2019-11-24 19:20:26

Here is another random little game I ran across on Itch.io.
The basic idea is similar to the wastes, though with a smaller pool of random generation for things like creatures, but plus things like bosses, lots of armour and equipment and some interesting mechanics such as presteiging, which lets you take on harder difficulties, plus its html rather than dos style console window.

You can click on the items to change the top pane to show things like heirlooms, prestieges, stats such as food energy and hp, and traits which are your combat stats  as strength, luck and elemental damage.

Below this are some clickable options for the main game screen, namely pack to show what yoru carrying, gear to show what your wearing, and events to show what is currently going on (note that new events are written to the top).
also take note of the button with the question mark, this is used to examine some items and in game controls, plus makes a handy screen reader marker to go down and read events from.
At the bottom are buttons for various actions like exploring, fighting, when you run into a monster, using food and potions, and searching for loot (note you can search in every room and after every fight).

The only miner thing which I don't like, apart from the  tiny size of your backpack, is the fact that you don't seem to be able to examine weapons and armour to  what stats they have.
Oh the names  are relatively self-explanatory, EG dagger of heat or helm of fortune, and your always shown the items level, but I'd really like to have had some more specific information on what stats do what, especially since I gather elements play more of a part later.

Also as a tip, merchants are few and far between, so don't keep hanging on to old gear in hopes of selling, since as I said your backpack's size limit isn't large, indeed merchants are sort of this game's soft reset and way to advance your character.

Anyway I think this one should be fun for anyone who wants a casual and relaxed rpg with a little of a clicker game thrown in. Find the game here

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-11-25 03:16:03

Wow good find! I can even play this on mobile! I like it.

2019-11-25 08:49:09

Wow! Nice! I'll definitely try this one.

2019-11-25 08:54:05

This sounds amazing. Will definitely check this out!

Take care, it's a desert out there.

2019-11-26 01:38:34

my game isn't saving. I was never asked if I wanted to use cookies to save it.

I like to sleep, Sleep is good,
This is how I do it: Lie on a nice warm cozy bed, and dream dreams about how to rule the world!
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2019-11-26 06:07:25

Most games on Itch.io I've seen like planet life use cookies automatically, so unless you've got something set to auto clear them, or run a program like  C Cleaner you should be okay.

In the explanation on the front page, the author mentions "saving between playthrus" IE after you've met the merchant and reset, so I  suspect it's only your prestiges that save, rather than your entire game  state, though  I have been a bit busy with manamon and other things to verify that as yet.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-11-26 22:46:39

I can't save the game either

2019-11-27 00:38:37

I have never even seen a merchant, I get to the third boss or so and no matter how careful I am the bosses murder me. zI often wind up using all of my potions and then they still finish me off before I can kill them, sometimes it has even been a double kill on our parts. I've also never found equipment or  armor or anything like that and I've never seen a merchant.

2019-11-27 01:55:37

ooooh
cool.

Go, balloons. I don't see anything happening. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. Stand by, confetti. Keep coming, balloons. More balloons. Bring them. Balloons, balloons, balloons! More balloons. Tons of them. Bring them down. Let them all come. No confetti. No confetti yet. No confetti. All right. Go, balloons.

2019-11-27 02:31:19

Hey everyone, I am the auther of InfiniCrawl. Thanks for putting this thread up and checking out my game. I came over to answer some questions and address some concerns. First off, I should say, that I am not visually impaired, just a fan of text-based games, so the interface and everything might not be totally optimal for you (but I'm willing to work on it and fix that if I can).

First, the most common comment: Saving the game! As some have speculated, saving is a function of the prestige mechanism. When you prestige by eating a Humble Pie, you'll save all of the prestige bonuses that you've acquired through eating the other prestige foods (Toughen Muffin, Pricey Spice, Breezy Cheese, Funny Hunny, Dandy Candy and Vitali-Tea). Once you prestige, you'll start the game over, with some bonuses. You'll start with bonus xp equal to the amount of gems you've acquired, and increased stats based on the bonus foods you've eaten. You'll get bonus HP equal to the number of times you've prestiged, and you'll start on an advanced scene based on how far you've gotten so you don't have to slog through the early parts again, wasting food/potions on low level stuff.

