It took me some time to understand how it works and I am still not sure in which order every thing is working. It was a little hard to experiment how the ships were effecting the results as the modified value of a dice is not displayed. It would be nice if the results of a failed roll was not desapearing to have time to see what went wrong (sometime they stay but sometime they quickly desapear). More generally, I thought that there was lacking some way to see what went wrong when I was doing some tests or when I thought I found the solution but it failed. It was neverrless was fun to experiment with this concept and the art is well done !
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I totally agree with your comment! It was my intention to display results after the dice have been modified, but unfortunately I didn't have time to implement that. Good idea giving time to players to look at the wrong solutions: I don't think I will directly change that in a future update, but I'll try to balance this idea with making things more clear, like with adding the modified results.
When you get a puzzle wrong, dice should always return to blank bbbuttt... a damn visual bug happens in a couple of levels and I hate it. I just didn't catch it when coding since I haven't playtest that much. I think that is the most confusing bit currently, since it's unconsistent and doesn't help players to understand what's happening.
Btw, you surely took a good approach by testing things out and I think that's a good thing for the game and I will try to keep it. By making it more consistent it will surely become more accessible, and the players will be able to understand that, in fact, the order of operation is the traditional one: x and % first, then + and -.
Sorry for the long response, it's almost a devlog now haha! I have actually already implemented these changes in the game project and as soon as the jam ends I will update the new version of the game. Thank you a lot for the spot on comment!
Hello again!
Just wanted to say that an updated version of the game is out now, where most of your suggestions have been implemented! There's a dev log in the game's page, but to make it short here's the new things: lv 1 is now a sort of tutorial and cannot be brute-forced, forcing players to understand the mechanics from the very start. Both when you input the right or the wrong solution, dice results will be displayed so that players can analyse what went wrong/right and make test to understand the process behind the rolling. Initially I also added a value that displayed each modified result, but at the end I've decided to remove that: it's not in the spirit of the game, making it extremely linear and clear, and it eliminates the need of testing and exploration. Anyway, the improvements above balance this choice and I think that everything works fine.
There are also new quality of life features, but most importantly a new (secret) level to try out!