itch.io

(Josh)

The game looks and sounds great! I liked the tactics conceptually, but I had trouble understanding from the UI when I was using an ability. That made it harder to plan my turns.

I enjoyed it, though, good game!

(Josh)

I love the double wordplay of curse as magical art and as insult. The gameplay was great, too! I could also envision a lot of ways to make certain tiles worth more, thus encouraging more creative words.

The audio and visual presentation was cutesy and fun, too.

Great game!

(Josh)

Curses as cards was a fun concept. I didn't feel like I could do much strategy, though, since I only got one curse at a time and it was usually to my benefit to play them. Could be I just got bad hands dealt.

The VFX on the curse sigils were great.

Good game, overall!

(Josh)

Taking away movement options as curses was an interesting idea, but didn't really land well for me. I eventually got to the point where my lack of skill got me killed a lot, so I didn't finish the game after the third curse.

That said, the controls themselves (when I was allowed to use them, lol) felt good to me. Could use some coyote time to make the jumps a little more forgiving, but most of the time I could do more or less what I was trying to do. I just did things that sucked. :P

Good game, all in all!

Thank you!

(Josh)

Thank you for playing! We'll certainly let you know if we decide to expand on this.

Thank you also for streaming the game, despite how unfinished it was. Found even more bugs that I missed lol (like the fact that the order tickets weren't actually shown "offscreen"). I'm sorry you didn't get your bacon, though. :( Wrong resource reference.

Great game! I loved the twist on idle battlers to try and sustain a war effort, and the presentation was awesome!

The only thing I would suggest is a way to see the curse info by hovering over the curses, instead of having to curse someone and then read the curse icon in the person description.

(Josh)

Very unique idea, I loved it conceptually.

The art and music were great, and they fit each other well.

Practically, once the curses got to about three I lost track of how to translate between all of the curses. It also seemed like cursed words would eventually not light up any letters, so I couldn't tell which set of words I was typing.

I eventually resorted to keyboard spam to try and progress, which seems like something that would need to be discouraged (since it defeats the point of the game).

Great game!

(Josh)

Definitely needed to read the tutorial to figure out how to play (the curse key is not something I would have realized on my own), but once I did I enjoyed the idea of cursing enemies to destroy them.

I liked the visual differences curses inflicted on enemies, but I didn't really notice any sort of statistical differences, even on things like Haste. Could be I just didn't notice, though.

Would've been nice to see some damage feedback to know when I was hit.

Overall, good game.

(Josh)

Very well done! I loved the art and audio, and there was a surprising amount of content packed into the game. (I might be a bit jealous. :) )

The jump and air movement didn't feel very responsive (as other comments have alluded to), but they weren't problematic to the point that I couldn't finish the game.

The respawning at checkpoints was great, and minimized my frustration at getting killed by the controls.

I enjoyed playing, thanks for making it!

(Josh)

Audio and graphics were good. I liked the use of light as a mechanic and as aesthetic.

The UI looked good, too.

The cheater option definitely made the game feel more fun to play, whereas with the intended mechanics it just felt ineffective and frustrating. It would've been fun to let you build your way up to that through gameplay.

Didn't feel like there was much to play for, winning and losing both had the same outcome for me.

Of particular note for me, the constant mouse clicking was bad for my carpal tunnel. It would have been nice to hold the mouse to fire, which reduce the number of time I'm having to press down.

Good work, overall.

Thank you! It was definitely a lot of fun to play around with, and the resource-based system was flexible enough that, in theory, it would've been relatively simple to add additional effects to mess around with.

Thank you! Yeah, it was surprising how fun the sandwich making on its own was, even without having a goal implemented. A good sign if we decide to explore this idea further in the future.

Thank you! Agreed, definitely a lot of potential here. :)

Thank you for playing!

Definitely has a lot of puzzle potential, especially if the curses were randomized (as originally planned) so then each time you got new ingredients you had to solve the curse problems different ways.

(Josh)

I was able to get the game to start, and win it.

This take on dice battling was neat. Having different loaded dice was a good way to introduce some controlled randomness and make it less likely that you get screwed over by pure RNG. The whole game felt slow, though, and the UI felt sluggish. I also had no incentive to take on dice battles that were significantly risky, instead winning by picking battles with the lowest enemy dice.