The other progression mechanism is heirloom gear. When you open a chest, you'll get a piece of heirloom gear. This saves automatically when you get it, so when you start a new game you'll start with that gear. It levels up with you, up to its maximum level, but it doesn't have any elemental bonuses, so you'll end up replacing it while adventuring. It'll be back when you start a new gain again though.

bookrage wrote:

I have never even seen a merchant


You summon Merchants by using a Wooden Nickle. They are a little bit rare, so don't waste them. Save them up for when you have a full inventory to sell. Merchants are currently the only way you can obtain prestige items.

bookrage wrote:

I get to the third boss or so and no matter how careful I am the bosses murder me. zI often wind up using all of my potions and then they still finish me off before I can kill them, sometimes it has even been a double kill on our parts. I've also never found equipment or  armor or anything like that and I've never seen a merchant.


In order to find gear you need to do a Search action. You can search every scene one time and it uses up 1 energy when you do it. In order to search a scene that has an enemy in it, you'll have to defeat them first. When you find items through a search, they appear in your Pack, click them to use/equip them. If you haven't been searching and/or equipping gear, you'll definitely get creamed by about the second or third boss every time.


KenshiraTheTrinity wrote:

Wow good find! I can even play this on mobile! I like it.

I tested it on the only mobile devices that I have and it works, but on itch.io, you'll have to scroll on some devices (still trying to figure out why).

dark wrote:

The basic idea is similar to the wastes, though with a smaller pool of random generation for things like creatures...

The pool of monsters may seem small, but as you progress up in levels, different monsters will appear (up to level 20). Also different dungeons contain environmental hazards (traps, high chance to spawn monsters, etc). It might be hard to notice the environmental changes if playing through a screen reader. For the visibly unimpaired there is a graphical change that happens. Every time you defeat a boss, you enter a new dungeon with a different theme. You can use the inspect tool on the Scene heading, to show what type of dungeon you are in (crypt, castle, temple, etc).

dark wrote:

The only miner thing which I don't like, apart from the  tiny size of your backpack, is the fact that you don't seem to be able to examine weapons and armour to  what stats they have.

The inventory size probably wont change, you are meant to be selling stuff off as you go and not hording things. When you have to drop items, just drop the lowest level stuff, use the consumables as you get them and you should always have enough room. Keep Skeleton Keys and wooden nickles, everything else is equip, consume or drop for the most part.

As for the examining gear, I've got that fixed on my dev version, I'll be publishing an update soon!


Hopefully, this clears up some things. If anyone has any other questions or comments, feel free to let me know. Also if you have any ideas on how to make this more accessible to people with screen readers, I'm all ears!

2019-11-27 04:02:30

Hi.


@malachi1616 this will deffenetly keep me entertained for a long time!


I'm wondering, have you thought about using Aria for your info text box, what this would do is allow the screen reader to read an alert message instead of us having to use shortcuts to read it.


For example, you might press enter on search and hear, alert: you find a potion.


Hearing alert all the time might be a little annoying but as far as I know there's no way to avoid that.


Having said that, pressing shift e, (the command to jump to the box where you read things,) is easy to do so this is just an idea I had.


Here's a link for the alert roll I found, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc … alert_role


Making the Stats Traits Prestige Heirloom, have shortcuts might be nice, I'm not sure what shortcuts to use though but to make keyboard shortcuts, use the accesskey tag in HTML 5 https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_glob … sskey.asp.


This is going to be tuns of fun, I'm off to explore.

I'm gone for real :)

2019-11-27 05:00:37

You could also use aria live regions instead. That may require a little more work to implement.

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

2019-11-27 10:38:58 (edited by Dark 2019-11-27 10:41:25)

@bookrage,  it sounds like you aren't using your  equipment, as has been said, use "search" each scene or after fighting a monster to hunt for loot. Any stuff you find will be stored in your pack, you can get to it by clicking "pack" and then equip. See your equipment by clicking "gear"
At the moment as I said you don't seem to be able to look at the stats of the gear individually, but that might change in the future, though the names should tell you what is what, personally I always went with the highest level stuff I could find.

@malachi1616  thanks for getting back to us regarding the questions, the game looks like a lot of fun, and I certainly gathered there's a fair amount to discover.
My first playthrough I got through six bosses and to the first merchant, but not realising the game only saved when you used humble pie,  I accidently deleted my save.

