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A jam submission

Turn Based DestinyView game page

Game Jam participation of Sacra Scriptura Team
Submitted by Sungeon, Gelaw974 — 1 hour, 42 minutes before the deadline
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Turn Based Destiny's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Enjoyment#35172.2913.500
Creativity#40962.2913.500
Overall#41132.2193.389
Presentation#44582.0733.167

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
Turn based game, dice determines what you can do on the turn, enemies can only do the same.

Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?

Yes

We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam

Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?

Yes

We created the vast majority of the music during the game jam

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Here comes a rather comprehensive review written partly on the fly. :) (I would restructure it if I had more time; sorry for it being a bit messy!)

Observations:

  1. Oh, very nice that you put sliders for the volumes! :D Not that common a feature; I had thought about adding them for some game jam games, and I was always afraid this would take too much time.
  2. I like the title screen music, which I see you made yourselves. The background, font and buttons are pretty, too! I just think the ‘effects’ word from ‘Sound effects’ would be better inside the panel (using a carriage return), but that’s nitpicking.
  3. I also like the in-game music, and the simple yet cute animated little characters. The big die right at the beginning has a nice rotation animation, gives it volume!
  4. You even put contextual panels to display when hovering the mouse over choices! :) Very considerate of the player. There was definitely a lot of effort to make things clear.
  5. The little sequence with the die rolling at the beginning of each turn may be just a little too long, I think you could either reduce it a bit, or let the player skip it (with a click, for example). Once again, really nitpicking. ;) Discard that, I realize you can already act during the animation. X) (My comments are made semi-on the fly, I apologize.) I wonder if you can convey this better to the player. I think you should at least make the die disappear: otherwise, you can have a lot of dice simultaneously rolling.
  6. Does the enemy have the exact same attacks as us? I would have liked to know, because this is a very tactical/planning game. I am wondering if the system is not too symmetrical, because if both the player and the enemy have the same range, then you are bound to be able (or not) to perform the very same attacks at the exact same turns (except if the total mana counts differ). This may be less true when there are multiple enemies as in level 2, but still, this phenomenon is still somewhat valid, I think. Seeing how I was not attacked by in level 2, I guess abilities are not symmetrical; which is good! But then, I wonder if it is better to show the enemies’ skills (which would make the game more tactical) or not (which would push the game more on the random side). Or you wish for the player to learn by himself the different enemy types (seeing how there are two reds and two blues in level 3, this could well be), which can be a good idea too. Reaching level 10, I realize learning seems both practical and interesting. :) For instance, I could see how the healing enemies inflict 2 points of damage, and already roughly gauge their mana bars in level 9 (since they seem to mindlessly heal even when they are not wounded XD).
  7. Haha, slain that red enemy from level 2 with a sword and heard his gasp. XD Cute!
  8. I see that you earn experience from level to level.
