Screen Reader Support
The game is written in HTML5, and I set myself the challenge of making it screen reader friendly. It turns out that there's not a lot of information out there on the internet about making web games work well with screen readers; the closest thing I could find was how to make web applications work, but most of that was in the context of making, essentially, web forms navigable.
So I ended up having to do a lot of experimentation and testing, but I eventually got a "Hello World" app working with VoiceOver, and I was able to apply that to Battle Weary as I developed it.
But the technology for making an interactive game wasn't the main hurdle; it was trying to adjust the gameplay of a traditional roguelike to make it understandable and enjoyable when used with a screen reader. For instance, having to listen to something like "There is a snake four tiles west and two tiles north, there is a door six tiles east and seven tiles south, etc." every time you take a step to understand the environment would get tedious quickly. So I changed the game's movement to be room-by-room instead of tile-by-tile, a'la Telengard. That preserved the basic gameplay of roguelikes while making it easier to describe the player's situation in text.
Result
Overall, I feel the game turned out pretty well considering the challenges I had. I haven't gotten any feedback from anyone who regularly uses screen readers yet, but I'm hoping that the manner in which I exposed the gameplay works well in practice. If you have access to a screen reader (particularly one other than VoiceOver) and are willing to test the game with it, I'd love to hear how it goes.
Play the game here.
Deckbuilding
Your character is your deck of cards. You start the game by drawing a hand of four cards. When you encounter an enemy, you can play as many cards out of your hand as you want (attack, defend, and other types of cards) and then discard the rest. Then it is the enemy's turn to play a card. Then you draw another hand of four cards, and the battle continues.
When the enemy manages to hit you, you take a Wound card. And every time you reshuffle your deck to get a new draw pile, you shuffle in an Exhaustion card. If you ever draw a full hand of "deadly" cards like Wounds and Exhaustions, then your hero has fallen and it's game over.
Over time, you can build up your deck to be more powerful by buying new cards from the trainer, the blacksmith, etc., which allows you to delve further and further into the dark forest before having to return to town to get healed (to remove Wound cards) or rest at the inn (to remove Exhaustion) cards.
Screen Reader Support
The game is written in HTML5, and I set myself the challenge of making it screen reader friendly. It turns out that there's not a lot of information out there on the internet about making web games work well with screen readers; the closest thing I could find was how to make web applications work, but most of that was in the context of making, essentially, web forms navigable.
So I ended up having to do a lot of experimentation and testing, but I eventually got a "Hello World" app working with VoiceOver, and I was able to apply that to Battle Weary as I developed it.
But the technology for making an interactive game wasn't the main hurdle; it was trying to adjust the gameplay of a traditional roguelike to make it understandable and enjoyable when used with a screen reader. For instance, having to listen to something like "There is a snake four tiles west and two tiles north, there is a door six tiles east and seven tiles south, etc." every time you take a step to understand the environment would get tedious quickly. So I changed the game's movement to be room-by-room instead of tile-by-tile, a'la Telengard. That preserved the basic gameplay of roguelikes while making it easier to describe the player's situation in text.
Result
Overall, I feel the game turned out pretty well considering the challenges I had. I haven't gotten any feedback from anyone who regularly uses screen readers yet, but I'm hoping that the manner in which I exposed the gameplay works well in practice. If you have access to a screen reader (particularly one other than VoiceOver) and are willing to test the game with it, I'd love to hear how it goes.
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