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Dicey Depths's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun! | #2 | 3.900 | 3.900 |
| Uniqueness! | #3 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Game Feel! | #4 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Overall | #4 | 3.350 | 3.350 |
| Harmony! | #5 | 3.700 | 3.700 |
| Horniness! | #8 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Theme! | #9 | 1.800 | 1.800 |
Ranked from 10 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?
There's some vague stuff about there being signals coming from the castle that brings the party here, but its not explicit right now since I had to leave placeholder text in lmao.
Did you get any significant work done before the jam? If so, please tell us.
Did one panel of the prologue, and did early sketches on the sprites for party and monsters. All coding and 99% of the effort was within jam!
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I played this for so much longer than I had time for lol. At first I was feeling like there needed to be more than three base abilities each, but after getting past the first battle and corrupting the knight it clicked and I think it's actually remarkably well balanced for the design. The mix of party member abilities and enemy quirks, even with the fairly limited scope, led to some really fun strategizing and made me feel clever every time I played a good round and eager for the next one even if it went badly. The visual style and character art is so good! Everyone has so much personality, even the enemies. And the tone and writing are super fun, I never would've guessed any of it was a placeholder.
I did find it to be a little bit of a challenge to get the hang of the UI without more direction, but that's totally reasonable for a jam game, especially considering how well everything actually works, which is what really counts. I think a brief little popup to highlight the changing round phases would help, rather than just having the text in the corner change, and in the very beginning I was confused that the only option was "reroll" when I hadn't rolled yet. The only thing I would call a genuine problem was pretty often one or more dice would just pop up, maybe spin flat a little, and settle right back on the same face without ever really rolling. It felt pretty unfair but it wasn't enough to stop me enjoying the game, and I can't imagine how tricky it must've been to get simulated dice physics to work as well as they do in the game.
At the seventh or eighth battle I seemed to break the game somehow, having only the cleric up, and no matter how much damage she took she never dropped below her maximum HP. Unless there was some protection mechanic I was missing, it happened whether I had her heal herself or take no action.
But yeah, this was so much fun and I'm definitely going to come back to it to see all the different corrupted forms and try to reach the end!
Yes okay I already came back to it and I was so OP by the end with my corrupted druid and rogue that the boss didn't do a single point of damage to any of my party. Repeatedly shutting down the minion summon with stun was so satisfying. Still have to play again to see the corrupted cleric, though!
I’m so glad you had that much fun with it! It feels well balanced makes me really happy; the math theoretically worked out, but you never know how it’ll be in practice. And I’m glad the personality of everything came through!
It being challenging to figure out what to do without instructions is definitely the biggest piece of feedback I’ve gotten. A pop up for round changes is a great idea - I always wanted to make that a bit more offical than what it is currently.
The dice is also 100% an issue - thankfully one I’ve solved since/will push through in the post jam update, but it definitely is the only part of the current experience I think feels truly unfair to the players.
I also have no earthly idea how you managed that with the cleric, hah! Then again, I’m delighted to hear you got all the way to the end without corrupting her - I thought for sure she needed to be to complete the game in its current state.
The boss being stunnable wasn’t supposed to be possible either - if you ever come back to the game post-ratings, I’m very curious how you’ll fare against a boss who you can’t keep down indefinitely! ;)
Thanks again for the in depth comment!
Okay, the prologue had me rolling; absolute best intro I've seen in a long time.
This was fun and charming! It took me a few minutes to figure out how to attack/defend/heal and all that, but it was so easy to restart that it didn't really feel rough figuring it out through trial and error. The character art is fantastic, and I managed to get the warrior to turn in to the dragon/demon warrior, which I quite liked. The music was also a thorough jam!
Might not hurt to adjust the angle of view on the dice a bit; there were a few rounds that I thought I had the dice showing a specific result, only for it to be that a side was showing more clearly than the top. (This seemed to happen moreso near the sides of the dice tray.)
Also, it seemed like it was entirely possible to abuse re-rolls by using the 'unstuck' command in the menu.
Overall, cute as heck and I enjoyed it a lot! I hope you do more with this!
I’m so glad the prologue had you rolling - it really seems to have been a highlight of everybody who played, hah!
Super happy to hear you enjoyed your time with the game overall :D I went into this jam really wanting to put forward a complete product, so hearing that the whole package (art/music/gameplay) seemed to all click really delights me.
You’re right, the dice viewing angle is a bit bizarre - never could figure out during the jam time frame what caused it to be so fish-eyed - it works well enough but I’m still not quite sure the cause. Also 100% aware of the “unstuck” abuse that’s possible - not sure there’s a more elegant solution that doesn’t potentially run the risk of abuse in a different way; I think it comes with the territory a bit of it being an inperfect physics based system. At the end of the day though, I’d much rather people abuse it to get infinite re-rolls than the alternative early players ran into (restarting viable runs because the dice froze and “unstuck” wasn’t visible.)
Definitely not against exploring this more after the game get unlocked if the right ideas come to me - thanks so much for the comment!
played 2 levels. i like the character and enemy art. some more SFX, like for the dice, would be nice. the gameplay took me a second to figure out, but after that it felt smooth. nice game :)
Thanks for playing, glad you could figure it out! Yeah, some impact sound effects definitely wouldn’t go amiss. :)
I think a lot of this is cool, but some mechanics are unclear (I did not realize the ghosts counted as flying as far as the gargoyles are concerned), and it NEEDS and "are you sure" pop-up if you have an unassigned dice roll. I barely scraped by a round (mathematically) and lost it anyway because it detected my click as a double click.
