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I really like the idea of playing a meta-game to pick the next round of towers. The idea of that game being Yahtzee is interesting and it fits really well with the theme as a push-your-luck dice game. That said, it might help the gameplay to either tie the mechanics closer to Yahtzee, or to change the dice metagame to be more in line with the TD aspect.

• One interesting feature of Yahtzee is that you have to play each group once, so sometimes you want to roll a lot of 1's, because you can get an extra 3-4 points by the end of the game. This isn't the case in your TD, because even three 1's is useless when you can go for two fives or two sixes every round. However, I think a change in this direction would require a lot of changes to the tower defense aspect.
• You could keep the meta-game the same, but perhaps each die number corresponds to a type of tower. So maybe 1's are low-damage slowing towers, but four 1's slows a lot more than just one or two 1's. It seems like this would make each tower more useful, and I bet you could come up with a set of rules that are more interesting than Yahtzee as a result.

This is a very neat platformer, I liked the idea of having to build a level with random parts to reach the finish line on time. I struggled pretty badly with the time limit on the last level, but I was able to beat it after exploiting a bug that I found :-). I think it would be really nice to add some kind of ghost/outline that shows what piece you rolled as a reminder to the player, and you might consider an "easy" mode where you have unlimited time but every time you roll the die you lose points or something.

It looks like you're planning to work on this more after the jam, so here are some very minor bugs I ran into:

• Clicking to place an object before the die finishes rolling seems to always place the 1x1 ground tile, so this made it easy to build platforms. I could even roll, jump, and place the platform under the character to climb up.
• The timer doesn't stop when you reach the end of the level, so I got a win message followed by a loose message when I finished with one second left.
• My laptop's resolution is 2736x1824, and the die UI element was almost completely off the screen on the first level. It was fine on all the levels after that though.

I think this game has a lot of potential, and I can see how it would be a lot of fun with a few small quality of life improvements and more content.

The title art on this is super eye catching, and I thought the premise of protecting your eggs from foxes was very fun. I think the randomization + time limit on towers was a really interesting twist, especially when the wave paths would switch. I realized pretty quickly that if i clustered around the coop I may lose all of my towers before the wave ended, but if I put more towers near the spawns I could use them for multiple rounds because I could kill each wave faster.

I did run into some balance issues around ~800 points, it seemed like the poison chickies didn't do much, while 2 snipers with 2-3 ammo buffs could clear entire waves on their own. I also thought the game started to drag on a bit when I was getting foxes from every path every round, but I figured that's just because this is the jam version and the hand-crafted content ran out. Nice job!

I really like the presentation with the graphics and the music that changes based on the turn. I also found that the game could get tedious in some cases, especially when the enemy and I both only had one die left. If I moved away from an enemy in a straight line after attacking them then they could hit me with a sword or bow attack. In this case the optimal strategy was to do nothing or try to roll toward a wall/corner to break the stalemate. I also found the enemy attack that shot 3 arrows to be super unfair, because they could roll away from me but then shoot backwards at me! It also seemed like my grid-aligned shields could never block the diagonal arrow.

I think if you let the player move then select the attack/defend direction you could keep a lot of the tactical elements you have while avoiding these stalemate situations. It might also be interesting to add directional support abilities to buff/heal nearby dice in a line or something. It might break the design if you allow the player to repeat an action if they don't move, but it feels like not moving is a fair cost for the benefit of taking the same action again. It would also feel better than just choosing to do nothing so the enemy can't attack you.

Your game is adorable, and it gives me a "gameboy Starbound" feeling for sure. I really like the game's vibe and the D'ice industries backstory.

I didn't totally get the point of the blank blocks on Level 1, since interacting with them didn't seem necessary until level 2. I also got stuck carrying a blank block far from the trash can on level 1, and it would've been nice to be able to drop it down without having to teleport back to the top of the level. I also thought the interaction system felt a bit clunky, it might be nice to have an option to use the mouse to highlight a block then press space to pick up/place the block. I think it's got a lot of promise, and it's a great little jam game!

This is a really solid jam submission, and I especially like that you have to learn the mechanics to start playing--initially I thought I had to click and drag the die to throw it instead of bumping into it.

It feels like you could really lean into the arcade-y action elements with more visual effects, some animations on the spikes disappearing/showing up, and and  some kind of breakout-like obstacles in the level or something. I think it could also go the other way if you were to make longer multi-screen levels with more strategically placed obstacles and pickups. Right now it feels like a mix of both, but it's still a solid experience.

It looks like we both started with the same idea of using dice as workers, and I think you nailed the building placement / resource economy aspect for sure. I had some small issues with clicking the UI elements in full screen, but it worked great in the regular window size.

