itch.io

Thanks for giving it a try anyway. I'd like to make sure, though: did you read the instructions? I understand if you didn't; the instructions should absolutely be in the game itself instead of down in the description, so I figured there was a risk that players would miss it. It's on me for not getting them into the game itself on time.

I ask because the description of the game as "filling the board until you lose" sounds like you don't know about the reroll mechanic, where most of the game's strategy lies. Without the rerolls, yeah, it's just picking highlighted dice until there's none left, which would be pretty boring! If you didn't know about rerolls, I'd encourage you to give the game another shot (I understand if you're not interested, though).

If you did know about rerolling, I'm curious where it fell flat for you. Was the charcoal too hard to clear? Did you feel like there wasn't enough incentive to go for a reroll unless there were no readily available clears left? If you only rerolled when you absolutely had to, and always rerolled the chains that were closest to being complete, I could also see that feeling like not much of a choice.

Anyway, I agree with the rest of the criticisms - the blocking of input needs to go. Audio, online leaderboards, bonuses, and an in-game tutorial are all things I wanted, but left out because I spent so much time running through basic rulesets until I found one that actually worked well in practice. That's why I'm particularly interested in whether some players feel like they don't have any meaningful choices, because making the choices feel meaningful was the primary focus of the design.

I'm not super happy with the physics, either. Most of of the time I didn't spend on the basic rules was spent trying to get the physics to behave (attempting several solutions, such as explosions, to try to get them unstuck from each other). Sadly, the friction can't go much lower without introducing major jitter (to the point of the dice clipping through walls) or requiring me to increase the tick rate (which would worsen the already-serious performance problems that the game has in its current state). I have other ideas for workarounds that I'd like to try later, though, and if I optimize the game better, I may be able to increase the tick rate anyway.