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sKILL or DIE's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #1396 | 3.372 | 3.372 |
| Enjoyment | #2123 | 2.814 | 2.814 |
| Overall | #2377 | 2.907 | 2.907 |
| Presentation | #3371 | 2.535 | 2.535 |
Ranked from 43 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?
Combatants roll dice, then use dice combinations to gain victory in this turn based battler.
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
I had a lot o difficulty to understand the game. But once I got it, it was awesome. Had you had more time to polish it, it would be a killer for sure. I absolutely recommend you to keep up with this project, it has a splendid mechanic
I'm glad you enjoyed it. "Awesome" is quite the compliment :D
We agree, the core can be difficult to understand without the primitive UI design we had time for. We have had quite a bit of positive feedback so will be exploring this idea further post-Jam: our first step has been thinking about what an ideal interface could be and how that could guide our design.
Great! Do you have any social media we can keep up with the development of the new version?
We don't have anything official yet in regards to social media. The best option would be to follow me on Itch and when we do decide to proceed further with this one we can pop in DevLogs for updates.
This is fantastic - the skill tree is wide and varied, with a whole lot of very exciting powers, and makes really excellent use of the dice - you've mentioned elsewhere in the comments that your focus was on input rather than output randomness and this really comes through, with the skill tree containing many ways to use dice of all scores.
I loved the aspects that encouraged considering whether it was worth retaining die for subsequent turns: in one playthrough I ended up holding a pair of twos for multiple rounds in the hope I'd roll a third and unlock the opportunity for criticals, and in another I had to debate whether to it was worth spending my valuable pocket 6s or to retain them to keep a chance at criticals each turn. Decisions felt well balanced, and gave me plenty of room to adapt on the fly based on my rolls.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to finish the game as it'd crash after a few rounds on each playthrough - if it's any help, the output of the console is below:
I found the issue for that Bug. Do not select the Critical Attack Node - when it is triggered it cause a NullReferenceError. It is an easy fix in code, but alas I cannot until after the Jam.
Ah - no worries! Will give it another shot :)
Edit: managed to beat it on all difficulties - great fun :) was definitely very much obsessed with the idea of criticals on my original run, which I'm guessing is why I kept encountering the bug! I focussed on regen abilities this time around, and found they're a great strategy :)
I'm glad that bug fix worked out for you. Thanks for giving it another go. It's quite unbalance at the moment haha - balancing RPGs isn't a 48hr task :P as long as you pump DEF early it's hard to lose and Regen is way powerful with high DEF. Glad you enjoyed it.
I like the core mechanic and think there is so much room to design further cool mechanics/tradeoffs. I think I will spend another month on this one at least after the Jam and see how it pans out
I really liked the nodes idea, it lends itself to lots of great strategic possibilities. The music and art was good, my favourite piece was the dice roll.
Some criticism is that quite a few nodes were partially drawn off screen. I'd also have liked health indicators. These are really minor issues though.
Thanks for the positive feedback.
It sound like you either did not have it on Fullscreen Mode or your Device cannot support the 16:9 aspect ratio that is default. If you cannot use 16:9 it will not display correctly.
Sorry you had that issue, but if you can replay it on 16:9 it should show up correctly.
I definitely think this was a great attempt at a game, especially considering time constraints. With a touch more refinement, this would be perfect!
Thank you for the positive feedback. It definitely would have greatly benefited from another 24 hours.
I've seen a similiar concept to yours a few times this jam, but none have executed it this well I feel like. The added limitation through the tree nodes makes this idea a lot more complex and engaging, which is something the other games lack. Really smart decision. Good job!
Thanks for the positive feedback Rolim. My game isn't very polished due to time constraints, but I am glad you liked core mechanics.
It was exactly what I was going for: by having input (rather than output) randomness and then by having the game state constantly changing I hoped to force the Player to make interesting decisions and trade-offs rather than relying on RNG or some optimal strategy. For example:
The skill tree isn't as impactful or balanced as I was planning - but that's the 48 hour limit for you. There was even a Shield resource that I implemented that provided temporary Defense but then able to be traded for a big attack (e.g. Shield Slam), but it is almost impossible to use with the current skill tree.
Thanks again for your feedback and good luck with the Jam - I liked your game a lot as well.
Great music and cool gameplay
Weird gameplay and really confusing.
Thanks for playing and I'm sorry it was not understandable. I can definitely understand where you are coming from. We had to rush the aesthetics and UI, so it is not very easy to understand without reading up the Description Page. There are also an occasional random bug that happens and you cannot progress and need to Reload the page- you might have even encountered this.
If your willing to give it another go, here is the short rundown - the longer HOW TO PLAY on the game page goes into more detail.
At it's core, the game is a Turn Based Battle System (e.g. Pokemon, Final Fantasy). Each Turn has 3 phases:
1. The game rolls some dice for you
2. You then can:
3. Lastly, Click the Attack Button or Buy an Action Node (Yellow with Attack Description) to do and Attack and End the Turn.
The enemy does the same thing as you, back and forth, until someone is Dead. Damage Dealt is equal to your ATK - their DEF.
Thanks !
Nice game play mechanics, Lovely music spot on the theme you made.
Thanks for the feedback. I will let our Music Team know you liked the music - this is their first Jam with us so they will be happy to hear the feedback.
An easy 5 stars on creativity, a really unique game yet utterly dedicated to the theme.
Sadly I encountered a couple of bugs that sort of made the game unplayable:
Firstly, the enemy would reuse its dice to completely deck out its stats. By turn three it would have every box full. I restarted the game several times and this happened on almost every turn.
Secondly, after a turn or two I would stop receiving new dice on my turn. Sometimes I could click around madly and they would suddenly spawn and roll, but this was rare.
