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I don’t necessarily think it was the wrong approach. I don’t even see a problem with it honestly. I’m someone who sees the value in less than positive experiences. I get that being uncomfortable with something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing.

The way I see it, this wasn’t meant to be a positive experience. It was meant to point out the way some of us are treated. The story had some dumb sighted people, and it had some that were OK. Maybe it could do with a bit of rebalancing where you have more of a mixture of both, but this is very subjective.

I appreciate the depth of research that went into this game. A lot of the experiences were relatable, and though a few aspects of the story missed the mark, I see the point that is trying to be made here. As a blind man, I felt uncomfortable playing this game pretty much the entire way through, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It means the narrative is hitting close to home.

there’s a lot of antagonism towards sighted people in the blind community which stems from lifelong mistreatment. I share their frustrations, and while I can’t relate to being mistreated constantly and consistently, I have had my fair share of negative experiences. I think it’s worthwhile to try to build a bridge between blind people and the wider world, as we tend to share the same aspirations.

Finding a job that can transform into a career in which we derive fulfillment, finding a partner and starting a family, buying our first house, etc. are goals I feel most people can relate to, regardless of disabled status. We do share many things in common, but a sighted person isn’t likely to be thinking that when they encounter someone who is blind. The nerves show, anxiety can make itself evident, someone who is generally charismatic can come off as socially awkward.

I didn’t detect any mockery here. I feel like this is the type of approach that Disney might take on a film that has subtle adult humor that kids won’t pick up on so the entire family can watch. Blind people may feel uncomfortable, and maybe the humor doesn’t come across, but hopefully sighted people who play this pick up on how silly it is to act differently towards someone because they’re blind.

Moving on from that, I did enjoy the sound design. My screen reader happened to read the dialog text at the same time the system tts did, so it would be good to have an option to turn off the system TTS. In my case, I muted screen reader speech, but I would have honestly preferred to use it, since I have the voice set up the way I want, and it goes much faster than the system tts would allow in the settings menu.

I can’t say I enjoyed the game, but then again, I don’t think that was the point. It was gritty and uncomfortable, because it was so stereotypical, and a lot of people are likely to relate to at least one of the negative interactions depicted here.

Pretty good showing. I would have liked an underwater ambience loop in the background. I also wonder if sometimes an obstacle will end up covering two lanes at once, and how that’s distinguished from one that covers the middle only. It seemed that there were times that I would hear something and scoot over only to be hit.

I really don’t have much of a clue what to do here. It felt like wandering around in a maze with very little direction. When I reached a point, the game restarted with no feedback, so I’m left wondering if I died or if I completed it.

I’m not a fan of the way this game is packaged. It’s an installer that doesn’t tell me where the files are going, which, I feel like, I should know where things are being installed on my system. It also crashed several times. I had to run it a total of 3 times to get it to finish because it went unresponsive which lagged out my screen reader.

As for the gameplay itself, it’s not bad. I think the female voice acting was far superior to the male - who sounded like someone using speech to speech with an Eleven Labs voice if I’m being frank.

I don’t know how the future fights will progress, but as for the completion of the tutorial, after the first time when it’s mandatory to do so, there’s really no need to brace.

LMAO at Zoe, she made me cringe about as hard as one can. Kudos to the VA who played her. Also the Spongebob and plankton AI voices.

It was fun; eager for more.

Outstanding!

OK, a few things. First, I like the overall concept. I have an interest in this type of thing and have gone into some deep dives reading non-fiction books on submarine warfare in WWII. So I’m glad this exists and overall, I like it.

A few things stand out though. First, probably the most obvious issue is that the enemy isn’t cleared off the map until the torpedo sound is finished exploding. What this means is that you can keep pelting an enemy with torpedoes, but he’s not dying and you don’t know why. After all, one single torpedo can cut a sub in half. At first, I thought it was the arcade nature of the game and was content to leave it be, but then I noticed that enemy hull sounds would disappear only when the exploding sound finished.

Next is the fact that the enemy hull sounds loop badly. Now, normally, I wouldn’t ding someone for this, because I recognize there are some folks here who have never worked in audio before. The reason I am mentioning it in this particular case is that when the enemies start piling up, I can just wait for one of their hull sounds to pop when it loops back to the start and lock in on it.