  9. Oh, a very interesting phenomenon at level 3: you can be surrounded by several enemies, which is to be avoided, because an attack die then results in multiple attacks! I realize this is somewhat chessy! :) I think the concept does work! Really realized it at level 3.
  10. Question-suggestion: I wonder if only allowing the enemies to perform an action if the player does not skip his turn could be interesting. In this case, I am anticipating that strategically, once you have started hitting an enemy, you had better finish him off before healing, otherwise, he might heal himself too. And so, you should also concentrate on a single enemy rather than spraying damage. Would this make for a more interesting/balanced game? I am unsure, it should be put to the test if considered.
  11. I could heal myself although I had zero mana… In any case, an easily fixable bug. (This was in a lower level before healing cost nothing, I think; or I may have not noticed it was free, in which case, discard this.)
  12. Small bug: you can still attack the (wriggling) lying enemies. Except if you let this on purpose, for overkill. XD
  13. Nice sound too when you try firing a magic missile at zero mana. I realize this sounds mechanical, weirdly. X)
  14. It is nice that you put both keyboard and mouse controls; during level 8, I realize I have mastered the system enough to need the keyboard shortcuts. :) Oh, and you get some supplementary sounds for keyboard (such as the skipping turn one) which you do not have for the mouse! I would suggest also triggering them for clicking.
  15. In level 9, I went through a long phase of non-attack dice, which let the (first!) healing enemy heal himself a lot; I wonder if this dice sequence was there on purpose. It may be strategic. I noticed you seem to have voluntarily put many walk dice at the beginning of each level. It seems voluntary, seeing how there was also a long phase of healing dice in levels 10 and 11, shortly after the initial ‘walking phase’.
  16. I realized during level 10 that healing did not cost me mana anymore; maybe this was said in the lower-left log panel, but I missed it. I think upgrades should be stressed more (using some very visible central text and sound, for example; you know, the ‘LEVEL UP!!’ sort X)). By the way, I wonder whether infinite heal is overpowered or not… It all depends on the assortment of enemies. For my test, I still took care of my actions, but I felt it made the game rather easy and was a bit of a game breaker. I guess more magicians may make you need it (arriving in level 18 as I am writing this, I see two ominous such magicians approaching…). All right, I have just died in level 18 because of those two strong magicians. XD (And this is the end of my testing session.) So, what I said applied only partially, this is definitely a question of balance, especially if you extend the game with more abilities.
  17. Seeing the deep blue enemy in level 12 able to move a range of 2 tiles, I also think you did a very good job at introducing progressively the various enemies, with different abilities. I think implicit tutorials like these are smart game design.
  18. Very small pseudo-bug: when skipping while the missile attack is selected (for example), the range indication (ie the highlighted tiles) is still shown.
  19. The AI seems a bit smart: the ‘magician’ guy does not come right next to me when he is able to fire a missile. Or was it not on purpose? On the other hand, you can manage to block some enemy by aligning him with another one; although that may be an advantage to the chess-like aspect of the game. :)
  20. One last note on the theme: I think your use of the theme is more original than that of those entries that merely threw some random randomness (!) into otherwise classic genres.

