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After just one week, I've made some pretty good progress. I would estimate I'll have the game playable via Web GL within a few weeks.

As I understand it, Proton is how my first game, Mooselutions, can be played on the Steam Deck without any extra work on my part. If you ship a game on Steam for Windows, it's just automatically available on the Steam Deck via Proton. You have to make some adjustments to your Windows build so it plays well and looks good, but otherwise it's totally viable. Mooselutions got Steam Deck approved without any need to do a straight Linux port. Gaben delivers.

Will do. You never know when it could come back. I just wasn't able to use it for that game, but I might design a different game where I could fit it in somehow.

Nope. That's from a really old prototype. I wasn't sure where to take that gameplay so I started working on a different game concept.

hahaha enjoy. I need to do a few more passes on Rogue Deck Builder. It's still an early prototype. The resource harvesting is too repetitive, and I want to add in some automation ramps so it's more strategic and you aren't spending the whole time chopping down trees.

If you want a more refined experience, check out my full game Mooselutions on Steam.

Glad you like it! Next up is a Web Assembly / WebGPU port. I've realized I need to make all of my games available on the web. A friend of mine said he was running the game via Proton. That might be worth looking into. He didn't run into any performance issues doing that.

"Personal preference" in large numbers determines whether a game will do well. It's just a lot of people with "personal preference." So if the majority of people prefer the dice gimmick, great, keep it. If they don't, then I guess the game won't become all that popular. Do you want it to do well or cater to a small group of peoples' "personal preference." ?

Other successful games have systems like your dice rolling system, but they usually give you a choice. Voidigo has a powerup option that basically rolls a dice to see if you'll get a very powerful weapon, but I think they have a better design because you don't have to choose to roll for that upgrade. You can just pick the standard upgrades too.

It doesn't really mean anything to "save up" for another upgrade if all upgrades are gated behind RNG. I don't know if I'll get lucky this upgrade cycle or the next. They're the same. You think it's giving players a choice, but it's taking away choice.

It plays a lot like Vampire Survivors. The core interactions are good. Enemy behavior is what you would expect for a game done in three days (basic chasing, no interesting movement patterns, not much enemy differentiation).

I found the upgrade menu confusing. I know you're supposed to roll the dice to determine how many upgrade points you get, and I did that. I got some points, and I think I spent them on upgrades, but it didn't feel like it was clearly communicated to me. Sometimes the dice lands partially between sides instead of cleanly on one side, and that adds to the confusion.

I had to click on the "skip" button to get the upgrade menu to go away, even after I chose one of the upgrades. I didn't know of any other way to dismiss that screen, so I just kept clicking skip. It felt like I wasn't playing the game "correctly."

Just to test the limits of this thing, I walked as far as I could to the right. I walked right off the map. The enemies followed me for a bit, but then they disappeared and it was just me in the void.

Overall it seemed like it needed to be more challenging and less confusing. Enemies need to form big swarms like they do in Vampire Survivors, and they need to encircle you, making it hard to escape. Then you have to balance that with the upgrades.

But more importantly, I would just ask, why create this? How is it all that different from Vampire Survivors, outside of the gimmicky dice throwing upgrade system? Why is it better to put upgrades behind RNG, and why is it better to expose that RNG to the player? Isn't it much simpler to just let people pick their upgrades? What does it add? Why would I want that?

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Make two separate versions of the game, one with the dice gimmick, another without it. Give both versions to ten different play testers. See what they say.

For the record, I think you can take out all of the dice stuff, pare it back, and just work on executing the basics flawlessly, then consider how you can add a twist.

There's too much going on. It's a mess. I think you need to simplify and take out a bunch of the extra stuff.

Why does my gun automatically rotate? Why are there clowns in addition to the ghosts? What are those skulls? You're thowing all of that stuff at me right away at the beginning of the game, and I haven't even gotten a chance to get familiar with the game's controls. I don't know what I'm doing and all of this stuff is happening to me. Not fun.

When you add in the dice rolling trap mechanic, it's just more stuff on top of stuff. Sure that's the theme I guess, but there's just no reason for it. Why do I want to roll a dice to determine the number of ghosts I can trap? Why is that more satisfying than the alternative?