These bugs made me really sad as I love your game concept and really wanted to play it. The concept of growing your character per-battle, watching that skill tree fill up, that's really good and sounds uber satisfying. And being able to hold your low rolls to activate the special moves is really clever too, it means the player is never totally screwed by rolling low and they don't really get that pang of being screwed by bad luck.
Reading other comments makes it seem most people were able to play just fine so I'm not sure why I wasn't able too. I would love for you to continue development because the concept is so solid and I'd like to play a working version haha.
Thanks for the in-depth review. Glad you found it 5-Star Creative: it was our main focus to do something completely unique.
As you say, the aim was to make the player be able to compensate for RNG and make active decisions as they flesh out the skill tree/action tree. I'm glad that was noticeable.
It's unfortunate you ran into so many bugs. We did know about the "enemy reusing dice" issue right before publishing, but it seemed to be random and related to some race condition between the AI decision tree and the time taken for the dice to properly clear the dice buffer. Did you try a different difficulty because it seemed to happen more often on Hard than Normal.
I have never encountered not getting new dice though when you have a slot open - I will look into that.
I think if we work on this further we will remove the physics dice and use a simpler "Mario Party" style visual for both speed, clarity, and de-clutter. It could also remove that potential race condition. I will also rebuild the Turn Based Framework - it was quite complex and I'd say rushing that in 48 hours is the root cause of the bugs.
If we end up doing an update, I will let you know.
I found a bug when choosing the Critical Attack Node - it causes a NullReferenceException and crashes the game. If this is what you encountered, it can be avoided in the build by not buying or triggering the Critical Attack Node.
I don't think this is what I encountered as the game never seemed to crash, I could always pick "attack" and the enemy could always take its turn. But thank you!
Cool game, definitely needs more polish and a tutorial though
Still, good job on your game!
Nice game !
This is a great game with a fun and cool mechanic. The art in the game looks great and the game is overall really good!
A fun and very intuitive game ! didn't need to read much (and with a little bit of experimenting) I can easily understand the underlying mechanics of the game. It has this effect of wanting to make your character stronger and have higher stats.
All in all a very enjoyable experience, congrats on finishing the jam !
A fun game with a unique mechanic. I really liked the art and music as well
Thanks for the feedback. I am a fan of your game as well.
A nice game to kill some time! At the start, it was confusing on what I'm supposed to do in the game but after a while I managed to understand the mechanics of it. Overall, a fun and decent game. Great job <3
It's a very creative idea having a skill tree develop over the course of combat. There's a lot of design space there and I could see a whole game being built off of it, even if you didn't stick with the Yahtzee/dice gimmick. I think 3 dice per turn felt low, I think I would have had a bit more fun rolling the full 5 just because you get to see more combinations per turn. Very cool game! :)
Thanks for playing.
I agree with your opinion regarding having more dice to allow more combos per turn. I'm going to update it after the Jam to have the 5 dice plus 1-2 rerolls and then adjust the unlock requirements. We ran out of playtesting time and I think I would have implemented this if I had more time to playtest.
I agree, there is a lot of design space - which I found difficult to manage in a short Jam as it didn't give me enough time to iterate on ideas. I already have a few ideas to try out.
For example, I want to try changing the Dice faces from Values (1-6) to Symbols (maybe Stat or Role Based). Then we could trial using a generic "Stat Up" that can improve any stat depending on which Symbol is used rather than using individual Stat Nodes (e.g. Double STR symbols = STR + 2, Triple DEF symbol = DEF + 3). This would reduce the total amount of Nodes required on the Tree so it could be cleaner and give player more agency on growth trajectory towards the Capstone Abilities. It also would give us more leeway to use different dice loadouts for different classes and options to change the dice as you play (e.g. purchasing a skill to replaces one basic dice with an offensive oriented version).
Anyway, thanks again for playing and providing feedback on the mechanics.
Very brilliant idea. Most unique rpg game mixed with dice I ever see so far in this jam. Well done. I hope you improve it more ^^
Thanks for the positive feedback. We really wanted to do something truly unique so I'm glad you think we succeeded in that aspect.
I will probably try to improve on it - I can see an interesting core but I am not quite happy with where it landed after 48hours. The problem I had was trying to solve unique design problems spent more time on gameplay design and mechanics and left less time to work on aesthetics and UI design.
I always like to try unique spins of the theme for jams. Our last Jam "Recovery" was a UI driven, detective/doctor puzzle game https://fatedgamedeveloper.itch.io/cosmos-md. I was much happier with how that idea turned out but we had a whole month on that one.
Very interesting concept! I was confused at first but enjoyed it :)
Glad you enjoyed it. I will take a look at your game when I next have time.
Pretty cool concept, I enjoyed it a lot! There were a few glitches in the UI when I played and the skill tree requirements were a bit unclear without hovering to see what they do or require. If you expand on it, just ad small dices under each skill like 1, 2 or 3 dices so it's easy to see what I need to put where :-)
With some polish I could see myself coming back to this game
Thanks for the feedback. Using small dice or an appropriate symbol would be much better than our rushed text heavy UI.
Alas, that 48hrs goes very quickly.
played the game for a while, beat it on easy mode, pretty fun game and i can see myself coming back to it to kill time. that being said it seems the current build isn't fully stable as when i clicked one of my dice (pretty sure it was on the 2nd difficulty) the game froze and prompted me an error message.
overall great job
I am still looking into that bug to be sure, but I did find a bug with the Critical Attack Node - when it is triggered it cause a NullReferenceError. This can be avoided by not buying that Node. This could have been the issue you had I am not sure. I have had another random crash that I am trying to find the solution for.