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DreadKyller

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A member registered Jul 08, 2017 · View creator page →

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With the results in I see quite a number of low ratings. Yet all those who commented seem to have enjoyed it at least some. I'm a little disappointed that more of the people who didn't enjoy the game didn't leave any feedback to help with future improvements. Negative feedback is just as important if not more so than positive feedback and I'm somewhat annoyed by the lack of negative comment feedback despite the amount of negative ratings feedback, as a number helps very little in knowing why.

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If you roll bad pieces or place your pieces in a way that can't be completed, you can hit Escape to exit back to the roll the dice page, it'll keep which level you're on. Hitting Escape on the rolling page will quit the game but Escape while in the game itself will bring you back to the roll.

Thanks for playing it.

Thanks. It'll likely be a while as I have lots of things I want to change about it.

Thanks. I'm relatively happy with how the gameplay came out, but I really don't like the state it is in polish wise. The animations and sounds missing in particular I feel really bad about.

I don't really agree here. One of the core components of this game is that the dice faces determine your speed, you roll sideways to access the faces on your left and right, and move along the ground to roll back to front, the fact that your plane is a dice has a direct impact on the gameplay so I don't agree that "This could have been a game about flying ants if you want". Many of the harder traps can only be passed at low speed, like 1 or 2, so it could be that because you didn't seem to think the dice made any difference you likely didn't try to change your speed.

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This is a very interesting concept. The margin for error at the bottom is a bit rough, there's a very small margin you can be, just too high and you hit the red walls, just a little lower and you start rolling and bounding up into the walls. Other than that the controls felt fairly responsive and intuitive (especially once I turned off inverted controls)

My main criticism is just that there's no real incentive to "Do a dice roll!" usually, and no real incentive to fly any faster than 1-2. If you roll a 1 or 2 you could in relative safety play the entire game like that. A timer for example would help to motivate people moving faster. Hitting an obstacle applying some rotation to the dice may lead to more frantic moments where the player needs to react quickly to their changed circumstances.

Thanks for the feedback.

I can understand the camera issue, I tried to make it a majority rotated in one direction to make it clear which was up/down versus left/right rather than a 45 degree angle. I could have rotated it more, but I feel a perfectly straight on angle would look too sterile visually.

The dice rolling off the table is actually intentional. I tuned the randomness of the throwing to having a dice roll off on average every 5-6 or so attempts. It's possible to lock yourself out from beating the level, but I considered that fine, as the premise is to build your own path so if you make the level unbeatable by choosing not to make a path that's how you decide to build it. The idea was that periodically limiting the number of dice you have means there's left options for how to arrange the tiles, which might lead to forcing users to find spots for tiles they may otherwise try putting off to the side to ignore. The game really isn't balanced enough to really encourage this however.

And yes, certain tile combinations are impossible to complete (well or so I thought until I realized that unintentionally you can use the enemy pathing to allow you to do things, like if you get the enemy to path a certain way and you time it to attack the enemy on an ice slide for example, it'll actually stop you at the location you attacked, allow you to then move in a direction after defeating the enemy, so under certain conditions these impossible combinations can be passed). The original idea was to implement random rotations for the 5x5 grids represented by each dice, however I forgot to do so and realized too late that they were all in the same orientation. My general mentality was that it's okay for there to be impossible paths, because worst case scenareo you can hit escape to go back to the rolling screen and get new dice to use/reorder. The idea was originally far more complex, I wanted you to be able to reorder the tiles you currently have, and have a currency you could pick up in the game by going out of your way to optional locations in the level that would be used to grant you a reroll. But that was scrapped entirely because of time required to develop it. I was a bit over ambitious with the idea and spent too long on a handful of aspects of the game and the overall design I feel flopped partially because of it.

I'm glad you enjoyed it in it's current state anyways. I definitely plan on updating this, though I'll be restarting from scratch, I'll likely use hexagonal tiles, and it'll likely be turn based than real time.

Yeah, 10 hours is not much time, it's a good progress for 10 hours however.

I see at this moment 13 people have rated but only three have commented. Please if you have a moment leave some feedback as it's useful/helpful.