In terms of access fixes, the things that occur to me at the moment are mostly cosmetic, though if there are indeed environmental changes which effect gameplay it might be nice to see these; I thought that the names  of the different dungeons were primarily aesthetic and didn't actually have gameplay changes attached.

Most screen readers have shortcut keys to quickly navigate  between standard web controls, eG B to go between buttons, h for headings, so it might be nice if some of the areas of the screen, EG where your stats/traits are shown, and where the events/your pack is shown had a heading to flick to them quickly to save having to go up and down with the arrows so much when you want to check miner details.

It might also be nice if the examine button had a label, since most people using screen readers have punctuation turned off, so when I first found the button I  didn't realise that it had a question mark on it.

For reading the popups, I usually just use the read window key myself, more standard web alerts or open windows might be nice, but imho aren't essential.

You can try the open source screen reader NVdA at https://www.nvaccess.org/ which should give a good idea of what works how.

Looking forward to seeing more of the dungeon.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-11-27 15:42:13

Hi,
I am experiencing a bug. After having a lot of fun with this yesterday, I've just gone back into the game, and absolutely nothing is showing up in the events textbox. I am not sure what's happening. This means, that at the moment, I can't really play the game at all at the moment. Also, the scene is no longer advancing when I click explore, but it's saying that my health is at 20.
I simply clicked easy to start a new game, although I did notice a save in the box. Also, everything is saying NaN, instead of damage and such, under trates.
I'm trying to play via Itch.io, which worked absolutely fine yesterday. I've tried forgetting the website, I've tried putting nothing in the save box, and I've even tried switching difficulties.
There is also no progress bar for next level. This read fine yesterday.
Interestingly, I've launched the game in Chrome and it seems to show the events dialogue, but no progress bar. Then, playing the game in Firefox no longer works, as said earlier, there's no events box, no advancing scenes and you also can't fight enemies.

2019-11-27 17:30:32

I knew about, and have always known about the search feature, but still have never found gear. I find potions, food, and gold, but have never found anything else at all while playing. And Yes! I do search every single room.

There is a bug with the message window that occasionally happens around searching though. Sometimes after you search, it won't actually say what you've found or that you haven't found anything until you go to another scene, at which point it will catch up. A minor annoyance, but just thought I would share it.

2019-11-27 19:18:56

@Bookrage that's interesting, I'm wondering what's happened as the events window was working absolutely fine yesterday, no catchup required.

2019-11-27 19:40:00 (edited by malachi1616 2019-11-27 21:23:30)

brad wrote:

I'm wondering, have you thought about using Aria for your info text box... Making the Stats Traits Prestige Heirloom, have shortcuts might be nice...

stewie wrote:

You could also use aria live regions instead. That may require a little more work to implement

I will look into aria regions. Keyboard shortcuts were a planned improvement already. Are there some keyboard shortcuts that I should avoid that might conflict with screen reader shortcuts?


dark wrote:

At the moment as I said you don't seem to be able to look at the stats of the gear individually, but that might change in the future, though the names should tell you what is what, personally I always went with the highest level stuff I could find.

This should be fixed in the newest update (might have to do a hard refresh on the page to see it).


dark wrote:

It might also be nice if the examine button had a label, since most people using screen readers have punctuation turned off, so when I first found the button I  didn't realise that it had a question mark on it.

It actually has a magnifying glass emoji in it. It might be rendered as a question mark for you though. I'll get some better labels on some of the graphical things (the inspect icon, trash icon, etc). I had hoped that by using emojis is would be more compatible, since its not an image at all.


dark wrote:

You can try the open source screen reader NVdA at https://www.nvaccess.org/ which should give a good idea of what works how.

I'll definitely check that out!


aaron wrote:

Hi,
I am experiencing a bug. After having a lot of fun with this yesterday, I've just gone back into the game, and absolutely nothing is showing up in the events textbox. I am not sure what's happening. This means, that at the moment, I can't really play the game at all at the moment. Also, the scene is no longer advancing when I click explore, but it's saying that my health is at 20.
I simply clicked easy to start a new game, although I did notice a save in the box. Also, everything is saying NaN, instead of damage and such, under trates.
I'm trying to play via Itch.io, which worked absolutely fine yesterday. I've tried forgetting the website, I've tried putting nothing in the save box, and I've even tried switching difficulties.
There is also no progress bar for next level. This read fine yesterday.
Interestingly, I've launched the game in Chrome and it seems to show the events dialogue, but no progress bar. Then, playing the game in Firefox no longer works, as said earlier, there's no events box, no advancing scenes and you also can't fight enemies.

