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A jam submission

RolololView game page

A slow-paced puzzle game where you roll around as a die.
Submitted by CookedBench — 13 days, 23 hours before the deadline
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Rololol's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Gameplay/Design#163.6003.600
Audio#263.2003.200
Fun#263.0003.000
Graphics#263.4003.400

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?
On the difficulty, music, and general game design.

What did you update?
I made most of the game easier and added more levels and music.
Also did a lot of code tidying.

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Comments

Submitted

I found it particularly difficult, couldn't get past stage 5 of Normal despite a dozen tries. Then again, maybe this type of game isn't for me. I think the lack of an undo command and the speed of the die get unnerving after a few unsuccessful tries, sometimes I know I got no movements left, and I gotta still make the die roll somewhere to fall into oblivion, slowly.

I liked the music though it felt repetitive after a short while, I think  a bit more variations are in need. Perhaps a more upbeat part? Also, the menu could have a different song, or a slightly variation of the default music.

The game is solid, just seems to lacks more variations and mechanics. I couldn't progress much so maybe on the Hard levels there are some more twists. It could also benefit from sound effects, like when you finish a level, or a falling sound when the die goes down. I like that you added the rolling die visualization for planning, but I didn't use much of it, as even with it seemed hard to plan movements. I just stuck with the sum of 7 on the sides and planning 1 or 2 moves ahead. Personally, I'd like the die to move/fall faster, maybe this could be a setting?

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks for the feedback. I found is that some people find it easy while others struggle a bit, so it has been hard for me to find a difficulty level that works well for both groups. I'll definitely make the earlier levels easier though. And I'll also keep everything else you've said in mind when I update the game. You can also restart the level with R.

Submitted

I'm generally not a huge fan of this sort of dice rolling puzzle game, and the GMTK jam hasn't been great therapy for it. That being said, while this game does have some of the same problems, there are also a few things it does pretty well.

First, why do I generally dislike this genre? It mostly comes down to finding it easier to solve puzzles by accident than by reasonig about the level. The best puzzles are those that require you to have key insights about them in order to be able to solve them, which often includes backward reasoning, where you need to figure out what the solved state looks like and work your way backwards from there.

A good example of backwards reasoing is the very last level, where I managed to work out two "winning states" and then could work my way forward to reach one of them. I was a bit frustrated with the level at times, especially since for most of it I hadn't figured out how to use the example die yet, but in the end, the solution felt very satisfying.

Speaking of the example die, it's a great feature, especially for backwards reasoning purposes, but please document somewhere how to use it! As I mentioned, I hadn't even realised I could use it until the very last stage. Also, I would probably swap the functionality of QE and AD so that WASD matches the behaviour of the arrow keys.

Another thing your game mostly does well is that even in forwards-reasoning puzzles, the possibility tree is pretty limited so you can sort of do a "breadth-first-seach" here. Also, figuring out losing states (e.g. a 4 being bad until the parity lines up perfectly) was an enjoyable process. Notable good example: Hard3. Notable examples where I found the possibility tree to branch out of conrol: Hard5 and Hard6.

Usually it's a good idea to have an undo system in your puzzle game unless you have a really good reason not to. I guess you could argue that this forces the player to explore the forward tree more deliberately, but I'm not sure that's enough reason to deny the player what is essentially a convenience feature.

Music is well composed, but the instruments feel a little too synthetic for my taste and you should probably also add some dynamics and stuff, but most importantly, you probably want to add at least one more track. Hearing the same thing over and over again eventually gets repetitive, no matter how good the music is.

All in all, one of the better dice rolling games I think came out of the jam and you seem to be a very capable puzzle designer. If you can figure out a way to make more "lynchpin" puzzles (where you need an "a-ha!" moment to solve them), that would be great! I think the genre unfortunately just has its limitations, but I'll be glad to be proven wrong.

Developer

Thanks for all the feedback and for taking the time to play my game.
I'll definitely implement changes to make the example dice much easier to understand.

And Ill also try to add more to the music, although I don't think I can do anything about how synthetic it is right now because of the software I'm using.

And I've been thinking of ways to expand the puzzles, and unfortunately, I haven't thought of a whole lot I can do. I've thought of different mechanics like trap doors with pressure plates and teleporters, but although I could make many more levels with these, I don't think they would fix the inherent restrictions with the genre, as you said.

Submitted

Nice take on that kind of game ! 

As someone who's usually bad at solving this kind of puzzles, I managed to solve all the normal one without too much difficulty. The exemple dice in the corner is definetly a great help to plan ahead. kuddos on that !

The hard levels where definetly too hard for me. but again I'm kinda bad at it in general. I was only able to solve the second one. I'm not even sure the first one is solvable (but I might have missed something)

Not much to say on the music. It's nice & it fit the ambiance.

Great job !