The “are you sure” popup is definitely needed, I’ve noticed that in my own run-throughs - I just couldn’t figure out a way to do it in the jam. Glad you still found some stuff in this cool!
Very cool and interesting game mechanics! I really enjoyed this one even if I didn't manage to get all the way through yet. That might be my fault though since in my first run I lost/transformed the warrior, and in my second run I tried not to transform anyone, which I guess left me underpowered later on. I do like the strategy involved of trying to choose between getting stronger dice sides vs more base HP and rerolls. I might have liked to see maybe a shop or something to add to this, since near the end I did have one or two characters who still had the base due to the options I was given.
I'll definitely try a run where I transform one or two units, but I also hope to get through it with a 'pure' party haha. I did get the dice stuck once or twice, but found the unstuck button in the menu.
Excellent stuff!
Glad you found the game mechanics so interesting! It seems from what I’ve seen that a completely “pure” run isn’t quite possible with the current power setup - the game was definitely balanced assuming that you’d lose at least one or two characters. A shop could be a really interesting idea to play with - I was toying with being able to choose two level up options per level, or having random events that could give you better odds of extra die faces. There’s definitely room for experimentation!
Glad you could find the unstuck button too - ideally I wouldn’t need it at all, but alas, 3D physics are a bit janky.
Delighted you enjoyed it!
Even though I'm not very good at it, I had fun with this game ! It actually took me an embarrassing amount of time to understand I had to choose a target after rolling my dice (ᵕ—ᴗ—) I only finally understood when I read the tiny text at the top so I think it would be good if this was made less easy to miss.
Once I got over this hurdle I found the gameplay loop quite amusing, even if the dice can be a little finicky I didn't encounter bugs with them (but I still found that sometimes some of the previous actions seem to 'stick', allowing the player to redo their previous action on top of the new one that was rolled, in case that wasn't on purpose). The sprites are simple but cute in their different states and seeing the corrupted versions of each girls was super fun. The little text-only sequences had a nice text-adventure flair to it too ! And the intro made me chuckle, I'm simple like that.
I did hit a wall against the armored ghost (I thought maybe I needed to get the defence of every single one of them to 0 before I could do damage because it seemed like I couldn't, but by this point one of them had accumulated a whooping 25 defence so I was not able to test this theory). I think it might be worth hinting at what is needed to do to defeat new enemy types, even if figuring some of it out is also part of the fun.
Hopefully I can get back to it and get past those dudes so I can see it through the end, but I still had a nice time with it overall ദ്ദി ( ᵔ ᴗ ᵔ )
Thank you so much for the in-depth comment! Really means a lot to get a glimpse into the player side of things, especially when our entries were so different.
You’ve definitely touched on the main things I’m taking away from the jam - a good tutorial I think would have been super helpful to ease people into the game, rather than relying on just the tool tips. I did include some instructions for the monsters that have weird mechanics - both the armored monsters and the winged ones before it have a status icon you can mouse over - but it seems like those have been either real easily missed or not informative enough.
The armored enemies seem to have been a wall for a lot of people, so you’re not alone in that! Their armor does intentionally increase much more rapidly than you can get through it, which is supposed to guide you to try other ways to damage it - I definitely could have made that path more obvious though. The action sticking from the previous round is also unintentional, but considering it helps the player I’m not mad it’s there.
So glad you enjoyed the art, and especially the writing passages! I didn’t realise until now it gives that text-adventure flair in the way it appears to the player, but I’m delighted that’s the takeaway - I’ve always been a writer first, so it was nice to flex those muscles even in a small way - and while the intro wasn’t the original plan it’s gotten a bunch of laughs, so I’ll take the win. :D
I like this game. I found a bug that stores the last die from the previous round giving an extra action each turn and I still can't make it past stage three with my cleric and rogue transformed. The unearthly just will not die. The game is confusing at first but once I figured it out I had fun. For a minute. The starting loadouts are bad. I would much prefer the girls start transformed and lose their powers when they fall. This game is a few tweaks from being great. I am only being critical because you have potential. And because the third fight is frustrating as all hell.
Oh yes, that bug! I discovered that bug after the submission deadline - not the end of the world honestly, since it works in the player’s favour. As for the third fight, there’s a tool tip on the unearthly spirits that mention they don’t like life magic. If you end up playing again, try healing the spirits instead of trying to damage through the shields they keep replenishing. It’s a much easier fight that way. :D
The starting loadouts are intentionally bad to push the player to see the kink content/transformations, since that setup is the specific kink and vibe I was going for. It’s supposed to be balanced out by the fact the corrupted girls are very powerful early on, but I can understand it may not be intuitive.
Thanks for playing - I totally get the critique comes from a place of interest/care and I really appreciate the feedback!
The gameplay mechanics are cool but becuase of the slow combat and the repetitive royalty free music it feels like it takes too long to get to the horny parts.
Thanks for playing! It’s very much a game with erotic theming rather than a sex game (in that kink doesn’t need to be about sex way), but definitely planning to make the pause menu with the music mute more accessible in future.
This is a really fun and charming game, this is something I would want to come back to when I wanna kill some time.
My only two attempts (one a third in, and the other half in) died because of a dice getting stuck on its tip and against a wall which would disable the proceed and reroll button.
Besides that, the gameplay is great once you learn what your looking at.
So delighted to hear that you’d consider coming back to this! I always feel like the hallmark of a good rogue-like is repeatability, so it hitting that for you means I’ve done something right. :D Like I mentioned to you on Discord, there’s an unstuck button if you press escape - definitely going to make the pause button visible in-game in the future, but hopefully that should stop you getting stuck in the middle of runs in the future!