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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!

Hello! Thanks for reaching out. As a fellow horror avoider, I can assure you that there is no horror content. The writing can sometimes get dark, but in an existential way. Cheers!

Congrats on your progress and demo release! It’s been a long time since I last played this during Marathon Jam 3 in 2023. I recall reaching some tough areas and fighting the first boss. I’m excited to give you a download on Steam and digest how your project has improved. Cheers!

Hey! I sincerely appreciate the feedback about the reading level of the text. I apologize that it’s isolating, because it’s not intended to be.

A big theme of Periphery Synthetic is how it’s your own personal journey. That includes how you interpret the text, and its uncommon words and sentence structures. A thesaurus has always been one of my favorite resources, because it shows how words can have so many meanings! I love learning new words, using and forgetting them, and having to look them up again!

I’m nearly a quarter through writing the expansion. Unfortunately, it’s using the same writing style. It’s not something I’m excited to compromise on. However, I’ll tell you one secret: the expansion includes some perceptions that could be considered a developer commentary mode. It’s not exactly what you’re asking, but I’m very excited to expand the worlds with what I think they mean to me.

Cheers!

Congrats on returning to the project, and thanks for a nice update! You should definitely update us more with your progress, as well as that final development log. I find that it’s always helpful to take a step back and have that final reflection, especially on huge projects like this. If anything, it will hold us over until release. Best of luck with the release and your degree!

Looking forward to future updates! Glad you have a plan to get things finished. Please let us know when it’s ready, because I’m sure it will be a hit!

I played the desktop build on Windows with NVDA enabled to test screen reader compatibility.

I can’t speak specifically to GDevelop, but if NVDA is interpreting your application as a document, then it needs to explicitly tell it that it’s an application. For an HTML document, that would be accomplished by adding role="application" to the <body> or <main> element. You may need to consult your documentation for the actual fix. Otherwise, the workaround for an NVDA user is to press Insert+Space when they open your game.

Sorry for the triple reply! I updated the project just a bit ago. If you’d like, could you please let me know what you think about the disallowed buttons? Beyond increasing the overall font size, I also adjusted how the opacity and strikethrough is applied, especially on hover or focus. I’m still trying to find that balance between legible and stylish, and I don’t think squinting myself is the best test. And if you weren’t using it already, there is a new high-contrast dark mode on the settings screen.

Check this one out: https://itch.io/jam/no-video-jam/rate/736066

This is from a similar jam that I organized during lockdown. The submission is a stealth game that the community found very successful. You made something that I would have made back then. (Now I make abstract things with synths on purpose.) The sound in Unwanted Passengers, on the other hand, is very diegetic. So that’s a good instinct to try to consider the physicality of it. If you want to stick with the synths, then you might just tighten the release to get them snappier, and then trigger them whenever the guard steps. It will sound pretty cool no matter what.

The other boats thing actually got me really considering it. It would be pretty easy to generate traffic between the ports. Spawn a boat and have it move along a straight line. Bonus points if it makes evasive maneuvers when you try to hit it. Or maybe you get points for destroying them? Two fun problems with this:

• In general, my engine doesn’t have the concept of models. Even in Periphery Synthetic, the authored terrain (like pyramids and portals) are just functions f(x,y) which return a z-value. I could probably just treat it as a point source, but to differentiate it from a bottle, wouldn’t it be cool if all those particles were emitted from the surface of some boat-like shape? I suppose could just use a cone, because cones are futuristic and cool. 😎
• I think I’m approaching the audio performance ceiling with this one. Lots of synths are playing all at once on the surface. But these boats should definitely have sound! Let’s say I add one and it sounds and performs great, but having two playing at once grinds things to a halt. Do I make the sound less interesting? do I only play the nearest one? or do I change how the spawner works so they never intersect?

Totally up for the challenge, but we’ll see! ✌