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Dice in Space's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #603 | 3.512 | 3.512 |
| Overall | #1532 | 3.215 | 3.215 |
| Presentation | #2086 | 3.122 | 3.122 |
| Creativity | #2352 | 3.012 | 3.012 |
Ranked from 82 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?
Instead of reloading, you roll dice to get a new weapon.
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
Nice twist on the top down shooter genre! Could use a bit more juice!
Nicely done. Congrats on finishing this in 48 hours!
For the most part, your different guns felt pretty good, but there lacked some variety. A lot of the just felt like "shoot with a different cooldown and damage", but the weapons with unique properties that I saw like the shotgun (and especially the chainsaw!) were the most fun.
A really tough design problem I've seen a lot of folks encounter this jam is coming up for 6 fun and meaningfully different abilities when doing "get a random ability" designs. It's hard! And with the absolutely huge amount of guns in here, I'm guessing a lot of them are just variations of each other. That's the sort of nuance you can get into in a full release, but for a short & sweet jam game, less is usually more. I had the most fun with your game when I was getting a completely new gun to try out. But when I rerolled and got something that fired slightly faster but did slightly less damage, it just wasn't exciting. Get playtesting in and find stuff like this to help find the most fun parts of your design!
As for the movement speed - at first I thought it was way too slow. But I actually came to enjoy it. The bullets are slow, the enemies are slow, and the reload is slow. It gives it all a kind of lightly tactical feel. You need to be thoughtful about your movement and the game gives you the time to do that. The low ammo count on some guns makes this okay because you're constantly trying to adapt to a new playstyle. I think that worked pretty well.
Wew, wall of text. Woops! Hope you enjoyed your jam and learned something new. Keep making games!
Thanks for the advice!
Nice art style and time-tested gameplay, with a dice twist! Loved it. Could use a little bit juice on firing/hitting
Other then the lack of the tutorial this is the biggest thing I wish I had time to work on more. Thanks for taking the time to play!
Fun twist on the dice-roll-decides your weapon mechanic! Each weapon feels unique to use , and has benefits and disadvantages depending on the situation you end up on. This game gives you the ability to pick what type of weapon you want, which both makes sure you get something relevant and also lowers the chances of a frustrating scenario where you rolled an inept weapon for the task, while still forcing you to adapt on-the-fly to whatever you got. Great implementation! My main note would be increasing the contrast between foreground and background sprites—it was often hard to read text over the background or discern incoming bullets. I also had some trouble aiming with the mouse as I kept losing track of it. Showing a crosshair in the direction of aim could help alleviate this.
Overall, I had fun and enjoyed the soundtrack! I got up to round 7 after a couple attempts. :)
Simple yet fun game. I think the collision could be improved a bit - a few times I shot an enemy and it didn't lose health. Really cool idea, though, and quite a bit of fun! Nice work :)
It was very fun!! only thing missing is that I really wanted to roll/reload at anytime
I thought it was really fun! I kinda wish I could just reload at anytime, and I agree that the reload currently takes you out of the game a bit. Maybe a hotbar so you can select whichever dice you want to use that u currently have, or something that can cycle through them (along with some UI showing what's currently equipped), and then allowing you to re-roll the die whenever I think would be great. The time it takes to roll the die can be the downside of just rolling till u get the gun you like, and with the uses on the special die it also wastes your roll if you just try to keep changing your weapon.
Very fun! The only major issue I have is choosing your dice between reloading kind of takes you out of the action. Maybe if you had a little Hotbar to choose your die and then you throw it without actually pausing. Love the strategy of choosing your die though. Great job!
Cool game and actually quite fun!
Really nice game! Very cool concept and execution, cool art as well. I especially liked the music! Well done! Good job!
Neat take on the theme, I'm a fan of hotline miami, so i felt some vibe playing this one.. i was so unlucky first that i got the saw, and i thought shooting do not work, but i t was me not recognizing the sound of veeeeew :D
Had fun playin it, really well use of randomness.. sure if yuo got more time u would have polished it more, as a thing that is really needed in TDS is bpolish and trails, it just make game moves stages.
Like the art, Solid design and potentioal fora great shoot'm up (liked the music, it fits)
Keep up the awesome work! ^^
Nice usage of randomness! Try making the text more readable, maybe add a background?
Really fun! Having an element of controlled randomness where you at least pick the die really elevates this game. I had some trouble reading text when choosing a power up however.
Fun game! It was interesting to try the different dices.
It would have been great to have more different effects: bullet colors, shapes > similar to the grenade.
Very cool concept, and great variety of guns! I really like the idea of choosing which dice you will roll and balancing that with how many enemies are out and when you'll get a new dice. Having to pause the game to roll a dice did slow the action down quite a bit, but I'm not sure what the right solution there is.
The games pretty fun! All the weapons are pretty unique and the collecting certain dices with specific weapons on it is a great mechanic. Unfortunately it was a bit hard to see some of the stuff on the background such as the ammo text. The pressing space to roll and then waiting a bit didnt really feel the greatest. A better system would probably being having a key to swap weapons and then having it reload to a new weapon on the dice automatically
I like it! The presentation is simple but clear, I think what you did with the dice mechanic for different guns brings a lot of variety, and it feels really, really good to get the chain gun! I also like your music SFX. Music is simple without being annoying, and kicks a little ass while also being kind of chill.
Really cool game! I think forcing the player to switch playstyles is really cool, it's just that the guns were all very similar with teeny variation. That's obvi down to time constraints. Also pausing the game to choose a dice to roll is annoying and cuts the pace. I'd suggest having the player choose which dice to use in the time between waves.
It's a really cool idea, that works really well. I wish it was more nervous though, so here are some suggestions if you want to go in that direction:
I would recommend this talk from one of Nuclear Throne's developer on how to make your game feel better to play.
Had a really nice and fun gameplay loop! Had a blast trying to get farther than my last try and strategically circling around the enemies so that I can have a better chance of shooting them while they try to shoot me, made me feel like John Wick lol. This really proves that a basic concept can also be the most fun if given enough care into the balance and mechanics of it! The sound design is great too and it really felt good to play. I do suggest that for the visuals, to make the floor have less visual noise to them and to make the text clearer and stand out more because as it stands I have to get really close to the monitor to read them, the enemies and player have a clear read compared to the background but the text kinda blends in to the floor. Also I suggest that for the gameplay, I think it would be better if it indicated that you had to press space when there is no ammo maybe like make the ammo count red and have a "Press Space!" right on top of it, I think that would help the player to know what to do.. Also for the bullets, I would also suggest having a better distinction between which is the player's and which is the enemy's because it kinda looks the same at a glance (also it blends with the background a little bit). I know its a jam game but if you're ever thinking of improving this concept somewhat in the future, may I suggest adding some more movement options to spice up the gameplay and also a more visual difference for the different enemies (although it understandable that you weren't able to during the 48 hours). Overall its a fun and addicting little enjoyable arcade shooter-esque kinda game!