Overall, good job!

(Josh)

Surprisingly fun and addicting game, and with such a simple design, too. Great job!

Yep, 48 hours is a small amount of time to try and make anything work in. :)

(Josh)

I love the mechanic, and the incorporation of chess movement to make it obvious how the enemy's pieces moved. The included abilities were a good fit, and the AI was surprisingly good for a game jam.

I think the one thing I wished I had was a free-move camera to see where other pieces were on the board. It got tricky at times to remember where the offscreen pieces were, so I could avoid long line attacks.

Overall, though, fantastic job, I greatly enjoyed this!

(Josh)

For as simple as this game's premise is, it was still fun. I had the thrill of rushing to beat the last level and stop the mad king just as he started to roll his die, possibly to roll the 1. I stopped it before we could find out, though. :)

Keeping the mad king on screen and showing his reactions was brilliant. It was a blatant reminder as to why I was madly pushing boxes around as quickly as possible.

Mechanically, the puzzle solving was fun. The one thing I would have liked was an undo button to avoid having to restart the entire level when I accidentally push a box onto a wall or a corner.

Good game!

(Josh)

I love me some Portal-esque gameplay, and this game delivered that experience. The art and sound (despite some commentary in-game saying otherwise ;P) looked good for having 48 hours to do it.

I liked the idea of throwing a die in 1st-person and having the upward face be an ability; that said, the actual act of throwing the die and hoping it landed on the ability I needed to use was a bit frustrating at times, especially in cases involving the missile turret. Knowing what I needed to do to solve the puzzle and not being able to execute it because the die didn't roll the way I needed it to didn't feel great. Being able to rotate the die while holding it, so I could start my throw with the die positioned to my specification, might have made it easier to time the throw better to make it land the way I wanted it to.

Overall, great job!

(Josh)

The idea of making a visual novel with die rolling determining how the story plays out was interesting, as a premise. However, I honestly couldn't see what difference the die actually made, in terms of which scenes I saw and when "roll of the dice" was spoken. I played three times, and all three times I got the same first three scenes (in a slightly different order), the same second scene twice (with once having it interrupted for reasons I didn't understand), and two of the five endings; the die at the top didn't seem to match with what scene was presented, and with "roll of the dice" it just always seemed to result in an explosion. The lack of understanding how the die actually impacted my story experience made the mechanic less enjoyable for me.

Getting the same scenes also meant I wound up wanting to skip through scenes for which I'd already seen the story, and as a result the delay caused from the animations made it take longer to get through, which annoyed me.

Overall, interesting idea, but the experience didn't gel with me. All that said, congratulations on making the game!

(Josh)

A randomly generated playing field is an interesting concept, since you would theoretically never have the same playing field twice. That said, I'm not sure I would have wanted to keep trying this game, for design reasons I'll go into below.

Since the dice count down as soon as you stand on them, I had little time for strategic thinking. The board was large enough that it takes time for me to try and form a plan, and the global timer prevents me from being able to do that quickly enough. Consequently, I found myself just dashing across platforms and hoping I didn't make a mistake.

That also meant that the dice platforms which did other things meant little to me, since I had no time to really evaluate whether there were good platforms for me to go to, just bad platforms I needed to avoid.

Having the number dice count down while standing on them also played into me not wanting to stand still and figure out where I should go. Even if they don't always explode, I always treated them as though they would explode, because I didn't want to risk getting sent back to the start, so it was just a lucky break if the die I was on didn't explode.

Maybe these were all things you wanted out of your gameplay, and this was just not the right fit for me. The way I see it, though, the strategy of having a randomized playing field with different effects gets neutered by me not feeling like I have enough time to make any strategic plans. I did beat the game, but it didn't feel like it was because of anything clever I did; rather, it felt it was because I got lucky in which platforms I happened to step on.

I hope I don't come across as being too negative, I was just intending to provide my experience, as feedback, should you wish to consider it.

All that said, the visuals themselves looked good, and you made good use of your sound effects. I also enjoyed how you crafted your exit button. :P

Even if this game wasn't my cup of tea, I'm glad I got to play it!

