Retracing my steps for answers after a hectic testing phase, thank you for your detailed reply! :)
et al.
Haha, this is starting to resemble a research article comparative analysis! XD (I actually asked semi-jokingly for a ‘state of the art’ in my comment for Marimbla; you do provide a part of it here! This is hilarious, in a good way.)
One slight correction to a statement you made in 1: The red dots in our game actually decrease the dot-count on the respective face instead of overwriting it.
Oops, sorry! :s Maybe I only stumbled upon cases that were equivalent to overwriting by coincidence? I am not sure. Seeing your remark on point 6, this could be.
You can also accidentally reduce the dots to 0, which then works like your blank stamp mechanic.
Cool! I don’t think that happened to me. (… Wait, are you saying you tried my game? While I am happy on the originality side, I feel ashamed because of my rushed levels seeing the level design at work in other games, incuding yours. XD)
We also cut the music due to time constraints. Our team is just a friend group of CS students, so none of us had much experience with art.
… but Kevin MacLeod has. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I know it’s less original to take already made music, but it feels acceptable in a game jam, especially such a short one. (Actually, even a released game such as The Stanley Parable features the Kevin!) Alternatively, you can use some tools such as Beepbox or go full a cappella, especially since you are a five-manned team; I suggested the latter idea to Gadert from Dice Knight since these guys did all the funny sounds with their mouths, and he seemed to like it. :)
(I had considered making music solely out of voice for my second game jam, although I gave up on it for time reasons. Although I did make the bubble sounds myself. XD)
Collectively I think we invested about as much time as a two- or three-person team would.
Fair enough, I suspected it could be the case. On the other hand, individually, lone participants invested as much time as one person would — sometimes even less, I know I lost a few critical hours. ;))
(Just joking around, I have nothing against teams in themselves; I just think the game jam rules are a bit weird by not taking the manpower issue into account. I tend to think there should be a ‘team’ project category and a ‘loner’ project category, but this is up to debate!)
a feature (due to time) where the player could lift up the cube to inspect it. With the different solutions I've found in the jam submissions so far, I think we'll go with something else in future releases.
It turns out Roll Of The Dice had the smart idea of showing the hidden faces dynamically if the player presses a button; I could not help noticing this results in a display close to my own (static) UI element. ^^
(As a point of interest, I had also thought of the tile-painting idea during my initial brainstorming! But I’m still glad I changed it for something else. :) I realized it would force the player to change the terrain dramatically, and indeed, the goal of the game is to have the whole level painted a certain way, which would not go well with the possibility of having larger levels to explore adventurously which I intended if mine gets extended. Although stamping the tiles from time to time could still be interesting, as it would go well with the stamp concept. :))
It was a match between "Ice Dice" (due to the sliding mechanic) and "Face Value". […] I'm really happy with our choice because otherwise, we'd have entered a fierce competition with the other "Ice Dice" games ^^
I feel clueless, what is the pun behind ‘Ice Dice’? ^^' Is it merely an allusion to an ice cube? (I am not a native English speaker, which may be a valid excuse. Or not.) I cannot find a reference. Sorry for the silly question. XD
15: Oh wow, that was not intentional. By your ':)' I guess we did it correctly? So you control with ZQSD instead of WASD? Or do I misunderstand you, and you have to arrange your fingers in some twisted way?
You got it right, the game does work with an AZERTY’s ZQSD controls. That’s what I meant by ‘layout-independent’: the keys you chose are defined by position, not by symbolic value / letter.
According to Frank Alfano, Unity — which you used — may have switched its convention to automatically take this into account. Yet, he is not sure, and I think I have seen Unity games not provide this, but I would have to see how the game jam programmers fiddled with it to know what happened. :p
(Phew, that was a somewhat long answer to an answer! XD Hopefully, this should be enough.)