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. Strip it all the way down to the gun, the ghosts, and trapping them. Try to make just *one* satisfying interaction, and then build the rest of the game from that.

Ah yes, Mervert Sloane, the prank name my dad and his friend would put into the wedding registry when they were younger.

Interesting. It sounds like you've been working on this game for more than three days. I don't think I would have the same level of connection to a three day project.

I'll say this. You're speaking as if you're already very committed to this particular game conceived in this particular way, and I would just ask why?

It's a three day game jam. What you're proposing is like getting married after one date. 

You tried this out. Certain parts of it didn't work. You've still got the assets, the animation rigging, the sets, the engine, all of that. You're not married to it. You can scrap the whole thing if you want, and you're still totally fine. You can give it to ten different playtesters, see what they think, and if they say the same things I said, you can just kill the thing with no longterm harm done.

The only time you really commit to producing a game is when it starts to get traction from players, when playtesters consistently play it for more than a few hours at a time, when a few of them get all the way through the game and ask you for more of where that came from. Until then, you're just trying stuff out. You're not married to it.

Minesweeper already has procedural generation to make the levels. The dice doesn't really add anything to the design. You could have easily made the number of mines be procedurally generated without showing the dice, and that would have been the better design choice. 

Exposing procedural generation, which is typically hidden from the player in most games, just puts extra clutter on the user interface and makes it a little harder for the player to grasp all of what's going on in the game. That's likely not a problem with this game, since it's Minesweeper and many people already know how to play, but you could easily see it becoming a much bigger distraction in a different kind of game where the player doesn't start with a certain level of familiarity.

Take it out. Fix the bugs. Start with a clean implementation of classic Minesweeper, and then experiment with some different twists. A great example to follow is Dragonsweeper.

Ok now I think *this* one is the best I've encountered thus far. It's like one of those Sokpop games. Stacklands comes to mind as a potential inspiration. 

The game makes use of the dice theme without just slapping it onto the game superficially. There is a risk/reward tradeoff you have to make every day. Random events mix it up and make you think strategically on your feet.

Although there are many trinkets and options for crafting, I felt like I was barely able to get through each day. I played the game pretty safely, usually picking health/food/water and very rarely trying to craft anything. 

I think that's mainly because the UI doesn't clearly communicate the costs per turn. I vaguely know that if I make a campfire, I'm probably going to lose less health that night, or possibly gain health? I don't know. Do the values on the dice prevent more damage with the fire, or is it kind of like a real bonfire in the sense that you usually toss the lowest quality dead wood onto it (in this case 1s,2s, etc.)?

Bosses and events are mostly communicated clearly, but I wasn't totally sure about what happens if I leave a dice on a boss/event at the end of a turn and don't destroy the boss/event. Do the dice stay on the boss/event through to the next turn? I just assumed they don't because they don't stay if you partially make a campfire, and I figured the rule also applies to the bosses for consistency, but I was too "afraid" to check.

In any case, that's the sort of design problem that's going to be crucial for your team to solve. How do you visually communicate when a dice you place persists through to the next turn? Maybe you simply don't allow it. Maybe you explain that with a tooltip. But at the very least, I think the rule needs to be applied consistently no matter what you do.

I also think it would be valuable for you to explore alternative representations of the dice. Even though "roll the dice" is the theme of the jam, I don't think standard dice fit the theme of this game. I like the idea of some kind of thing with multiple states representing tokens you can use to pay for stuff. I just think it needs a different visual representation that fits the outdoors survival atmosphere a little better.

Really solid entry. This is exactly what a jam game should be.

Controls well, graphics are impressive. The sounds are the major highlight. I did run into some performance issues and dropped frames throughout the experience, mostly at the start when scenes load. It's a jam game. Performance is kind of a high bar to set, but something to be aware of.

As for the dice rolling powerup design, I just wasn't feeling it. For me, it takes agency out of powerup use. The fun with powerups is the ability to make risk/reward decision once you have them. If you put the powerups behind a random number generator, I can no longer choose which ones to use, so it just feels like I've gotta deal with whatever gun I'm dealt.

