When I noticed the shattered gnome bits weren't getting cleaned up, I thought that was fun to see. Then I noticed they still had physics and got a little worried. Then came wave 7 and the piles of bodies started to act as cover. The audio strained. The power of the Blue Garden's superior engineering began to buckle under the might of that fiendish Red Gnome legion. What drives a gnome to take up arms against our glorious Blue Garden? Greed? Spite? I shall never know, for now my porcelain shards litter the dirt.
Elrohir_Helyanwe
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Keep at it; your next one will be better! I imagine the maze was time consuming to create and was possibly the crux of your dilemma. It was a neat thing to see: how the player glimpses a little maze underfoot, to then have to traverse the big maze. I suggest instead of taking the time designing a complex level layout, focus on what you'll have the player do and then design a few key pieces that serve that. A simpler maze would save you time/effort and still accomplish your goals. Good effort, keep on learning!
I was a little surprised to see an options menu in a game jam game, but turns out we needed it. After swapping from cinematic, the game ran smoothly. There's some jank in many places, but I'm very much impressed by everything on display. The biggest hiccup was stopping the cursor with precision: it kept going and would blow past the stretch radius, causing a reset. I'm most impressed by the way you managed to catch problematic ant placements and reset their position without breaking flow. Cheers to the level design as well. Great job!
I'm not seeing a way to go back or to undo placement that just gets me stuck. Perhaps that's just the penalty for not using the right piece to build the path? I like the vibes. The lag makes trying to platform rougher than it ought to be. The audio that plays when the mist is closing in is a bit loud.
It took a hot minute to understand what was going on and what I was supposed to do. I changed the controls to WASD, then figured it out, then thought that maybe the default controls might make more sense now, but they didn't. I'll be honest that I didn't read too much at the start. Pretty fun once you get going.
I was a bit confused at first, and for a hot minute. I ended up losing, but still playing until I won. Then I ran into the negative turns. There are some kinks for sure, understandably, but if my understanding of what's there is right, I like it. Good use of output randomness and input, I think. Plenty of strategic decisions, despite the randomness, in fact, because the randomness.
It seems like everything boils down to choosing which number you want to pick, then reflex-checking to get it. I'd like to see some additional options available on the bar that have different effects, specifically things that would allow the player to strategically choose to aim for. For example, a decision based on whether or not they hit the last target or not, or to mitigate some penalty suffered for missing a previous one. Nice work.
That's one tricky movement system. Yes, you have control over the movement, but then you get moving and find out you hardly do. After rolling around a bit, I was getting somewhat of a feel for the rhythm of it, the speed it rolls when given a specific amount of thrust. Seems like something approachable, then vast, then maybe even something one can master with practice. Kudos.
Is it just me, or is the dash ability simply non-functional? Similarly, the wall-climb doesn't seem to allow me to climb up the wall, just cling to it and then jump off of it (but not up it). Hopefully, I'm just bad at the game. Aside from that, I like the look, sound, and overall feel of it. I like how the layout seems to simultaneously accommodate the different abilities that one might get. One isn't accosted by an unwanted roll; one just has to adapt to what's been given.
I'm getting a crash on startup. If I'm not mistaken, this is something to do with Unreal Engine? I've gotten this with at least one other game in this jam, so I think it's just some between Unreal and this old laptop not getting along. Of course, if you didn't make this with Unreal, then I'm way off, but oh well.
First time playing it, a lot of enemies were running around, but they seemed to not really be interested in me, or at least, didn't want to get close. They bundled up a little ways away from me or crowded at the bottom. Sometimes I'd sidestep one that got close as the crowd was on the other side of me and I just let him pass so he could join it. I might have been shot at five times. I replayed it to see if that was a fluke, but the second time, no enemies spawned at all.
Getting started was confusing. Not thrilled about a wall of text that I can't seem to access anymore once in game. Once I got an understanding of how to progress, it was fun. Seeing the score ramp up faster as faster as my die leveled up, getting more dice, levelling them up; the feedback loop creating by these interconnected gameplay loops was fun to figure out and run up that ramp. The glaring issue though, is that this loop doesn't seem to go anywhere other than back into itself. I'm racking up score, because it allows me to rack up more score, which allows me to rack up more score, ad infinitum. I played for a while after realizing this and can say that I had some fun just figuring it out and seeing how fast I can make it climb. There's just a certain let-down that comes with no other goal than farming a number higher.
Interesting idea, having variable jumps that can potentially leave you in many different areas, covering terrain differently as you go. The big issue for me is that every action is sluggish. Going from waiting for a jump to charge, to waiting for the die to land, waiting for it to trudge down a slope so that it'll rest so I can jump again; feels tedious.
I really like the foreshadowing you get from all the levels overlapping. Once I started playing with the blocks that slid into a solid platform, I realized I've never played a game that really captured the feeling of anticipation of being sucked in, when riding an escalator. One thing that stood out that I didn't like was the sound effect that played when respawning; the high-pitched squeak was abrasive. All in all, well done.
I've gotten it for many of these games, including my own. I imagine there's some simple verification/certification step that many people, myself included, overlooked. Although, like someone else pointed out, this one's just an executable file, not the whole thing zipped, so Windows is extra fussy about it.
My favorite parts were the fourth wall breaks and insight into the design of the game. Overall, the core mechanic of solving puzzle rooms with a specific ability used in a specific way, but not being able to choose to use that ability at will feels bad. I've solved this puzzle; I know what ability I must use and how, now I must stand here and wait for the die to allow me to use it. It seemed like picking it up at a certain angle, and then dropping it at a certain angle, would allow me to force it to land on a specific face, as the simple drop didn't allow it to roll, but that would only work for situations where I could simply drop it, without the need to throw it.