Guiding Star
Notes:
1. You can disable text-to-speech in the Options.
2. If you need to, check the tutorials below to understand the controls.
Story🐱
When a magical child falls ill, the sun sets on the land and the wizard is called to find a cure. In this blind-accessible game, our cat will lead us through the darkness of the night in search of ingredients for a healing elixir.
Trailer
Controls🍄
Tutorial
Watch the tutorial to understand the game mechanics, as we had a couple problems with the in-game tutorial!
Note that the only fully functional default controls are Keyboard + Mouse.
Keyboard Navigation
You can use the following shortcut keys on your keyboard to navigate the menu:
- Escape (Esc), Tab and Backspace: Pause Game.
- Escape: Go back
- F11: Toggle fullscreen or exit fullscreen.
- Escape (Esc): Exit fullscreen.
- Enter: Select button;
- Spacebar: Select dropdown box or checkboxes.
- Arrow Keys: Move between options (up and down) and adjust the slider (left and right).
- PgUp and PgDown: Go to the top or bottom of a Menu page.
Gameplay 🌸
How to play with Keyboard and Mouse (WASD+mouse) - these are the only default controls that work with no problems:
- Walk: WASD;
- Rotate camera (left and right): move the mouse.
- Interact - pet the cat, pick up mushroom: Right-Click (mouse).
- Fire Spell: Left-Click (mouse).
- Send cat to find a mushroom or exit (or to come back): C
How to play with Mouse-Only:
- Walk: Strafe (move the mouse forward or backward):
- Rotate camera: Move the mouse;
- Interact (pet cat, pick up mushroom): Right-Click (mouse);
- Fire Spell: Left-Click (mouse);
- Send cat to find a mushroom or exit (or to come back): Scroll Button (mouse). - [Not currently working; click C instead.]
Accessibility 🧙
In this game, you'll be following the lead of your cat, your Guiding Star, through the darkness of the night.
We tested this game with players who were blind or had motor impairments to try to ensure the following features:
- Accessible for the blind:
- Text to Speech integrated in the menu, tutorial and gameplay (disable it in the Options);
- Audio cues for all key events, such as finding an enemy or a mushroom;
- Follow the cat's meows to find your way around the scenarios.
- Press 1 and 2 to check your health and level goals with Text-to-Speech. [not currently working]
- Integrated audiodescription in the Wizard's dialogue lines.
- Hearing:
- A radar in the corner of the screen indicating the direction of key sounds;
- Mobility - Controls
- Auto-aim available in the options;
- Choose a control scheme to play: Keyboard and Mouse or Mouse-Only (not fully functional), which allows strafing to move. [in Mouse-Only, the "Send Star" middle mouse button isn't currently working]
- Copy and Modify Control Schemes to customize them to your needs (don't forget to save them!). [Not fully working at the moment]
The Team 🌙
Project Lead: Patrícia Mendes, RafazCruz
Game Design: Patrícia Mendes, Cydeamon
Programming: Cydeamon, KoalaPanda, LordCatto
Art: RafazCruz (lead), Patrícia Mendes (book illustrations)
User Experience: Patrícia Mendes (lead) | Cydeamon
Writing: Patrícia Mendes
Music: Hamza Aydin
Sound Design: Hamza Aydin
Voice Actors: Ross Minor, Zleepy
Our pages 📚
RafazCruz
Artist (lead)
Itch. io: https://rafazcruz.itch.io/
Patrícia Mendes:
Project lead | Game Design | User Experience & Accessibility (lead) | Art (assistant)
Itch.io: https://patriciamendes.itch.io/
Portfolio: https://uxpatriciamendes.wixsite.com/patricia-mendes
Cydeamon:
Game Design | Programming
Itch.io: https://cydeamon.itch.io/
KoalaPanda:
Programming
Itch.io: https://koalapanda54.itch.io/
LordCatto
Programming
Itch.io: https://daslittlepuma.itch.io/
Hamza:
Sound Design | Music
Itch.io: https://itch.io/profile/anthrophantasmus-music
Ross Minor
Voice Acting (Narrator)
Website: https://www.rossminor.com/
Zleepy
Voice Acting (Wizard)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zleepyzheep/
Jaogwal
QA Tester:
Itch.io: https://jaogwal.itch.io/
Thank you to our Playtesters:
Jeppe "Serth" Nymand
Lucille Inepta
Jonathan Nyman
Jaogwal
Known Bugs 🍂
After the Jam voting period ends, we will be fixing the following bugs and any others we find:
- The alt controls of the control schemes are not currently working;
- The cutscenes don't play the full animations;
- Star gets stuck at a certain spot in the Level 2 clearing.
- In Mouse-Only, the middle-mouse button isn't working to send Star to search.
- The controls customization aren't fully working (they allow for new keyboard keys, but not for mouse keys).
- Sometimes, Star is hissing and coming to our backpack when there aren't any enemies nearby.
Contact Guiding Star Team 🏡 ☀️
Did you find some bugs? Want to get in touch? Join our discord server: https://discord.gg/x2wTd59wzj
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
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A lot of events have to be instanced first, which causes a crash a lot of the time, particularly with the first ever LMB input.
(pre-instancing: the sin?)
I realy like the graphique style !
Star is cute but he tends to get on the mushrooms when we want to collect them
The sound when we take damages seems... well, coming from a context where pain takes on a different meaning :p
Beautiful game !
Thank you! Yeah regarding that, while we update the game, I advice to only press interact on the mushroom when you see the big text that said Pick up Mushroom below, or else that can happen so far. Either way, thanks for playing!
Thank you! Besides of what Rafa said, you can press C to put Star in search mode. This should prevent you from accidentally petting her when picking up a mushroom.
wow!!! this is really good, the art is AMAZING! the game is really fun to play and very enjoyable. good work!!
Thank youu for the kind words <3
Gorgeous looking pixel art, which sometimes seem top miss the proper filters in the webbuild, nonetheless they are well executed.
Love the clear priority on the kitten petting animation compared to everything else!
The base idea of the sound-echo-location thingy is cool and I enjoy it how it ties to accessibility. Trailer seems really nice, it is a shame that in the webbuild intro-outro cutscenes are not animation at all.
Game was a nice experience, as someone who doesn’t have motor or other issues I felt that enemies could be a bit more proactive (chasing from further away, aggro-ing on taking damage), and maybe an enemy you have to dodge projectiles from could help the actual non-walking gameplay.
Overall it is a nice experience, well done! Would love to hear if you plan on expanding in it in the future, or if it is gonna stay like a jam project. Well done you all!
Thank you for the kind and well though comment. Means a lot. (Artist of the game speaking) Indeed, time was quite small for the ambition we had on this game , with that the blind accessibility was a lot more intense than we initially thought, but we are very happy we made the game possible.
Right now we are working to at least implement everything we did, there was a lot of stuff we didn't put because of time and fix the overall game. In the end, it was possible because of all the people that worked together.
From me, Regarding the difficulty, we planned on having 3 game modes, you can see them in the options menu, where the difficulty is a lot harder, the game is a lot darker and the players ends up having the same type of gameplay as blind person. Which on itself is a lot of fun, of course regarding the dialogue and text speak they will also be refined.
Thanks again.
Regarding filters. We use nearest (pixelated) filtering, but for some reason the web build of the game forces linear filtering. Desktop builds don't have this problem, and the performance will probably be much better than you had on the stream. Thanks for playing the game and for the kind words!