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A jam submission

Dark Rolls (GMTK Jam 2022)View game page

Dice roll adventure souls game?
Submitted by Codoor — 59 minutes, 37 seconds before the deadline
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Dark Rolls (GMTK Jam 2022)'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Presentation#24832.9294.143
Overall#35532.4583.476
Creativity#38012.4243.429
Enjoyment#42162.0202.857

Ranked from 7 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?
You a Die and you interact with the world by rolling and using rolled values to fight enemies and open doors

Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?

No

We used pre-existing art

Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?

No

We used pre-existing audio

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Comments

Submitted

Finished playing (but did not reach the end of the game, see below), here is some feedback. :)

Commentary:

  1. The controls are QWERTY-only instead of layout-independent! Trouble for me and my AZERTY.
  2. Rather laggy / low FPS for me, as with other games made with Unreal Engine (more or less depending on the game); I think this is resource-consuming. Optimisation is surely complicated, but I feel the pain!
  3. The roll is cool! Did not expect to be thrown into the air ! :)
  4. It seems I cannot shoot (with the left mouse button)… Or only once, rather. You would have to ask other people if they experienced the same, as this is somewhat gamebreaking (in the literal sense). ._.
  5. I am being shot at by the towers from very far, seems unavoidable: homing projectiles! :o Do they never deactivate? (Except if you die.) They have about the same speed as the walking die, so you have to either lead them into an obstacle or take damage.
  6. Spoiler: I had trouble opening the first door; my first intuition was correct, but since my first attempts did not work, I was wondering if it was really about the die value. Some sounds (and additional visual cues? Although I get that the cyan highlighting is a hint) would probably help; also, putting those dreadful towers near made things super difficult. Except if you can destroy them, but since my shooting ability seems to be deactivated, I could not try that.
  7. You should distinguish 6 from 9 on the die; for example, adding an underlining bar for each. (Think of Uno. ;))
  8. Bug: I fell through the terrain after a roll in some sort of hole in the red tree forest . :o

    (By the way, the concept of the red tree forest makes me think of The Witness.)

I could not exit the first area after my first attempt (which was cut short by aforesaid bug :o), and playing with both the low FPS and the inability to defend myself soon became too taxing; I tried evading the zone by rolling out of the walls, but to no avail (they are too high, so… your level design is unfortunately not that poor, contrary to what you assert in the game page XD).

Nevertheless, I can see how the concept is original and amusing; I just feel the randomness of which face you get may not get along well with what is required from the player (apparently, having at least some threshold to ingress into another area). The whole Dark Souls spoof aspect makes me laugh. ;) Well, I never played it but know it has a reputation for hardness, and I can tell you this test may have been my personal Dark Souls for the reasons I mentioned. XD

The level seems huge, so I think this was quite an effort (especially for a lone creator).

I will take all this into account, thank you for your funny entry. :)

Developer

Thank you very much for playing and for very thorough feedback! Yeah, unfortunatelly with this being my first Unreal game, it ended up being more of a very rushed prototype. I am actually remaking it from scratch and going to take some time to improve on the concept. Again thank you very much for taking your time to write up this feedback, I really appreciate it.

Submitted

Don’t get me wrong, I think your idea and game look nice and pleasant! :) (I gave you good marks, actually.) It’s just that I concentrated on useful criticism, so that may emphasise drawbacks. And some were specific to me (keyboard layout + lagginess). In particular, I was impressed with your huge beautiful level; I ended up somewhat frustrated not being able to explore it the way it deserved! ;)

Developer(+1)

Oh absolutelly your feedback is very useful, it echoes a lot of what I heard from people that I watched play this prototype and from my personal experience playing it. As mush as I think it's good to praise the games for what they do well, for something like this project that is so early in dev and is barely finished I feel like comments on what doesn't work help a lot more. The level was literally first pass because I was running out of time, I barely had time to playtest it, so most of the things in the level are just placed where I had first put them and then only after uploading it and playing it I was like "Yeah I am not sure why first area has enemies guarding the door, but the second one doesn't, that should be otherway around :D

As I mentioned I really appreciate your feedback, I haven't had a chance to try your game yet, but I will be sure to do so before the end of the jam :D

Submitted

(Just woke up and took my breakfast (it 3:57 am in France), stroke of luck that I see your answer. XD My little rest of yesterday became a full(?) night’s sleep, but I am trying to test as much as I can, I may have to start rushing it just like for designing levels!)

Your experience with having had to design the world in a rush reminds me of how I designed my latter levels… XD Which may be even more of a problem, as level design is critical in puzzle/reflection games. I even realized at least one of my earlier levels has an unintended shorter solution which could be solved by merely shifting a ‘stamp’ one tile away (which is not gamebreaking nor that serious, but still, I felt remorseful).

I haven't had a chance to try your game yet, but I will be sure to do so before the end of the jam :D

Well, thank you very much, but don’t feel forced to; there are still many entries that are in dire need of votes (and you can stumble upon little gems that deserve them; I know I had a very positive impression of Turn Based Destiny). Still only 5 votes as the minimum for all on my list as I write, and knowing roughly how the (ill-conceived median-based) scoring system works, this is not right; I have mainly tested games from this list, with only few exceptions. I wish I could test all games; I had even made the calculation of how much time each game could take at the beginning of the voting phase, and it was super tight. As it turns out, I am so slow out of perfectionism and lengthy reviews that I only currently reach 75 counting invalid/broken entries on which I did not vote, technically 58 really counted. XD So, I will try today entering ultra rush mode.

I have not even been back to see my own game vote count and comments for a while, being so busy testing! But I had a reasonable share of votes (at least 20 the last time I checked). Not saying that I am obsessed with votes and that this makes a game worth seeing or not, but I just want every game to get its chance, and I feel some still do not, while mine apparently did. Did you know: I found your game through said list of entries needing votes. ;)
(On the other hand, I had a glimpse of the thumbnails for most voted-on entries, and there are at list two clickbaity ones in it… ._. People are irresponsible.)

Anyway, use your best judgement. In case you test my game, don’t let my own admission assessment of it bias your view. ;) Have a nice testing day!

(… I will never manage to test those games if I keep on being so wordy. XD My God.)

Developer(+1)

Oh I was not aware of this list of games that need votes, I will check them out as well, thank you very much.

Submitted

Oh, I thought the list was conspicuous! :o For the record and the future: although I can’t find an official link for it now, during the voting phase (and this is true of all ranked game jams apparently), there was a sentence at the top of the entry page calling to help those entries with few votes.

Maybe the site should make this page even more visible, perhaps the default display for everyone. The fact that you did not notice hints at many people missing it! ._.

Did you know: although there may not be a visible link anymore (but if there is, please tell me!), you can still access the page directly through its URL, and it does still show entries!
https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-jam-2022/unrated

Also, weirdly, there are differences between this list and the ‘Least rated’ ranking for the entry page — I noticed this in several game jams, not just the current one. (Just in case you did not know either, but I hope you did as it is useful: you can order the entries according to several criteria using the left panel; in particular, I feel ‘Least rated’ and ‘Most Karma’ are the two really interesting ones — and possibly ‘Random’.)

Submitted(+1)

the rolling is a lot of fun and the art is so pretty!!! great work :)