Same, even just a slight tilt forward would have helped, but a nearly perfect 45 degree angle becomes ambiguous, a slight angle (say 30 degrees?) would have been enough to still shot the number but disambiguate the directions.

There is a button called "Guide" that explains the weight system by showing that each number was heavier, and then multiple other sections with buttons you could click to play previews of different mechanics. Also the first 3 levels automatically pop up the same tutorial video when you open first play them, showing you the mechanic. So I don't know what you mean by asking them to "add a tutorial inside the game"

I think the showing of the invisible face is unnecessary, as the dice follows the usual rules of opposite sides adding up to 7 you can figure out the three missing faces from any view. Puzzle 7 represented a major difficulty spike for me. And the complexity of the patterns were long enough that it felt more like trying combinations rather than thinking out how to get through it, as it was too many moves in a row to position the dice correctly for me to      calculate the moves in my head. At that point my enjoyment dropped a bit. Given more time I'm sure I'd build up intuition that for example a counter clockwise 2x2 rotation moves the faces in this way, but without lots of time investment that intuition just isn't there, so the later levels just feel like memorization and guesswork.

I have to agree with Sappir in that there's not really any content. I also feel there's little context. There's no indicator which dice you can roll or not, nothing explaining what each dice does, and no info on how the tiles around the ship are generated. It's neat to watch and the art is nice but yeah, not much to do in it. But good job on what you got done, 48 hours is a really short period of time.

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Great game! only issue I had with it was that it gets a bit easy once you get decent at it. After a certain point it seems to stop getting more difficult, I got to 80 m 55 s because I decided to stop because my hand was cramping. And that was without even really paying attention to the color of the enemies or using W (which I think I did twice?). Once the E upgrade is max level, my strategy was essentially to focus on the closest ship, and use the clear screen effect only when a ship is within pixels of getting me. I only needed to use the clear maybe 15 times in that 80 minutes.

But it's pretty easy to get into a good flow state here, I didn't really know 80 minutes had passed until I let myself lose.

The screen gets a bit hard to read, paying attention to colors gets difficult with the number of enemies, and I rarely looked at the text on the bottom left as it felt too far away from where I needed to focus.

Was a fun experience, love the arcade feel of it, really feels like the type of game one could grind to get the highest time on.

Thanks. Despite being the main idea of the game, I didn't get things to a state where I could really work on the dice system until around 32-34 hours in, which is why it looks visually less interesting than the levels, I had to essentially throw it (haha) together.

Yeah, though if I continue this concept I will start from scratch, to get it functional in 48 hours I did a lot of not-so-good code quality, for example there's a good amount of static abuse in the code, so I'd want to make it from scratch and set everything up better. Glad you enjoyed the idea.

Thanks. I've participated in a few game jams before but usually it takes me hours to come up with an idea. This is the first time an idea popped into me head within a few minutes so I'm glad you enjoyed the concept even though the game has a myriad of issues and missing things.

Finished all levels, quite fun little challenge. Polish it up a little and add more content and this is definitely sellable. Very creative and interesting puzzle design. There's some wonky stuff with multiple boxes overlapping depending on their activity conditions, but overall very nice.

The text that tells you what keys to press are:

1) Small
2) Not in the easiest to read font
3) In a color that doesn't stand out from the background

There are also some keys that show up as empty, and they're not space, as that has the term "space", so I couldn't figure out what key it was.

The points where the controls switched felt random, the first set of keys lasted me like 30 seconds, then I had fairly rapidly switching controls. every 5-10 seconds.

Game felt pretty good when I have figured out which keys to use, for that moment the gameplay, the platforming feels fine, but I  agree with many of the other commentors here that some form of warning/notification needs to occur before/when the keys switch.

Thanks for the feedback. And I'd recommend anyone reading this to go checkout Team AI's game, after a few rooms it starts getting into some really good puzzle design.

This was very fun. I love the puzzles you cam up with using this mechanic, and once you get the hang of them it's very enjoyable to form a plan and then be able to execute on it. That being said, I have a few critiques:

1) Something when you gain the abilities to let you know, I walked into the first guy for almost a minute before realizing I could now jump.
2) Sometimes the character wouldn't jump when I hit space, although the other abilities worked all the time.

it takes a bit to get going. If I could go change one thing it's be the chances to spawn more spawners. It takes around 5-6 minutes to really start getting what I would call "out of control", it gets nearly impossible at the 8-10 minute mark, depending on how you play. You can be surrounded by around 200 enemies consistently at that point and past 15 minutes which I've only made once without exploiting a glitch you can barely see the level.

