Really interesting game! I love how you fully leaned into it all the way and committed to everything being random across the board. It definitely makes for a whacky experience. I love the pixel art and overall aesthetic by the way. I also was not sure if all powerup pickups randomly gave you + or sometimes - to that stat or if it was a color thing. It was also wild to have an initially really bad character, lose and then get the sword which was wild. Anyway, great job!

Simple but great visuals

Interesting game! 

Very cool game, made me play this game multiple times,

Pretty cool concept! The presentation was nice and the gameplay was enjoyable. Good work!

I tested some rounds, but unfortunately, the game is made way harder for me a I have an AZERTY-layout keyboard while the keys were programmed statically as being QWERTY… ._. This happens in a lot of games (not all, though!), but either speed is not of the essence, of the arrow keys are also enabled; this game is one of the rare cases where I really run into trouble.

Still, I can get a sense of how things roll; I think it can work as a funny way to let off steam, when you are in the mood for some undue trigger-pressing. ;) On the other hand, I am more sceptical as to how long such complete randomisation can work out. If you take The Binding of Isaac, for example, even though a lot of the game is random, you still get a notion of levels and progression in the game.
Of course, the big difference is that What’s Next? is a short game jam game, so it all depends on how you decide to extend it. But the principle ‘everything is random’ sounds difficult to adapt to a longer game.

I like the pixel art visuals, smooth animation, and upbeat music combined, they give a dynamic impression, which matches the gameplay style. :) Maybe some  background could have given it even more life, although I guess the colour choice would have been complicated to have everything visible. Twist(?): you could have made a procedurally generated random background!

As for how the game relates to the theme… well, one common interpretation was to think ‘randomness’, which a lot of people did, and they seem to often have added a random element inside a more classic larger picture; you took the idea to the extreme and just put everything random. XD So, I would say you took a common approach, but to an uncommon degree. That’s where you have some originality.

My conclusion: I would describe the game in its current state as a funny experimental minigame. I often wonder about the future of games, and in this case, I tend to see it as inextensible under the same premiss.

It is good that you tried the ‘all-random’ option, this is a fine way to see what this results in concretely. :)

Overall fairly decent. Might have been too random at some points for enjoyable play, but it was game that could be played in the end. Art style was consistent and well put together. Overall not a bad time. 

Cool game! The concept is really interesting and I love the way you incorporated the theme into your game! The movement was nice and shooting and powerups were pretty cool. I did find taking damage to be pretty confusing since sometimes I would take half a heart of damage or like one heart and then other times I wouldn't take any damage at all. Also, the enemies didn't seem to take damage at times and when they died I don't think I hit them, so I got a bit confused. Overall though, I had a lot of fun playing! The art and music are great too! Well done!

Hey! great job on the game!
had a lot of fun playing it multiple times.
also a very cool presentation!

some feedback:
- I wish I had some way of interacting with power-downs. maybe I can stomp the ground sending a shockwave changing all upgrades to power-downs and vice versa? but these power downs just litter the ground and I hate them. haha, I prefer to hit the enemies than to receive a power-down. 
- I wish I had some way of changing my character, the cellphone sucks 😫 and I got stuck with it the whole time. I get that it is random, but I wanted some kind of control of it.

Great game. Variety in characters is great for replayability. High damage Inaccuracy characters could be more fun if shots were less random. Learnt there is such a thing as too many speed upgrades lol.

Got a horrible starting character without knowing the concept (couldn't even aim my weapon)! Thought the game was busted until I tried again and everything was different, then I just had lots of fun rolling different starts until I got a tiny fast firing maverick.
Really good fun, only suggestion would be to have negative power ups maybe fade away, as it feels bad to not have a chance to get more OP, unless that's the intent!

Awesome game! It looks great and the mechanics work well, really fun to play, although i did just get a really overpowered rapid fire gun at the start.

But apart from that, awesome game and great submission!

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.

Lol now this was random and a lot of fun!! 

My first run I got some useless attack that goes like 2 feet away from you and stops... I don't think I made it past round 2. Then I tried again and got some massive 8 way attack that I just kept spamming that and collecting everything! Eventually I guess I got so strong that attacks weren't even hurting me but I could one or two shot everything, so that was pretty neat. I stopped at about wave 25 since I was already uber powerful.

Probably my only minor annoyance is I don't think I like the debuffs (I believe that's what the grey icons were?) or at least not so many of them. Makes me feel worse when I grab one.

Overall though fantastic addition to the jam and so far one of the top 5 games I've played out of 30 or so! Great work on this!!

Edit: Oh also about the theme, it makes complete sense to me. I think when Mark announced the theme he didn't literally mean that DICE has to be physically in the game. It seems like 90% of games took that literally but oh well lol, nothing wrong with those games just funny how it looks with 5000 games with dice in the title.

The game is quite fun, has good visuals. However it wasn't very clear how it connected to the theme, I didn't know what it had to do with the theme at first, it wasn't until I read the discription that I understood. Good game.

After my first run I was like "hmm is this it?". I had some weird slow character that couldn't really shoot. But then when I played again for a few runs, they were all completely different. One time I had a really OP setup. Cool idea and the execution is really fun. The game has that "one more run" kind of feel.

I really like the visuals in the game, nice work!

Very cool!

I collected all the boots and was straight hum zinging... I don't recommend that as a strategy.

Great work!  Love the art, lots of fun :)