Yup like Stasys said, we cut away a big chunk that was going to be a combination of the last biome mixed with another biome based on a different crystal design!
Originally, the top of the map was also connected to Boneblight, but scrapping the 5th biome actually allowed for a more controlled, linear experience that was way easier to manage in such a short time.
Patternoid specifically was designed to be hard to read (Hence the name haha), but all the dice have a number system that makes sense behind them. There's a lot of them that are references to different number systems used through various cultures & media, so I wouldn't be surprised to see certain people find certain faces confusing. I definitely hear your feedback though, and I think this is one of those things that could drastically change the "feel" of the gameplay directly.
I do think there's a lot of satisfying potential of getting accustomed to the look of different dice and understanding what number you got from a glimpse. Pattern recognition is a really powerful tool we have just as humans, so having numbers tell you directly what the dice may do in the moment, might actually be distracting and less immersive, as soon as you start understanding the corresponding look of the different dice.
Basically, we're not sure yet ourselves and we need more playtesting to really determine to be honest haha. A nice in-between might be that numbers show up for a brief moment as soon as the specific die has stopped rolling, so you can quickly assess the needed info. The die all roll in sequentially, so this makes sense to me. Or maybe only highlighting a specific number when hovering over the die.
Appreciated! We're a bunch of mixed media artists that dabble in a lot of different stuff, so even though there's definitely things we're better at individually, we're able to fill in for each other, discuss things more thoroughly on a mutual understanding and give each other advice in pretty much every aspect of the game's design. So if one of us was feeling uninspired in one area, another could pick up where they left off and take inspiration either directly, or from a mood board where we have all our ideas written down. There's some exceptions of course with some of the heavier programming having to be done by Stasys and some of the more intricate pixel art having to be done by myself, but that's always the case and we all learned along the way.
Stasys also being the most experienced in actually creating games & programming in the team, was very quick to re-orient everyone if things either got just a little too ambitious due to time constraints or if people ended up getting distracted. His quick wit is something I really came to appreciate at the end.
And thirdly, the game never had any major stopping points in terms of design choices. We brainstormed all our decisions immediately in the beginning, landed on something we all thought has a lot of potential on paper, and then additively worked it all up till what it is now. There were few minor changes like some of the backstory being rewritten to make more sense stylistically, a lot of back and forth on how nodes should look for players to easily identify them, etc. On my end, the only major thing I had to scrap for the game jam was another major biome that would've connected onto the Crystar Belt since the map as it is alone already took ~7 days to draw. But yeah, the game's immediate clear direction helped all of us know what to aim for during most hours I think.
Overall, I'm incredibly proud of everyone on the team for even being able to do this, we're honestly all a bit surprised too with how it came out!
Super super cool! Really love this game and the pixel art is very gorgeous, It's really fun chaining together those super big combos. Especially love that big room with all the enemies for you to just demolish, it's so satisfying
Balancing QOL and general variety in the gameplay features themselves are definitely something we'd love to expand upon further, although with how much work has gone into polish, I'm not super sure when that future will be haha.
Either way, super glad you enjoyed this fun little 10 days experiment ^^