I'm not able to reproduce this, I've checked on Firefox and Chrome on the local version, on my website, and on itch.io they all work the same for me. This may be due to some local setting that you have. I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this. The only thing that I can think that might be wrong is if you have a security setting that is disallowing javascript either partially or fully. It could be a browser plugin/addon conflicting with it. There was an update to the game yesterday though, is anyone else experiencing similar issues? A hard refresh might fix them, or trying to play in an incognito/private tab. Let me know if any of that works for you.



bookrage wrote:

I knew about, and have always known about the search feature, but still have never found gear. I find potions, food, and gold, but have never found anything else at all while playing. And Yes! I do search every single room.

There is a bug with the message window that occasionally happens around searching though. Sometimes after you search, it won't actually say what you've found or that you haven't found anything until you go to another scene, at which point it will catch up. A minor annoyance, but just thought I would share it.

I haven't experienced that bug yet. The "catching up" portion seems like local latency, it may be due to a browser plugin slowing down javascript's responses. Since there is no networking or internet connectivity to slow things down, it has to be simply processing speed. I can try to work on optimizing the code to run more efficiently (which is something I'm always working on, but I can target it to that specific mechanism), but if there is something specific about your setup I likely wont be able to fully troubleshoot it.

For the searching, I guess it is slightly possible that you are just very unlucky and haven't found any gear. It's never happened to me after a thousand or so times playing through, but it is theoretically possible. Do you have a way to copy/paste your events tab here so I can read the log?

EDIT: Also, I downloaded NVDA and am using it to optimize the layout/controls and feedback from the game. I added a "polite" alert to the event box so it'll read it to you as it updates, so you don't need to keep going back to it. BUT, the reverse order that it logs the events makes it read weird, so I'm going to reorder that. Hopefully it makes the game a lot more enjoyable.

2019-11-28 01:54:49

Hi.

@malachi1616, I just had a quick look at the game and the game shortcuts for some of the buttons are a bit strange.

I'd think f for fight, r for run, p for potion, e for explore, d for food and s for search might work.

I'm gone for real :)

2019-11-28 02:41:38

https://malachi1616.itch.io/infinicrawl … lty-update

Here is a list of the recent updates to the game. I converted the event log to plain text instead of being inside of a big text box. Also, using aria-live I was able to get the event log to recite new events as they come up. There is also a button that reloads the box, so that screen readers will re-read all of the events in reverse order (newest first) in case you miss something.

brad wrote:

@malachi1616, I just had a quick look at the game and the game shortcuts for some of the buttons are a bit strange.

I'd think f for fight, r for run, p for potion, e for explore, d for food and s for search might work.

In the above link, I put which quick keys go to which buttons. These are based on my hand position while I'm playing most games, 1/2/3/4 navigate across the top tabs, q/w/e navigate on the middle ones. z dismisses the merchant, x reloads the event log, ? turns on inspect mode. The access keys for the action buttons are a little strange, but they allow you to get things done more quickly once you get used to them. [ and ] and your most used actions (fight and explore) " is search, p is potion and o is run. Finally, ; is for food.

I do plan on implementing the ability to customize these key assignments in the next update, which wont be until after the holiday.

2019-11-28 06:08:59

hi.


When I press b for button, I hear the button read out, search for example, but no accesskey, I think that's a bug.

I'm gone for real :)

2019-11-28 07:48:18 (edited by Dark 2019-11-28 10:03:53)

@Brad, with most web based games, screen readers will  default to their webpage navigation keys, EG H for heading, B for button etc.

If you want to use direct shortcut keys on webpages, you need to do whatever your screen reader does to allow key passes to the application. For example in NVdA hit NVdA+space  change to focus mode then hit the key, or in supernova hit ctrl 0 to allow next key press through.

I know Jaws has something similar, though I'm not sure what it is and I'd assume voiceover does too.

I will admit that personally I don't tend to use custom keyboard shortcuts on webpages most of the time (though there are exceptions such as in trimps), since it's usually quicker for me to find the controls with the buttons etc, but obviously this is a very individual thing.

