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Dice King Journey's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Creativity | #196 | 4.047 | 4.047 |
Overall | #259 | 3.903 | 3.903 |
Presentation | #275 | 4.217 | 4.217 |
Enjoyment | #717 | 3.443 | 3.443 |
Ranked from 106 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 shape of the dice and the numbers on its faces inspired us to create a unique control scheme for platform game. The side of the cube that the hero lands on when spawning determines even the forward button, making every attempt randomly different.
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
The idea is really good, I think it's perfect for a game jam. I wouldn't want to play a full game like this though xD
Very nice idea! I love how you didn't use "randomness" in your concept, and the player actualy HAVE controll on what's going on. It's hard, but the fact that player can control the game, is the best part for me after so many "randome" games))
The visual is nice too, simple and stylish. Good job!
Great concept! The theme implementation is really cool... The Kenney assets are really great (I used his audio packs for my game) The game/puzzles are fun and the game looks really good! Well done!
Really interesting and unique game design, a breath of fresh air among the other dice puzzlers. The game is quite hard and takes awhile to get use to the controls, but still fun nonetheless! The dice step preview is really helpful as well, but sometimes it can get covered by the level decorations itself.
Would love if you can check out my game too. Thanks!
This is such a unique take on the theme! When I read the description it sounded really confusing - but it's not so difficult to play and genuinely very fun!
Everybody loves Kenny art assets - they look so pro!
Also the game page design is the best I've seen so far. Can I ask how you got the image to appear under the play game thingo? My team just has a black background for that.
I appreciate the ghost of the numbers near the dice - also I never knew opposite sides of a dice add to seven?
Probably will see this game in a highlights reel!
Thank you so much for this wholesomeness of a feedback <3
Kenny art assets is a life saver for sure! Helped us a lot to focus on other things like level design, definitely a must have for anyone going into casual style 3D!
Thanks for the appreciation of the game page :3 We did tried our best! Yours looks very good too!
The thing under the play game thingo is an "Embed BG". You can find it at the very bottom of the "Edit theme" side panel. If it matches your Embed game resolution (you can configure it in Edit game menu) — then you can have some fun with creating cover art for it too! I would recommend making a screenshot of your game page to locate the Play button correctly first. And don't forget to tweak the Edit theme settings for the Embed BG as you put it in, as the art can be hidden behind the gradient by default. We turned all the settings down and designed the Embed to fit. Hope this helps!
The true d6 dice always have 1-6, 2-5 and 3-4 on the opposite sides of each other, yes! This random fact sparked our imagination to find a way of using it as a game mechanic. A lot of folks don't quite like the pressure of constantly calculating the hidden faces of the dice, but we thought it can be quite fun! Very happy that you liked it!
The movement was original and frankly very fun! The levels are designed wonderfully and keep you engaged.
If I had to list a negative it would be that the Inputs, if pressed too quickly, are ignored and you end up falling to your death.
Also, not sure if this is a bug, but if you press the jump button right at the apex of you jump you can double jump sometimes. I'm guessing that you are using the player speed for your grounded check, and since there is a split second right before the die starts falling where it's velocity is at zero, you are able to double jump. May be something else though.
All in all, very enjoyable! Ended up playing for over 20 minutes.
Thank you very much for all the kind words! Very happy that you liked it!
You are the first person to mention the repro for the double jump and we cannot say how grateful are we right know. We spotted it here and there, but couldn’t reproduce it consistently. We are definitely going to fix that in post-jam update.
The thing with quick inputs is our “best we can do fast” way of making the grid system. You cannot move mid-animation. The window for not getting inputs is small but it is annoying, especially for speedrun intentions. It will require rewriting some of our core, but we will fix that too. Tbh already figuring out the best approach to it.
Thanks for taking your time and effort (20 min is waaaay above average session length for our experimental controls, heh) to play the game and also pointing out crucial movement flaws. That really means a lot to us.
Additional love rays from our programmer <3.
Hope you enjoyed the ride!
My suggestion to fix the Input problem:
Let's say you want to move like 1-2-4. If all 3 Inputs are pressed in quick succession, I'd only store the 2, check if there is a stored Input and move the die accordingly after the animation ends. The 4 is lost to avoid the player from chaining to many Inputs. You'd have to be careful not to accidentally store the 1, but that should be a pretty simple fix.
Happy to hear about the post jam update, I'll be looking forward to it!
