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Count Your Steps's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #1568 | 3.296 | 3.900 |
| Enjoyment | #1569 | 3.043 | 3.600 |
| Overall | #1920 | 3.071 | 3.633 |
| Presentation | #2597 | 2.874 | 3.400 |
Ranked from 10 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?
The player controlls a die which rolls around.
Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?
No
We used pre-existing art
Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?
Yes
We created the vast majority of the music during the game jam
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Comments
I've already played two other games with very similar concepts though I think that this is the best out of the three. The game is quite well polished. The level design is good for the most part. One issue that I do have is that sometimes the tiles to alter the number of moves can give away the answer. That said, those tiles were part of what made this game so great. Well done on this one.
Very well made game. It's fun when the solution falls into my lap, which happened often in the early levels since my choices were limited, but finding that solution comes down to a lucky guess (a roll of the dice if you will) when the possibility space branches just a couple of times. The gameplay is essentially trial and error because it's not feasible to plan more than 1 step ahead. I don't feel like I have the ability to find the solution through thinking alone.
The sound effects add a nice emphasis to the steps. Makes me wonder if there are more "mnemonic" melodies or rhythms that can be associated with each number. Not explicitly suggesting this but an anecdote that comes to mind is the idea of rhythmic solfege, which associates different sequences of syllables with different rhythms (say "ta-ki-ta" for triplets or "ta-ka-di-mi" for a group of 4 notes, etc.) A melodic approach might be:
Or maybe there is a pre-programmed song in the steps and the player essentially controls the pacing of it through the act of walking to the goal, which would add some tension and release to the gameplay, increasing the satisfaction of reaching the goal. Anyway, neat submission.
Agreed, I was actually thinking of, after the jam, making it some sort of different melody. Gotta experiment with some things, see what works. And yeah, come up with a way to better communicate what number you'll land on after moving. It's technically possible, just very difficult rn.
Really clever yet simple, both the sound effect and the gameplay. Awesome !
This is exactly the sort of game that I was hoping for when I read that the theme was "roll of the dice"! I love puzzle games where you have to figure out routings and there's modifiers to movements/placements so you can't just trace the easiest path all the time; the use of the faces for the number of tiles moved was wonderful because of how easy it communicates that important bit of information within the game instead of needing a tutorial! Most of my complaints are regarding it being too short (when I beat the last level I just sat still for a few seconds, going, "Wait... that's it? NO! I wanted more! q-q"), the first few levels being a bit too simplistic even for tutorial levels (but I'm an old grognard and comparing to when I was a kid, not kids nowadays, so may be being too harsh there?), and that the tiles/pads that modify distances don't have any visual differentiation other than just the + or - beside a number; some way to tell them apart more easily visually would be appreciated, with a mono-colour scheme like currently exists being something used in a challenge mode perhaps?
I absolutely LOVED that you could finish some levels without using all the pads, too, so while some were "figure out the exact pattern you need to move in", others were, "try to find the solution on your own", so it never got stale and always felt fresh changing between the map types. I also really liked the harp-like sounds used when moving, and how each face had subtly different notes from each other, too. Just all in all, very fun. I really hope you decide to take this game and fiddle with the visuals some, make it more your own thing, and expand on it greatly!
Thank you so much! Yes, I'm definitely planning on working on it more. I agree, I probably made the beginning a bit *too* simplistic. I wanted to compensate for the unnecessarily steep learning curve that jam games tend to have. There was stuff I would have added like different pad colors and more levels, but I decided to sacrifice quantity for the sake of a bit of polish and personal sanity. Still, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!
The choice to sacrifice quantity for polish *really* worked out well for you! I'll never look negatively at someone putting effort into polish over just dumping more content out, frankly... I just wanted more to play, which to me means you did a damn fine job of making an interesting gameplay loop!
Clever and fun!
I enjoyed the visuals, although I think that some sort of more stylized... style might've worked better [perhaps using a sort of cell-shaded shader] as the textures did look a little cheap. I enjoyed the notes that played when the dice rolled, although I think that sometimes the note was double played when dying, which was a bit jarring. The UI was simple, but quite effective, I liked that you had scaling for different resolutions and a fullscreen option - just some good ol' QOL features, which are often missing from gamejam submissions.
The main mechanic was clever and quite intuitive, and I enjoyed the puzzles, however I often had to resort to just guessing, as I often just didn't know what side I would land on because I don't have the numbers on a dice memorised; perhaps allowing the player to rotate the camera, or to have a floating cube model which you can rotate and look at all the different sides without having to guess would greatly improve this game's fun factor as it would allow for the player to actually thinking about their movements. Regarding the difficulty curve, it felt like lvl 3 should've probably been the final level, as, at least to me, it seemed like the toughest one with a lot of ways to fail and it and it also felt quite unique and different from the other levels, with it being so compact. I did also feel a little cheated when I worked out a solution and ended up not using half the addition/subtraction pads, although I do understand that they server a purpose as just showing only the needed pads would make the solution quite obvious - a not so easy solution to implement would be to focus more on non-pad levels and just designing the tiles in a more tight way, but I do understand that that is easier said than done.
Overall I really enjoyed this! Thanks for making this, and good luck on the jam, I hope you get somewhere high!
Very much appreciated! Stylization might work pretty well. I know the die textures had some issues, mainly because I baked them from Blender at 1024p when I probably should have done 2048p. Level 3, though? The one that introduces the addition pads? Interesting. I'd be quite interested in hearing more about the difficulty of each level and what you thought.
And yes, it can be difficult to figure out what the next number the die will land on is. I've been working on finding a solution to that. Possibly rotating the camera, possibly something else. And yeah, in the future I might rework the die sounds. I did come to like how it made familiar little songs for the solutions during playtesting.
But thanks for your kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I actually meant to say lvl 7, the one that is just a 4x5 rectangle with a lot of pads, not sure why I said 3 (maybe the third to last?); I felt like this was the hardest level in the game, as I always thought that one of the solving moves would kill me, but was instead the solution, whereas I did die a few times on the last level, but I ended up figuring it out quite quickly. I think that otherwise the difficulty scaling works pretty well, its just that the last few levels seem a little misaligned
Okay, that's very good to know, thanks! That is one of the biggest problems with game jams. Making sure the difficulty curve is smooth enough while always knowing the solution.
My first thought to mitigating this would be to ask some friends beforehand if they could playtest a version of your game without all the polished stuff just to see how the level design and difficulty curve are. Of course this is easier to say than to do, but I think its worth a shot in the future :)
Yeah, definitely going to test the difficulty curve more thoroughly in the future. It's just difficult to take the time to do that in the middle of doing bug testing and feature and content implementation. But thanks!
This was really fun! It really made me think on the third level. Sounds are satisfying and the concept is really good. I just wish you were able to see which side on the dice you'd end up with after moving. Great game!
Pretty cool gimmick, all things considered. I may have stumbled onto the solution after just guessing random directions and hoping it worked, but this is still a pretty fun puzzle game.
Thanks! Yeah, that's a change I should make if I want to update after the jam. Some way for the player to have more information so they can properly solve the puzzles.
This feels like it could be an addictive mobile game everyone plays on the subway. The puzzle are brilliant and it fits perfectly into the dice theme. I might show my SO this game!