In my eyes, this is a clever, enjoyable, and well-presented spin on ARPG/tactical combat that results in a semi-chess-like battle game. Well done, I was eager to see if there was an end to it before yielding under the vicious attacks of the magician duo. ;)

You only have 5 votes (soon 6!) at the moment I am writing this review, I hope your game gets noticed and rewarded the way it deserves to be, I see it as worthy. :)

Technical question: Ah, I see on the game page that you used Love2D! :) I love (! XD) this framework, almost used it for this game jam, but I was unable to correct the problems that arise for a navigator version made with love.js, and was afraid I would have trouble cutting out a proper menu template from a previous game. Did you use any library for the user interface, or made it all yourselves? Just out of curiosity. :)

Developer(+2)

Hey, first of all i want to thank you for your awesome comment, you spent a lot of time helping us to improve and I am really glad and proud reading your message. Thanks, I will try to bring you some answers about the gameplay.

Answers:

  1. (if I don’t answer to one of your point like the first one, you will receive the answer from our lead dev soon enough ^^)
  2. Thanks, glad you liked our design, our artist made it with photoshop by patching together existing files to have a “nice looking” background. We added the text a bit late, so we had not enough time to upgrade it, thanks for the advice!
  3. The music is made with FL studio (with not so much of knowledge and skills let’s be honest haha). Our second artist made our characters except the “basic foe”. We did not have enough time to change it, that's why the basic enemies are just a recolor of this one, they were supposed to be changed. It’s from https://love2d.org/wiki/Tutorial:Animation the tutorial of Love2D x) We made the dice rolling to explicitly fit the theme! We tried to not spend too much time on it.
  4. Our lead dev tried to make it as clear as possible, and this is one of his brilliant ideas. Glad you appreciated it.
  5. We tried to reduce the time of the roll to have two actions a second (approximately). We’d love to make an adaptive speed depending on how many dice are rolling at the same time, this feature was not implemented sadly.
    (do not apologize for your comment, they are awesome btw!) Having a lot of dice rolling is a part of what we wanted, but yes, always having at least one action would be better for the game feel ^^
  6. The gameplay is not symmetrical. Every spell/action has a type “move” “attack” “support”, as you can see, your “attack” dice unlock the melee attack and the spell attack. Enemies have the same type of attack. But they are different as you saw. We have a runner, fast and not really threatening, the powerful mage with a lot of hp and deadly attack, the “oneshoter”, a red guy who wants your death haha. And so on. Not showing their abilities is a choice from us, both of our artists tested it and one of them understood every mechanic by playing “a lot” and the other one tested 3 levels and was not able to figure it out. At this moment we decided to not display enemies skills.
    (spoiler: some heal have mana cost other are free :P)
  7. Hahaha glad you liked it, audacity and some scream lead to that gasp!
  8. We had to make it more obvious, the quickest method was to display it in the corner, but yeah some juicy animation to make it even more obvious was needed here.
  9. It’s the core gameplay so far, avoid the attack as much as you can (since you know when they’ll occur with a list of dice) but do not miss you opportunity to hit the biggest threat. This balance is important to win every stage.
  10. Nice idea but you give too much power to the player, it’s deadly to skip for no reason, so you’ll have to think about it twice with our system ^^
  11. cf 6. , some spells cost 0! ;) 
  12. True! They are still ennemies haha, but we will not remove the possibility to use all your mana one this boss you had so much trouble to kill! Tea-bag him by hitting is corpse !
  13. This sound occurs when you try to do something you are not allowed to, like using a spell with not enough mana or performing an action which is not on the current dice.
  14. We forgot to put it on the mouse click! :o Sorry we did not realize it!
  15. Some of them are (like the walking part) others are from the randomness of the dice haha. It can result in a deadly man to man fight or a loooong skip session, it’s all about the Rolling Dice!
  16. (player heal mana cost = 0 :P ) We definitely need to make a good “level up” animation to display it, yes! To pass the level 18 you need a loooot of luck haha, it’s not “the end”, every enemies have a “weight”, and every level pool is made of the sum of enemies weight. So level 18 pool is 20 (for example), a magician weight 10, that's why you have 2 magicians, but level 17 pool is 18 so you can only have one magician or zero! Adding more enemy type would result in a larger diversity of encounters and harder gameplay, that’s how we made it. ^^
  17. We learnt game design by playing, and watching a lot of content (youtube is our teacher), so we tried to put it in our game ^^ Glad you liked it!
  18. (tech problem :3)
  19. Our initial idea was to have a different AI type, yes. They all try to reach you and attack you, that’s it for now! But we wanted to have some of them able to block you, or take you from behind etc. Too much ambition for a game jam, we had to make compromise ^^
  20. We are all really happy and proud right now. Your analysis gave us a big smile :) Thanks a lot!
    (Tech questions are not for me!! :P )
    I’ll thank you one more time, and hope you had a good time playing our game!

Wish you the best, and sir, seriously, stay this awesome <3

Submitted

Thank you for the detailed answer. :) (You were not forced to address my every remark, I am a bit of a fussy nerd, writing everything down. XD)

10. Nice idea but you give too much power to the player, it’s deadly to skip for no reason, so you’ll have to think about it twice with our system ^^

Yes, I gave it some thought afterwards and realized it. So, it was not a ‘nice’ idea, but a terrible one. XD

13. This sound occurs when you try to do something you are not allowed to, like using a spell with not enough mana or performing an action which is not on the current dice.

This is what I understood; I was just noting the contrast between magic and mechanics/machinery. ;) (By the way, one game that mixes the two is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura; never played it, but saw a video about it, and it seemed interesting, from the creators of the original Fallout and in the same vein, with an awful lot of freedom as to how the events depend on you.)