Yes, this is a great way to solve the problem, thanks. I think we will make the movement a command that can be successfully processed or not. Each command, depending on the type, will check its conditions (movement conditions), and stop the command execution flow in case of failure. I agree with you that you should not save the entire input, but limit it to two commands. This is a useful note, thank you very much )
Visually a very good game and I understood the idea really well, I just had a difficult time actually controlling. Was still entertaining though! The only bug I actually had was turning down the SFX didn't seem to work for all sounds? Good job overall though! -Kaylee
Thanks for your feedback, Kaylee!
Yeah, the whole SFX thing in gameplay is kinda weird right now. We mentioned it in the Known issues section. We are gonna fix that by reworking all the audio system inside the game, accessibility is one of the key priorities for us and our noisy uncontrollable SFX really don’t help with that.
We are happy that you found our game entertaining! Thank you!!
Presentation is very good! I loved the graphics, the juice and the sound. Not sure if control scheme complexity adds anything to the gameplay though. It’s original, but doesn’t lead to interesting puzzles? Might be wrong, sorry
We never tried to make a puzzle game. Our initial design intention is the grid based classic platform game from the early days of the genre, but with a spin on familiar platform games controls, changing the perception of a levels and making a challenge on even a simple straight line walking.
Thanks for your feedback, hope you will enjoy our post-jam version, we will try to make FTUE less of a challenge and add some simple puzzle game mechanics to support the initial design decisions!
You certainly achieved your goal then—walking was hard :) looking forward to post-jam version!
Pretty nice game! The art is really good and the music & sfx are nice additions. The music though tends to get very annoying after a bit due to the very short loop time. If you're using a song that's going to be looped over and over you tend to want to extend it a bunch before it loops. If its being listened to for a bit a 1 min loop is fine, more than that and you want it to last 2 - 3 minutes (or above if you're making ambient music and its in the background for hours). It needs to be long enough where people cant pick out the patterns in it immediately. Also something for post jam would be adding stuff like randomly playing wind sounds and other misc ambient noises to add differences in the track on each loop.
The pick up coin sfx (and jumping sfx) is also way too loud compared to everything else. The number to move tended to be very annoying more than anything but that may just be me talking as a speedrunner. The jumping mechanic is a really nice touch although it took me a bit to discover it and I only did by spamming everything on my keyboard to try to get through the wall.
I guess our nice additions need a
big chunkylittle rework, huh :)Thanks for your feedback! We will punish our SFX and music guy for poor work (it is actually me and I’m kinda scared now) and lock him in the room with no AC until he makes it good…
Talking more seriously — sure, we are considering the total rework for SFX organisation in the project. That will solve some other problems and also fix the mixing. Your points really helped in getting the priorities right.
All the music stuff takes a little more time than I had in this jam, juggling more than I can handle. Kinda sad that the music didn’t get our full attention during the developing. Could do better. But didn’t. And it is sad. But now we have more time and I’ll get my hands on the proper OST as soon as I can.
Thank you for the great feedback!
Nicely done! Congrats on finishing your game in 48 hours.
Your core concept here is very nicely executed. The dot shadows are super helpful for helping teach the player how to move in this world.
I only played two levels. I thought I was getting most of the coins but didn't realize there wasn't a difference between the checkpoint flags and the end level flag, so I missed a few that felt a little unfair.
Ultimately, I think there's a little too much content here for what the player can do. Even after two long levels, the movement got tedious and lost its charm. Having shorter levels or even just two levels would have felt a bit more satisfying I think.
Still, y'all made a super cool game in just 48 hours. Controls well, looks and sounds good. Well done. Keep making cool games!
Oh that game can be very frustrating at times. But its not the fault of any mechanics but just me having to get used to the controls. It kinda replicates the feeling of these early 2000s learn how to type games xD
Now my fully professional analysis:
The stages were well designed and straight forward. The aesthetics were clean but sometimes you couldnt really see on which height a coin was hovering (maybe add a shadow beneath or something). The little details in the levels didnt go unnoticed and were a nice touch. I found the sound to be a bit grading and getting repetetive after a while. The difficulty is perhaps very subjective but it was hard to me (which is not a negative) and i really appreciated the checkpoints. I think to a fully top contender it lacks a cool secondary mechanic or depth in the main one. Sure you could "roll" over a few air tiles at once but thats it - the rest is pretty much the same actions in different settings.
