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A jam submission

Dice: The DeliveranceView game page

Submitted by Stopa, Moutes, Pozitreo, Shami42, Rozari — 13 days, 55 minutes before the deadline

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Dice: The Deliverance's itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Graphics	#3	4.800	4.800
Fun	#10	3.800	3.800
Audio	#10	3.800	3.800
Gameplay/Design	#16	3.600	3.600

Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

What would you like feedback on?
Especially the *presentation*: what looks good, what could be improved, how readable the UI is, where the game could use more feedbacks.

Other aspects like the gameplay mechanics, balance etc. are also important for me, but less so.

What did you update?
Overall polish, added monster introductory cutscene, some sound effects, movement tweens, etc. Also many bug fixes and a few gameplay changes.

Comments

KkhavSubmitted2 years ago

I'm writing this comment as I play through the game.

First of all, I like story in a games, don't get me wrong, but there's a problem. You don't want to overload a game with a story before player gets attracted. Because first instinct of any player (especially in a jam) is to get to the gameplay as fast as possible. You probably want to create a tutorial level first to explain how mechanics work and then add a story. Second thing, your music is way too epic for a story that is written.

Story: "Bard goes to the tavern and plays a sad song"

Song: "Epic adventure"

Maybe a switch to more calm song would do the trick.

About the tutorial, you shouldn't remove the text before the button is clicked. Sometimes I wanted to read the text twice to understand how the mechanic works, but then it just faded away. Also, I think tutorial should be a bit less "texty" and a bit more "try it out for yourself" kinda thing.

Gameplay:

I don't think that I understand the game fully even though I'm pretty far into it. Up until now I randomly placed cubes and haven't felt any trouble doing that. But now I'm kinda stuck on "Hal Fork". I don't get how the mechanics work and why exactly do I die. And I can't really play a tutorial level one more time now. I'm guessing that every player gets random stats and then you roll random amount of cubes that have random numbers on them. But I still die even when I place like 20 defence and Hal has only like 8 attack...

I like the interface in the game, but its a bit out of place. I think when you do 1v1 battles, enemy health and player's health should be placed somehow opposite to eachother. Maybe since your player's interface is at the bottom-middle, enemy's should be placed at the top-middle.

Presentation:

The art style is freacking amazing. I love it. Really great job on that part. But if you dig into that, I think main character shouldn't be less attractive to look at and less detailed than the enemies. Also there is no visual represantation of the fight whatsoever. You hear some sounds get cool first animation and then everything else happens behind the scenes. So, basically, everything that's happening after you placed your dices is a mistery. Need some feedback for the fight. It would add like 100 points.

Submitted

Cathobot Upgraded

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nizbelSubmitted2 years ago

Alright, I really enjoyed my time with this one!

So, I took a few notes, especially regarding presentation:

On the initial dialog when the bard asks why the diceholder didn't imprison him, why are some double quotes starting at the bottom position and others at the top? This one was more out of curiosity.
I liked the dialogue between characters when you freed a new die, but maybe adding some expressions could make it stand out. Like just tweaking their eyes, as in mad or very happy.
The victory screen could use some sound. It doesn't really feel like you won, a banner just appears and that's it. Maybe a more epic sound on the monster dying and a small victory fanfare.
I might have not seen the explanation, but I took a few rounds to find out I could level up the characters. I just upgraded my mana for a while.
The defense sound, when the enemy attacks you, feels really odd. Like someone slurping milkshake.
There could be more indications of what is actually happening at during the fight sequence, maybe your sword icon shooting something into the monster, then their defense getting into the way. Right now it feels a bit complicated to keep track on what is actually happening.
Fighting the Lime Slime, I thought I ran into a glitch, because when one of my characters got jellied, it decreased my attack considerably, but then I understood my attack was also reduced considering enemy's defense. Once again, maybe keeping base values in player/enemy areas and then fiddling values somewhere else would make it easier to keep track.

