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A jam submission

Circus Tesserae DeluxeView game page

A game of juggling dice. Works on your browser and phone.
Submitted by Mystical_Pigeon — 8 hours, 38 minutes before the deadline
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Circus Tesserae Deluxe's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Audio#44.2864.286
Gameplay/Design#44.2864.286
Fun#83.8573.857
Graphics#143.8573.857

Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

What would you like feedback on?
UI design
Obstacle design/ideas
Player feedback
Difficulty
Would you play this if it were ad supported on mobile?

What did you update?
Reworked the UI
Made it vertical
Tightened controls and game balance
Added cheats
Switched from numbered dice to shapes
Added in game animations to better convey dice spawning and your goals
Added practice and endless modes

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Comments

Submitted

This game is very fun - especially on mobile.

  • The UI design is straightforward and easy to understand 
    • Visuals (colours, font, textures) matche the circus theme very well  
    • I prefer the shapes over the numbers, so I liked that change but found it confusing that in the menu for switching colours it still shows numbered dice
  • I liked the added challenge of the bombs and sorting the dice into bins
  • Something I noticed is the touch controls felt much more responsive than the mouse clicks on the phone
  • I would play it if the ad support were done in a none intrusive way and linked to an optional button, like an undo button
    • As an example, say the player matches two out of the three they need to get in the pattern, but failed to match the 3rd; instead of having to do the level all over again, the "watch an ad to undo" would then re-drop the 3rd die so the player can try to fix their mistake - but they can only do this once per level 
Submitted

I like the dice juggling and appreciate the limited scope as this game seems to have fully explored the mechanics of that. also as a vertical monitor haver I do like the vertical layout, though definitely consider this a mobile game ala fruit ninja. The tutorial levels and animation flourishes were also very well done and the menu UI and sound design are on point. Overall a delicious well done small but savory bite of a game

Submitted(+1)

Very, very nice game. On to the topics:

UI

I find it really impressive, I love the tickets as buttons and how it all works together. The only points I got on this one are:

  • In the settings menu, when seeing the cheats/interface, I thought the white font was a bit hard to see, maybe because it was smaller.
  • I feel the background during gameplay doesn't blend in with the UI/3D elements. But I'm not sure what bothers me in it.

Obstacles

I really like the ones implemented, though I found the inverted dice harder than in the old version. But it might be because I was already used to the "sum to 7". Something I'd like to see, in levels ahead, was something tied to time. Like dice that turn around after x seconds or simply become disabled after an amount of time, so player can't get away with just swiping them up over and over.

Also, I really like the bombs now, they aren't so big and they always seem "swipable", instead of the angles they were thrown in the old version! I hit them twice in my run.

Player feedback

I felt like the dialogs before each stage were enough and it is easy to understand failure/success conditions. I just didn't get the logic of the star ratings, when I hit 3 correct out of 5 I still got 2 stars, does that mean as long as I get at least one I am passing? Also, something very minor I noticed, once the bomb exploded I had the retry menu showing up, but the dice that was rolling kept on going and entered the bucket, thus making the success sound effect. It's really no big deal, but maybe once the player loses you could stop the dice rolling or its sound effects?

Difficulty

I really liked the ramp on difficulty. It starts super easy but soon you need to be paying attention, and the inverted dice to me got quite challenging. In some of the later levels though, I think it became a bit overkill, perhaps you could start with stages that mix many ideas (buckets, bombs and 5 dice) with a slower dice spawn?

Would you play this if it were ad supported on mobile?

Not really as I ain't a mobile player.

Developer

Thank you for the feedback :D

Totally agree on the font in those menus - it can certainly be hard to read. I want to find a simpler one that has a similar feel, but don't want to use the hand-scrawl that I have on the tutorial text boxes.

For the in game background, I also agree. Currently exploring some other, simpler options. It's not that I don't like it, but it feels weird next to everything else.

Someone else suggested crumbling dice, so you can only flip them x times before they burst. I think that would work pretty nicely.

For the stars - you get 1 for scoring anything at all correctly, 2 for getting half of the goals (rounded up) and 3 for being perfect. Currently you only need 1 star to unlock the next level, thinking through some options to change that. Might switch to requiring 2, or having a more fluid "x stars total to unlock this level"

The die that kept going is a good point. I have the spawners all disable on game over, but nothing stops an in-play die from continuing on to succeed or fail. Definitely something worth investigating - I might just have all the in-play dice de-spawn.

