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Circus Tesserae's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #68 | 4.138 | 4.138 |
| Creativity | #107 | 4.190 | 4.190 |
| Overall | #132 | 4.086 | 4.086 |
| Presentation | #581 | 3.931 | 3.931 |
Ranked from 58 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?
You juggle dice to get them into the right orientation, and each time a level resets it has random starting conditions
Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?
Yes
We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam
Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?
No
We used pre-existing audio
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Comments
Very cool idea and fun game play! Has the "just one more try" vibe in spades!! Especially bc it is actually quite hard! Great game!
Cool and funny game!!! Well done!
Cool concept and theme implementation. A lot of fun and very nice for a 48-hour jam! Awesome work!
I played the core loop and it was a lot of fun! The idea is simple and fruit-ninja-esque. I managed to get some die stuck on eachother, which gave me extra time. The art style is wonderful and the game seems to be incredibly polished. Wonderful job.
Definitely see the Fruit Ninja inspiration. An interesting concept and matches the jam theme very well, but I think after about 15 levels I was about at the limit of how much I was enjoying the core loop. Still, very well done, sounded and looked great!
This game is so cool, great take on the theme, while being a very interesting fruit ninja twist, I really love it ! And you added so many secondary features that keep the game fresh all along the levels, that's really awesome !
This one really made me chuckle, it's cheeky and very, very fun! I like the aesthetics a lot! I suppose the only thing I could complain is that I did not understand when did bombs really collide with the dice, maybe a better hint of depth could help? Sometimes it seemed it would hit but it didn't (and it was a relief actually).
Also, kudos for including the accessibility mode of coloring the dice, really helpful for color blind people.
Thanks, glad you liked it!
The bombs don't actually collide with the dice, they only explode if you swipe one. That's probably something that could be conveyed better.
This was an awesome experience. I enjoyed playing it through. Had a lot of fun finishing all the levels. A great use of 2D resources on what felt like an entirely 3D game. Great work :)
Thanks!
The physics are all 2D, but the logic for figuring out dice orientation is actually 3D - the code has no idea which face is which, it calculates it on the fly by checking the 3D object's orientation and seeing which axis is pointing away from the screen. Similarly, for rotating the dice it does a 3D rotation toward the axis closest to the swiped direction.
That's cool. I used the same logic with the axes to check the side facing up in my game. I used the forward axis of the object and checked it with the global forward axis and mapped them to the sides.
Congrats on finishing your game for the jam!
This game feels very polished and cohesive, well done! I really liked how your levels went about teaching the game by slowly introducing new concepts and then ramping them up before integrating them with the rest of the game. That's a great formula to follow.
I encountered a weird interaction in which a correctly faced die landed on top of another already landed die. It didn't count as a win, but I had to turn its face to get it off the die. Did you try having stacked dice count as landed? Thematically, it would make sense since the die is no longer in motion, but I can see how that might also make levels with 3 or more dice a little more difficult and could lead to some feelsbad fail states.
I also really liked the emergent strategies I discovered as I played, especially on barrel levels. I found I felt clever being able to spin a die into a wall to give more control. This of course comes at the expense of time, so it felt appropriately balanced.
Overall, super well done on this. Feels good, plays good, is good. Keep making games!
Thanks so much!
I want to try redoing the tutorial, not in terms of content but in terms of conveying things to the player. I think it's a pretty good ramp up in terms of introducing rules and difficulty, but I'm unsure how I could go about instructing the player without a text dump at the beginning of each level. I tried to keep the text minimal and give it a bit of flair, but wondering how I could make it more accessible by limiting it more or adding better in game hints about how things work.
I know exactly what you're talking about with stacking dice, and I'm honestly torn on solving it or not. It feels like a funny troll to me when it happens so I'm tempted to leave it in. It's similar to a physics quirk with the barrels - often you can get a die to land on an edge and it'll just barely have enough force to make it fall into the barrel correctly giving you a tense "will it or won't it" feeling. I have thought about going down 1 of 3 other paths for the stacked dice: have it count as a success if it's valid, give it a nudge so it falls off instead of just sitting still, or add specific levels that are about stacking dice in a proper order. I definitely don't want to have it count as a fail in the normal case, as it would likely lead more to frustration as you described.
I was originally annoyed that you could cheese the barrel/bomb levels by spinning the dice in the corners, but I think if I sped up the spawn timer that would help balance it out a bit without removing the strategy there.
