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Alright, I really enjoyed my time with this one!

So, I took a few notes, especially regarding presentation:

  • On the initial dialog when the bard asks why the diceholder didn't imprison him, why are some double quotes starting at the bottom position and others at the top? This one was more out of curiosity.
  • I liked the dialogue between characters when you freed a new die, but maybe adding some expressions could make it stand out. Like just tweaking their eyes, as in mad or very happy.
  • The victory screen could use some sound. It doesn't really feel like you won, a banner just appears and that's it. Maybe a more epic sound on the monster dying and a small victory fanfare.
  • I might have not seen the explanation, but I took a few rounds to find out I could level up the characters. I just upgraded my mana for a while.
  • The defense sound, when the enemy attacks you, feels really odd. Like someone slurping milkshake.
  • There could be more indications of what is actually happening at during the fight sequence, maybe your sword icon shooting something into the monster, then their defense getting into the way. Right now it feels a bit complicated to keep track on what is actually happening.
  • Fighting the Lime Slime, I thought I ran into a glitch, because when one of my characters got jellied, it decreased my attack considerably, but then I understood my attack was also reduced considering enemy's defense. Once again, maybe keeping base values in player/enemy areas and then fiddling values somewhere else would make it easier to keep track.

A few things that could add some juice:

  • Monsters speaking to the player on the first time you find them, an upgrade to the introductory cutscene.
  • Tutorials to explain how level up and fight rounds work (I'm still not sure when does healing happens in the fight, sometimes it seemed at the beginning, sometimes at the end)
  • Perhaps after the first encounter, you could see some info about the monster, in some sort of bestiary. This way players could be more prepared when grinding!
  • Add some fixed ability to characters, like the cleric always rolls heal plus something else when levelled. On the last fight I lost because all characters would roll attack, and there wasn't much I could do when the diceholder kept on flailing me. It felt like my strategy was working but I lost to unfairness. On my second run I managed to defeat it, but I was lucky to never run into full attack rolls.

Thank you so much for your thorough feedback!

  • We are from Czechia and in Czech the opening quotation marks are at the bottom. I suspect one of us had a Czech keyboard switched on when writing the dialogues and it automatically made the bottom quotes. Thanks for noticing that, I'll fix it!
  • This is definitely on our TODO list, unfortunately, our artist was too busy with work lately so we did not have time yet to create and put in emotions for our characters.
  • Another item from our TODO list, adding some FX to the victory and defeat screen is probably the next thing I will add to the game. Some animation and sound of monster dying is a nice suggestion though, that would be cool!
  • After your first fight, the rescued Mage tells Bard it's time to level up and Bard continues telling Mage they share XP with their mana dice. This was supposed to hint that you can use your points to level characters as well as dice, but I could add something more explicit directly into the level up screen.
  • It does sound a bit odd, doesn't it?
  • The whole combat animation will get a rework. I would like it to communicate much more visibly what is currently going on. It is not convenient to watch top and bottom bar UI numbers at the same time, so there should ideally be something happening in the middle of the screen directly on the heroes and monsters. And it should better communicate what is currently going on. And use less slurpy SFX.
  • I am not sure I understand your Lime Slime glitch. The way it works is that as Lime Slime jellies a hero, their stats are subtracted from the total in the bottom UI. Then if the attack (after this subtraction) is less then Lime Slime's defense, the attack does not do any damage. This will probably be solved with the previous bullet about less readable combat animations.

Also thanks for the suggestions on more juice to the game.

  • There are three ways the monster could say something to the heroes:
    • There could be some catch phrase inside the introductory cutscene dramatically sliding to join the name of the monster. Something like: Dice collector <swoosh>'Tax or die!' <Whoosh>
    • There could be a dialogue containing a piece of the story between the heroes and the monster similar to that at the end of the fight.
    • There could be some in game "voicelines" from the monster in specific moments of the combat (at the beginning but also possibly during the combat or at the end)
  • All options have their pros and cons in terms of implementation challenges, writing difficulty and added value for the player. I don't really know which one I would prefer myself, but they all seem interesting.
  • The tutorial in the first combat definitely needs some rework for better readability and completeness. As for the level up, this I already addressed above: some explicit call on what you can do in the level up screen could help this.
  • In another comment, I suggested that the number of actions for each hero could be higher. Currently each hero has either one or two actions, but it would not be much difficult to raise this number to 2-4 and then it would be really unlikely (if even possible) to not roll any defense with all heroes on the board. Adding a special "passive" ability to each hero is however a nice suggestion that could make the planning phase more interesting (for better strategy it would be interesting if the special ability triggered only when that hero has been assigned a dice with number less than certain threshold).

I am glad you were able to defeat The Diceholder. He might not be overpowered after all! Another thing I would really like to add to the game in the foreseeable future is some ending final victory screen that would take you to the credits and so on. Sorry for the end being a bit anticlimactic.