In the original version the dice spawning was slower in the barrel levels, but I thought it felt too easy haha. Will probably go back and tweak it some more.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

First of all, this is without a doubt a very well polished and fun game! Since you're probably here for constructive feedback, I'll focus a bit on the things that can still be improved, but just be aware that those are mostly nitpicks and most of what you've done already works very well.

To answer your last question first, no, I personally probably wouldn't play this with ad support on mobile, but that's mostly because I'm just not a huge fan of mobile gaming in general and it's also not quite my genre, so don't give too much on that. It definitely has enough quality that I could imagine it doing pretty well on mobile platforms. Just be sure not to overdo the ads and have an option to remove them entirely for a small fee.

(I kinda wish more mobile games would just charge up front, but I know that's not how the market works. Possibly one of the reasons why I dislike it as much as I do)

I have only one big complaint with the main game mode, which is that cannons shooting from the bottom obscure one of the dice down there. I often found myself rejuggling a die because I didn't remember what I was aiming for, and frankly, that's also not something I should be expected to do in this sort of game.

Other than that, this mode feels very nice! There were a few difficulty spikes whenever there were five dice to juggle, but those are fine. It's a bit annoying that the difficulty of those levels depend so much on whether you manage to get good rolls on your first swipe. I know I can influence those a bit in theory, but let's be honest, most people will just do a diagonal up swipe into one of the buckets here.

Also, maybe this mode is a bit short, but I'm not sure what's the best way to add more levels while staying varied. Maybe you can think of a couple more game elements you can add?

The new modes feel a lot like an afterthought. Practice mode just feels very weird and quickly slapped together. I'd like to be able to adjust the number and type of dice, toggle cannons, and so on for some actual practice. Maybe a simple solution would just be to use the default levels, but remove the win / loss conditions.

Endless mode feels like it could be fun, but boy, even at the very start it's just so much more difficult then the main mode! I'm not sure if there is such a thing as I only managed to get a score of 9, but if not, this definitely needs some sort of difficulty progression. Simple suggestion: Start with dice coming out very slowly and increase this rate continuously until theres more or less one constant stream of dice in the end. Also, maybe turn on inverted dice and cannons after certain score thresholds.

EDIT: Oh, and one more thing concerning endless mode, I'm pretty sure I would prefer if solved dice would be replaced immediately. Would also help lower the difficulty a bit.

UI, as well as generally the look and feel of the game are very nice. One suggestion I have here would be to add an outline shader to your 3D scene, which I think would help the 3D objects blend in better with the rest of the cartoonish style. Never tried implementing one myself and I've never used Unity, but here's a tutorial that seems to implement something similar: https://roystan.net/articles/outline-shader

Sound design is generally very nice, though I think the cannon shots could have a slightly more impactful sound. Music feels very synthetic, maybe there are versions of the music out there that feel a little more natural? I think I would prefer those.

Anyway, as mentioned in the beginning, these are mostly nitpicks. Overall, this is a very polished and professional-looking game, very well done!

Developer

Thank you so much for all the feedback, this really helps a lot :)

I 100% hear you on the ads. From what I can tell, unless your game is really good no one is going to pay up front for it, so it's an unfortunate evil. I'll definitely have a way to pay to remove them though, and certainly don't want them to be annoying.

Also agree on the cannons. I added them in as a way to signal to the player that a bomb was coming, but I really don't like how it covers up that 1 die. If you have any ideas to get around it, I welcome them. I like how the goal UI works right now, so I don't want to mess with it too much, but we'll see what happens.

I'm not sure how to avoid getting a correct die in one swipe... unless all the goal dice are the same, I can't guarantee that a spawned die will start in an orientation that isn't 1 swipe away from valid. Again, I welcome any ideas to get around it.

Practice and Endless are still being fleshed out. I do want to add full customization to practice mode, and have it show you when dice are valid/invalid. And endless is planned to swap obstacles in and out with each roll of the goal dice. I've been working on a "stage manager" that lets me turn on and off every obstacle from a script, so for practice it would mainly be exposing those toggles in a UI, and endless will be automatically enabling them.

