I knew I wanted to do a top-down shooter. My thought process was dice have 6 sides and a revolver has 6 bullets. So, from there, I figured I'd use the die to select the gun based on the amount of ammo it held (except the launcher which has 2 ammo. I just thought a 5 on a dice looked like an explosion). Sorry if I sold you on the game based on potato cowboy and then underdelivered. That was my last-minute way of justifying the default Unity capsule as the player. I coloured it the same colour as the hat and thought it looked like a potato.
I hadn't really thought of pausing interrupting the flow. I wanted the forced pause to force people to engage with the system and so you can't just roll all 6s once and be good for the rest of the game. That's also why the damage buff decays and it would have been a stronger theme with more buffs that decay over time. I used the Megaman Battle Network system of you have to survive x seconds, but then you have the option of when you want to rebuff. You have to survive a minimum of 10s and are forced at 30s. So I figured the player would have enough agency of when they wanted to rebuff. But that isn't explained anywhere so I could definitely see some confusion from the forced pause like "I don't think I pressed space? Did I?"
The enemies upgrade from 1s to 2s, etc. every 10 kills, increasing their health and damage, and then they spawn the big boss dice with 6 health bars. So I should have had these bosses drop some sort of bonus like the extra dice, but I just opted to have every enemy have a chance to drop extra dice. So the only form of tension you get is having to go close to enemies to pick up what they dropped.