Yeah, you’re definitely right if we’re talking about a normal game, but in the case of game jam, you can’t afford to make your game too hard. There are a lot of unexperienced players that would get frustrated way too fast. Even if game is really good — people aren’t playing it the same way they play normal games. They’ll usually speedrun the game, test some mechanics, check ideas and evaluate artstyle. So if these debuffs were hurting player too much — it could easily break their experience. Instead, we made buffs stand out more, so people would want to get them. Probably you’re right and we overdone it and the game should be bit harder, don’t know.
About the dice, I totally agree. This was the whole point of the mechanic. Its actually a bug. Dice shouldn’t be working if you missed the timing. There is a line of code, I just placed it in a wrong function. My mistake.
But putting the dice itself in a middle of a screen, or even turning a character to dice is a good idea. Sadly, we didn’t think of that.
Anyways, big thanks for your detailed feedback on the game.