A few things that could add some juice:

Monsters speaking to the player on the first time you find them, an upgrade to the introductory cutscene.
Tutorials to explain how level up and fight rounds work (I'm still not sure when does healing happens in the fight, sometimes it seemed at the beginning, sometimes at the end)
Perhaps after the first encounter, you could see some info about the monster, in some sort of bestiary. This way players could be more prepared when grinding!
Add some fixed ability to characters, like the cleric always rolls heal plus something else when levelled. On the last fight I lost because all characters would roll attack, and there wasn't much I could do when the diceholder kept on flailing me. It felt like my strategy was working but I lost to unfairness. On my second run I managed to defeat it, but I was lucky to never run into full attack rolls.

Submitted

Luck Arena

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StopaDeveloper2 years ago

Thank you so much for your thorough feedback!

We are from Czechia and in Czech the opening quotation marks are at the bottom. I suspect one of us had a Czech keyboard switched on when writing the dialogues and it automatically made the bottom quotes. Thanks for noticing that, I'll fix it!
This is definitely on our TODO list, unfortunately, our artist was too busy with work lately so we did not have time yet to create and put in emotions for our characters.
Another item from our TODO list, adding some FX to the victory and defeat screen is probably the next thing I will add to the game. Some animation and sound of monster dying is a nice suggestion though, that would be cool!
After your first fight, the rescued Mage tells Bard it's time to level up and Bard continues telling Mage they share XP with their mana dice. This was supposed to hint that you can use your points to level characters as well as dice, but I could add something more explicit directly into the level up screen.
It does sound a bit odd, doesn't it?
The whole combat animation will get a rework. I would like it to communicate much more visibly what is currently going on. It is not convenient to watch top and bottom bar UI numbers at the same time, so there should ideally be something happening in the middle of the screen directly on the heroes and monsters. And it should better communicate what is currently going on. And use less slurpy SFX.
I am not sure I understand your Lime Slime glitch. The way it works is that as Lime Slime jellies a hero, their stats are subtracted from the total in the bottom UI. Then if the attack (after this subtraction) is less then Lime Slime's defense, the attack does not do any damage. This will probably be solved with the previous bullet about less readable combat animations.

Also thanks for the suggestions on more juice to the game.

There are three ways the monster could say something to the heroes:
- There could be some catch phrase inside the introductory cutscene dramatically sliding to join the name of the monster. Something like: Dice collector <swoosh>'Tax or die!' <Whoosh>
- There could be a dialogue containing a piece of the story between the heroes and the monster similar to that at the end of the fight.
- There could be some in game "voicelines" from the monster in specific moments of the combat (at the beginning but also possibly during the combat or at the end)
All options have their pros and cons in terms of implementation challenges, writing difficulty and added value for the player. I don't really know which one I would prefer myself, but they all seem interesting.
The tutorial in the first combat definitely needs some rework for better readability and completeness. As for the level up, this I already addressed above: some explicit call on what you can do in the level up screen could help this.
In another comment, I suggested that the number of actions for each hero could be higher. Currently each hero has either one or two actions, but it would not be much difficult to raise this number to 2-4 and then it would be really unlikely (if even possible) to not roll any defense with all heroes on the board. Adding a special "passive" ability to each hero is however a nice suggestion that could make the planning phase more interesting (for better strategy it would be interesting if the special ability triggered only when that hero has been assigned a dice with number less than certain threshold).

I am glad you were able to defeat The Diceholder. He might not be overpowered after all! Another thing I would really like to add to the game in the foreseeable future is some ending final victory screen that would take you to the credits and so on. Sorry for the end being a bit anticlimactic.

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jermrellumSubmitted2 years ago

OK, so you want presentation feedback, and it looks fantastic. Beautiful characters, monsters, UI, everything. If I want to get real nitpicky, maybe I don't like the way the font looks on the tutorial screen, but I have to stretch to criticize that. I think also maybe some double digits numbers have some overflow too -- my screen is 1920x1080 fyi.

As for understanding the game...well...so for most of it, my brain just says, put the big numbers in the squares. I was confused on what my health even was though until the fourth fight, when I realized it was the dice. Before that, couldn't find it and wasn't sure if it was part of the enemy's status box because all the numbers at the bottom were 0. I think also the bleed stat isn't really necessary -- it'd be more clear to just have a number pop up on top of the boss with a -5 in red or whatever, like in your standard JRPG. Your eyes aren't really looking at the UI, so it's hard to really glean information off of it, especially the bleed info.

