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Dice of Scaling: Puppet Showdown's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #164 | 4.260 | 4.260 |
| Overall | #174 | 4.106 | 4.106 |
| Style | #308 | 4.293 | 4.293 |
| Enjoyment | #542 | 3.764 | 3.764 |
Ranked from 123 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
Player has a dice that can scale physical objects in the game. On top of affecting the size of that particular object, attributes associated with the object will also be scaled.
Development Time
96 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Programmer, Lin He, https://mizudo.itch.io/
Art, Zhengyi Wang, https://rangerwang.itch.io/
Sound & Music: Zapsplat.com, Pixabay.com
Font: https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/3dumb
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Comments
Great game it was the first turn based ive acc played Music Was really nice as well I found it funny how you could basically make the enemies headless and have really small legs too LOL
Really cool concept and gameplay! It's fun how ridiculous it can get. I also very much enjoyed the atmosphere and naming of everything.
Very creative interpretation of the theme. Cool art and addictive gameplay. I see some inspiration from the Slay The Spire and really enjoy it :D. Great work!
Great game ! Good approach on the theme, Also great art style ! Love the game :)
Awesome game! I like the interpretation of the theme. Imagine being able to scale body parts in real life! I was able to get to level 5 by myself the first time, though im sure if i played more i could get to much higher ones :)
Overall solid game, the only feedback i have is that i didn't quite get the hang of how to play, but it caught on pretty quickly.
Also, nice reference to the GMTK Jam 2022, very creative and thoughtful :)
Two themes in one! Well Done! What I would add is a health bar to each part of the body.
I like shrinking these guys, its really fun to watch the different body parts change, then target them. I liked it a lot!
Love how well this all fits together: the art style, music, gameplay, and puppet theme all come together to make a very coherent and fun game. The art was very cute in particular. I will say that it felt a bit obvious what to scale depending on the dice roll, scale goes to the player and scale down goes to the enemy. Adding situations where the opposite is optimal could make for a very interesting game. Well done!
Slay the Spire is one of my favorite games of all time and this has some incredible mechanics that feel like it could expand that style of gameplay a lot. I really enjoyed this game immensely.
Couple notes: I was able to shrink the body of some enemies to the point where I couldn't attack them anymore lol, kinda funny and I'm not sure that was intended. Also, I ended up just attacking the body every time. Is there a purpose to attacking other body parts first? I got pretty far just focusing in on the body.
The mechanic/idea here is beautiful though. Not to mention the music and art style. Very unique and enjoyable game. Thanks for making this!
Thanks for the review. Slay the Spire was extremely influential to me so it means a lot when people compare us to that game.
Regarding your notes: Yes that was intended. It is precisely to prevent people from simply shrinking down a particular part without a lot of thought. Though the execution should've been better, as it'd require pixel perfect mouse detection. The obvious limitation to that was the time constraint of the Jam.
Regarding the torso - I did try to design the body parts such that the most optimal strategy is not always going for the torso right away. A destroyed bodypart will not only reduce the torso's health by 20% of its max hp, but will reduce the overall attack of the enemy. I think in the early stages in the game, it's vital to keep your own health high so that you can get some of the attributes rolling. The game's balance is completely off though, there are cases where player can achieve infinite floors as they scale faster than enemies. So this is definitely a "solved game" (though very much unintended) with an optimal strat, but I don't think "always attack torso" is it.
Thanks again for the feedback and the opportunity to discuss game design in such an open arena :)
Wow this is really amazingly executed, this gives me slay the spire vibes but it fits the theme. Everything about it was perfect and amazingly fun to play. Amazing job!
Wow being compared to Slay the Spire is not something I anticipated. Big compliment; thank you very much!
This was extremely creative great take on the concept!
Awesome art style in this game! It would be nice to have a little prompting/tutorial, but the rhythm of the game is nice once you get into it.
Yeah you're right. We tried to hide it in the first level only, but it's not obvious enough that most people miss it. Thank you for the feedback.
I have two particular things I would look forward to if you continue development:
When focusing the same bodypart for decreasing size, it ends up making it really difficult to click for attack later, like the sprites dont match the hitbox exactly, so there is a large overlap of some other larger body part. Also there is no reason to target the legs for example, I just keep increasing either my sword or body, and decreasing the enemy head and torso, since killing those gets me the win, it would be nice gameplay-wise if for example removing the enemies legs gave you a turn-speed advantage or something like that.
Overall looks really nice, and more importantly is actually fun to play! Great job!
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah we realize the game requires pixel perfect mouse detection and apologize about the frustration that it creates; it's not there for the very obvious time constraints. As for the legs - there is actually a secret mechanism that's not disclosed - if you destroy legs, not only will that deal direct damage to the torso (like all other body parts), the enemy will also receive fall damage (albeit slow). But the balancing is pretty off so that the best strategy is likely just focusing on the torso majority of the time.
Maybe make it so that we can only attack the body once the shield is out of the way. I feel like the only strategy is to destroy the enemy's weapon and then their body. But still, a very great game in 96 hours!
Yep collision based attacks were planned but not implemented, for obvious time constraints. Thanks for the suggestion though!
Really well executed! Fun game to play, it was exciting to feel super powerful as I scaled myself up and the enemy down. I think the perk system was really fun, my only qualm is that timing the dice roll was a little bit difficult to pull off. I especially loved the fact that the physical size of the enemy mattered: I scaled an enemy's head down too far, and then I couldn't hit it until I scaled its helmet down to match. Really well-done game!
The game has an interesting idea and I kinda liked the power-ups. But I think it has some troubles with balanacing (Or I'm just casual XD) cause strategy called Me buff weapon, me bonk hard was working really good. Anyways, good concept!
Very enjoyable and nice aesthetics, though there's not too much strategy as shrinking the enemy body and growing your own seems to always be the best option.
This was fantastic! Loved how it had the puppet show art style to it. I thought progression was super slick. The core gameplay was simple, but not bad. The style carried it though, really fabulous stuff.
Very creative and fun game! I thought there was only one specific strategy and then it forced me to rethink how I played. Great job! I'm curious, is there ever a reason to not roll the dice first before attacking?
I do not think as is there is a case where its better to attack first in the current state of the game. However the features are there for a creature design for such situation. For example, the eye of the boss is actually a weak point that deals massive direct damage to its Body. If the weak point is hidden behind something you can finish this turn, itd better to attack the protecting part, then go for the weak point next turn.
Great question!
That was very creative, with a very unique art style and... incredibly fun and downright hilarious, I can see this grow into a succesful title.
Definitely deserves the spotlight 5/5/5