Could you change the top side of the collider of a grounded die to be slightly curved/convex and lower the friction to near zero so that a die naturally slides off if it happens to land on it? Might be way more trouble than its worth try in a jam game
I should be able to do something like that - I'm thinking I'll just set add a specific collider for die on die collisions that's either a sphere or a rounded square.
I honestly think with a few quality of life updates, and more content, you could just throw this up on the app store as-is! Great job! Played at https://twitch.tv/hedgein <3
Thanks so much! I missed the stream where you got to play it unfortunately, but glad you liked it :)
What kind of qol things would you look for? I know I want to tweak the menus and tutorial buttons, but curious what other problems you ran into.
There is indeed a vod on my channel, although you may have to search for where I play it! In terms of QoL things, I would say tweaking the swiping mechanic with lots of testing! I think there were a couple times where it felt inaccurate or it went the opposite direction I expected (although this could be because I as the player was inaccurate). Of course, do more extensive play tests to see if this is the case and refine it as needed! Other than that and UI stuff, add more content and I would totally download this game on the app store!
Really fun concept and gameplay! The dice were a little stiff and unresponsive with mouse controls, but it seems like it was designed for mobile so I assume it works better there. Also props for making a mobile game, don't see those very often in jams
Thanks! I'm curious what you mean by stiff, wondering if it's something to tweak or more something that's unclear. I know it doesn't play well with a trackpad, but I was mainly testing with a normal mouse while developing. Did it feel like you were missing with your swipes, or more that the die would rotate to an unexpected side causing you to have to swipe additional times? Also, were you swiping through the die, or clicking on it and then dragging out of it?
I was clicking and dragging, swiping through it worked a lot better. Sorry about that. But if it helps, sometimes clicking and dragging just wouldn't move the die very much.
No worries at all! I think that's something I should have conveyed better in game, and the game should definitely handle clicking directly on a die better too. Thanks for the clarity :)
Huh very good concept and gameart I would admit. Bte could you pls checkout my game if u dont mind?
I really was hooked by this game and really wanted to finish it!
The only level I didn't try too much is when you have too many dices, too hard :(.
Everything else? I was back to being a kid playing a game, raging against that unfair game that hates me, then truely proud of myself as if I was the only one that could ever finish this because-i-m-too-good.
I really liked play this game, well done for the atmosphere! Congrats!
(If you want to see me play again, here it is : https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1537297068?t=1h48m5s))
Thanks so much for all the kind words :) I'm glad I kept the difficulty as I did, I almost had it be a lot harder haha
Wow, this is hard!! Yet, the idea is great, to roll dice when it falls.
Maybe some delays between die falling could "defuse" the situation so that the increase in complexity can be managed by this delay. If one die starting to fall, the other one would fall only in in 0.5 or 1 second (in easy mode, for example).
A very good suggestion, I think I will do something like that once reviews close. I will say, you can swipe multiple dice at once and you don't have to release the mouse button to keep swiping, so that may help alleviate it a bit.
Glad you liked it :)
So so so clever, and you did so much variation in such a little time ! Just well done, this is amazing and really impressive. It could be out as a phone game just as it is !
Thanks! A goal to work towards haha
Wow this game was really fun, I'm not spending too much time on one game, but I can't stop playing this one! Great job!!! :)
Thank you so much!
Loved it! A wondergul set of minigames that develop on the same concept. Some of the levels seemed not to differ from each other, but I had fun playing all of them nonetheless! For some reason I reall love the fact that all dices always start in a wrong position, so you can't just not pay attention to some of them. Also, previewing dice numbers before starting the level really helps to plan your actions with multiple dice. The presentation is great! The game was lagging when I went fullscreen, but when I switched back to windowed, everything was great. Again, loved it!
I hear you on the repetition - I didn't want to increase the difficulty too quickly, but I think that lead to a bit more padding than is necessary. Glad you noticed the forced invalid orientations, that's the main reason none of the levels have six or more dice - since the goals are all random, there would be a chance to get one of each number and then there'd be no invalid starting orientations.
Really cool concept, tried it on mobile, but it often had a late input response time. Handeling 1 dice was managable, but 2 or more became a nightmare. Maybe this is not on every phone, but this was my experience. I guess that if I played it on pc (which I can't right now), it would have been a nice experience. It looks really polished!
That's a shame, it works on the handful of phones I've tested. When you're back on your computer you should give it a try there, it plays just fine with a mouse.
I really loved this one. Well made, super polished, everything is really consistent. Def one of my favorites so far. Good Job.
This game seemed simple at first, but once it gets to multiple dice and stuff, it's crazy and pretty fun.
It's like next-level fruit ninja
nice game!