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A jam submission

Snake Eye SagaView game page

A roguelike turn-based RPG with crazy dice-rolling mechanics!
Submitted by Potato Sack Games, gammagoat, BackAt50Ft (@KyleTheCoder), Deas, Kaishido (@kaishido452) — 1 hour, 58 minutes before the deadline
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Snake Eye Saga's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Accessibility#13.7223.722
Overall#43.9443.944
Graphics#54.6114.611
Controls#73.8893.889
Originality#134.1674.167
Audio#143.8333.833
Fun#183.8893.889
Theme#723.5003.500

Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Godot Version
4.3dev5

Wildcards Used
Wah wah wahhh, Hardcore

Game Description
A roguelike turn-based RPG with crazy dice-rolling mechanics!

How does your game tie into the theme?
Use resources found from treasure and enemy loot drops to spend at the forge! Forging allows you to add new abilities to your dice, by adding elements or changing out the face type entirely.

Source(s)
N/A

Discord Username(s)
gammagoat, backat50ft, kaishido, itscasekun, lindsaylikesthesaxophone

Participation Level (GWJ Only)
15+

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Comments

Submitted(+3)

Awesome graphics and a lot of content for such a small window of time, great job! The only thing I can suggest is that maybe the battles could be shorter, I kinda felt like I was just waiting for it to be finished instead of being engaging. Maybe some sort of mechanic so that lets you strategize more. But yeah you guys were really ambicious so I get that you couldn't have everything done. Good job on the submission!

Developer(+2)

Thanks a lot, really kind of you! And yes, I agree that the battles seemed a bit long. We didn't want the player to get so strong they just blew everything away in one go - what fun would that be? But early on, they take a little too long I think. We did plan on having a "dice tray" mechanic that took unused dice from a throw and put them in the tray for some kind of special power, but as you can imagine we did not get around to coding that aspect, as awesome as it sounds.

The strategy is to eventually forge enough combos onto your dice that you can take stuff down faster, but you probably wouldn't see that until much later in a normal game, which I think will likely be 2-3 maps, maybe 4. We certainly didn't have time to make that though during the jam. :)

Thanks again for the kind words!

Submitted(+4)

OOOH Super fun and I really like the game art and music!

Developer(+1)

Thanks, that means a lot to us! We are really proud of it.

Submitted(+4)

Really really fun, original, well-thought out, well-polished, good graphics and audio! The mechanics deserve five stars for originality.

Developer(+2)

Oh, thanks! That really means a lot to us! 

Submitted(+3)

Amazing game, loved the gameplay and graphics, the roguelike-type loop is fun, the one thing i wished was that a description of the Element would show up on screen when you hover on the icon during battle instead of having to open a separate screen for that

Developer(+2)

We actually wanted that too but couldn't design a tool tip that we liked. Thank you for playing!

Submitted(+4)

This is basically a complete full game!! The polish is insane. Feature-rich, and didnt even skimp on the UI design. Very very impressive. And you even got Heartbeast to playtest it!

Full marks for Art obviously. And there is even effort into character design (I liked the backstories). I ended up going with guitar lady as she looked super unique. The peripheral mechanics, like the element types and the boardgame-esque progression is right up my alley.

The forging mechanic seems really interesting and I would have liked to do it more. The path I chose, I only got 2 opportunities to do it. 

I was slightly confused with the forging outcome, despite me reading the instruction. I was pretty sure I added more elements to faces then eventually added. I think the desync here was that the currency was deducted on application, but there was still a need to press forge to confirm? I might have gotten this part mixed up. I feel like a "preview" which doesnt deduct currency may work better, with choices confirmed on forge.

Oddly, the part lacking most was the core mechanic of dice rolling without deeper interaction from the player. If there was a way for us to influence the outcomes besides rerolling, it will have a less deterministic and "on-rails" feel. Understand that there was some strategy to make sure you get even distribution of symbols on forge, but I had limited forge opportunities to cover all bases. Perhaps each character could have a way to change symbols in your favour (e.g. guitar girl can play a note to change the enemy's type to a type of your choice before the roll of that round etc.)

But overall, this is likely the most complete, polished package of the game jam for me!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for your detailed feedback! If we had another 3 days, we would've been able to implement ways to spend unmatchable dice differently. We wanted each character to have its own "dice tray ability" that would change how those dice were handled, whether it allowed healing, extra money, or converting 2 misses into a hit. Sadly we ran out of time for that, but we're gathering all this feedback because we might make a full game out of it! Thank you again!

Submitted(+4)

Very well produced game. 

The main mechanic wasn't fun for me, at all. There's no player agency, basically you roll and hope to get the correct symbol. It was wayyy too feast or famine. Either I get the correct roll, or I get nothing. 