Yeah, the getting stuck is a common issue, and one that I'm aware of, given more time I would have looked farther into figuring out why, something odd about the way Unity physics work, it's a problem I've ran into in the past as well I'd like to figure it out because then I can avoid it in the future as it's rather annoying. It happens when you are holding the direction against a wall specifically. Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for the feedback. The actual kill area of the attack is a bit larger than the shown outline, it was more of a way to show where it'd land and not it's area of effect, if was just after the game was posted that I had a facepalm moment that I should have made the radius of the outline the same as the attack.

This was quite fun and challenging. After the first few levels it did feel like you could only move a little bit each time because of how much exchange was needed, just made the levels drag on a bit. I think some type of indicator of which character you're currently controlling would help, so that you don't have to move to find out. But very nice, and nice puzzle design.

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I am indeed using set velocity instead of add force, because add force continues to accelerate, I know there can be a velocity cap on it but I've had major problems with it before, especially with the vertical component when using AddForce. I create a new velocity vector using the y component of the current one, so it's not like I'm overwriting gravity. And the physics materials have no friction (using drag purely for horizontal slowdown), so colliding with a vertical surface shouldn't slow the vertical component of the velocity down, and if it does I'd consider that personally to be a physics bug. I vastly prefer manually modifying the velocity because it gives far more control over the movement. If you wish to discuss more, send me a message on Discord, DreadKyller#6332

Awesome, glad you liked it.

Thanks for the feedback. I am unsure about the cause of the getting stuck on terrain, it only happens when moving towards the wall. I'm using the built in physics of Unity and applying a velocity and the player and world have physics materials with 0 friction, so I'm unsure why it gets stuck, but I agree that it's annoying.

For the camera I'm using Cinemachine, so I have limited control over the rotation of the camera. The camera is much smoother in the standalone executable, because I forgot to multiply the rotation by the frame time, so it's slower on Web and less smooth because the web version runs at a lower framerate. Sorry you didn't like it.

Glad you enjoyed the rest of it though.

That was fun, got to 86. Could probably last a little longer now that i know the mechanics better, but it seems like an interesting idea. Had a hard time distinguishing some sound effects, I'd hear some of them and think I was getting hit when I wasn't which threw me off some. Overall quite nice, you didn't go for something too ambitious for the time limit and it paid off in execution.

Indeed. I wasn't actually sure if I would participate in this Jam until literally 10 minutes before theme announcement.

The two levels with the pulses that change your controls were when I feel this game was at it's best. It's quite short, but interesting. I agree that something that makes you need to go fast, even if it's just a level clear rating for getting under a certain time, would help to make the game more frantic and lead to more mess-ups and interesting outcomes.

Thanks for the feedback. A tutorial would have been great, or some on-screen instructions, but in a 48 hour jam I tend to find it difficult to prioritize putting that in than getting the game working.

I tried to use fairly standard controls (WASD+Space is a staple in video games, Q and E for rotation was a bit less obvious but not uncommon, and I figured when moving the mouse the selection outline would guide people towards clicking. Glad you figured it out.

For the bars I tried again using common conventions, blue for energy/mana/etc. and red for life/health, and indication of when you got hit would have gone a good way towards making it clearer.

Yeah the world being detailed makes more sense when you have to navigate it for sure.

It stops being relaxing after like 5-6 minutes of survival when you have to constantly run and jump frantically to avoid being swarmed by a hundred enemies.

The enemy AI is extremely dumb simple, and it gets stuck a lot because of it, it literally just moves towards the player and if it detects an obstacle in that direction it goes straight up until it no longer sees an obstacle in which case it keep moving directly towards the player.

And no, I understand that some people won't read the description, I would have loved to have put more of a tutorial just didn't have much time so everything went into the description, not ideal but still useful.