16. […] every enemies have a “weight”, and every level pool is made of the sum of enemies weight. So level 18 pool is 20 (for example), a magician weight 10, that's why you have 2 magicians, but level 17 pool is 18 so you can only have one magician or zero!

Cunning system, I like it. :) It reminds me of the general ‘bag’ concept, which is used at least in some versions of Tetris to select the next few pieces (RNGenie Corp from the game jam used it; funny game by the way, try it if you did not ;)), except yours is weighted.

stay this awesome

All right, I’ll try. It comes naturally to me, though. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) *stated in a deep Duke Nukem voice*
More seriously, I wish every game got its well-deserved review and its fair share of votes. I tested almost exclusively few voted-on games, yours was on the list. ;) It’s unconscionable my comment is the only one you had, and you had this few votes (while some clickbait thumbnails skyrocketed in popularity)… ._. Of course, votes are not an end in themselves, but it means less people came to see your work.

I created a personal collection Petits bijoux (that would be Little Gems in French) where I put your game as an inauguration; I am a total nobody (so, do not expect to get on the news XD), but still. :) (I may add other game jam games there, I have yet to decide. I put No More Mr.Dice Guy in Humour, but I wavered a bit with letting it in the other category. XD)

Submitted

Alors là !! Je me permets une digression : je viens de jeter un œil à ton compte par pure curiosité, j’ai vu le titre Aventure en français, alors je me suis interrogé, je l’ai ouvert, et je vois que… c’est un jeu de game jam Gamecodeur, alors que j’ai moi-même participé à une game jam Gamecodeur ouverte au public (la 36, sur vThumby) tout récemment (ma première game jam) !! :D

Je ne savais même pas que tu étais français. Le monde est tout petit ! ;)

Bonne continuation en tout cas, les gens. :)

Developer

En effet le monde est petit haha. J'ai suivi la formation gamecodeur pendant un moment, mon affinité avec love2d vient de là :P !

Bonne continuation à toi aussi, et reste comme tu es, t'es un vrai bonheur à lire ^^

Developer(+1)

Thank you so much for your review! I'll be answering your technical questions: the game was made in Love2D 11, and with a custom package I made and maintain for my personal use. I searched during this jam for love.js, but ended up not using it. I'll make sure to take a look in the future, as having a navigator version could help a lot for sharing games!

The bug you mention in your 18th point wasn't caught during the game jam, but only wrongly displays the highlight, the game wont let you cast it!

Submitted (3 edits)

Thanks for the technicalities. :)

with a custom package I made and maintain for my personal use.

I see, good practice; it’s interesting to see how the others do. I should definitely create such a proper template; thought about it for quite some time, but… still not done. I was lucky I could reuse the menu/interface code from my previous game jam. XD

The bug you mention in your 18th point wasn't caught during the game jam, but only wrongly displays the highlight, the game wont let you cast it!

Being the responsible game wrecker that I am, I did try casting it and noticed it was safe. ;)

I searched during this jam for love.js, but ended up not using it. I'll make sure to take a look in the future, as having a navigator version could help a lot for sharing games!

Apparently, people play a lot more when there is a Web version, although I do not know the ratio.

Nonetheless, Web versions can have specific problems (as to sound, resolution, and other things); and I can talk about my (small) experience with researching love.js: there are two possible versions you can compile, a ‘compatibility’ one and a ‘normal’ one. The official documentation says that the compatibility version should be more universal, but with possibly ‘dodgy audio‘; it was worse than that: the function for stopping the sound made my game crash! So I went for the normal version, which did require taking care of the SharedArrayBuffer problem (it prevented the game from launching…). I did not know how to set up the HTTP headers properly for a local server to solve this, so I experimented directly by uploading to itch.io: the SharedArrayBuffer issue was indeed solved by ticking the right option, but… I was then served with another crashing error (Uncaught TypeError: src.bufQueue is undefined, even though I had tried increasing the allowed static memory). This was the end of my attempts.

Tell me if you get it to work, but it does not sound straightforward, and may depend on your game.