Beside the game design issue, the game is very well made and impressive for a short gamejam. 

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks for playing! We wanted to include character-specific abilities for handling dice that weren't able to be used, but we ran out of time to implement it. I'm glad you took the time to play it even though you didn't care for it!

Developer(+1)

We genuinely appreciate feedback like this, so thank you! One thing to note, in addition to what Gamma has written, is that if the game was longer, you would really feel like you're starting to control the chaos/randomness by forging your dice however you want. As it was, we simply didn't have time to include more maps and such, as I had mistakenly made the map navigation much harder than it needed to be. Thank you for playing though even though you don't think it's for you - I fully understand, and if I didn't know I wanted to have it "eventual controlled chaos," I would be right there with you!

Submitted(+4)

Really great graphics and cool game play loop. I didn't quite figure out how to properly forge the dice - when dragging the icons, they sometimes stick, sometimes don't.

Great overall feel and congrats for making this in 9 days!

Developer

Thanks! The only reason I can think of for a value not sticking is the drop targets were too small. That's good to know and is feedback we'll take and use. 

Submitted (1 edit) (+4)

Great work for a jam! I finished the game (one act right?) with the Samurai. Didn't try out other characters. (You made a roguelike and have three characters!)

This game offers a unique forging experience. Thinking about how best to combine the dice symbols and elements, the game really comes alive in the forging cells. I really would have liked to have the element reference during forging, so I took a screenshot next time around, and was using that.

The difficulty curve is pleasant to work with: I wasn't daunted by the initial battles, but the later ones became more challenging, so good job there.

Some of the mechanics didn't work the way I thought they would. For example, when an attack is blocked, the special effect, like Dream still goes through. And the attack also counts towards Critical even if it's blocked? Maybe these are ok (although I feel they should get fully blocked). Just that I didn't expect it.

The "Bug" element is really cool in particular. I started "holding" a dice even if the symbol didn't match, because it counted towards the "Bug" bonus. This suggests there's good potential in the core design for even more mechanics.

The rerolls are helpful. Is there a (planned) economy to them? Or I can simply keep rerolling each time?

The symbols. All I understood now was that you have to match them. Is there a pattern to them depending on the enemy? Maybe that's something to think about.

When there are multiple enemies there's more matching happening initially, which is great. But as the enemy count goes down, there are more idle turns where nothing matches. The forging should address that to some extent, but still.

Some improvements to UX would surely help. (Not counting this as a minus or anything for this jam. It's already quite good. Just notes for future.) (1) The element reference as mentioned above. (2) Once I forge a die it's frozen, which is sort of ok. But I can't view it again for reference during forging, which is a pain. (3) Being able to view the progress map during forging.

You guys certainly have something here. And I can see in the notes here you're planning to expand this further. Wish you the best for that!

Developer (1 edit) (+2)

Thank you so much for the incredible feedback! We loved every bit of making this game! Lots of things slipped through the cracks during testing and development, and we had so many more ideas that we ran out of time to implement. One of those ideas was what we were referring to as "dice tray abilities," essentially things you could use the unconsumed dice for to help when you have incredibly bad RNG. I really wish we had been able to implement those, as we had so many ideas for them! We tried to have each enemy type correlate to the different symbols, but I ran out of time to properly balance it without drastically swinging the RNG even further. We definitely fell short on the UX a bit, and if we do continue this, we'll be focusing on the UX as a pillar of the design. Thank you again for playing!

Developer

In addition to Gamma's comment, I wanted to add that, as the Forge was my responsibility, I had a lot of trouble with how I'd originally coded the faces and the dice and stuff. Because of some issues with duplicating them (or not) when I needed to, what you saw with the Forge locking out the die after one change was due to one of those bugs, where if you selected the die a second time, it would not have the updated faces. That was found approximately five minutes before the end of the jam, and I was only barely able to upload a version with the lockout as a kind of fix. It was not fun. :P Of course, I also managed to upload an unrelated bug at the same time with a refactor I'd been doing, so we ended up having to fix that with a ticket to the admin team, because it was a showstopper at the time.


Thank you so much for the kind and thoughtful/constructive criticism. It is incredibly helpful to us, and inspiring. You may not always feel like it when giving a long response like that on the internet, but for many of us, it really does matter and really does help us try to do our best. Thanks again!

Submitted(+1)

No worries at all. Seeing the die unrolled flat in the forge with the forge UI really got me excited. With that bug, that was a cool fix. You have to make quick decisions like this in a jam, and atleast it works.

I actually played the Firefox version (since that's what I use), and am curious to know what the difference is to a "non-Firefox" version.

