Wow, what an amazingly polished game, presentation-wise! Also, what a cool concept! I very much want this to turn into a full game!
I love the idea, this is one of the most strategic and interesting uses of output randomness I've seen in a while. Unfortunately, right now the game is extremely cheesable, as 1. you can just walk by and even through enemies and 2. you can select any dice folk on the map without having to "activate" them first, you can just send every singe of your dice folks directly into the final battle if you really want to. Which I did, the second time around. Players optimize the fun out of games.
Apart from that, there were a few UX issues that made the game feel a bit more tedious than it needed to be:
- As much as I loved the tiled dropping down and disappearing back into space, I would like to have a higher range of vision. Maybe have the semi-transparent tiles appear a bit earlier and more prominently? Maybe also zoom out the camera a little bit?
- Camera movement was also very slow and I wished there was a way to quickly switch between my dice folks, for example the tab key or number keys.
- Speaking of that, it would be really awesom to have a list of all your active dice folks on the bottom of the screen, including their stats. That would make it much less of a pain to look for which one I want to send into battle against a specific enemy.
- Lastly, some movement indicator would be nice to show if you would start a battle on the end square. Maybe turn the path red? On my first playthrough, I accidentally sent my 15-heart guy into a battle they were bound to lose because I didn't see there was an enemy next to the target square.
In spite of all this criticism, I think this game has an incredible amount of potential. If I were to continue working on the idea, I'd probably take it into a roguelike or tactics game direction with small, condensed levels where the focus is decision-making and not exploration. Maybe also add a sort of turn-based system where enemies can choose to initiate a battle on their turn, too. But that's just personal preference and I can just as well see this going into a more exploration-based traditional RPG direction.
One final observation: While more absorbing dice are just strictly better than less, it's very interesting to me that that is not true for attacking dice. While having more of them makes you a better allrounder, having less can lead to having some specialized characters. I think that's a really neat strategic component that can lead to some interesting decision-making.