Hi everyone, I've been working on a browser-based kingdom-building game called Everrealm, and I'd love to get feedback from VoiceOver users. It's an alpha, so things will change, but the core loop is playable.
What is it?
Everrealm is a peaceful strategy game where you build a civilization from tents to citadels. You establish settlements, develop them by merging pairs into higher-level buildings, unlock discoveries that enable special buildings, and guide your realm through six Ages. No combat, no timers, no fail states. It's designed to be calm.
Does it work with VoiceOver?
Yes. A player on AudioGames.net has already confirmed it works on iOS with VoiceOver in Safari. I built it screen-reader-first, not screen-reader-compatible as an afterthought. I'm totally blind myself (NVDA user), and I built it because I wanted a strategy game that actually works with screen readers from the ground up.
- Fully keyboard-driven. Every action has a shortcut.
- Semantic HTML with ARIA live regions for announcements.
- No visual information required to play. No dragging, no spatial reasoning, no color-coded anything.
- Saves locally in your browser. No account needed.
- Works in Safari on iOS and macOS, plus Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers.
A note on sound
I want to be upfront about this. Sound might be added in the future, but this will never be a full audiogame. I have a combination of disabilities that means I can't interpret spatial audio, and I get overstimulated by too many sounds at once. That's part of why Everrealm has no spatial grid at all. If I add sound, it will be optional, minimal, and never required to play.
How to play
Just open the link in Safari and name your realm. The game walks you through the rest. Play Everrealm
Keyboard shortcuts:
- E — Establish Settlement
- A — Advance to next Age
- T through I — Develop settlements (Tent, Hut, Cottage, House, Manor, Village, Town, City)
- F, M, O — Develop into Farm, Market, Workshop
- L, G, Q — Develop into Library, Town Hall, Aqueduct
There's also a collapsible shortcuts list in the game itself.
What I'm looking for
- Does it work well with VoiceOver on your device? Any announcement issues?
- Is the game flow clear? Can you tell what's happening and what your options are?
- Is it fun? What feels satisfying? What feels tedious?
- Balance feedback. How long does it take to reach your first Citadel? Does the economy feel right?
- Any bugs or confusing error messages.
I'd especially love feedback on the iOS experience — swipe navigation, rotor behavior, announcement clarity, anything that feels off.
About me
I'm Lanie, a blind writer and accessibility advocate. I don't come from a game dev background. I built this with AI assistance because I wanted to prove that accessible games can be genuinely fun, not just "accessible enough." This is my first game, so be kind but honest. The code is open source on GitHub if anyone wants to look under the hood or contribute: View the GitHub repo here. Thanks for playing. I'm excited to hear what you think.
Comments
What are your suggestions for starting?
Hi!
Congratulations for the game. I'm using Jaws 2021 and Google Chrome and it works perfectly fine but I had to start again and again countless times. Are there any suggestions on what to do?
Like
Turn 2: Agriculture unlocked.
Turn 1: Discovered the Tent.
Turn 1: Established a Tent.
then what? I can't afoard nothing and the game becomes impossible to continue. Do I have to click on Establish Settlement for like 10 times at the start or...?
Do you have any suggestions on how to start?
Getting started
You will need to click establish settlement a lot. That's how you get new tents you can merge into new buildings. Your first two turns will need to be establishing settlements, which will give you two tents you can merge into a hut. That should give you enough prosperity to unlock agriculture. Then, establish settlement twice again, merge into another hut, and now that you have two huts and agriculture unlocked, you'll have a choice between merging into a cottage or a farm. I hope that helps get you through your first few turns.
Everrealm 0.20 is Live!
This update addresses feedback from the alpha playtest, including the onboarding issue that was reported here.
What's new:
Age-gated content. Each Age now unlocks new technologies, improvements, and buildings. In 0.1, everything was available from the start. Now you progress through content naturally as you advance:
Onboarding tips. Thanks to Sysskuu's feedback about getting stuck on the first turns, the game now shows hints for the first 3 turns: press E to establish your first settlement, press T to develop by merging, and build toward a Citadel to advance. This should help new VoiceOver users get started without hitting that initial wall. Age transition messages. When you advance to a new Age, the story log now tells you what new discoveries are available, so you always know what to work toward next. New keyboard shortcuts: Shrine (S), Bank (B), Apothecary (P), plus more for late-game buildings. About existing saves: Your current game won't break. You keep everything you've already unlocked. But if you want the proper progression experience, start a new game.
How to play:
Thanks for the feedback so far — especially the JAWS confirmation and the onboarding report. Keep it coming!
Citadel?
Hi.
I am giving this a try on Brave with NVDA.
As a big fan of city builders and strategy games, and liking to grow settlements over time, I'm really excited in this one.
I've just built my first citadel after about 1000 turns, so here are some thoughts.
First: The gameplay loop really needs speeding up.
At the start, using prosperity to unlock improvements while my buildings expanded, things were really interesting, but I ran out of other things to build very quickly, indeed I now have far more prosperity than I could ever need, and the game has basically become cookie clicker.
I really like the theory of making tents into huts, huts into cottages, then houses, mana houses, hamlets, villages, towns, cities and citadels, but the methodology for growth an unlocks for these make zero sense.
From a logic perspective, one might see the progression from tents, to huts to cottages to houses, but mana houses were comparatively few, likewise, citadels were buildings around which settlements coalesced, not necessarily the crowning achievements of existing cities, indeed some castles were often built in out of the way areas or near small towns (I literally live in the north of England in a quite small market town and I live opposite Newark castle where prince John, he of the Robin hood legend is buried).
There is also the problem that prosperity generating buildings don't actually do anything for you, so you end up with massive cities, with barely any farms, markets or workshops.
Quite aside from this, the gameplay loop gets a bit nuts, especially since only a couple of the shortcut keys work.
E for establishing a settlement, and t for building a hut work fine, but cottages onwards I need to click the buttons, indeed when one considers that you need to build 256 tents to establish a citadel, quite aside from all the turns you need to spend building other buildings along the way, thigns do get a bit nuts.
So my suggestions:
1: unlocking architecture.
For each architectural improvement a player researches, the basic settlement unit increases, IE people are starting to build better structures than tents.
Wood cutting for huts, plaster for cottages, stone masonry for houses.
Secondly, remove mana houses and citadels from the settlement build list, have them be special buildings created from hamlets or cities with extra prosperity boosts.
Indeed, each larger settlement type could have its larger prosperity building corresponding to the home of the gentry, mayoral houses for hamlets, mana houses for villages, villas for towns, palaces for cities.
Players would need to build prosperity buildings to get the boosts from settlements, and advancing to the next age would involve prosperity based improvements, not merely larger settlemennts.
Either way though, definitely liking the look of this and I'll see where gameplay goes, even if at the moment it is something of a finger hammering exercise :D.
A few questions