Well that was a tour de force of some dungeon crawling XCOM goodness!

Starting with possible improvements, I think the sound and visual effects for enemies being damaged is pretty weak. But considering how many plates this game already has spinning I think it's acceptable.

And while the dungeon areas are well used in combat, the exploration side I think was left lacking. There are hidden walls, but they usually contain nothing, and are revealed on the map and during combat. It felt like I would kill everything in battle, and then just walk through an empty level until the next encounter.

I'm not sure how I feel about randomized item purchases honestly. For weapons, armour, accessories and upgrades I think it's fine. With consumables I found I was gettig health items more rarely than I would've liked. Which I think could run the risk of soft locking the player since you don't regenerate health after an encounter. Maybe intentionally part of a more hardcore design, so idk.

I did notice a bug where I could heal a knocked out ally, but then they wouldn't actually rejoin the battle.

As for the length, I enjoyed it all the way through so it wasn't too bad. Though 2 hours is quite a lot to demand from players. If this game was less polished and had less variety I think it would drag quite a lot. Frankly I would think the biggest benefit of aiming for a shorter game is just less burnout lol.

Back to the positive's, there's too many positives to count. I love the artstyle, I love the writing, I love the enemy and item variety, and I REALLY love the 3D dice rolling view. I liked the rolling dice in Baldur's Gate 3 and I like it here too lol, might have to use it in one of my own games someday.

This was one of the best entries I've played this jam, and thats saying a lot for all the strong entries this year.

Excellent work!

Zany scenario, just the way I like it.
It reminded me of the kind of scenario you can find in some old-school/OSR rpg's (like DCC or Troika).

The conversion of gold into upgrades for the characters makes the game too simple in my opinion, but for the rest it's particularly polished and well done for a game jam !

Thumbs up for open source code, that's nice.

Hey, I was able to finish the game in around 1:55 or so, nice one! Thanks for including this info, it was vital for me to choose a proper moment to play this game, when I’m ready to spend ~2h on the game!

Movement and perspective felt nice. Pixel art in dungeons and in the battle felt good too. A lot of music and sounds, which adds a lot of the quality to the game I think!

Battle was nice, though I felt like it was dragging me down by the second half of the game due to being a bit repetitive and me not being able to skip enemy dice rolling. I wish there was a “skip” button, or “instant roll” button, as dice rolling felt nice at first, but after minutes of rolling dice it just gets in a way and I want to think about tactics instead of looking at the animation. In addition it would be great if I can assess actions before committing to them, like “can weasel reach this enemy with their attack and what is the required accuracy will be” or something along those lines.

During the crawling part I found some illusionary walls, but I wasn’t able to get the idea why you have them there, as I haven’t figured out their purpose. Maybe I haven’t understood something in the process?

But overall it felt like a solid game which I’ve enjoyed completing, thanks for making that one!

Here’s a video of my play-through:

Absolutely excellent. Thank you for using scancodes instead of keycodes, I didn't have to toggle between Dvorak and Qwerty to play :)

When I saw the G.O.A.T. I thought it was going to be a game final boss it looked so scary, but then I didn't find him that tough. Pretty much typical to what I found on floor 3.

I loved the progression system, random eggs I could drop onto players was fun. Like, a loot box in the best possible way :P

Really, really impressive ambitious game! Really well thought out combat, lots of good actions, some strategy, and very polished. I would love to see this expanded into a larger game. The dice rolling feel was awesome and the mechanic wasn't that hard to pick up.

I guess I'll give some feedback instead of just saying things I liked - I would like a few fewer clicks during the combat, or full keyboard control, because I found it moved a bit more slowly than I would like. For example have the movement always on the screen and then just click on a guy to attack, no need to click the action buttons. It's a small thing though.

Overall a very good offering, definitely one of the best this year!

Awesome entry!

A lot has been said already. Usually I am not into tactical combat unless it looks and feels like XCOM and this pretty much nails it.

Along with a good story and a solid implementation.

Well done!

