Play game
Dice Knight's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Presentation | #3701 | 2.400 | 3.667 |
Overall | #4622 | 2.000 | 3.056 |
Creativity | #4798 | 1.964 | 3.000 |
Enjoyment | #5100 | 1.637 | 2.500 |
Ranked from 6 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?
Dice rolling is combat
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
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
I like the concept, but the combos are very specific and too many to keep track of :(
Congrats on the entry, though!
Here go quite a mouthful of observations written on the fly! Not necessarily ordered enough, but I think it makes sense.
----------
Things I like:
Spoilers: the swelling of the ‘slime’ makes me think of the bosses from Yoshi’s Island. :) And the two-guy enemy has me thinking of a duo boss from Kirby’s Dream Land. And their side-switching that matches their current bonus is another nice detail.
Observations + suggestions:
The ideal to teach complex mechanics is to have a progressive tutorial, but of course, this can be hard to set up in a short game jam context; trust me, I know, that’s why I do it partly the way you do! X) But also partly through IMPLICIT tutorial levels. I think it’s a cunning game design idea to have the player learn things without going out of your way to teach him.
I think this was confirmed right in the very first battle for me: I had trouble remembering how everything worked precisely. Everything, except maybe some sparse combinations, but I remembered perfectly the four types (because it is visual thanks to colour, and simple). So I think a good strategy to help the player understand what is going on would be to gradually introduce more types and combinations as he progresses through battles, or even through the turns of a battle. Or an explicit tutorial battle would have helped.
Right after defeating the slime, I launched a second instance of the game to read the second page of the tutorial once more. Actually, this gives me another idea: you could have also simply let an in-game button allow the player to access the combination list at any point! Because my way of playing and reading amounted to this.
I also think that a BIG in-game help would be to have something (such as text) signal explicitly what the dice roll has just produced. (Things like "Debuf!", "Defense+!", and so on.) I know there are numbered indicators, but it is still a bit hard for me to get the action. Eventually, it sinked in partially.
By the way, props to you for the mouth-made sound, the ‘chiiiing’ had me heartily laughing (and I mean that in a good way). XD For the record, I did the same quite recently for aquatic bubbles in a previous game (for Mini Jam 109). I was then considering making ‘mouth music’, so maybe you could have done it (especially since there is four of you XD), in a Smooth-McGroovesque style of a cappella. ;)
I am not sure I saw the multiplicator die from page 3 in the game, but that may elude me.
I am also not sure I understood correctly when the sack is being drawn from, because it can happen when it is neither empty nor when I threw a (yellow) ‘draw’ die. I only understood very close to the end that you can also throw single dice… XD I thought you could only throw combinations.
It occurs to me I may have had invisible super dice, but could not… So the game may be more beatable than it seemed to me. Anyway, I wonder whether the last phase is buggy or not, because it seemed that the bonuses and penalties I cast were occaionally immediately thrown away, contrary to what happened during the first phase!
I am sympathetic to the game, its concept and its style, but I just spot that it may be lacking in the educational side. Enhance this, and the game will really gain something in my opinion. It is surely easier to remember all the rules when playing for some time, but as a ‘game jam minigame’, this is somewhat tough.
(My comment is meant as a constructive one, once again, I like the game and will even give it good marks! :) The concept is great.)
By the way, thanks for warning about the bug and how to deflect it, as I would have been stuck midway through the last battle otherwise!
Alas, trying once more, I stumble upon a blocking bug: I have exactly zero dice, and apparently none invisible, which means I would have to restart the game again!! ._. I am interested in knowing what happens at the end, so if you could tell me… Rarely have had luck at games of chance; this dice theme rolls against me! XD
(Spoiler, sorry)
Thanks for the thorough review and the suggestions! There was a lot that we still wanted to do, like making a button to see the combination list while in game and making a kind of tutorial enemy like you suggested, but we ran out of time in the end. There's definitely some things we can take from your suggestions to improve for our next game jam. I think it would be really funny to make accapella background music for a future game. Maybe next year :)
As for how the sack works, it draws 4 dice every turn by default. The sack only refills once it reaches 0 dice. So if your draw count is higher than the number of dice in the sack it won't draw any extra dice. In these cases draw dice don't really have any effect. We should've explained this better in the tutorial page.
Regarding how the enemy's actions are determined. It depends on the type of enemy, but it is basically pseudo-random, yes. Initially we wanted the enemies to use dice as well but we already had too many things on our plate.
For the difficulty balance we did want the last enemy to be challenging. Initially the person that was working on the enemies had made them even stronger, but when we playtested it we quickly asked him to nerf them, because he had made them way too strong. Maybe we should have nerfed them a bit more XD
SPOILER: As for what the ending of the game looks like. It's just the map with a "victory" text on top of it:![](https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzk1ODY2NDIucG5n/original/jWYsds.png)
Thanks for playing the game and the review!
Thank you for the details! :)
Be sure to notify me when this happens. XD
I liked it! Fun & Short game
Heads up if you're playing! Gameplay bug: Dice gained from the reward buttons at the end of a battle may be invisible (you'll see an empty space between dice), but can still be used. Just drag and drop the empty space in one of the dice slots like any other die and it should work.