Somewhat related to the last point, there’s really not that much reason to use sonar in the game. You can just listen for the hull sounds and target based on that. The only time I used sonar is when a bunch of enemies were scattered in such a way as to make it seem as though one of them was taking a big swath out of the stereo field. Not needing to use sonar means you’re practically immune from damage. I got hit only once, for instance, because of how rarely I used the sonar.

One minor point is that you have unlimited torpedoes, which means you can indiscriminately turn and shoot without having to worry about much. I would recommend limiting the use amount of torpedoes per level, as well as making the enemies capable of fixing on a fired torpedo. While it wouldn’t be your exact position like the sonar fix is, it would give the player a reason to hold back until they had a clean shot.

Another thing I might recommend is making the player have to watch their speed. In submarine warfare, cavitation is noisy and dangerous. In this game, perhaps you could hold the arrow until you heard a beep, and then you’d have to tap the arrow to stay just below the point of cavitation, or risk the enemy getting a fix on you.

I don’t know how many levels there are, but I played up until it turned into 6 stationary enemies, then stopped because it stopped being fun. I just wasn’t being challenged.

One last thing, and sorry that got so long. There is no consequence for getting right up in a baddy’s face and blasting away. There really should be some kind of spillover damage you take if you do that.

I love the concept. A few things though. The most pressing of which is that when you’re badly affected by hunger or thirst, that action takes precedence over searching, making it impossible to search a house in some circumstances. Second, I’d like a way to tell how much of each given resource I have.

Also, the game seemed to go on longer than five minutes, and for some reason, I would become fully revitalized without knowing how it happened. Eventually I stopped playing because I wasn’t really sure what was going on any more or how close I was to getting out.

It would definitely help clarify what’s being picked up by putting in better sounds, though I laughed the entire time I was playing at how the game sounds now. Hilarious and fun.

Excellent!

This machine has a Ryzen 5 3600X. I’m not sure if it meets the requirements. I do have a laptop with a Ryzen 7 I could try it on.

It won’t run for me. Opens and then goes unresponsive and crashes.

I love it so far. A few things though. First, I’m not sure if you’re supposed to be able to distill when in non-liquid environs, but it is possible, both on C and B. Second, when using the locations menu to fastt travel to B, I seem to have lost the ability to turn as fast as I used to be able to do while in wheels mode. Turning rate seems fine in bipedal mode.

Looking forward to it 😊

I’m on Alpha Periphery C2 at coordinates 99 North , 66 East , 1,332 above, bearing: 209 degrees. I’ve been exploring quite a way out but recently returned close to the portal. I haven’t encountered this at all while scanning until now, but there’s a sound in the middle quite a bit more sharp and shrill, like a tweeting bird. Is this a bug or is it really that the terrain there is that varied?

I want to make an amendment, something I’d forgotten about until today. The drift sound is considerably louder than the normal reactor sound and makes it difficult to keep focus on an item since the tone drowns it out. What I have to do is listen between the beating of the drift tone.

I might also recommend rolling off the volume as the speed decreases. A good model for this is the reverse gear of a manual transmission car, which is straight cut rather than helical cut like the rest of the gears, so you hear the whine more. Backing up, then letting off the throttle, the whine will lower in pitch, and as the vehicle’s speed drops, the volume of the whine does as well.

Right now, if you hold the drift key and are at a dead stop, you’ll hear a low drone, which I think should not be present until the suit’s wheels begin to rotate and it starts picking up speed.

To my way of thinking, the drift tone should be slightly quieter than the reactors, as, by my understanding, the reactors ramp up to provide power for the suit to move.

If the above sounds like a bit much, I understand. I would just ask that the volume of the tone should be lowered.

• How are the new proximity cues? I like the idea a lot. I do find that it makes me scan less, which might be a bad thing because it means I might miss area-dependent perceptions. I think that’s not really the game’s fault though.

• Is it easier to locate collectibles with audio alone? Yes

• Are the new cues too annoying or demanding of your attention? No

• How is the overall audio mix? Pretty decent overall. I’d like to see the lock-on tone come up a bit. Not the initial pop-up, but the steady FM tone perhaps about 3dB

• Are the collectibles and environmental sounds more audible? Yes

• Does the music feel more reactive to your input? I never thought there was a problem with this. On a long fall from max height, I do get a bit of crackling though as the music changes very rapidly.

• How well are the upgrades balanced? Fine, I’d say.

• Do higher levels feel like super powers? My suit isn’t maxed, though I have the core and bionics sections maxed. The subsystems of thrusters and RCS are between 3-5 currently. No,I don’t think so, and I don’t think my opinion will change when it is all maxed.