Nice art and very nice stlye of gameplay, on the more complex side but it well made. Not much on the dungeon crawler side of the game but the combat was fun so it help make up for that. Overall great game made here , very good work on it and i had good time playing it

Excellent entry!

Didn't expect a project this complex in gameplay :D

I would have liked some more traditional combat system for a DC - probably because I was exhausted and fried mentally - and it was a bit too lenghty for me.

I loved the dice rolling, it's similar to what I've made for my card-battler game some months ago.

Considering how long the jam was this is some incredible effort.

Nice entry!

It sure takes some time to get into and understand all combat mechanics and tactics, but once you do it is a fun game.

The intricate dies combat system took a while to master.

The dungeon crawler part is kinda small compared to the time you spend in the combat though.

This was the last game I played for this jam, it feels sad to have to wait until next jam for next jam game experience. It feels nice that this jam holds a high level of both people playing and rating and the level of the general entries. 

My playthrough took 2h 15m.

Thank you!

How dare you make such an engaging and lengthy game when I still have 50+ games left to review.

More seriously, this is the best game I've reviewed thus far. Tweak the combat (I was pretty overpowered by the end) and it could easily be the basis for a full release.

Amazing work for such a short timespan! That must have required some mad coordination and project management skills. It's beyond impressive.

The atmosphere is great and the writing is enjoyable. I like the tone shift from the rural farm to the dungeon to a futuristic spaceship. It felt like quite the odyssey and it took me by surprise. The clucking music is genius, too!

The character upgrade system was a true joy to use with a lot of interesting micro decisions, gameplay-wise, that's what I enjoyed the most.

I didn't like combat as much for a few reasons : The battles are quite long, with most of them running more than 15 minutes long. Progress in battle is very slow and a bit too dependent on luck, which makes losing near the end of a long battle frustrating. When approaching a battle, if you're not strong enough but don't know it yet, this can lead to a lot of wasted time. Also, the UI requires a lot of clicks and manipulations (rotate the camera constantly to look for the enemies, select actions, perform them, close popups and click on a lot of buttons). I feel like the UI could have been streamlined a bit to reduce the number of clicks needed. Adding lifebars above the enemies sprites could have helped them stand out more, reducing the need to "hunt" for them by constantly moving the camera.

Despite not enjoying combat as much as I would have liked, I got  engrossed by the game and grew attached to the characters, and wanted to see what would happen next and how strong I could grow them. 

Tutorial was fantastic.  Playing 1 character at a time was a nice easing in to the combat.  The *bawk* *bawk* at the start of the combat theme is golden.  Thanks for not forcing me to spend all of the wild dice before hitting Confirm if it'll kill them =).  Not sure if it was me confused by something or not, but the Sling's power ability, (at least when in my off-hand) didn't give the +3 accuracy it says it gives, I had a similar issue with another bow's power not giving any accuracy.  I had a lot of difficulty telling which were the doors in the gray tileset (made some terrible mistakes in combat from that :).  The variety in levels was very nice though.  I had a lot of fun with this one, enjoyed it all the way through to the end!  The "shop" in your inventory was really simple and fun, that's a great mechanic for a jam game.

The party fled in an escape pod!

The game is amazing, I had a ton of fun playing. Golden egg goose as the villain was an hilarious twist.

It looks cool and consistent.

The tunes are super nice, this kind of wacky music is ambitious as it could have easily ended annoying but here it never does which is great.

The first person part controls perfectly, I like the instant movement. I like that you've got some hidden doors, I never checked if you get some money there or simply nothing but it's fine either way.

The reproduction of the dungeon map into battlefields is perfect and translates into different battefields layouts through the game which is great.

Navigating (moving, 90° turning, Zooming/Unzooming) through the battlefield view is super pleasant.

The combat system is great. I typically like choosing between attacking twice or aiming and attacking. The miss side on some dice is cool. The lethality of the system feels right on point and then so does the duration of the fights.

