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I made it to level 10. I think the gameplay's pretty decently intuitive, especially with the tutorial explaining things, so I had no issue figuring out how to play. Was confused on why blank dice were showing up when they do nothing, but maybe in the future you can modify the dice in some way? That is, in game, the player could collect another die or use an upgrade somehow to change faces.

Some things about balance: once you start getting a few levels in, your sword attack becomes less and less useful. With its low output damage the game kind of becomes mostly running away from enemies and hoping you get fire and lightning magic. I like the whole pick 5 mechanic, though, which helps add strategy to the randomness.

I think sword attacks should maybe be a little more powerful for the risk it takes to get close to an enemy, and also maybe the ice attack should have a slightly greater range because it doesn't feel anywhere near as useful as fire and lightning. Or to give the sword more importance, maybe there should be more low defense but high attack enemies (I think the spider might have been one, but it still had >1 HP so the sword is a dangerous tactic on it).

I would say a way to heal would be nice, but the tutorial implied that endless is not the final form of the game's campaign, so that's less important right now if it'll be structured differently anyway.

Also, even though you did explain what he speed stat meant in the tutorial, I still found it a little tricky to try and predict where I'd be safe from an enemy and where not. It was dependent on the die roll of the enemy of course, but was movement based on speed multiplied by the die?

Anyway, balance is a tricky thing to fine tune because every new thing you add could potentially break something. But I also recommend checking out Mini Dice Battle, also in the post-jam -- it has a similar idea except you control multiple characters, and coins scattered about the battlefield encourage you to move to different places.

But I do want to mention that it's nice to see you have a decent number of enemy types, and they're introduced gradually with increasing difficulty, easing you into the game.

Thanks for checking out my game! Dice-building is my goal from the beginning but I wanted to put out something playable (at least the core game loop) for the jam. I have plans for various ways to customize the gameplay (adding dice, upgrading/duplicating faces, etc.) and I have laid the foundations in the code for it. I will start working on it after the next planned update which adds terrain features to make movement more interesting. 

Another planned feature that didn’t make it to this version is to have 3 characters, each focusing on either magic, weapons, or movement. I kept the sword for the wizard because I wanted to give a more reliable source of damage when the player is low on mana. I think it works best with ice magic since the frozen enemies can shield you from the others while you slowly pick at their health. I’m looking into reducing the blank faces on the sword dice to just 1 and/or increasing the number of sword dice to 2 to make it even more reliable. (The spider actually had 1 hp previously but I buffed it because it was very easy to deal with during playtesting).

I will have to explain or show how speed works better since this is what confuses a lot of people. Enemies don’t actually roll to move - they can always use up all of their speed to move as an action. The only times they don’t are when their path is blocked or when they see their target on the same row/column midway through. So a slime with 1 speed can use its 3 actions to move 3 times (1 tile at a time), or move 2 times then attack, etc. I will try to explain it more clearly in the tutorial or maybe I can also change the term from “speed” to “step” or “pace.”

I’ve seen a lot of games from the jam with a similar concept (Vimlark actually made a similar game using the same asset pack I used lol) but I haven’t seen Mini Dice Battle so I will check it out. Will also check out your game. Thank you so much for the thorough feedback. I really appreciate it.