Developer (1 edit)

There's a bug in Firefox (if you want to call it that) where they won't support "Shared Buffer Arrays." I think it's actually a decision on their part because Shared Buffer Arrays can be a bit sketchy in terms of security. Chrome, however, supports them. In Itch, the problem is that you can't tell it to selectively pick whether or not to support Shared Buffer Arrays: you have a project that either supports it or not. I could have just uploaded a version without support for Shared Buffer Arrays that works in both Chrome and Firefox, but I prefer the higher fidelity audio that you get in Chrome (which is what I use) due to the Shared Buffer Arrays, so I tend to upload two different projects.

The reason this happens is Godot itself has the ability to do multithreading and it's an option you check when exporting, but if you check it, you have to have the Shared Buffer Array support, or it won't run in your page. So I have two web exports: one for with Threading and one without, and then upload to two different pages. Multithreading in web exports is used to make the audio fidelity much higher, with less crackling.

I'm genuinely glad to know people are taking advantage of that, though! Maybe in the future Itch will give us the option to autodetect via the browser choice, and have two different uploads depending on which is found.

Submitted(+1)

Ah ok. Didn't know about this multi-threading and audio fidelity. I'll keep this in mind. Thanks! Also glad there are devs who care about Firefox users!

Submitted(+3)

This is an incredible feat for such a short jam! Graphics are awesome, the mechanics are fun and I really appreciate the help/tutorial options at each stage. Super impressed by this one! If I had to give one piece of feedback it would be that I didn't really understand the overarching goal and what role the hybrid snake plays - I wanted to know more about that especially given the great character bios! Major kudos ^_^

Developer(+1)

The story was something we came up with just as a sort of way to pique interest, but I'm glad it worked well enough to think about what that goal might be! We only had time for one major section, so we didn't include any sort of actual story beats other that there's a boss that the playable characters are invested in defeating. Thank you so much for playing and for the feedback!

Submitted(+5)

Really awesome game. Great art, audio and cool dice combat. Really high quality considering the time period!

Submitted(+4)

I WANT MORE!!!  GREAT GAME :)

Submitted(+4)

The game gives an excellent RPG experience. And you made it in just a single week. This is something. Congratulations. Снимок экрана 2024-04-22 в 7.15.38 PM.png The music and graphics are very good. The Combat system is quite original. At Least I haven’t played anything like this before. At first, it looked puzzling. With one enemy, the combat was like an image matching in a game for children. But with a couple of more advanced enemies, it becomes much more interesting.

I defeated the final boss and was ready to play more :)

I didn’t fully get how the elements work. But forging two of my dice with elements/spells really won the final battle for me. On every turn, I had either a shield or a sleep spell, so the snake was helpless.

A few side notes:

  1. During the forging of dice, you want to know what elements do.
  2. Dice in combat and foreign were in different positions for me. Confusing
  3. There is no way to roll one step back if you made a mistake during forging and exceeded the budget.
  4. Some enemies are too cute.
  5. The map is excellent.

Good luck with your game!

Developer(+1)

Thank you so much for your very detailed review! I'm glad you enjoyed it, and my team is ready to gather all this feedback and see how we can make this even bigger and better!

(+4)

The game looks awesome. I really like the general aspect of the game, it feels really unique. You should consider expanding it to a full size game !

Also, bonus points for the music it's amazing !

Developer(+1)

Thanks a lot, that means a ton to us! We are intending to. We knew we had a runner as we playtested it and just kept playing. :)

Submitted(+4)

Greetings from the HeartBeast discord!  Really nice job y'all.  Very crisp and aesthetically pleasing.  I could see something like this being expanded into a full game.  Nice work!

Developer(+2)

Thank you! We're considering the possibility of expanding it, so that feedback is incredibly valuable!

Submitted(+4)

Had some trouble figuring out I have to drag the dice onto the enemy, but once I knew how it worked I had fun. The pixel art is really great and  as a huge fan of rogue-lites I love the "progress board" in-between fights.

Overall an amazing result of a jam! Well done.

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks for playing! We realized too late in the process that we should've added a bit more resolution in order to fit clearer information about how to play without making pages of text for how to play. Glad you were able to figure it out!

(+3)

This is slick, great work!

Developer(+1)

Thanks!

(+4)

Oo the art is so pretty! The game is so well polished, I was really confused about what I was doing at first, but i figured it out, lol. Very fun! :D 

Developer(+2)

Thanks for playing! I wish we had a bit more time to make some more interactive and intuitive tutorials, but we crammed so much in there already!

Submitted(+5)

Very fun and the art, music, and sfx are wonderful!

Developer(+1)

Thank you so much! Our team is very thankful!