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(1 edit) (+1)

Great job — as always your games are second to none in terms of juice and polish!

The good:

  • Graphics, audio, animations. Everything is bouncy and the UI is responsive and has character.

  • I really liked the passing mechanic, and the “bonk” mechanic once I realized how it worked. There’s a good amount of strategy for planning out moves while making sure you have your best odds of reducing damage the next turn.

  • Your team slowly gets more and more hats

Areas of improvement:

  • The UI for passing and throwing could be better. There was at least one time I got confused which player was holding the ball, and at least one time I clicked “throw” on accident while trying to pass the ball to the player ahead of me (lost me the finals too!)

  • Obviously the die rolling is a central mechanic given the theme of the jam, but there were times it felt pretty bad — especially given that there are certain enemies that are literally impossible to kill/block if they get slightly lucky. I’m not sure if you had some behind-the-scenes logic to help the player out on the RNG, but if not that might be a way to help a little. (Something like power-ups, such as shields or damage multipliers, might help give the player more tools to fight against the odds as well)

  • I think this might be a game where having really good enemy AI might actually be a bad thing. There were a few times the enemy AI pulled some crazy maneuver to take out my highest numbers that involved a four or five member pass, and proceeded to wipe my team in one turn. Given that the enemy’s dice are so much stronger than the player’s, maybe it’s okay if the AI blunders a little more often.

Honestly all of those are pretty nitpicky in the scheme of games made in 48 hours. Amazing work!

Cool, you actually noticed the bonk mechanic (exactly the same name I called it in code too) and the correct use of it. The bonk failing the throw was there pretty much since the beginning but it was actually quite a late addition to add that re-randomization to it too making it a (pretty much the only) defensive tool.

Yeah definitely the pass/throw UI could be better. Just not quite sure how. 😅 I myself too did quite a lot of accidental bonks while trying to quickly pass to the other dice right on front. I guess one easy improvement at least could be to tweak the throw button placing so that it doesn't cover other dice so much.

There is no nudging on RNG going on at all so yeah, the bigger dice are obviously outclassing you by a lot and you'll require some good luck to take them out (and not get one round wiped by em). I think for the current state of the game it's fine but if I were to continue it, I think I'd add more of a progression and skills etc which can balance out the odds.

The AI does indeed always pick the biggest die they can take out. It's not perfect by any means, at least it doesn't take bonks into account and sometimes loses track of all the passing/moving steps. I thought those (and the big advantage of going against D4s on the early stages) were enough to balance the AI. Usually I add some random chance for the AI to do "derp" and pick some option randomly which I can then decrease to slowly increase the difficulty but didn't feel like this needed that treatment.

Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback! ❤️