Thank you for the feedback, and for playing!

Thank you for the feedback, and for playing!

Jump was definitely high, for sure. Intended to fix that, but ran out of time. (I thought my jump system was made to be adjustable, but this was the first time I tried to do it and turns out it's not! :P)

I did have a controls menu available from the pause menu, but I relied on people understanding that pressing escape in games usually brings up the pause menu, and it looks like that is not always a good assumption to make.

Thank you for the feedback, and for playing!

Yep, should've just made sprint the default movement and not had walking in there. And yeah, definitely needed some audio to make it feel juicier, we just ran out of time. :(

(Josh)

I liked the art and audio. The mechanic of rolling dice and having to decide which slots to use them in was interesting, and I'd love to see more of it.

I had a lot of trouble finding the information I would've liked to have to make informed decisions. I didn't really know what the difference was between using sword and using shield, other than shield gave me some kind of defense stat which sometimes blocked part of the enemy damage. There was also no indication I could find as to how my damage and enemy damage was calculated. There was an attack stat that I could pay gems to increase, but it didn't seem to exactly correlate with the actual damage I was doing; I also couldn't tell why I was applying damage to some enemies on the field and not others. Likewise, there was no indication to tell me how much damage enemies got to do to me; the closest I could figure out was that beating all three of an enemy's dice prevented them from doing any damage. Overall, I think better explanation of what the mechanics were and better communication of what was happening and why would've made the game feel much better.

I also failed to see the point of giving me a rest/shop option at the start of the game, when I needed no healing and had no money. Also, the balance was such that I couldn't progress further than Day 9 before getting killed.

Overall, though, I really liked the idea. Good job!

(Josh)

Fun mechanic! I know the sound was pre-existing, but I think you picked good sounds and music and used them in the right ways to make the game feel juicy.

I liked that all the characters were dice, and I liked how I could see my health indicated by the face on my die. I wish there had also been some kind of health indicator on enemies to communicate how much health they had, because without that it just felt like I had to keep pumping dice at them until they died. I could see enemies were different die faces, but I couldn't figure out if there was any particular meaning to that, each enemy seemed capable of shooting the game's various weapons.

Also, not sure if I missed something, but it seemed, visually, like my dice bullets were always a d6 rolling 1-6, even when I had weapons that shot non-d6s or d6s that rolled specific numbers (at least that's how I interpreted the weapon graphics).

Movement felt quite smooth! A minor gripe is that it was easy to get shot multiple times because there was no grace period of invulnerability between hits, so getting caught in a flurry of bullets is pretty easy. That's possibly more a personal preference, though.

Oh, and I couldn't figure out much about how the score was determined because there was no indication of how my score increased throughout the game. A display that shows when doing something that scores points would have been helpful.

Great game, well done!

(Josh)

Excellent execution on the design! You not only had different types of weapons for each die face, you made sensible associations for which weapon went with which die face. Each weapon also had a distinct role, so nothing felt repetitive.

The sound effects were charming, and the music was fun. My favorite was the RPG shot and explosion. ;)

I wish I could see what my score was on the game over screen, since I'm not paying much attention to that while trying to survive. And it would also be nice to see more variety of dominoes/baddies to fight against.

Overall, though, this was a blast. Great job!

(Josh)

I like that you roll the dice and then need to throw them to beat the enemies. I also enjoyed the pixel art and music, both were well done.

I don't like that the camera restricts your forward field of view when you move forward; it makes it harder for me to see what's up ahead. I kept getting tripped up over Z doing everything in the inventory, while X was Cancel _and_ attack; I think I would have kept Z strictly for opening and closing inventory, and have X be the button which performs inventory actions, but that's maybe personal preference.

Overall, though, I had fun. Good job!

(Josh)

I liked the story theme of crashing on a D&D game. The art and sound were both great.

