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A jam submission

Roll or DieView game page

Subtitle: A Good Day to Die (Hard)
Submitted by kylewoodger — 1 hour, 24 minutes before the deadline
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Roll or Die's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Presentation#32562.5843.222
Enjoyment#34402.3162.889
Overall#34542.4943.111
Creativity#34632.5843.222

Ranked from 9 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?
It's a tower defence game where you throw dice that become towers!

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?

Yes

We created the vast majority of the music during the game jam

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

This is a nice jam game, the controls are intuitive and there's a lot of little details. It's a really interesting idea to mix randomness and die rolling with a tower defense, but I think there is some tension in the mechanics and the game design could use another iteration or two to make it really tight:

  • A lot of TD games let you keep the same towers to compensate for the increasing difficulty. I think being able to keep dice kind of compensates for this, but it was hard for me to judge whether the dice I already rolled will be enough to defeat the current wave or not. The "standard' TD approach makes this easier for me personally, because if I destroy all the enemies early I know I have enough towers and can save up for something more expensive (for example).
  • Not being able to chose the position OR type of the tower is a very unique mechanic, but I think something in the design is missing to balance it out. A lot of the interesting gameplay in TDs comes from strategizing about where to put towers (for example, putting a freeze tower before a short range but high damage tower), and that type of decision doesn't really exist in the current design. I think if you rolled the dice first to see their type and then dropped them into the level (and replaced falling die with a crate or something?) it could add an interesting strategic element without changing the gameplay much. It would also make the precision dice way more valuable, and maybe you could even make the player chose between 3 normal die and 1 precision die (or something) each round.
  • I ran into a game balance issue around level 3 or 4, one type of tower (that shoots grey blobs) actually was shooting projectiles that went slower than the enemies. This made the tower essentially useless based on where it landed, and on the next level I rolled all grey blob towers and lost. These kinds of balance issues are super common in jam games though, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
  • I also found a bug where my die rolled off the table into the white void, never to be seen again.

I'm not sure if you're planning to release a post-jam version, but I think you've got the core of a really fresh take on the TD genre. I really did like the game, I promise!

Developer(+1)

Wow, thanks so much! This is amazing feedback and I totally agree! Initially we had planned for the player to be able to swap the positions of towers that had been placed and also have a rare dice that let you choose which tower it would turn into, but unfortunately we just didn't have time to implement that stuff. We were honestly still looking for ways to give the player a little more agency and I think the idea of rolling before placing the tower is a great solution to that problem. 

Thanks so much for playing and taking the time to give such detailed and constructive feedback, it's really appreciated!

Submitted(+2)

Awesome game. Love the isometric art!

Developer

Thanks! We're pretty happy with what we managed to make!