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(1 edit) (+1)

I assume you want honest feedbacks on the game to understand why you ranked low on the jam, so I'm gonna do my best to be thorough.

The concept is good and could be enjoyable to play but there's a lot a painfull gameplay element that make the experience very frustrating, some due to the core concept of using dice others that can be fixed by tweeking the game a bit.

The guardians movements are partially random which make them unpredicatble even if you understand the pattern. You have one part of random due to the dice roll (core to the gameplay and the jam theme) and another one when they hit a wall/crack where they choose a random new direction. This mean if the guards is near a wall /crack you better pray he wont go your way.  Dying because of random always make the player feels like he have been cheated and lost because of the game and not because of its own mistakes. Which is not a good incentive to keep playing a will make most player ragequit.

You could solve that by defining & displaying a clear path that each guard will allways follow, wether it's a round or a back & forth (and in case they hit your ball they just go back in the opposite direction, reversing their path)

You could also display their next dice roll earlier so that you can plan your movement accordingly.

Some long corridors combined to the short range of view sometimes make you end up right in front of a guard walking toward you before you can even realize you're screwed since you cant go back. Again, same point as above about dying because of random/unfairness.

Those  also make you want to skip on gathering bones since there's a good chance you'll get caught because of random.

The first time I picked up a guard speed boost, my first thought was : "why is this a bonus ? it basically makes me wait less and make the gameplay less frustrating... it should be like that by default." Loot/bonuses should bring new gameplay elements or improve the one you have. like the black & the gold dice or the second red dice that are actually very interesting adds to the gameplay and bring really cool new possibilities or the key & bone detector that makes the search easier. In short, If a bonus makes the game less frustrating, then it should be in there by default.

The level design honestly needs a lot of rework. There's a lot of long corridor in there. I think the whole thing would work better as a succession of short rooms to solve like puzzles (avoid guard > get key > avoid guards > get to door) with an optional bone to collect in some rooms to make it more challenging. The huge rooms filled with lots of paths and guands wandering around are very frustrating and don't really bring much to the gameplay.

in term of visual design, the sprites looked ok, but the absence of outlines on the dog & guards kinda make them blend in the background making the whole thing a bit fuzzy looking. Adding outlines on obstacles that can collide with you would also help a lot with readability.

The sound design is also ok & coherent but I have to admit that the music loop kinda got annoying pretty fast so i just muted the game. :s

I went a far as the forest with the gold dice (not sure if I was close to the end or not).

All in all, It's a decent game with a nice concept & with a few improvements to remove some frustrations could be a cool game.