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MoritzRoth

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A member registered Jul 29, 2020 · View creator page →

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This is the coolest-looking game of the game jam! Also extremely fun to play, good job!

Thanks for your feedback! We'll definitely make the respawn time shorter. I think I know what you mean with the clipping sounds and it's 100% my fault. The clipping is in the sound file that plays while the die slides. Since the sound is cut off if the die stops early you should only hear it on slides across >= 4 tiles (which I didn't test in a hurry). We got that last remark about the control scheme quite a lot. It's a difficult trade-off between the visibility of the third dice side and the control mappings. It seems like we didn't hit the mark there so we'll make some adjustments.

WOW! Thanks for the extensive feedback! I'm going to respond to your points a bit out of order so I can group similar topics and keep my response shorter.

1: It also surprises me how different the individual dice roller games actually are. By now, I've also played my fair share of Sokobans, and though there definitely are overlaps and shared mechanics, almost all of them have that one "main secondary" feature that sets them apart and completely changes the game. I've seen our falling platforms in Ice Dice (by Telaba) and DOS (by Frank Alfano et al.), which both have very unique win conditions. Rololol (by Nyfnkurfer) and Marimbla (by Tristan Mansfield et al.) also have our "dots = move distance" mechanic but change things up with walls and turn platforms. The one thing I have not seen done by others, is our sliding mechanic (regardless of how many tiles you move, you only do one turn).

One slight correction to a statement you made in 1: The red dots in our game actually decrease the dot-count on the respective face instead of overwriting it. You can also accidentally reduce the dots to 0, which then works like your blank stamp mechanic.

2, 9, and 11: Glad to hear you like the sounds :D 

We also cut the music due to time constraints. Our team is just a friend group of CS students, so none of us had much experience with art. This being our first game jam, we decided to keep it as simple as possible, get something running quickly, and then jam-pack it with levels ^^. My team members were also busy with other stuff during the weekend, so they regularly popped in and out of the group chat. Collectively I think we invested about as much time as a two- or three-person team would.

3 and 5: Yeah, we had a lot of discussion about that and ended up cutting a feature (due to time) where the player could lift up the cube to inspect it. With the different solutions I've found in the jam submissions so far, I think we'll go with something else in future releases. Thank you for mentioning Marimbla! I might have missed that game otherwise. I agree that displaying all possible next moves might reduce the difficulty, but I also think our later levels are pretty hard at the moment and players could use the help. Alternatively, one could only show where the cube ends up with a ground marker. That way, players no longer need to count tiles but still have to imagine the cube rotation themselves. 

4: That's exactly what happened. Nice to see that appreciated :)

6: Thanks :D I'm pretty happy how it turned out, especially for a game jam game. Though, as I said in the other reply, I think there is still a lot of unclarity. The fact that I had to correct you in my response to 1 shows me that the introduction level for the red dots still leaves some room for interpretation. And I realized that the tutorial for the pink tiles (lv 11) shows how they interact if the player slides over them, but not what happens if they stop on them.

7: Hard agree. We definitely need this.

8: Interesting Idea, that might be fun to watch ^^

12: Oops, I set that when I uploaded the minimum viable product to itch. Back then, the levels were no longer than a few obvious moves. Thanks for the notice! I adjusted it already.

13: Thanks! :D

The team really knocked it out of the park. I also think everyone took a very different approach in designing their levels, which helps give the game a bit of variety.

14: Thank you! It was a match between "Ice Dice" (due to the sliding mechanic) and "Face Value". But since we didn't have the icy visuals, we went for the latter. I'm really happy with our choice because otherwise, we'd have entered a fierce competition with the other "Ice Dice" games ^^

15: Oh wow, that was not intentional. By your ':)' I guess we did it correctly? So you control with ZQSD instead of WASD? Or do I misunderstand you, and you have to arrange your fingers in some twisted way?

Awesome visuals, very cool idea (pun intended), and overall fun to play! Sometimes I felt the ability to turn the dice on the spot was a bit too powerful. Especially in the earlier levels, you can make many moves without thinking and then fix the puzzle on the last two fields. Have you thought about making specific tiles on which the player can turn the dice or limiting the dice to only one turn per tile?