Difficulty progression is on the table for endless, I quite like the idea of ramping up the spawn speed over time. I'm thinking there will be base endless difficulties you can pick from, but that sounds like a good way to keep the in-game difficulty moving up as you progress.

I'm not sure about swapping out goal dice when they are solved - but it could work. My current plan was to have the obstacles swap out on every new roll of the goal dice, but if that were switched to swap them out based on your score it would play well with the dice auto-replacing each other and would solve some other problems I was thinking through. Will give that some experimentation.

I did start experimenting with outlines - the bombs currently have a red outline. Was thinking of adding it to all objects as an accessibility option, but I may make it default if it looks good on everything else.

Agreed on the cannons - the sound made more sense when the cannons weren't there, so you could envision a catapult or something shooting them, but now it does feel odd.

The music I 100% want to swap out for something else. I found these clips on free sound and they fit well enough for the jam, but I find the in-game music gets a bit grating after a while so I want to find something that fits in better. It's currently low on the list, but will be done eventually.

Submitted(+1)

So firstly, I was trying to get this to play on my iPhone because I saw it was vertical, but Unity's telling me WebGL doesn't support mobile and has a runtime exception if I try to get it to work anyway.

I think what's really great in the game is its progression of levels. It starts simple, but slowly introduces more and more mechanics with each level, increasing the complexity in a manageable way. Reminds me of the way Portal is designed, where the first two-thirds of the game is a tutorial, yet it doesn't feel like one. 

I like the whole inverted dice mechanic too because you're then not just trying to juggle the dice but juggle which way they're supposed to be filled-in in your brain. I also like how the goal dice match the regular dice while the inverteds don't match. I saw in the original screenshots there originally were numbered dice, and it's good that it was changed to this shape filled unfilled system. Also it was a good choice to have the dice be fixed in orientation after you slash them -- it would have been so finicky and annoying if they retained angular momentum.

I thought it was interesting playing the original though that the change to vert didn't even seem like it affected gameplay that much -- it didn't necessarily seem any easier, so I think that's a good thing -- the orientation change didn't mess with the design. The ball dropper though is a great addition -- it looks better than the timer and the way it rotates before it drops gives the player some notice about the incoming die -- plus since you can see what die will fall ahead of time it lets you plan a little bit, as opposed to it just spawning.

I also thought the star system was a great way to reward perfection without requiring it -- the original had to have you be perfect, but deluxe lets you move on anyway. Well OK you could just hit skip level in the original but I imagine most people would be much more resistant to pressing skip than to just continuing with 2 stars. Though it's maybe almost a little too forgiving -- you only need one die to match to move on, which probably would just happen if you did nothing. But if you had a skip level button anyway, what does it matter really?

I was kind of disappointed the last level didn't have me putting everything all together -- buckets, regular + inverted dice, and bombs (I think there weren't buckets). Just because it felt like it was building to me managing everything at once. But you could also now look at the whole game as a tutorial for endless mode. Yet endless mode doesn't even have the buckets -- though endless mode is much harder so I'm glad it didn't have them really (I didn't have too much difficulty throughout the levels, got 1 or 2 stars on a few levels, but immediately went back and replayed and got 3 stars. Never even hit a bomb until I decided to slash one intentionally just to see what would happen, and seeing as it immediately ended the round, I'm glad they weren't too difficult to avoid because that would've been frustrating).

Actually, while I think the levels and everything are designed great, I do wish there was a little more to endless mode. The dice drop super fast, getting you overwhelmed immediately, and when you clear a line you have to wait for the cup to drop more, meaning you have to continue juggling even as more drop out. I think maybe the dispenser should at least wait to start dispensing again until you can see the next dice goals -- you can keep juggling the ones you have of course. I appreciated that there was a cap of the number of dice allowed out at once, something like 5 or 6, because I was very quickly getting bogged down. I think endless should probably gradually increase in speed rather than it being fast immediately, or maybe difficulties levels for it. I maxed out at a score of like 12, which didn't seem very high of a score. Oh, also, there should be a display of how many mistakes you've made because otherwise you're making the player count to 3 themself.

