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this was really fun, cute, and well designed! that is, until the king's regalia showed up, with a full vertical lineup of heavies, and I rolled two all-vertical dice in a row, and lost. I think that was a mathematically-impossible round to win, given my roll results, which was a bummer, because I had been winning perfect up until that point.

maybe for the post-jam version, you could write some special case logic to handle such cases, to not give players impossible challenges. but, very very well done for the game jam!

cute idea, I think it should be more apparent which move direction is the currently active one, and some kind of feedback for if you attempt to move in the inactive direction. it was hard for me to notice the red flashing, especially on the background color you have, and the arrows are so small, and both direction's dice are exactly the same size. pressing a button to move in the "off" direction, and nothing at all happening, just made the game feel broken. 

I made it through a few levels!

I like how you went all out on the art!

as for the gameplay, are these fair dice, or are the silver / golden better, like have higher chances to roll bigger numbers.

if they are all fair, then I don't really understand how there is any strategy to this game. in the end, I defeated several monsters, but then got unlucky and spent a lot of dice just going around in circles trying to find space that actually had a monster, and when I finally did, even though I had saved up silver dice to fight against it, I just rolled bad rolls and lost the game. it was not a very fun experience, I just felt frustrated by losing the game due to bad luck.

this was a fun little puzzler! 

I'd be interested in a grading system for "number of moves to complete each level", because if felt like I flopped about randomly a lot, with no encouragement to actually strategize.

Heheh, yeah, it's kind of a "create your own hell" game, where you can make the game very hard for yourself if you don't know what you're doing, or are thoughtless. I was hoping players would figure out for themselves that they should put some effort into composing a "nice" piece, but maybe Schnailpin should be more direct about advising on how to compose. 

this was wonderfully delightful, excellent presentation, the gameplay was fun, and as challenging as I wanted it to be, and I love all of the secrets. 

my high score was around 4k, but that was before I discovered some of the secrets. 

as a non-instruction-reader, it took me a bit of time to figure out how things worked. I think it wasn't very obvious that I needed to drag the dice onto the cards at first. 

it felt very satisfying to be able to use up the entire board of dice, it would have been nice to have some kind of special visual / sound effect when that happens.

cute presentation, I like the 3D/2D pixel style. I think the game has too slow of a start, it took me forever to even find any of my 4 beeples. I think instead of needing selecting specific units, it would have been nice to just pick the nearest one to go do a task. the world is big enough that I think starting with 10 would be better, since the main enjoyment of the game is watching the beeples go about their business, but in the beginning you're mostly watching an empty world. 

I really like your presentation and idea! especially the floating head and hands. 

the game felt good to play, and felt polished, lots of nice touches, like the camera shake. I think the gameplay is pretty innovative, and felt good to play, with automating the movement and aiming, and just giving a fire button, and a "nudge in some direction" button. I assume the goal of which was to free the player up to look at and strategize around their current dice roll. however...

my main critique is the tuning of the game. in the early levels, I felt like I /could/ strategize around my placement, timing, and decision making based on the current dice roll, but I didn't need to. if I just rapidly clicked on enemies without any thought, I did just fine.

and then, in the later levels of the game, I felt like even if I wanted to, i couldn't successfully strategize, because of how many enemies spawning, just rapidly clicking on enemies, and right clicking on hearts seemed like the best and only option.

I think that leveling up and getting new abilities was a cool idea, but it really made no impact on how I played, just clicking on enemies and hearts as much as possible. it never really seemed to matter what dice was up, or where I was positioned.

I played until level 11, then quit, because I was had been stable at 4-6 hearts the entire time, and the gameplay just got monotonous. 

so, I think tuning the enemies to hit harder and/or have less health, and dont let the game get too crowdy in higher levels, would serve the gameplay of actually paying attention to the dice. 

but, tuning in a game jam is basically impossible, so, great work over all!

Actually, I have no idea what I'm doing! But I did get a strange WebGL crash from attempting to access the stack trace for debugging purposes that never crashed in native builds, so that was fun debugging right before submissions closed.

I like the resource mechanic of dice as both bombs and dieders! I think the dieders were cute.  maybe you were going for the feeling of dread of being "stuck" as a spider moves towards you, but I felt like I'd like to run around, like traditional twin stick shooter, it felt unnecessary and illogical that the character is immobile. 

Also, extra bonus points for being able to pet the meow.

I died on wave 5 at the hands of a Tanuki... Aw man!

This game was completely delightful! I love everything about it. The music and art are so fun, I love the mechanics of buying and powering up dice. I love the references with the enemies, like The Ring girl.

I'm not an "instructions reader" so I didn't realize I could attract the dice at first. 

My biggest complaint is that game over is 100% game over, I felt invested in my character / build, so to lose it all permanently was pretty sad. I think being able to retry the wave, either endlessly or with a life system, would have been nice. Or maybe you can buy lives / heals?

How exactly does your health between rounds work? It doesn't seem likely you heal completely, but maybe you heal a little bit? That wasn't very clear to me. 

Entity is a fun character, and I think the idea is creative, but the dice trapped me and itself with a platform under a laser, then exploded and killed me, right before a check point, and I can't say that was a good experience. 

I think it's cool that we both did dice based rhythm games! however, I had a pretty difficult time reading the "beat" of the dice. for one, I struggle to look at both the dice and my player character, since they're on opposite sides of the screen. and as far as matching a beat goes, I would rather have audio queues as the primary source of information, with visuals as secondary. and for the visuals, I would expect them to be moving at, or centered around, my character, in sync with the beat. there didn't seem to be a clear feedback for missing a beat / losing a health point besides the tiny label at the bottom going down, so I struggled to get a sense of when I was doing it right or wrong. 

hope this feedback helps!

woah, no way, snails have gone mainstream!? I'm glad you liked the voice acting, it's my first time, and I had a lot of fun with it!

yay! the intro was definitely the most fun part to make, especially the stingers! I'm really glad you liked them too.

I'm so glad! it started as a pencil sketch in a note book; I gave it a bit of digital refinement, but not too much.

thanks for playing! Schnailpin is quite a charmer, it was an honor to work with them!

:3 

I love Schnailpin, I'm really glad we were able to give them life.

thank you, it was a lot of fun to come up with the character and record!

yay! the wrong note sounds were fun to record, I'm glad you enjoyed them, even if it incentivized playing wrong notes haha

really lovely animation and visuals! the hands working the dice was delightful to watch! I kind of expected there to be a resource management aspect, like, reloading dice costs points, so you can't just fire willy nilly, and I figured the points you get from killing enemies would go back into gaining dice to shoot.

getting random weapon choices is cool, but I think that having weapon damage randomized to this extent just made the game more frustrating without adding anything to it. like, I never want to get hit anyways, so getting hit just "sometimes" ends my run. I think the game moves too fast for me to actually read the dice coming at me and make strategic decisions, for example, to move left to avoid a 6 coming at me, and just get hit by a 1. 

very soothing, and yet puzzling, and I love your take on the theme, how the dice rolling isn't random at all, just pure decision making.