@Malachii, nice job on the event log fixes and the labels, though oddly enough they aren't showing up as buttons anymore but as graphics (though since I can navigate between clickable graphics with g this isn't a problem).
I particularly like the ability to review the event log and effectively get the last events spoken, very handy when switching gear around, I also found the game's cookie and made it an exception to C cleaner, which means this time I keep my prestige big_smile.

I really like some of the different environments, and effects, though I'm still working out what elemental effects do, as most of the time I've found luck based gear best to use.

One fix I would appreciate, would be a change to health status. At the moment when your in fights, your told how much damage the enemy does to you, but not your total hp, which makes  harder to know when  get a potion. Obviously its printed at the top, but with fight instructions being auto spoken now thanks to the recent fix, it would speed things up if your  hp was noted during the fight, ditto with energy levels and searching, that way you wouldn't need to go up to the top pannel quite as often to check miner details, though of course you could always add headings to the top panel to make getting there easier and that would solve a lot of the problem.

I also notice that breezy cheese, and possibly other power up items the merchant sells don't have descriptions yet.

Lastly, I wonder if you'd ever considered adding a few other ways to manipulate your equipment, since I admit that at the moment the constant juggling necessary to equip things is something I do find a little irksome, EG when I find an item I want to use, but my backpack is full, so I first need to drop an item from the backpack, then remove  gear, then swap it out for the new gear, something I might need to do several times when finding a big hoard.

Even if the game wouldn't let you examine/leave items on the ground, It would be really helpful if there was a "swap" icon which would automatically swap something in your pack for something in your gear and visa versa, and if you could remove an item and instantly junk it without having to go through the backpack.

I'm also noticing that you get a stupidly huge amount of food, waaaay more than you need, indeed often I find I'm eating magic  berries more for the pack  space than the benefit, indeed when I prestieged I was level 7 with over a hundred psare food big_smile.

It sort of amuses me that  character has such a small pack, and yet is carrying around a shopping trolley full of assorted consumables big_smile.

I always like games that actually have your characters eat and need to manage supplies (I loved the dos classic fallthru), so you might consider in the future making the food system a bit more dynamic, EG giving your character a "food sack" similar to the backpack where you could carry actual food items such as bread, meet, fruits, mushrooms etc, which would have different effects when consumed, giving different amounts of energy, and maybe buffs/debuffs along the way, EG perhaps your character would find some lizard jerky, which would be good for food, but make your character sick and reduce their combat effectiveness for a little while, or perhaps your character could find some earth mushrooms, which would raise their earth affinity.


Thanks again for the work on the game, and hope you have a good holiday next week.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-11-28 10:10:33 (edited by Dark 2019-11-28 10:32:07)

Okay that was weird. I had an entire game where my energy and health were listed as nan, and I took no damage even when the game said I lost health, and I never needed to use food.
I also got to level 12 and scene 165 as well, and since things were getting a bit silly at that point in terms of loot and monster difficulty (or lack of), I think I better start medium difficulty next time big_smile.

Btw, around scene 150 there was a nameless female monster, that is the game told me I'd encountered a with no word given,
which was sort of amusing, though I@m afraid I don't remember what environment she turned up in.

Oh, and speaking of female monsters, it seems a bit weird that the lords can be female, when there are baronesses and I believe duchesses, I'd have thought the lords would've been ladies. I also find it a bit strange that there are female lions and not lionesses big_smile.

Oh, and quite often I also run into lord something or other the VI, is that the visually impaired?
Well why not, though it might be a bit more menacing to use "sightless" or "eyeless" or whatever, since while I'm really in favour of visually impaired villains, no reason not to make them sound sufficiently villainous, and the phrase "visually impaired" is a bit of an odd one to turn up in a fantasy game.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-11-28 16:04:30

Hello malachi1616, your game is very cool. I love it!

2019-11-28 17:38:41

Hi,
I am absolutely loving the new update, the fact the game now autoreads things is awesome!
I am experiencing the bug where it does not show any of the keyboard shortcuts, could there possibly be a link on the game's page that takes you to a shortcut list?
I've also noticed there's a few situations where the auto reading doesn't kick in, most prominently when you equip or remove an item, or draw from the deck of fate.

2019-11-28 17:38:54

Hm... hope you were just jesting Dark, sounds like the VI is equivalent to 6th.

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