As for aesthetics, I do really like the messages with their elephant watermark, and I had no problems with the UI. I kind of don't understand where I'm supposed to be -- the music tells me I'm at a circus, but I appear to be in some kind of shed with broken balloons on the wall? Is this like, a washed up clown's house/run-down cabin? 3d models are decent but could probably look a little better with some kind of shader/lighting/idk-im-not-an-artist, particularly on the dispenser and cup, which give off a kind of non-anti-aliased kind of vibe?

Would I play this as a mobile game? Well, I download like 1 mobile game per year probably, so not me personally, but I think it would be good as a free app with ads. You'd probably want to add a few more mechanics though, and then make endless mode a little more robust with an online leaderboard.

As for more mechanics, idk my brain thinks of a floating ring that's either colored and you have to hit a die of a certain color through it, or it's labeled with a goal die and it has to be in that orientation as it passes through. Maybe certain dice crumble after a certain number of hits (I'd be generous with it and allow it to take more than enough hits, but the challenge might be that you'd throw in regular dice with it too so you'd want to prioritize the crumbly dice first). Maybe barrels that move or are in different spots of the screen other than the left and right? Maybe add in a new item type, bowling pins, and you have to slash them mid-air like the dice but you need to make sure they land face up? Or maybe you have some kind of floaty ball that has a bomb inside and it'll explode once it hits the ground, so you have to manage that while orienting the dice (essentially like a die that's got to stay in the air, but probably more floaty than the other dice so it's not as frustrating to deal with).

Developer

Thanks so much for all the feedback! Funny enough, some of the points you raise are things on my todo list already.

The dice rotation was one of the first things I worked on - took a while to figure out how to do it cleanly, but yeah my focus there was to avoid frustration with controlling things.

Glad you like the gumball machine! It was an idea I had during the jam, but was not gonna happen with the time I had so the focus was on level building and bug fixing.

For the stars, I'm still thinking through what the best system would be. I could change it so you need at least 2 stars to advance, or you use accumulated stars to unlock further levels. In it's current state, it doesn't seem right to have that latter system but adding more levels may make it viable. I will say, it is impossible to get 1 star without touching the screen, every die will spawn in an invalid orientation (that's part of the reason there's never more than 5 goal dice).

The last level does in fact have everything - bombs, barrels, and inverted dice! I do want to have a more "ultimate" level that has everything plus normal and inverted dice, but my focus so far has been cleanup over new content.

Endless mode was a recent addition and certainly needs a lot more care. I am currently working on a system to swap between different obstacles for each "roll of the dice", so when you complete a roll of goals it would swap to barrels, or bombs, or a moving barrel. It will start basic. I want to have different difficulties, easy could have only 3 active dice and swap between easier obstacles, medium could have 5 dice, then hard could have 5 dice and swap between every obstacle. Currently there is a max of 5 active dice. I'm torn on stopping the spawner between rolls though - I was originally thinking it should only spawn up to the number of goals, and wait for you to lose or complete the current roll, but I also like the idea that you are constantly having to juggle the full number of dice and need to keep doing it while obstacles swap out. Maybe I'll have the normal difficulties only spawn up to the goal count, and have a "hardest" difficulty that uses the current system.

Endless does have a mistake counter in the top left, but it's not well animated so I see why you missed it (they just turn red in sequence). I'll need to work on making that clearer.

I'm planning to swap out that background for something cleaner and less dingy, might have it swap between a few options depending on the level.

For the models - that dispenser needs a massive update. It's 3 squashed unity cylinders, when I have time I want to find / make a better model for it. I totally agree that it doesn't look great. The cup I want to swap out for something that looks more plastic, like this

yahtzee cup" 3D Models to Print - yeggi

Rings was an idea I was thinking through myself - could be an interesting thing to play with, where there is 1 or more rings, maybe they move around as they score them, so you have to juggle a number of dice and only launch the right one through when it's ready.

I like the idea of crumbling dice... I'll definitely explore that and see how it feels in game.

I already have a prototype for a barrel that moves across the bottom of the screen, so glad to hear others think that could work.

Not sure on the bowling pins... I like the idea, but it sounds like it'd be tricky to control with the current player input. Worth experimenting with, so we'll see if anything comes from it.

Also really like the bomb balloon idea - I was thinking of adding in balloons in a different way, where they could float up from the bottom of the screen and obscure your vision or if you swipe them they pop and cause nearby dice to move and rotate. But the idea of a jugglable die you have to manage but never score sound like it could add a nice challenge.