I'm curious to see how the "dice for workers" mechanic expands to something at this large of a scale. I would expect (from the law of large numbers) that the randomness will average out almost completely (e.g., 100 farmers rolling a D6 will yield about 350 food very consistently). Or perhaps that's a design issue you can sidestep entirely if there is only tension to collect/spend higher tier resources that only have a couple of workers, then it won't matter if the lower tier (e.g. food) output is consistent.

I really like the visuals and audio, but I found the platforming to be incredibly frustrating. I think my longest run didn't even make it to 30 seconds. I think the main issue is a roll of 1-3 made it essentially impossible to jump more than 1-2 platforms before a huge gap appeared, and the die moved too fast for me to reliably hit them to pick up a 5 or 6. This meant that 50% of the time I would be gifted with a die that guaranteed I would lose.

I can think of two things that might make the game less frustrating: 1) if you tweak your procedural generation to also generate some long paths with lots of short jumps, that way you don't make half the dice useless, and/or 2) if there was some benefit to rolling a low number, such as a faster move speed or time slowing down.

The game looks really cute in the screenshots and I really liked the flat & colorful aesthetic of the game. I also found that having more than 2-3 die attached made it hard to strategically decide how to attach the next die, and a lot of the time I ended up rolling around almost randomly to see if I could get the desired number to pop up. In my opinion it might be easier for me to calculate how to approach the next die if my goal was beating the desired value instead of matching it exactly, then I'm trying to just maximize the sum of faces instead of counting them all. I also thought the cut scenes were very cute, but it would be nice if you could click to go through them instead of having a timer.

It's a very clean looking game, and I think it looks really good for using just primitive 3D shapes. The requirement to roll yourself off ledges to change which face is up is a really interesting mechanic, and it adds a new level of risk to the platforming. I thought the acceleration felt a bit slow, but even then all the levels felt satisfying to play. I absolutely struggled with the 4th level, so I was glad to see your comment about that!

I like the idea of throwing out dice into the physical 3D environment to roll for damage. I also think that being able to pick up additional dice works really well when combined with this mechanic, because I had to think about whether I should burst down an enemy or spread my damage around to other enemies/gates with my attacks. The long delay between attacking and recovering the die creates an interesting decision about what to attack without some of the annoyances that a traditional stamina system has.

This is a really nice prototype for a tactics game. I like that the 3D environment blocks shots and isn't abstracted out as some percentage to hit, and it would be a really useful QoL improvement if you add a raycast + line renderer to show the path a projectile will take. The only issue I had with the gameplay is that the move die apparently lets you move an unlimited distance. I felt that it made some of the tactical gameplay less interesting, because enemies can always just run behind you and start melee attacking.

I really liked the art style, especially the little melee enemies and the sound effect when they all start stampeding toward you! I think this mechanic would fit really well in a rogue-like bullet hell type of game, I feel like random weapons are already a staple of the genre and the ability to randomize the player and enemies is really interesting. It also adds an interesting decision of whether it's worth the risk to randomize if there's melee/ranged/boss enemies ahead. For example, having slow bullets + big bullets + fast fire rate felt like totally different gameplay and made it super easy to create a wall of bullets to defeat the melee guys, while the ranged enemies were much more dangerous.

I personally would also add the player's current speed to the bullets when you instantiate them, it's a bit more physically intuitive and I find that it makes it easier to aim correctly while strafing. Nice job!

This is a nice jam game, the controls are intuitive and there's a lot of little details. It's a really interesting idea to mix randomness and die rolling with a tower defense, but I think there is some tension in the mechanics and the game design could use another iteration or two to make it really tight:

• A lot of TD games let you keep the same towers to compensate for the increasing difficulty. I think being able to keep dice kind of compensates for this, but it was hard for me to judge whether the dice I already rolled will be enough to defeat the current wave or not. The "standard' TD approach makes this easier for me personally, because if I destroy all the enemies early I know I have enough towers and can save up for something more expensive (for example).
• Not being able to chose the position OR type of the tower is a very unique mechanic, but I think something in the design is missing to balance it out. A lot of the interesting gameplay in TDs comes from strategizing about where to put towers (for example, putting a freeze tower before a short range but high damage tower), and that type of decision doesn't really exist in the current design. I think if you rolled the dice first to see their type and then dropped them into the level (and replaced falling die with a crate or something?) it could add an interesting strategic element without changing the gameplay much. It would also make the precision dice way more valuable, and maybe you could even make the player chose between 3 normal die and 1 precision die (or something) each round.
• I ran into a game balance issue around level 3 or 4, one type of tower (that shoots grey blobs) actually was shooting projectiles that went slower than the enemies. This made the tower essentially useless based on where it landed, and on the next level I rolled all grey blob towers and lost. These kinds of balance issues are super common in jam games though, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
• I also found a bug where my die rolled off the table into the white void, never to be seen again.

I'm not sure if you're planning to release a post-jam version, but I think you've got the core of a really fresh take on the TD genre. I really did like the game, I promise!