I love how you addressed this issue in the later levels by slowly introducing new mechanics that make the player think from turn one. The pacing is also incredible. Every time I had a realization that made the levels too easy again ("Wait! Those three fields always sum up to 7!", etc.) it took you at most two more levels to introduce a new twist/mechanic. Just enough so that I have time to feel good about my accomplishment and not get bored by the difficulty.

Another thing I noticed is that the levels are very linear. I always immediately knew what path I would take, the only question was how I would rotate the dice along the way. Was this intentional? I think it might also be interesting to have levels where you have to figure out which path to take as well.

All in all, you made an amazing game and I would not be surprised at all if I see you pop up in the announcement video of the Game Jam winners!

Cool idea and neat mechanics! It took me some time to find the win condition text since it is so small.

Cool Game, but has nothing to do with rolling the dice.
I liked your adaptive music system though.

Love the story and the art! The connection to the theme is a bit far-fetched, but I had a blast playing :D

Really fun game! I loved the chaos and spam clicking through the individual rooms/encounters. It was hard for me to understand the enemy animations, I never knew when a hitbox was active or how big it was. For the orcs, I'm still not sure if they do a melee attack or shoot an invisible projectile. Other than that, a very awesome game!

The first few levels were actually meant to serve as tutorial and slowly ease the player into the mechanics. But I guess since we didn't put any text/diagrams on screen many things remained unclear.

Neat idea, sometimes it is hard to differentiate between floor tiles. A grid on the floor could help the player identify which dots belong together.

Very cool concept, would love to see this expanded!

HOW MANY LEVELS ARE THERE!?!
Really awesome game, though I never found myself using the "ban a dice roll" option at the start of the level since I try to avoid red dice anyway (=> hopefully more than half pickups are blue dice => banning rolls hurts more than it does good). Letting players choose which stat dice rolls affect is an awesome concept and you included it brilliantly in your level design. The only thing I struggled with from time to time was the button layout. My index, middle, and ring finger are already occupied with WASD controls, please don't require me to switch modes on E (in midair) if my pinky and the entire right hand are free. Other than that I really can't complain. Slick and responsive character movement and overall a joy to play!

The fact that you can roll the other dice as well transforms this game from good to great! I also like that you put the dice against walls in the first few levels, so that the player gets comfortable with the core concept first.

I like that you force the player to line shots up and hit multiple zombies at once. It also seems like you adjust the spawn count so that there aren't an unreasonable number of enemies when the player gets a low roll. I suggest assigning a different melee key (e.g. space) so the player can move right and melee at the same time. Other than that, great game!

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Neat idea. Since there isn't really a loose scenario I wasn't as motivated to keep going. Maybe you could add one or more opponents that roll the same way as you and try to catch you.

Really awesome game that fits the theme perfectly. The controls feel great and with the different dice, you already have a ton of content. I also love, that the dice may have negative effects as well. I felt, however, that (other than the cooldown) nothing really stopped me from spamming one dice I was comfortable with. Maybe add some sort of ammo system? Overall great game, would love to see it developed further!

Really cool idea and I like your visuals. Since you can only see two sides of the dice it's impossible to know the left- and right sides of the dice at the beginning of the game. Maybe draw the board at a slight angle or let the player rotate the board.

Neat game, I didn't come across another game where the world is the dice yet. Difficult but fun.
On my first try, I didn't get the double jump powerup on the first dice which made it next to impossible.
It would be nice to be able to backtrack and reroll the level in such a case. Other than that, great job!

Damn, I really enjoy your art style and playful level design. Great game! The only thing that bothered me was that with increasing level-complexity, I found myself more and more inclined to mindlessly button-mash and brute-force a solution, instead of thinking about the problem and making calculated moves. I have the same issue with our own game so I'm not exactly sure what to do about it.

I agree with you on most accounts, but would changing the game to five faces (Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock) actually solve the problem? Each choice now beats two other choices and is beaten by two other choices, so the player takes damage in 40% (2/5) of the cases rather than 33% (1/3). That is a bit more punishing, but also a lot more complex.  Not only does the player need to visualize the 3D dice movement in their head, but they also need to consider the rules of a game they might not be as familiar to as the widespread Rock, Paper, Scissors.

I'd say your other recommendation of making draws hurt the player (maybe a bit less than losses) achieves the goal in a much simpler fashion.