Post by Blue-Dreamer in The Dogshank ReDICEtion jam comments

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I enjoyed the game more than I thought I would when I stated to play. It was such a relief to see the guards pass you by.

I like how you mixed puzzle, exploration and luck. And the way you forced player not to turn back by a ball and chain that also prevents guards from chasing you is brilliant and I've never seen something like it before.

Unfortunately I couldn't find the 5'th key of the set of five doors as I needed a lot of luck to search properly. (And I managed to pick 9 bones)

Great entry as you were also working on another submission. Well done :)

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jermrellum2 years ago

Hey, so the ratings on my game came in (also want to say that Dicevania ended up being my favorite jam game this year (second favorite is ThubyDev's Dicetris)), and I'm kind of surprised and disappointed about how weakly my game performed -- I've submitted 7 games over the years to these 6 GMTK jams, and this game performed the weakest out of all of them. So in that comparison, I'm more perplexed than anything (because there's no way this game is worse than my whack 2018 game (54th percentile vs 42nd) ), and the feedback from other people doesn't really elucidate much. My main working theory is that people are getting stuck at the second major area of Block K9 because the HUD element in the button right corner makes it look like a wall, and I've now seen three people plus myself make that mistake. But even so, that doesn't seem to explain comments like "You can just spam space to move forever", which is a comment that implies they played the game for all of 30 seconds.

More or less, I'm just trying to figure out -- is the game boring (lack of variety in environments, enemies, and mechanics), unfairly difficult (enemy movement patterns are unclear -- appear to have AI but don't chase you and there are no markings to their paths, plus even with perfect strategy you can still fail, also the screen is too zoomed in to see certain enemies at times), or is the mechanic itself not super interesting? Or is the problem more just that people probably got stuck early, quit, and gave the game a bad rating because they didn't understand it as a result?

I ask because it seems like you got the farthest in the game, and I want to do some major updates to this game (upgrades like being able to hold a die, mini-map charting rooms visited, full screen for more view distance) and I'm trying to figure out what to focus on.

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Blue-Dreamer2 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Hey! First of all thank you so much, I'm so glad that my game is your favorite game of the jam.

I thought about it and I can address some issues the prevented your game from receiving the rating you wanted. (some of them may apply to my game as well)

First thing is that it takes some time to present all the the game's dynamics. As I said in my first comment, your game is a mixture of puzzle(/strategy), exploration and luck but it takes five or 10 minutes for the player to realize the puzzle aspect of the game so when players start your game and for the first minutes they are only engaged with the luck aspect of the game, they would assume that they wont get anything more than that and leave the game.

The luck aspect of the game is dominant to the other aspects. The problem with it is that at some point it becomes the only thing that the player is struggling with to progress further into the game and since it's out of player's control and they can't do much with lower number of moves, it wont be fun to play. You can weaken the luck aspect of the game and reduce its dominance over other aspects of the game, Maybe make a negative feedback loop for the player when they get a low number like giving some points and letting player do something with them when they have a specific amount of that points. You can also strengthen the puzzle and exploration aspect of the game to reduce luck's dominance and balance the three core dynamics. Maybe have different enemy types like having them move randomly but in an easy to predict patterns. Some of them may only move horizontally, some of them may only move vertically, some of them may move diagonally, some of them may move like the horse in chess.

There are also some small issues with the exploration aspect of the game like having a more clear distinction between areas and making sure the player knows they are on the right path. I think instead of having a camera that follows the played all the time, it's better to have a zoomed out and fixed camera in each room and make it zoom in and follow the player when they are in hallways.

The last issue that I wanted to address is that the player has to wait so much when it's enemy turn and it's really annoying especially when there are no enemies on the screen that can hurt you or when there are no enemies on the screen at all.

I hope my comment is helpful :)

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jermrellum2 years ago

OK, yeah I agree, this is helpful so thanks for responding. I submitted my game to the post-jam jam (https://itch.io/jam/post-jam-jam-5) actually now so I already made some improvements -- zoomed out map because it's now fullscreen, enemy paths are more clear because their direction is telegraphed by their sprite, and to reduce luck, you collect upgrades like other dice so you can swap between them. It still doesn't fix the issue with the core mechanic not being revealed immediately -- I tried to fix this a little by not having the player have to roll the die before the first enemies appear, but it still seems challenging to emphasize strategy, especially when you don't get the second die before you've played the game for a bit. Then my solution to giving the player direction is adding a metal detector which is a collectible that when you push a button shows you the general direction of the next key, so that way players won't have no clue where to go next.

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jermrellum2 years ago

Oh also, you gave me an idea about how to fix the speed issue -- I'll have an enemy wait time decreaser be a collectible upgrade, so that way it becomes less of an issue as the game goes on.

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