Yeah, I'm not sure what causes that issue with the getting stuck on walls, I've had it before. I'm just using Unity's built in physics and velocity, so it's as if there's 100% friction when moving towards a wall, even though I assigned a physics material with 0 friction. Yeah, I probably could have created some effect for getting hurt, but for enemies spawning I feel that after a few minutes so many spawn it'd be too much.

Powerups is a neat idea. Maybe increased max health, reduced attack cost or energy regain, larger area of effect, etc, there's good potential there.

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I don't think you need to update it particularly, it might just be which browser you're using, I know some browsers don't work with it for some reason I'm still trying to debug, I tested it with Chrome and it worked fine. But if you can't play it in browser, if you're on a Windows device there's also a Win32 executable download for standalone.

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For the audio, our sound designed created most of the sounds during the jam, but the song was an edit of an existing piece of theirs. Even though it's an edit of, it's still derived from, and so I selected No.

Well no, I don't mean 3 of each ingredient, for example lets say your choices are beets, beef, onion, and potatoes, on easy you may have a recipe that requires 1xBeef, 1xPotatoe, and 1xOnion, or a recipe requiring 2x Potatoe and 1xBeet, summing up to 3 total, not 3 of each ingredient. The ingredients are always in increments of 1x, so if a recipe required more than one of something it'll appear on the recipe page more than once. But even on easy there's 9 slots for ingredients, just the last 6 are always holes on easy for example because there's no ingredient there., because of this it might be tricky to know how many ingredients are needed for the recipe, you may have had the last two items on a hard recipe with holes and only put 3 ingredients in instead of the 5 the recipe wanted. Or you may have put more in that was needed. Either way it needs more clarity, which will be something we'll work on when we continue working on this when the judging ends.

The theme was holes, so we put holes in the recipe book, that was our interpretation of the theme and the impetus behind the game. The description of the project states this, and we tried to make it fairly clear that that is the point of the game, is figuring out the missing ingredients based on comparing the known ingredient list to the name and the feedback of the customers. The names always consist of a descriptor about the food, followed by multiple flavors (a list of all the flavors who's strength for the recipe is above the average of the ingredients, followed by the two foods with the most sustenance totals in the meal, so meat and such end up being there when they're in the recipe as they have more sustenance than say a leek, We had a menu planned that would show the flavor profile of the ingredient you were looking at, so that the customer feedback of "too spicy" or "not sweet enough" would give insight into what the missing ingredients are.

We would have loved to have added a tutorial, and had plans on it, but near the end of the jam we were running out of time and had to rushy to even get the game playable so unfortunately it was never completed. This is why a good amount of information can be found on many submitted games' descriptions, because this isn't an uncommon thing to not be able to finish everything enough to have a great tutorial/introduction to the game.

The recipes are always randomly generated per playthrough (Each playthrough based on difficulty a certain number between 4 and 8 ingredients are chosen from a palette of 19 ingredients total, those ingredients are the ones you can find in the level. The recipes are then randomly generated from that subset of ingredients again based on difficulty, with easy having recipes of 3 ingredients, medium 5, hard 7 and hardcore 9, all randomly generated/procedural, and so are the names, coming up with code to take a list of ingredients and turn them into more complex and descriptive names would have likely taken longer than the jam on its own, so we went with a simple but descriptive way of naming things.

Yeah, we wish we could have added more instruction. Recipes on easy have 3 ingredients, recipes on medium 5, hard 7 and hardcore a full 9 ingredients per recipe. So it may be that you weren't putting the right number of ingredients. The book gives you a certain percentage of ingredients, easy gives like 75%, medium like 60% on hard, and etc. Using the book and the name you can often glean a good portion of the ingredients, but other times you need to learn the recipe by reacting to user feedback. Originally we were going to have a menu that showed the flavor profile of the ingredient you're looking at, which would have helped with the "too sweet" or "not savory enough" type responses. Glad you enjoyed it anyways.

Yeah, lack of instructions was something we anticipated as feedback, and feedback that we have indeed gotten. Unfortunately the reason was time, a lack of it near the end. We had many other ideas that didn't make it in because of time, and a tutorial-ish thing was one of them. Glad you enjoyed it as well. It's late for me personally when replying here, but if I remember I'll check your game out tomorrow.