itch.io

It is indeed an idle game.

I don’t know what items would be gained as loot. Would they even be useful? You don’t have an inventory and outside of enemies dropping dice (which would throw things way out of wack balance-wise) gaining loot would mean literally nothing.

How so? It works for me and the other people who have played it.

If you’re downloading the Mac standalone build, that version is known to be broken (and a fixed build will be uploaded as soon as the upload restriction drops). Try playing it in the browser?

how do i upgrade my dice?

You gain dice after leveling up a certain number of times (i.e; it’s automatic).

after 5 fight and there are still no tactic here

I don’t believe I promised “tactics”? The page description is pretty clear that it’s all luck-of-the-draw. You don’t really have the leeway to plan out any tactics, let alone carry them out.

Also I don’t think every game has to contain an actual dice or rolling?

Well, the theme was “Roll of the Dice”, which to me implies that the operative word there is “roll”, not “dice”. Still, to each their own, I suppose.

There’s no rolling of dice from what I can tell? Sometimes killing an enemy grants dice, sometimes it doesn’t? The upgrade mechanic (from what I’m reading of it) seems neat, but I can’t figure it out for the life of me. Good for a first-timer, but if you explain it a bit more maybe I can up some of my ratings…

This game… certainly is. It doesn’t really match the theme (you dice words, I guess, but the only “rolling” is the randomize button that I only used a handful of times), and the word puzzles get downright absurd (I quit around “Dice at least one word, with at least 11 letters”– are you kidding me?), but it’s a neat concept in and of itself.

What? Why? How?

These questions flew around my head as I tried to play this game. I’ve got a lot of criticism to give (and a bit of praise too) so I’ll try not to be too rough.

I want to open up with the fact that the art was pretty good. The grass texture was so good, in fact, that I thought for a second it came from GRASS+, a pixel art grass pack I downloaded a while back, but it’s an original. The knight texture doesn’t really fit with the rest of the art, though…

…Which leads to criticism #1: Art style. Pixel grass and board tiles combined with Arial (or whatever plain font Unity comes with) and a low-res knight JPEG is… certainly a look. If I were you, I’d redraw the knight at a resolution that matches the board and grass tiles, and swap out Unity’s default font for something like Matchup or Compass from Humble Fonts Free by Eeve Somepx.

I actually won’t criticize the game’s lack of music, given my game didn’t have any music either, but I will second the notion that it would be nice to have.

Criticism #2, however: UI elements. The “USE ARROW KEYS AT JUNCTIONS” text is hidden behind the dice tray in such a way that I can see there’s something there, but not what the thing is, leading to a moment while I was playing where I straight up asked myself “what is that text under the dice tray?” and had to remind myself what it was. Maybe you could have just a “USE ARROW KEYS” that pops up whenever the player is at a junction and hasn’t pressed an arrow key? Also, the HP bar should be full when I have the same current and max HP values, instead of weirdly having a bit of red bar at the end despite me not taking any damage. Finally, the bar for the text never goes away and never gets reset to empty.

Criticism #3: Bosses. This one’s kind of a hybrid, being a) the bosses are extremely difficult for something I can experience as early as turn 7 and b) some of the names are just… man, why did you have to name some of them Chungus? It dates the game immediately. As for point (a), I can literally encounter my first boss with the basic 50 health (take 2 lefts at the first 2 junctions), and it can do tons of damage. I barely was able to get the boss down to half health on all 3 of my attempts. There are also side paths I wouldn’t expect to have bosses that do (and I can’t see the whole board, so I have no advance warning that “hey, this side path features a boss!”)

This game has lots and lots of potential to be something amazing and worth playing, but in its current state, it could use a bit of TLC. I can’t wait to see if/when/how you move forward with this concept.

Well done!

Enjoyment: 4/5 (the dice puzzles were entertaining) Creativity: 5/5 (the operator blocks were interesting) Presentation: 4/5 (I wish there was a “are you sure you want to exit” screen, or at least save my progress so I can start from where I left off)

I didn’t take strenuous notes this time as I was too busy playing the puzzles. Good job!

All in all a fun little idler. Wish there was a New Game+ though! ;)

Enjoyment: 4/5 (The only unenjoyable part was dealing with Entanglement in Hurry mode)
Creativity: 5/5 (The dice mechanics were pretty cool, even if I could abuse it to spend 30 gold to score a guaranteed 2 extra damage per turn)
Presentation: 5/5 (Pixel characters looked amazing)

Full notes here.

This game was awesome and I’d love to see a more polished post-jam version. The concept is neat, but the execution falls flat at times, probably because of the time constraints of the jam.

Enjoyment: 4/5 (Ice snakes were annoying, and the die rolls often didn’t line up with that was shown (not counting explainable discrepancies like having more Luck), leading me to ask “why are the animations here?”)
Creativity: 5/5 (Very creative concept)
Presentation: 3/5 (Some parts of the UI were hard to read and descriptions all around could be better)

My full notes from playing are here. Really enjoyed this one!

Nailed the presentation! Retro vibes mixed with a pocket-monsters aesthetic. Also a fellow (sortof) idler game, I like the approach.

Thanks! I really tried to dig into that old-school pixel RPG sort of feel, and it’s glad to know I wasn’t completely off-base.

I do wish the player had something to do besides roll the dice. I just turned on auto and let it sit for 10 minutes.

Yeah… unfortunately, given the time constraint of the jam (and the fact I was on the fence about joining the jam until around a day had already passed) I didn’t have much time to go for something more intense– if you can believe it, I almost didn’t have a title screen on my entry! Funnily enough, testing the game was also very much an endeavour of “press auto button and wait for game to end or error or crash”.

If I could start over (and start my jam game when the jam started), I probably would have aimed for a more dungeon-crawler-y feel, with monsters spawning around a procedurally-generated map, with the player trying to clear a given number of floors (or even an endless mode). I think I’ll do that as a sequel after the jam.

Love the amount of exports you have! Great cross-platform support.

Thanks! TIC-80 gives me all of those exports for basically free, so I figure I should use them. (Notably, another jam-rush regret of mine is the Mac export; a friend gave me a custom build of the export that would have allowed my custom icon in the .app to stay on the app when it launched, but I was in such a rush I misread their directions and inadvertently created an export that doesn’t load. By the time they caught the error and alerted me, the time was up; the fixed Mac export will be uploaded when the upload restriction ends.)

Thanks! I was aiming for that kind of vibe, and it's glad to know it seems to have landed with players.

Sorry for the late response! I should have clarified that the buttons were gamepad controls, that's on me. On the keyboard, ABXY are Z, X, A, S respectively.

True! Although if you manage to make something good with it, then hats off to you.