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jermrellum2 years ago

OK, so you want presentation feedback, and it looks fantastic. Beautiful characters, monsters, UI, everything. If I want to get real nitpicky, maybe I don't like the way the font looks on the tutorial screen, but I have to stretch to criticize that.  I think also maybe some double digits numbers have some overflow too -- my screen is 1920x1080 fyi.

As for understanding the game...well...so for most of it, my brain just says, put the big numbers in the squares. I was confused on what my health even was though until the fourth fight, when I realized it was the dice. Before that, couldn't find it and wasn't sure if it was part of the enemy's status box because all the numbers at the bottom were 0. I think also the bleed stat isn't really necessary -- it'd be more clear to just have a number pop up on top of the boss with a -5 in red or whatever, like in your standard JRPG. Your eyes aren't really looking at the UI, so it's hard to really glean information off of it, especially the bleed info.

Now, strategy does come into play at least on the 3rd and 5th fights with slime and diceholder (diceholder I gave up on after like 10 attempts). It takes a while to really understand what's actually happening -- that the enemy is not just nullifying one of your die's attacks/defenses, but actually stealing it and taking it for its own. Since it almost always seems to go after the largest die, it means you want to sacrifice your largest die on defense, then hope the other dice make up for it. On diceholder then, if you get less than 2 defenses, you're basically done, unless you get lucky next turn and get a heal. I think gameplay wise, having different jobs or different effectiveness (or different values of rolls meaning different things) for the different characters would have been better, because unless I'm mistaken, only the healer seemed to have a unique role. But maybe that's why I was having a tough time with the boss -- maybe one of the dice was resistant to getting their attack absorbed or something.

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Stopa2 years ago

Thank you very much for a thorough feedback to our game.

The looks of the tutorial is currently a high priority item on my TODO list, but I intended to rework it completely and change it into some kind of dialogue (similar to the ones you see after defeating each monster for the first time) so it will take me some time to do that.

As for the overflowing numbers, do you mean in the combat stats UI? The rework on these parts is scheduled as well, I practically did not touch this since the GMTK jam ended, so it sure need some polish. I also intend to rework the combat animations so it is more readable what is going on, including all those flashy red negative numbers indicating damage and so on. If only there was more time!

You are right, that the strategy is mostly "put the big numbers in the squares". It gets a bit nuanced later on because you might want to save leveled up dice for another round if your roll was a bit unlucky but I agree that some element that would let you strategize a bit more would improve the gameplay significantly. It got a bit better when I introduced the monster abilities (these were not there for the GMTK submission), but it's still pretty much in the "use big numbers, don't use small numbers" state. I am thinking of adding elemental dice that would work better when paired with the right action but I also don't want the planning phase to become some tedious overoptimization until the best solution is found.

The diceholder has not been tested all that much since I added his mind control ability, so there is a real possibility he is currently too OP and would deserve a nerf. As for distinct hero roles, this was one of the more difficult parts of game design, because when we initially had the hero actions very distinct and characteristic, the game was not playable because you'd often roll useless actions (too much defense and heal and not enough attack). By adding more attacks though, the heroes lost a bit of their distinctiveness. I am not really sure how to solve this properly, maybe we could have more than 1 or 2 symbols per hero face (like 2-4 on each hero every turn)?

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jermrellum2 years ago

Yeah by overflow I meant topleft corner where the stats are. They overlapped over the icons a bit.  I also thought maybe one neat thing you could do would be if your max health was the number of faces on all the rolling dice, that way your health increased overtime and it would make higher rolls for meaningful for healing. Idk how you would represent rolling dice HP though, would they all have their own health bars? It'd be kind of weird for the dice to have their health bars but not the characters.

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Stopa2 years ago

Ooh, but that is actually a very good idea. If the dice themselve have "health" it would solve a lot of the current gameplay issues:

  • It would incetivise the use of low roll dice to soak up damage.
  • It would mitigate the effect of "unlucky" roll of no defense.
  • It would make up for more interesting combat by changing the strategy throughout the game. At first, all dice are fully healed, later they are damaged and must be used carefuly.

There's couple of problems that would need to be solved though:

  • Monster attack would have to be stronger to balance out "more health" of the player. How to balance player's defense along with it?
  • How would heal work? Currently it revives dead mana, would the new heal only heal damaged mana or only revive dead, or both? How to differentiate it substantially from defense?
  • I think it could be interesting and perhaps even more intuitive if the same system worked for monsters too. They could have some "red" mana dice they would roll and use each turn and when all their mana dice are dead, they are defeated.
  • How to display mana health on the screen? I think a healthbar for each die would be too cluttered, maybe a fill of the grayed out dead mana? Radial or linear? Would it reduce readability of the numbers?

Thanks for the suggestion, this could be fun to implement and it's a lot to think about.

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