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Ah, that makes sense, and I think I have a direction to go from there. Sounds like I overcompensated for a problem I observed in playtesting, where first-time players were able to keep the game going forever. After that, I changed how the charcoal worked pretty dramatically to ratchet up the difficulty, but was only able to play that change by myself (which of course is not going to give me an accurate impression of how hard it is for others).

As you observed, if the charcoal is too hard to clear, it makes the other choices less meaningful, and becomes basically just a game of waiting for the inevitable. There are plenty of potential happy mediums I can explore between this and the older version, and the difficulty really shouldn't be staying at one level like it does here, anyway. Thanks for the response!

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.

This game manages to wring a lot of tension out of a simple concept! The aesthetics are great - one of my favorite visual designs of the jam. I also got the feeling that 1s were more probable for me than the enemy, but I wonder how much of that is an illusion. I didn't keep count, and of course the player is going to remember their own busts more than their opponents' (not to mention it gives me an easy excuse for only landing one hit in each of the three full games I played 😏). I'd be interested in seeing if there actually is a difference. It seems hard to make a physics-based roll perfectly fair! In either case, I suspect the biggest advantage the enemy has is actually the fact that they go second, since it's easier to gauge risk when you have the final move (for instance, if the enemy has a higher score before the final roll, they know it's safe to skip because the player can't respond). This is not necessarily a bad thing when only one player is human - being the underdog can make victory all the sweeter.

I'm intrigued! There's enough complexity here to make surviving just the right amount of challenge. On my best run, I made it through three levies and just barely missed the fourth, but I'm not quite sure how to get points for my final score:

The parentheses make me think this might be a placeholder for a variable. Is this a bug?

At first I thought I was supposed to be attacking the snakes, but I realized I was supposed to be dodging them after getting steamrolled by a larger snake. I had fun trying to lure them into traps!

Hehe, I think I found a pretty good strategy:

I stopped after this battle because my clicking finger got tired, but it was quite satisfying to see the number of dice grow absurdly large. This was on the post-jam version, by the way. (It wasn't as effective on the original version because of what I'm guessing you call the defense bug, where the enemy HP can overflow to much higher numbers than their starting HP.)

I'm a simple gamer. I see "rhythm", I click. This is such a simple concept, but I was pleasantly surprised by how unique it was as a challenge. It almost feels like a multitasking game, since you have to memorize the rhythm while also mentally translating the numbers into the fingers you need to move, which was a non-trivial task for me. I liked the challenge, but I'm an experienced rhythm gamer. I imagine folks who are less into the genre may find this one too hard. I'm curious how the scoring works, since my highest score (80,552) and my lowest (around 20k) both came from runs that I thought did about as well as each other (I made it about as far into the third song, and thought I had about the same accuracy). I also saw some notes that seemed to be marked as missed even though they sounded right on time to my (admittedly lapsed) drummer ears.

No worries, this kind of feedback is super helpful! You're right that right-clicking only works when the cubes are "ready". I actually agree that the delay is too long, and it's not obvious enough that it's happening or why (I think I should rewrite the part of the description that talks about it). What's going on under the hood is that the physics engine is waiting for all the dice to stop moving, but sometimes it's impossible for anyone to tell with the naked eye that they're still moving. I tried a few ways to get around that problem, but in hindsight, I'm realizing that it wouldn't really hurt the game if you could click on the dice even while they're still moving (preventing that was more important in earlier versions of the game). I'm thinking of developing this game further in the future, so once the jam's over, I might just remove the wait entirely.

Thanks for playing! Yeah, I wanted to do an in-game tutorial, but ran out of time and had to write the instructions in the description instead. To clarify: the highlighted cubes aren't the only "right" cubes per se. You can click on them to immediately get points if you want, but there might be a better option if you reroll some of the non-highlighted dice. In fact, if you only click on highlighted dice, you'll eventually reach a point where there are none left to click, and you have to reroll. The strategy of the game is in balancing the rewards of rerolling against the risk and cost of doing so. From the sound of it, you didn't reroll at all; did right-clicking not work? (If so, that's a bug- if you're willing to share, what operating system and browser are you on?)

The sprites and and the bouncy walk animation are super cute! However, I'd recommend explaining in the instructions how points are scored. I played a few runs, collected every die I found, got past the first boss with 0 points, and almost moved on to the next game before I realized from one of the screenshots that you're supposed to bring the dice back to the chute in the first room, where they can be rolled to add to your score.

I did another run after that and got 34 points, so for other players: there's your score to beat! My run seems to have been cut short, though - I reached the "End of run" screen with 3:42 left while attempting to go through a door in the second world that didn't seem to work. I only had 20 HP left, so maybe I got hit by something through the door?