I think it is really good for what it sets out to do. I just wish there was a bit more depth to challenge the player other than just being good with the controls.
But anyway good job - cool idea and pretty much content for just 48 hours!
We are tried our best to bring the feeling of learning how to walk again through our game. It was our initial tweak to the platform game genre — to try to connect a simple platform gameplay and a constantly changing controls. When even your "walk forward" intention is challenged by a little puzzle before every move. We are actually quite grateful, that some folks found it engaging and fun.
We are very sorry to hear that it gave you that much frustration and lack of any other challenge that you would find satisfying enough. And thanks for pointing out various problems in our game. As our scope grew during Jam hours, we didn't manage to cover all bases. But as we decided to continue developing the game — your points are now our bullet points. Thanks for your feedback!
A good looking and sounding game with a unique and interesting mechanic
We had really similar ideas!! I think great mind think alike!
Great game!
I really like the presentation and your creative perspective! This is for sure a top 5%.
I am proud of you!
feedback: My only criticism would be that this game is "hard". Not hard in a level design way, but hard for beginners to grasp the unique movement scheme and this particularly makes me feel a bit miserable 😪. Without any game feedback (like a timer or enemies that I can outrun), I felt like I was the dumbest person in the world as I struggled with the first level with my drunk movement. Maybe this was your intention with your design approach, that's fine if that's the case, but this will probably disappoint a share of your players. To put it simply, I think games with hard controls aren't for everyone. 🤷♂️
Thanks for the kind words!
We have a lot of plans on making FTUE and controls easier to get, but unfortunately we didn't playtest it enough to really find this problem when developing. This is definitely in our "have to do it better" list now, thanks for a very precise feedback!
Very enjoyable game! I like the mechanic that you can roll while in the air to jump gaps. The audio loop is a little short and gets repetitive fast, but overall this is a really strong entry!
Thank you very much for your feedback!
I had similar idea but decided to do different game and then I was really happy when I saw this game on discord and wanted to play it so bad :)
It is good looking and really chill game. There is no need to rush and I like that a lot. BTW sometimes it happen to me that "dice shadow" showed me wrong value so it confused me for a while. But it is not that big issue, later it was much faster to not look at them :D Very good job with jump implementation and curved jump, very smart. I can see there is a big potential to do speed runs.
Thank you for nice player experience!
Thank you! Very glad you liked the game!
We will double check
and punishour cheesy shadow so it won't lie anymore, but unfortunately only in post-jam update.About speedruns — that is definitely a direction we want to explore a lot more in a future updates. Starting out with more advanced timer and fixing small lock for inputs in-between movement animations. It would be cool to have a global record board too. Can't wait already!
Thanks for your feedback!
I'm looking forward to it :)
BTW don't punish the shadow too much please, it`s trying its best. Some reckless player wants to move towards the wall... couldn't have expected that.
It is too wholesome, shadow is officially spared <3
I think numpad would have helped a bit to get over the .. unique controls. Still it is well presented! Great work!
You can already control the character with the buttons from NumPad! Give it a try! Just don't forget to toggle (or untoggle) your NumLock button.
I personally prefer the usual 123456 buttons above the QWERTY, as you can lay your fingers on all of the buttons at once — with NumPad buttons it is a bit trickier (at least for me). But one of our game designers is actually prefers NumPad buttons. Fortunately, you can try it both ways and decide for yourself ^^
Thanks for your feedback!
Yeah I probably could if I had a numpad :DD
Love the cute art choice! Definitely one of the more unique entry for the jam. Enjoyed the mind-bending controls, good work!
Very unique mechanic and super fun to play! Difficulty progression was just right for me. Also the little hints on the ground and suggestion that number on opposite sides add up to 7 really helped getting good at this game and making it to the end! Amazing job!
Thanks for coming to my stream! Here's a recording in case you'd like to refer to it
Thank you very much once again for playing our game on stream from start to finish!
You are truly a legend. And those mastered double-jumps... *chief's kiss*
Also thanks for the great feedback! We are planning to continue developing our game, and will definitely learn from your playthrough on how to fix some not so good level-design stuff you've stumbled upon! Your streams are very educational and your passion for every game you play is truly incredible. Keep up the good work!
Really polished entry. It might drive me insane though!
We kindly hope that's a love-hate relationship and not a hate-hate one <3