I absolutely love the money management part in this game, it's an excellent resource management aspect. Choosing what to make is super fun, choosing what to equip is super fun. Big bonus point for cursed items (I got some cursed mask), now that's something which adds to the cool factor of a game for me. And it's relevant the right way, as you try to understand the system your characters enter the battlefield much stronger than when you had no idea of what you were doing in the beginning. Your choices of equipment matter and translate in real differences in power, it's great. As an example during one of the first battles my fighter was super weak with only one poor sword in one hand and nothing in the other, he couldn't make any damage, then he got well prepared for the next battle, that was cool.

The difficulty is pretty much perfect for me in the context and is one of the reasons why I enjoyed the game so much. That's one thing I've appreciated about each of your games, I love that you manage to take the time to tune the difficulty so it's satisfying to advance through the game, games which are overly easy are not fun to me.

Opponents moving through hidden doors during battles is cool.

I've noticed that the AI of the enemies looking for their opponents in your game is a bit better than in my game although it's not perfect either. By the way even if they don't always manage to reach the party at least they try and I like that, I really like that all the enemies play from the start, one thing I hate in tactical games is when some enemies far away are waiting for some trigger to start to move.

Not sure if the enemy speed option does anything but their speed is pretty much as I want it to be anyway so it doesn't matter.

My main caveat would be that I don't know if there's a way to evaluate the lines of sight of your characters before selecting actions. If there's none then I don't like that, if there's one then that's on me.

Besides I don't love the entire UI. It's mostly intuitive, I missed a few parts at first (spending the points when validating a hit) but that's because they're plenty of things so it's fine, it's probably even part of some tutorial and I didn't apprehend it. Besides all the item management part is good and finally selecting and targetting characters with the mouse is good. Now the one thing I dislike is precisely clicking on all the tiny buttons. I'm undecided about whether the game take more clicks than it could, as it bothered me in the beginning and I took a note but then not anymore as it went so this aspect might be fine all things considered.

Overall this is an awesome entry.

Awesome overall entry. The combat was a ton of fun and very reminiscent of Gold Box era games. The progression was interesting with the random items to add stats between your party and neat equipment with different abilities to strategize during the fights. Good story, great pixel art graphics, movement and dungeons are all great and a lot of content for a jam game. 

There's a few things we discussed during the stream that I'll note here that could be improved. There could be some indicators on the passive abilities to reroll dice (like the one that's also a target), a combat log could be really useful and more feedback on getting and reminders to spend coins could go a long way as well

I had a lot of fun with this one and spent some good time with it. It was worth it! Kudos.

Gameplay starts around ~30s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTryNg8QIo0

If I play it second time it will be faster. It will be great to find couple upgrade eggs at the begining of a game, as well as weapons, it 'll give an idea that animals will use weapons)  And it might be good to replace gold to exp points or inthis case chicken feathers. I don't think the game is too long it isn't very big though battle system is complicated and it takes time to figure out tactics and usage of multiple parameters. I still didn't get some of them even I won the game) Overall this is a chicken fallout which can be a bigger game and feels great to play it, thank you. 

That was a really solid entry with a whole lot of content. Honestly, and I know you wrote it, but for a game jam game it is too long. My recording of playing it is closer to 3h. As I say at the end of the video, if we forget that it’s for a jam, I think the length is fine for the content but it could have had an optional play the next chapter type of thing perhaps.

A little could have been helped too with some quality of life improvements to make fights work more seamlessly. Like if I select to do two attacks and have done them, I shouldn’t have to click to end my turn for that character.

But overall the game worked really well, very few bugs that I encountered and I enjoyed playing it, otherwise I wouldn’t have stuck with it until the end. I liked how the music switched to match the danger, or perceived danger. It was a bit of a pity there seemed to be no bonus for finding the hidden areas, and I think it could have been done really cool if you didn’t get the full map and you had to be observant during battles to get hints of where they were.

Really cool too that battles take place in the actual area you are in while playing.

Here’s the recording of me playing: https://youtu.be/wVhcoSgfqTg