Really neat idea! I think it has a lot of potential to be developed further. One thing I noticed is that the camera being rotated at a slight angle made the grid-based movement a bit confusing. I think the movement would be more intuitive if the camera was aligned with the grid if that makes sense. There's also a chance that some of the dice roll off the table, and when that happens it is possible to build an arrangement of tiles that doesn't even connect to the end of the level. I think either preventing the dice from falling, or only letting the player proceed once a complete path has been made would be a good idea. I also encountered a scenario where I had connected a complete path to the goal but the terrain prevented me from getting there, so if the terrain tiles are being randomly generated then I think the terrain generation should check to make sure the terrain is passable. I understand that you ran into a lot of development issues though and I still enjoyed the game for what it is!
Viewing post in GMTK 2022 - Roll your own jam comments
Thanks for the feedback.
I can understand the camera issue, I tried to make it a majority rotated in one direction to make it clear which was up/down versus left/right rather than a 45 degree angle. I could have rotated it more, but I feel a perfectly straight on angle would look too sterile visually.
The dice rolling off the table is actually intentional. I tuned the randomness of the throwing to having a dice roll off on average every 5-6 or so attempts. It's possible to lock yourself out from beating the level, but I considered that fine, as the premise is to build your own path so if you make the level unbeatable by choosing not to make a path that's how you decide to build it. The idea was that periodically limiting the number of dice you have means there's left options for how to arrange the tiles, which might lead to forcing users to find spots for tiles they may otherwise try putting off to the side to ignore. The game really isn't balanced enough to really encourage this however.
And yes, certain tile combinations are impossible to complete (well or so I thought until I realized that unintentionally you can use the enemy pathing to allow you to do things, like if you get the enemy to path a certain way and you time it to attack the enemy on an ice slide for example, it'll actually stop you at the location you attacked, allow you to then move in a direction after defeating the enemy, so under certain conditions these impossible combinations can be passed). The original idea was to implement random rotations for the 5x5 grids represented by each dice, however I forgot to do so and realized too late that they were all in the same orientation. My general mentality was that it's okay for there to be impossible paths, because worst case scenareo you can hit escape to go back to the rolling screen and get new dice to use/reorder. The idea was originally far more complex, I wanted you to be able to reorder the tiles you currently have, and have a currency you could pick up in the game by going out of your way to optional locations in the level that would be used to grant you a reroll. But that was scrapped entirely because of time required to develop it. I was a bit over ambitious with the idea and spent too long on a handful of aspects of the game and the overall design I feel flopped partially because of it.
I'm glad you enjoyed it in it's current state anyways. I definitely plan on updating this, though I'll be restarting from scratch, I'll likely use hexagonal tiles, and it'll likely be turn based than real time.