Post by anttihaavikko in Elemental Dice Walking jam comments

GMTK Game Jam 2022 » Entries » Elemental Dice Walking

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Feels like this could go on forever, there is no challenge really...

As long as you have a clump of 4 tiles, you can reorient yourself however you want and there is no penalty for doing so and taking it slow. That way you pretty much never should lose lives unless you're just accidentally doing a wrong match. I guess the "difficulty progression" adds more and more holes to the floor so at some point you actually might stumble on a spot where you can't reorient anymore and are forced to take damage.

You did a pretty good job at showing even the non camera facing faces a little bit so that one could more easily "attack" up and right too but there were still quite a lot of spots where I just needed to rotate back to make sure. I guess it would of have made more sense to have the player progress to left or have the camera tilt so that the front face was the visible one. Now it's most of the time showing the back face which isn't that useful. Even though it is the same as the front one but my brain didn't allow me to trust on that fact most of the time. 😅

The UI would have needed some more love. The text overflowing the box and not having any padding on the UI elements makes it look sloppy. The whole help screen looks like it was hastily thrown together in the last second with all those misalignments, spelling errors etc.

So yeah, it would kinda need some additional mechanics like timer or something to make it less trivial. Bug good job anyways! 👍

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hatmajster2 years ago

1. I mean I don't see a problem with these 4 tiles. I wanted to have a way for the player to reorient itself and its working - can't say its there by design but when I saw it, I decided to not implement another mechanic to rotate. The game is procedurally generated and although its possible to generate precise solvable levels - maybe we will try to do it, I would like experiment with generators more, have barely any experience - the 4 tiles are there to make sure the level is always solvable. And most of the time it works. And it also lets You feel smart, and even for some reason drop the game, don't know why ;) but yeah You saw everything. You can read below that someone went to 4k points, and needed to go back to reorient itself, even when there was no 4 tiles - now that's being engaged!

The time pressure could be done, but we didn't want it really, now the game is more chill, like a minesweeper. What we should do is a high score table, it would become competitive on its own. Though people would find out there are bugs later in the level generator:P

And You are slightly wrong about penalty, its there. You get points each screen and You get less if You took more steps. It should be better balanced to make it more clear.

2. I agree. Actually - from the very beginning - I wanted to show projection of the face on the floor, that way You would always see what would come next. Heck, it could've even been just a light in the correct color. But somehow scrapped it, don't know why.

3. I mean, sorry but we chuckled at "looks like it was hastily thrown together in the last second":D Of course it was thrown last second, its a jam:D And even now when we slowly fix the game, we don't touch the UI, it won't make this game any better, there are games without menus at all and they work. I think for the next jams we will just prepare snippets/framework for menus and stuff, because its not what we want to focus during jam at all. Well unless its a part of gameplay, not a utility.

The text was written in like two minutes, so pardon my lousy English, im not a native. But I can't find spelling errors, where are they?

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anttihaavikko2 years ago(+1)

Yeah of course the menu thing isn't a big deal but it would only take few extra seconds to make it look decent. It's the first thing the players will see when they open your game anyway.

itch.io

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