Wow! I agree with the Jake Kaufman comparison - there's not many who can get a chiptune sounding this epic. I hope I'll someday be able to pull off that much modulation. Excellent work, cap'n! 🏴‍☠️

Serious horror game vibes! I could picture this one coming out of a crackly radio in a dimly-lit abandoned building. Great work!

I was a participant in ScoreSpace #17, which just released its results. I know that games receive a score penalty if they have fewer than the median number of ratings, so during the rating period, I had been checking both the number of ratings my game had and the number of ratings the median game had (when sorted by "Most Rated"), and trying to share my game with as many community members as I could to ensure my game did not fall below the median. By the end of the rating period, I thought I had just managed to avoid the penalty, as both my game and the median game had 14 ratings.

When I checked the results, I was surprised to see that I ended up receiving a pretty hefty ratings penalty that bumped me down from 3rd place overall (by raw score) to 21st place (by adjusted score). I was especially surprised because, while I had worked out the median to be 14 ratings, the results page stated that the median was 12 ratings, meaning my position was safer than I thought.

However, when checking the results in the individual categories, I noticed a discrepancy: while the Overall results said I had 14 ratings as I expected, the results for all the individual categories (Gameplay, Theme, Aesthetics, and Sound) said I only had 9 ratings (see attached image). I checked to see if this was the case for the other entries in this jam, and it was: all the other games I checked were listed as having slightly fewer ratings in the individual categories than in the Overall results. I copied all these smaller numbers into a spreadsheet to find the median, and sure enough, it was 12, not 14.

It seems that, for all games in a jam, the number of ratings that a game receives is actually two different numbers. The larger number is displayed on the game's rating page and the Overall results, as well as being used for the "Most Rated" sort. The smaller number is displayed on all the individual category results, as well as being used to calculate the median and adjusted scores. I'm guessing that this discrepancy is a bug, since you are required to rate a game in all categories before you submit, so it's impossible to have fewer ratings in one category than you do overall. Besides, I doubt this has anything to do with there being fewer ratings in one category than overall, since for all the games I checked, the game was listed as having the same exact number of ratings in all four categories - an unlikely coincidence if some voters were leaving some categories blank. If it isn't a bug, why are there two different numbers?

This is cool! I got 1,502,850. The graphics and sound are great. However, since the teleport does the same amount of damage as the regular attack, I didn't see much of a reason to walk or attack instead of just teleporting into all the enemies and bullets. I'd recommend placing a cooldown timer on the teleport, and maybe reduce the amount of damage that walking or teleporting into an enemy does.

This is cool! After a couple tries, I got 01:13:13 without using shortcuts, but I can see how that time could be slashed with the right route - I'm tempted to look for that optimal route myself. I noticed that sometimes, when I fell off and respawned, I would be facing backwards on the track, and I wouldn't necessarily be placed back in the area from which I fell. I also agree with Robin about the camera, but I totally sympathize with 3D cameras being super hard to get right. One thing I would suggest is focusing the camera on a point in the air above Speedy, so Speedy is near the bottom of the frame (or the top of the frame, when gravity is reversed), then using the mouse controls to orbit around that point, instead of panning and tilting like it is now. That should make it easier to see more of the track, especially when there's a bump ahead.

This is great! I got 1097. The fast pace makes it a bit tricky, but I like the challenge.

Here's mine; I'll play and rate yours now!

https://itch.io/jam/scorejam17/rate/1377797

Woo, 2nd place! I really liked this one. Those spiraling patterns are super satisfying to hit! I could see this working well as a rhythm game.

Here's mine; I'll play and rate yours now!

https://itch.io/jam/scorejam17/rate/1377797

Good work! I got 1020. It's interesting how the high score is based on max combo instead of how many enemies you defeat overall. I do wish you could see the descriptions of each power-up before selecting them.

Here's mine! I'll go play and rate yours now.

https://itch.io/jam/scorejam17/rate/1377797

Nice! I got 299. I know others have said this, but I also really like the splatter - although I found that the splatter sometimes served as camouflage for the enemies (maybe it should be a bit darker than the enemies).

Here's mine - I'll check yours out now!

https://itch.io/jam/scorejam17/rate/1377797

Good work, especially for a first project! I got 4640. I like how you don't tell the player exactly what they'll be doing in the description - I laughed out loud as soon as I realized what was going on. I also like the conflict of protecting the ship versus not blocking its shots. That said, the ship does miss a lot, especially when there aren't many enemies left. I'm guessing that's because the ship moves to a randomly generated position after each shot. If the random positions were restricted to where enemies are (or soon will be), it could quicken the pace of the game.

