Greetings! I'm the developer of the game, Roboid. User, Orin, messaged me in-game and mentioned this forum and brought to my attention that Roboid is a good fit for screen readers - being a text-based game.

I would love to improve upon this. So to start, I've added a note to the registration page that players using screen-readers can work around the visual captcha by sending us their registration info via the contact form. I'll enter the registration manually (you'll get an activation email and can change your password later). I'll investigate true audio-captchas when I get a chance.

I also opened a forum topic in the game under Suggestions to keep track of any other issues that pop-up for screen-readers... and I'll be keeping this in mind going forward as I develop new features.

Oh and the PVP aspect is always by choice, you won't log in hours later to find that your player character got attacked while you were gone.

Thanks for the suggestions Orin, and I look forward to improving Roboid's accessibility! And thanks everyone for giving us a shot. Please let me know either by the game's forum or by in-game message if you find other show-stopping screen-reader issues. I am player Elsereth in the game. Cheers!

hi all i am saying! awesome! just awesome! keep! up! the! good! work! thumps up to you silverkey!

Hi.

Well I have made a start on the game, (look me up as darkempathy).. I am very much liking the story, atmosphere and world, particularly the extra information and the story goals.

In access terms I've not run into any major issues thus far sinse even where graphics are employed the game has standard controls that any screen reader should navigate fine, and I do rather like the notifications in text of events in progress" page layout is also nice and logical and easily navicable with reference to standard web control features like headings, the + and * in the menus are also a good help to let you know what menus you have open once I realized what they ment.

I would suggest perhaps writing in the instructions and the new player information that the link with the question mark, ie ? is the one that leads to the in game help, sinse many screen reader users do not have their voices set to read punctuation specifically when using them in a standard way, but it's more than easy enough to read a question mark when needed.

I do need to check the layout and status of the calibration menu, sinse though the controls gave access to the info I need to check I got the meaning of what stats were being mentioned, I also wonder about the "stats in red" mentioned for items you couldn't currently use in the help, but I've not got that far along yet. I particularly look forward to starting on scavenging sinse I'm generaly an exploring sort of chap.

My only real miner niggle isn't actually related to access, but to the game's descriptions of combat.

as I said I love the atmosphere with the media, news etc as well as the stories, it's therefore rather sad to get a combat that reads just like a set of stats, ie, so and so attacks so and so for x damage.

It'd be great if the text here was a bit more atmospheric, ---- though if this was just the practice droids and tournaments get their own distinct description style (say a sports news caster), fare enough and I'll be glad to see later on.

Definitely nice to see a robot game with personality (no pun not intended).

Note, I won't always catch messages in this forum so please add any future issues into the in-game forum (I created a thread for screen reader issues here: http://roboid.com/forum/topic/31/1).

Cheers!

I agree that a turn by turn combat would be awesome. However for a browser game which is not using Java or Flash or some other plugin, this is very hard to do. You would need to ensure that each player is online (and not idle) at the same time, that they don't wander away from their browser, and then have each player's browser constantly poll the server to find out what the other player did and if it's your turn or you're still waiting.

It's possible, just very heavy server load and a monster programming task. As a solo developer at this time, it's more time and effort than I'd want to spend. Especially since my vision of the game is to have so much more than just combat. I want the combat itself to only be about 5% of what there is available to do in the game.

If I'm ever so fortunate to earn any income from the game, I might be able to hire a second programmer who could help with jazzy feature improvements like that!

Actually, having combat as part of a larger game sounds a nice plan, sinse too often in games with auto combat your left finding that auto combat is all there is, plus as I said I'm a big fan of exploring.

Flash and occasionally java have sometimes been dodgy from an access perspective as regards real time updates, but I have seen it done in the game puppet nightmares, (which actually has an awsome combat system though I did wish it had more by way of descriptive text).

If you fight an online battle against someone else you can choose a time limit for each turn as short as one minute or as long as seven, (I usually prefer a long limit myself to give me time to read my opponent's actions and assign actions for the three creatures in my party sinse puppet nightmares involves fights between teams of three puppets each).

The two players each submit a turn, and after both have submitted the page refreshes you get the results for the round with the actions of everyone's creatures.

There's nothing that special in terms of flashy controls, just a timer, and if a player times out before submiting their actions, the other player wins the fight.
I don't know how complex the backend of this is, indeed given how complex the combat in puppet nightmares is there is possibly something heavy duty happening, but in terms of basic system and interface it works fine and isn't all that different from fighting a battle against computer opponents other than perhaps waiting for the other player to complete their turn.

I'm not saying roboid should have this sort of system, just that it's not always necessary to go all realtime and flashy for controls when timers and calculating submitted info would work.

Getting back to the game as is however, I do have one slightly more practical question.

Combat seems pretty random, whether I win or lose fights seems heavily dependent upon what stance I choose and what my opponent uses, but sinse there is no way of knowing before hand (well not in the matches for competitions or the practice droid fights), I'm not sure how to make a tactical choice, indeed I tend to win or lose roughly half of the time despite having calibrated my robot, done several practices and bought a weapon.

I also unfortunately keep playing matches against the same robot in the competition, but I suspect this is more due to the lack of lower rank players at the moment, (perhaps until the player base fills up there could be some computer generated opponents just to keep the variety?).

Youch, I can understand the problem with creating npc accounts, especially when your making miner changes on a dayly bsis (I definitely like the new hour long classified).

At the moment unfortunately I seem to lose to the npc (or maybe it's a pplayer), with better stats (or at least better hp), than me unless I am lucky enough to hit their weakness. This wouldn't be so bad accept I've ended up running into them rather too often meaning my competition losses are rather extensive when they really shouldn't be.

As far as combat goes I'm actually looking forward to seeing what other activities and locations are added to the game, sinse I do enjoy exploring different worlds and Roboid has a great setting I'd love to explore in more detail.

This is my first time ever playing this type of game, and I'm looking forward to the experience. thanks for the attention to accessibility.

There are currently 9 missions total in Season 1. My ideal is for each season to require about 1-2 months to play through at a reasonable pace. The missions are long, yes, but that's intentional. It's a game for the long haul. I also need time to implement the features and story that will go into Season 2.

With the effort I spend on the written component, the missions are supposed to be long and satisfying when finally completed.

Eventually I'll have Side Quests which will be like mini-missions that players can do which are shorter and will bridge the time between longer missions and between seasons. But that's a ways down my to do list!

hi. I've begun playing the game and I really like it. my name in the game is mastodont.

I'm going to add a text-based captcha to the registration form soon. I think I found one that will work well.

Hi, I've been playing this game as well, it's so so awesome, keep up the hard work, my username is, AmroMeero,