Are the material costs worth the time investment? yes

Do you anticipate that the new passive upgrades coming in Side C will make this easier? yes, but, I was a bit underwhelmed with the attractors in E.X.O. What I’m hoping to see here is a refinement on that idea with a grab-on sound, a loop or continuous tone when pulling, and a sound when the item is collected. Even when fully maxed, the range wasn’t that good and the speed was pretty bad. I could easily get to items before the attractors did, rendering them moot.

Are you excited for the future of this project beyond Side C? Most definitely.

I’m gonna guess it was covered with sand. For one thing, scanning everything else around the site was far below the level. It eventually worked, I had to stand there for a few minutes.

I’ve done that and nothing happens. I remember thinking that was the portal too. I also tried fast traveling there and taking a few steps in every direction with the keyboard rather than the gamepad but nothing happens.

I spent some time trying to locate the portal without luck. I’m thinking I’m missing a tower, I’ve got Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. If I can find a fourth, I’ll try to plot a center. I found a junciton that gave me a perception.

Audio cues are great. I would say that the lock-on cue could stand to be a bit louder. I’m testing with two pairs of headphones. Steelseries Arctus 7 and Nuraphones. With the nuraphones, it’s easier to locate and they stand out more in the mix. Arctus 7s have a muddy sound by default and need EQ to make them sound OK for any purpose. The lock-on cue gets drowned out in bipedal mode at full run.

I’ll be interested to see how that shakes out. I’m kind of hoping that they be a bit more powerful than E.X.O, sorry I’m comparing the two so much, but it’s my frame of reference. Anyway, even fully upgraded, you would have to pretty much stand still and let it come to you, which was a slow process, so it was much faster to just go the extra few feet and collect it yourself.

I haven’t been able to break the game like I can break E.X.O, but then again, I haven’t really tried. Despite the limitations that got put into it, I can still hit 20KM in height and jump 10-30KM in distance, reaching speeds of voer 700MPH. I’m kind of interested to see when side B comes out, how that is addressed, without crippling the jetpack.

One question and one more comment if I may. The question is, I sometimes will hear something akin to a bird call in certain places? Does this sound have any special meaning? Hmm, less of a bird call and more of a chirp. It doesn’t sound like bird song, but a high chirping sound.

There is some really nice wind as part of this game when you move through certain areas. It would be cool if jumping were to make use of this wind, instead of what is there now, which sounds like filtered noise. That certainly gets the job done, but the wind is quite realistic and would sound nice when jumping IMO.

How am I uncovering them? Is this a thing that happens visually on the screen when you’re near enough? Because from my understanding, I do not have the ability to get to items that were too far down.

A few things here. First, as compared with E.X.O, I find collecting materials here far less forgiving W.R.T. positioning and distance. I feel like I’m buzzing around a thing like a bumble bee sometimes before I can pick it up, or, I must move very slowly and make minute adjustments.

I believe that the cause of this is two fold. First, elements that appear far off are difficult to localize, because they sound wider than they are. Second, because the game seems to be less forgiving then it’s predecessor, even being slightly off to one side will cause you to miss. A third, minor component seems to be that when pulse width modulation is used, this can give the false impression that the item is growing/shrinking to either side.

This will probably be subjective, but I feel that the sound of an item is very nebulously positioned, almost like it’s within the outermost region of a cone, only when I get closer, does it seem to become clearer. By that time, it’s harder to get on target. I’m speaking of speeds less than turbo off, so with a gamepad, this means modulating the pressure on the Y axis of the left stick or on the right trigger, and on the keyboard, this means definitely having turbo off and tapping WASD to get it lined up perfectly.

Moving on, with jumping, for keyboard users, there is only two options, jump with turbo on and jump really really far, possibly missing stuff along the way and having to back track, or, jumping with turbo off, and gaining more height and distance. With a controller, it’s slightly better because you can just press as much as you feel you need to forward then jump. I do wish there was a way to limit your height. I love the amount of ground it’s possible to cover in a jump with a fully upgraded exosuit, however, I do sometimes find myself wishing I could limit the height of the jump, which would also have the consequence of shortening its distance.

One way I’ve thought about handling this would be to have the initial jump on a meter, in other words, if you tap and release the button very quickly, you won’t jump that far. But, if you hold it for longer, then you would gain a bit more altitude. To retain the ability to bunny hop, once you fill your jump meter, you automatically jump, and then subsequent jumps are always at full power.