Here's mine - I'll go check yours out now!

https://itch.io/jam/scorejam17/rate/1377797

Pretty good! I like how there are two different goals that the player needs to prioritize. I got 66! I noticed the spawn-rate problem too, but I see you're already aware of that. It would be nice to see the current and high score on the game-over screen, not just during the game, so it's easier to see whether you beat your high score.

https://itch.io/jam/scorejam17/rate/1377797

I'll go play and rate yours now!

Nice work! I agree that the controls took some getting used to, but this game is very polished overall. I was a bit confused by the sound effect that sometimes plays when the water hits a house. At first, I thought the sound effect represented me putting out the fire, but it would sometimes play when the water wasn't hitting anything on fire, and sometimes it wouldn't play when I was putting out a fire.

This is wonderful! It's super cute (I love the squeaky-toy sound effects used for when the squirrels get hit), and pretty fun to play once you get the hang of it. I did run into a couple of issues, though:

- I noticed a bug where squirrels would run towards an empty spot on the ground for a while, sometimes gathering in a cluster. I think I saw a nut fall through the ground at one point, so my guess is that they're running towards a nut that they can't reach because it's underground, only changing their focus once the nut falls down far enough that the AI determines another nut to be closer.

- I think the red squirrels got temporarily stuck inside the stump a couple times (maybe a nut was blocking their path?), but that bug was much less common than the first one.

- I found the hold-the-mouse-to-aim to be a bit difficult to use - many a stone flew over their intended target, especially at close range.

- The difficulty curve seems to be a little slow. I ended up stopping once I reached 100 acorns in the stump and just waited for the gray squirrels to steal them while I wrote this. However, I did notice that after I stopped playing, the gray squirrels suddenly seemed to appear in much larger numbers than before - can the spawn rate be affected by how many gray squirrels you knock out?

Still, great work overall (and I'm happy to have the highest non-dev score)!

Thank you! Unfortunately, I couldn't reproduce the problem - I made it past 3 minutes a couple of times and the game didn't crash for me. Just in case, I uploaded a version below with a debug window so you can see any errors that come up while the game is running. I don't know if it'll help (when the game crashes, it might just close the debug window at the same time), but if you manage to see an error on there, it would be a huge help if you could let me know the error. This is a Windows version; let me know if you're on Mac or Linux and I can upload one for that instead.

https://mega.nz/file/tQBUgJ4C#SXAnifNyH0IGTIGens6Mm-HMWtkwaFZ60EMpQ8AM6G0

No obligation, of course; I know there's a lot of other games to try and not much time left to rate them.

Oh no, thanks for letting me know! I'll look into it and see if I can get a fix going.

Hi, I just saw this! Each row has a rectangle over it whose purpose is to tint all the other objects in the row a given color. If you're using Godot, you can use a solid white rectangle, set its Material to a new CanvasItemMaterial with blend mode "Mul" (in any other engine, there may be an equivalent "multiply" blend mode). Then, by changing the rectangle's Modulate color, anything underneath the rectangle is tinted that same color (all the platforms here are actually white; they're just tinted by that rectangle). From there, I had a counter that kept track of how many rows spawned, and for each new row, I would tint it the next color in the sequence.

Wow, this is ambitious for a 3-hour jam! I loved the monologue. I was worried at first about whether or not I would remember what the ship looked liked at the beginning so I could recreate it, but thankfully, it doesn't matter what pieces you put where- which I think is actually a pretty clever tie-in to the message of the monologue.

Finally, a game that draws attention to the perils of bycatch. :P

I love the cute crayon graphics, and the whole thing has a nice, relaxing atmosphere.

The speed limit on the dragons makes this very difficult, but I enjoyed it. The ability to drag multiple dragons at once creates an interesting risk-vs.-reward decision: how long do you let the dragons gather at the plane and damage it so you can fling them all away in one go?

Cool idea, though it very much needs a way to restart if you fall. Also, I encountered a bug on level two where my character "fell" even though they were standing in the middle of a piece.

It's a neat idea, but whenever I stopped time, I ended up dying before time resumed, since I can't move out of the way of bullets that spawn while time is still stopped. As such, it's actually safer to never stop time. Still pretty neat, though.

By the way, I'd strongly recommend adding a thumbnail image for the game page. Per the rules, you don't have to count making your game page as part of your 3 hours, so it's fine to do it afterward.

I can't take credit for the music, but I'm glad to hear you liked the game. Thank you!