The gameplay was initially fun, when I wasn't sure what was going to happen, but once I learned how things worked it got to be pretty boring. I think there was a bug where I never took any damage, even when I let goblins hit me. There was no reason for me to ever take my finger off the chaingun trigger, so it was really easy to keep spraying bullets and mow everything down; I think an overheat mechanic to force me to stop firing once in a while would have been helpful. I also didn't like that the d20 was just a static mine, with the randomness going into the cooldown; I would have preferred the dice roll be used for something more "juicy", like the size of the explosive radius (not that doing more interesting things in 48 hours would be easy, just providing feedback on how I think it could be better). Being able to shoot the enemy dice before they land was cool, but the gravity on those dice is light enough that it takes a long time for them to settle, giving me too much time to take them out.

I think there's promise, though. Despite the issues, and getting bored after awhile, this is something that I would like to see an improved iteration of. Good job!

(Josh)

Amazing graphics, the game looked gorgeous! The character animation was nicely done, too.

Conceptually, I like the idea of a third-person tower defense game with some platforming, but the gameplay frustrated me. I think the waves came too fast for me to realistically make it over to any of the "better" dice roll stations and bring the dice back in time to be useful. I was getting consistently annoyed with failing my platform jumps, because that meant time wasted and increased my odds of dying.

I also wished I had some kind of minimap to observe what was going on in the defense lane so I could have an idea of how much time I really had to pull off moves.

Good effort!

(Josh)

Great concept! I loved having randomized bullets with different effects.

Some of the effects were obvious, but there were a few that I never really figured out through gameplay. It would be helpful to have some text somewhere to explain what each bullet does (like in the inventory, maybe). I also wasn't sure what the final boss' gimmick was. I saw it rotating through various effects, but hitting them with a bullet of that effect didn't seem to do anything. I wound up just pumping bullets into them and occasionally seeing the health bar go down. (The AI were also not too hard to deal with, which is understandable in a jam game.)

The title screen/intro gave me a laugh or two.

Overall, great job!

Thank you for the feedback, and for playing!

(Josh)

This was a great idea! It puts a twist on card-builders by using "dice" and giving you the ability to affect what you can roll, and I enjoyed that. Would love to see what this plays like with more time to balance things.

I do think the balancing needs some work. The enemies do a lot of damage, and I never made it past Level 4 because I couldn't heal myself and deal with them quickly enough. I also had trouble telling which of my dice had changed upgrades (I don't think the art change when changing faces persisted across levels, even though the dice effects did). I also wish I could change more than one die's face.

I did encounter multiple bugs with restarting a game, like not having full health and not getting dice replenished. I also was only able to play the first level on the Windows build, it bugged and did not show the victory screen (did not encounter this in the web build).

Overall, great job!

(Josh)

Interesting concept! I liked the idea of rolling the dice to determine how many enemies attack, but I wasn't able to clearly see what roll caused what pattern to happen, so for the most part seeing the dice roll didn't really help me.

I would personally prefer a less floaty, more responsive jump.

I enjoyed the strings used to hold up the flameskulls. :)

Overall, good job!

(Josh)

Had a lot of fun with this! Loved the idea of using the dice to determine how far you could move, and having to time that around the series of rotating security systems.

I did encounter a bug where making an illegal move (i.e. running into a wall) still used up my movement points. Obviously the more stuff that could've been added the better, but for six hours this is really impressive.

Great job!

(Josh)

Great concept! I loved the sound effects and music, too. I also appreciated that you could retry levels that you failed. ;)

Admittedly, I strongly preferred the ranged attacks because it let me more easily keep away from taking damage, but overall the abilities were pretty well balanced. (I did exploit blow's rapid fire and the knockback of abilities to prevent the boss from making it out into the stage lol).

Good job, enjoyed playing!

Thank you for playing, and thanks for the feedback!

Agreed that walking was pointless (it was a leftover from when this game was totally different, and we just didn't think to take it out until after the deadline) and that the control is subpar at the moment. Saving progress is something we'll explore for when we expand development on this game.

(Josh)

Great aesthetic for this game! The sound and music were great, too.

This is one of the best visual presentations of using dice attacks that I've played yet, amplified by the juicy SFX when the dice hit things.

I wish there was more to do beyond just buying the set of dice you intend to use, though. I didn't really have anything to spend gold on once I had enough to buy the D20. It would also have been nice to get a chance to shop mid-game instead of having to wait for game restart.

Overall, good job!