I've played a couple of games with this sort of mechanic, and so far this one has been my favorite. Apparently my spatial reasoning skills are near zero for how dice faces move, but the levels were built in such a way that it was pretty obvious what path I should take. If you're looking to expand the size of the levels and avoid some of the trial and error solutions it might be worthwhile to use a simpler die (e.g., one where the opposite faces are identical).

The game is absolutely beautiful, and you clearly spent a lot of time on all the little details. I personally would not have understood most of the mechanics if it wasn't for all the comments here, so I'm glad I looked through them first!

The enemies seem pretty punishing, so at first I tried to approach it at more of a careful pace. However, it seems like the controls may have been designed for a controller in mind first, so the default attack is small and downward if you're not moving. I'm also not sure if the rolling of the die affected movement or if it was just the animation, but I found it a bit hard to position myself where I wanted relative to the enemies/obstacles. I personally felt like the game would be even more fun if you removed the die mechanic entirely and just made it about positioning and combat -- I'd definitely play it! :)

The game plays very smoothly and the puzzle were really nice--especially once more dice showed up! There were two or three moments when the die movement was a bit unintuitive, and it usually happened if I had two die lined up and the first die moved but still blocked the second. It was a super minor thing, and I really enjoyed playing through it!

I really like the blend of 2D and 3D components in the game. I actually found the game pretty easy, usually I would kill an entire group of enemies and have to wait several seconds for the next group to move onto the board. Eventually I ran out of space and started stacking Boarbarians at the end of the path just in case, but I never needed them. I think for jam games it's always better to err on the side of being too easy :-)

I think thematically it would make a lot of sense if you could upgrade your heroes stats/gear, and that might open up some more interesting gameplay decisions as well.

The keyboard controls don't appear to work on Firefox, but everything seems to behave in Chrome.

The game is pretty straightforward and the only real challenge is finding the dice you need and lining them up. The aesthetic and the music are very relaxing, and I think adding some kind of restriction on the moving the dice could add an interesting puzzle element.

The concept and gameplay are very unique, and it took me a couple of levels to understand how the mechanics work exactly. The decision space seems pretty small on some levels, and in some cases there are as few as 64 total combinations that can be brute forced through.

I think if the player had to assign dice per round it might give more good feedback on what's going on and make it harder to just brute force the game. What you've got now is still an interesting and cerebral puzzle.

In general I'm really bad at platformers, but the dice mechanic really felt fresh and interesting; I was more concerned with rushing to bank my dice than anything else. I think having a bigger level with more hidden dice could work really well if the player has to chose between collecting more dice in the level or saving them and re-rolling. The game has great vibes!

This was an interesting concept, the fact that you can only plan a few spaces ahead and the table destroy everything in its path led to some really interesting strategic decisions. I guess getting to the windmill is kind of the end game, because it very easy to pump out a ton of bread and survive indefinitely after that.

I think a little bit of UX polish could go a long way with this prototype, things like highlighting the selected building so the game acknowledges that I clicked on it to place it. Also adding a way for the player to understand what each building produces on the die rolls would make these decisions easier. For example, I still have no idea what the stone spike did. Nice job!

It took me a while to figure out how to actually play, but once I learned that I had to click on the dice THEN click on the enemy the game itself was very interesting. I also really like the aesthetic and die rolling effects. My biggest complaint is that it can be hard to see if a die is attack or defend because the spotlight washes out a lot of the color, maybe using colored dice would make it easier to distinguish them?

I.. uhh.. also removed one of my dice somehow right before fighting the dragon... I guess because I double-clicked it to try and progress. But that didn't stop me from taking its head!

I really like what you did with the theme for this one. I was immediately murdered the first round I tried, and the second round I got some terrible weapon with a super short range. After that I figured out what the buffs/debuffs did and enjoyed it. The only issue I ran into was that at one point there were several debuffs on the screen and nothing else seemed to spawn, it might be a nice idea to have the buffs/debuffs disappear after a short time so that more can cycle through.

This is a fun little game! I found it pretty easy to run around kiting the enemies, but they eventually wore me down with ranged attacks. I think adding a couple of small walls or rooms around the level could make for some interesting challenge areas.
Also the voices were 10/10, I'm looking forward to the Mage McDuffy extended universe.

Thanks for the feedback NellyFlo. I definitely did all of the balancing in the last 4 hours, and at one point you could win the game by just hitting "Roll" until the end. I also need to look into UI scaling, I always forget that not everyone uses a 1080p monitor!

Thank SwornCoyote! There are a couple of small bugs (like dice rolling out of bounds) that I'd like to fix for a post-jam version, I'm glad you enjoyed the game as it is. Pip refers to the numbers on the faces of a die, so upgrading +3 pips means randomly selecting 3 faces of the die and increasing its number by one. I think it may be better to use the word "power" or something else, but I was trying to lean into the dice theme :-)