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A jam submission

Dino EvolutionView game page

Survive as dinosaur 252 m. years b.C.
Submitted by Fernofai — 20 hours, 10 minutes before the deadline
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Dino Evolution's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Traditional Roguelikeness#773.3333.333
Scope#1032.6672.667
Completeness#1043.0003.000
Aesthetics#1103.0003.000
Innovation#1512.3332.333
Fun#1532.3332.333

Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • Simple roguelike puzzle game with cute art. I like the concept of playing with long term resources in mind. Balancing a puzzle game with auto-generated maps must have been a difficult task. However, the game is quite difficult to play, and even if you're doing well, you'll find yourself in trouble if you're on a series of maps with low resources. I tried again and again for about an hour and cleared up to 60 stages, but 252 stages seems a bit too long.
  • This is a cute game with a creative theme. It was easy to figure out. Once I learned the rules, it didn't hold my attention for long. Even when I was being extremely careful, the health mechanic felt really punishing with no way to recover reliably. I never figured out when going in the water would damage me, and water is needed to survive, so I lost every game trying not to die of thirst.
  • An interesting premise with a nice look (but no audio component) that is diminished by poor balancing. At best, it appears to make a point that survival and evolution is inherently random - so you do not just get a choice of two random upgrades whenever you get from one screen to the next (which is meant to represent 3 million years passing), but your chances of clearing a screen are dependent on its layout and spawns more than anything else. The only other dinosaurs are either triceraptors or T-Rexes: the former are somewhat manageable, but the latter will leave you half-dead at best, so taking on even two of them is suicidal within just one screen - and you get no healing outside of random top-up/MaxHP increase, neither of which will compensate you for more than a fraction of damage from fighting a T-Rex. While they start immobile and unaware of your character, and lose that awareness and pause if you move far enough away (represented by their red eyes lighting up and turning down, respectively), the spawns can often be too dense to allow meaningful dodging - it's possible to enter a screen and find 7 T-Rexes standing in three blocks around the middle, rendering dodging practically impossible - or even worse, 8 T-Rexes, some at perfect 1-tile distances between them, so trying to move past will get your dino hit by 2 at once. There are also screens where there are large lakes in the middle you have to pass through - while T-Rexes do not follow you in the water (although triceraptors do), this is compensated by a chance to randomly take damage every time you enter a water tile, with no way to avoid it - and you need to regularly enter water tiles just so that your dino does not die of thirst. There's also eating trees to top up food, which is near-irrelevant at first, but much more important when you go through the desert periods where they are scarce. In all, play it as long as you need to realize that you are wholly at the mercy of a random numbers generator - and not even a remotely realistic one at that.

Successful or Incomplete?
1

Did development of the game take place during the 7DRL Challenge week. (If not, please don't submit your game)
Yes

Do you consciously consider your game a roguelike/roguelite? (If not, please don't submit your game)
Yes

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Great concept to try to survive as a dinosaur through the different eras. I gave it quite a few runs because it was so easy to jump back in after you die. I like managing the different resources and choosing powerups.