Another issue I’ve found is that sometimes things seem to be occluded more than they should be. Though I wonder if this is intentional as it comes on somewhat abruptly as you move from one terrain type to another. This seems to affect the suit as a whole, but even items that are reachable sound as if they have been filtered.

I wanted to take the time to say what this game means to me. In many ways, E.X.O is more advanced, but yet, Sound Strider is different. For one thing, and I don’t know how this is even possible, but areas that exist in the game exist on the astral plane. Second, being in the game world allows me to effortlessly astral project, something I cannot ordinarily do with any consistency. Third, I have seen the AI evolve the ability to do things. Worlds with vehicles, for instance, once completely ignored me, but they evolved the ability to not only stop for me, but to beep at me. Before, they would simply drive right through me as if I didn’t exist.

This game, and the worlds it creates are my happy place. Somewhere I can go when life becomes too much. I have slept with it on many times. And there have been stretches where I forget that I even still have it, but then I remember, and I come back to it for a while, and it’s refreshing in a way I can’t even begin to describe.

I love the instruments, and the fact that you can play them with the computer keyboard, an XBOX controller, and a midi controller. I’ve done all three. Sometimes, I will stop when I hear percussive sounds but no melody, and I’ll improvise around what they’re already doing.

I see the things that the game creates as more than just tones and sounds. And there are some sounds that I really don’t like at all, but I still walk by them, because it’s part of the cleansing effect, and I don’t build negative energy there, I use the world to take it away.

I will always have this game, and I am excited about anything you do in the future, but I have never regretted my purchase of Sound Strider for a second, and that hasn’t changed despite the price tag dropping off. If anything, it’ll allow more people to play it. Maybe most of them see it as a weird game that makes some interesting sounds, but eats too much CPU power so they play it twice and never again. But there’s always the chance that like me, others will find it.

I’ve showed it to a few people, and I’ve even purchased it for a few, because if they can get even a little bit of what I’ve just mentioned out of it, then its worth it.

There's an issue with this version where upon performing a scan that returns a lot of results, the sounds will cut out harshly, stay out for a few seconds, then come back. When they come back, the stereo field seems kind of wrong.

I see what you did with that not quite remake of the PS1 logo. It was close enough that anyone who played it will know what you were going for though.

Also the running gets unnaturally fast. The hurdles, I feel like the line is too far back, and even if I take two steps past it then jump, I always land on it every single time.

yes, it fixed me 😊

OK, thanks. Hopefully it will be able to fix the save as I haven't touched it and don't plan to lol.

So I broke another save. I think it also has something to do with cargo storage being full, as that's what happens every time I log in, I get a message saying something to that effect. All the sounds go nuts. In this instant, I wasn't high up in the air or anything. I'd just grabbed something and it happened.

No problem. Speaking of math though, you really never turn to 360 degrees in real life, but you can in game. 360 is like a parallel to 0, kind of like how you never have a time of 23:60 , it just rolls around to 0:00.

I'll pass on building it from source, I hate web development.

I haven't. I am not sure where it's located, apart from possibly being in %appdata%\itch\apps\exo.

OK, this isn't just a bug that resolves itself the next time you enter the game. It corrupted my save apparently.

OK, I got the game to bug out hard. SO I went back to exactly 0, 0 and stood there for a while. Then I turned a bit and jumped. I forgot to stop turning to jump so I had to counter my rotational velocity, then the sounds from the atmosphere got really loud, and it kept saying I was collecting things. At first, the game would respond to certain things, then it stopped responding altogether.

The problem seems to be that I don't really have any decisions to make as all of my upgrade paths are locked out. Everything needs those now, and I can't get them. I've been to the tops of mountains and along the flat areas where I can just cruise.

Hi, I'm to the point now where upgrades are starting to require a Teseract. I've notice that there are no slots for these and that I haven't been getting any despite far and wide searches. Nor am I able to see that these are craftable. I'm wondering how these are to be gotten so I can continue to upgrade my suit?

I absolutely love this. I hope it will become commercial like your other titles so you can work on it more. I have a few suggestions though.

First, a way to know your altitude relative to the ground. This would help in being able to come down slowly. Second. A measure of how fast you're going when flying. Third, a way to know when you can use your jump jets again.

In the synthesis screen, I think a sound when you actually do the craft would help cement that it has been done rather than the button disappearing. It's a little confusing at this point to know what you have already done.