Now, strategy does come into play at least on the 3rd and 5th fights with slime and diceholder (diceholder I gave up on after like 10 attempts). It takes a while to really understand what's actually happening -- that the enemy is not just nullifying one of your die's attacks/defenses, but actually stealing it and taking it for its own. Since it almost always seems to go after the largest die, it means you want to sacrifice your largest die on defense, then hope the other dice make up for it. On diceholder then, if you get less than 2 defenses, you're basically done, unless you get lucky next turn and get a heal. I think gameplay wise, having different jobs or different effectiveness (or different values of rolls meaning different things) for the different characters would have been better, because unless I'm mistaken, only the healer seemed to have a unique role. But maybe that's why I was having a tough time with the boss -- maybe one of the dice was resistant to getting their attack absorbed or something.

Submitted

The Dogshank ReDICEtion

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StopaDeveloper2 years ago

Thank you very much for a thorough feedback to our game.

The looks of the tutorial is currently a high priority item on my TODO list, but I intended to rework it completely and change it into some kind of dialogue (similar to the ones you see after defeating each monster for the first time) so it will take me some time to do that.

As for the overflowing numbers, do you mean in the combat stats UI? The rework on these parts is scheduled as well, I practically did not touch this since the GMTK jam ended, so it sure need some polish. I also intend to rework the combat animations so it is more readable what is going on, including all those flashy red negative numbers indicating damage and so on. If only there was more time!

You are right, that the strategy is mostly "put the big numbers in the squares". It gets a bit nuanced later on because you might want to save leveled up dice for another round if your roll was a bit unlucky but I agree that some element that would let you strategize a bit more would improve the gameplay significantly. It got a bit better when I introduced the monster abilities (these were not there for the GMTK submission), but it's still pretty much in the "use big numbers, don't use small numbers" state. I am thinking of adding elemental dice that would work better when paired with the right action but I also don't want the planning phase to become some tedious overoptimization until the best solution is found.

The diceholder has not been tested all that much since I added his mind control ability, so there is a real possibility he is currently too OP and would deserve a nerf. As for distinct hero roles, this was one of the more difficult parts of game design, because when we initially had the hero actions very distinct and characteristic, the game was not playable because you'd often roll useless actions (too much defense and heal and not enough attack). By adding more attacks though, the heroes lost a bit of their distinctiveness. I am not really sure how to solve this properly, maybe we could have more than 1 or 2 symbols per hero face (like 2-4 on each hero every turn)?

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jermrellumSubmitted2 years ago

Yeah by overflow I meant topleft corner where the stats are. They overlapped over the icons a bit. I also thought maybe one neat thing you could do would be if your max health was the number of faces on all the rolling dice, that way your health increased overtime and it would make higher rolls for meaningful for healing. Idk how you would represent rolling dice HP though, would they all have their own health bars? It'd be kind of weird for the dice to have their health bars but not the characters.

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StopaDeveloper2 years ago

Ooh, but that is actually a very good idea. If the dice themselve have "health" it would solve a lot of the current gameplay issues:

It would incetivise the use of low roll dice to soak up damage.
It would mitigate the effect of "unlucky" roll of no defense.
It would make up for more interesting combat by changing the strategy throughout the game. At first, all dice are fully healed, later they are damaged and must be used carefuly.

There's couple of problems that would need to be solved though:

Monster attack would have to be stronger to balance out "more health" of the player. How to balance player's defense along with it?
How would heal work? Currently it revives dead mana, would the new heal only heal damaged mana or only revive dead, or both? How to differentiate it substantially from defense?
I think it could be interesting and perhaps even more intuitive if the same system worked for monsters too. They could have some "red" mana dice they would roll and use each turn and when all their mana dice are dead, they are defeated.
How to display mana health on the screen? I think a healthbar for each die would be too cluttered, maybe a fill of the grayed out dead mana? Radial or linear? Would it reduce readability of the numbers?

Thanks for the suggestion, this could be fun to implement and it's a lot to think about.

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Post Jam "Jam" #5 - For sharing your updated projects

Dice: The DeliveranceView game page

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