It also makes getting the powerups pretty same-y. It doesn't make any difference if I shoot this blue crate or that one. They're both going to give me a randomly generated powerup, so I guess I'll just shoot them all. Shoot the same blue crates. Wait for my random reward. Fire whatever that happens to be. Repeat. It's just not that much variety. 

It's also annoying that my ability to use a powerup is gated behind the RNG. It's like I have it but don't really have it. I've gotta wait my turn. Kinda takes the fun out of having a cool toy.

The dice don't add to the variety. The RNG powerup mechanic takes away from it. The game would be a better design without it, just doing something more standard where you have the powerups out in the open, you can see them, choose which one you want, grab it, and use it right away. I just want to play with the cool guns! You did such a good job with those. Don't tempt me with powerups I can't really use.

This is my favorite game of the jam thus far, and for a few reasons.

1. It uses the theme in a non-superficial way. You have to consider what's on the dice faces as a part of the overall risk/reward tradeoff, which is at the core of the game's design.

2. Simple discrete choices that have the potential to be much more interesting if developed further.

3. It's the ideal vertical slice for a game jam. Just enough gameplay to show the potential for something longer with more depth, but not so much gameplay that it gets mired in complexity and becomes impossible to complete in three days.

Of all the games, I found myself playing this one the longest. I was intrigued by the potential strategies one could employ in picking the dice, passing, choosing which dice to roll and in what order. Although I doubt any game made in three days can have much deep strategy to it, I was presented with something that can certainly be developed into a game with a much richer set of strategic decisions.

This is a solid base to iterate on. If you can add some more states between players, roguelike elements between the rounds, more ways of deckbuilding with the dice themselves, you could have something here.

One of my higher rated games in the jam. Execution is clean, and the design is focused on one thing. The theme is actually integrated into the gameplay, not just slapped onto it.

As a game design, I think this struggles with the marrying of continuous and discrete design spaces. If I were to compare this game to Tetris, the obvious difference is that in Tetris every move happens one tile at a time, and the scoring is also one tile at time.

In this game, pieces can occupy the space between tiles, and they can rotate a full 360 degrees (so much freedom!). Movement depends on physical interactions. The game is still scored using the discrete per tile "Tetris" system, but because you can move everything so continuously, more of the gameplay becomes this finicky struggle to get the pieces to do what you want them to do.

In Tetris, I look down and see a hole where I want to place my piece. Then I place it. The discrete movement system makes my choices much simpler, and that's why that design works.

In this game, I look down and see a hole where I want to place my piece. Then I furiously click and drag the crap that keeps falling into the hole up and out of the hole, trying to open a space for my piece to fall into. Eventually through a long laborious process of trial and error, my piece goes in, and then I've got to do it all over again.

It just doesn't feel satisfying. I dunno, maybe if you make that intentional like a Bennet Foddy game, you might find an audience for it. But I usually want to feel good when I play games.

This is the video that got me interested in game design:

I designed all of my puzzles in my first game, Mooselutions, this way. I think it also applies to other game genres. You have to play your games a lot to understand what's really happening in them.

I would say just rip out the dice roll part. I know that's the theme of the jam, but you could have a pretty fun auto-runner without the need to toy with the controls

Good feedback. Thanks for playing.

Really great points about precedence being a problem that interferes with the player's strategy. I wanted to do what Balatro does and only score the "hand" with the highest points. It didn't really occur to me that players might want to intentionally score a lower hand as a setup for something bigger.

It's a bullet hell shooter with elements similar to Galaga and class arcade games. Controls work fine. There aren't any bugs.

Thematically, it's all over the place. I play as a hand (why?) I'm shooting at stars that shoot me (why?) There are dice, and when you hit them your projectiles bounce off of them (why?) It seems like it has dice in it just to try and fit the theme, and so far as I can tell, there's no unique gameplay related to the dice. The dice might as well be any other object in the game, anything that rotates when you shoot it, any other thing that hurts you when it hits you. It all kind of blends together and becomes grey. There isn't anything to make this stand out.

You call it "The Die is Cast" Why? Is there any gameplay that relates to this theme, or is it just another phrase related to dice, so that might as well be the name? If the gameplay is in there, it's not made clear to me.

I've played some of your other games, and I get a general feeling that while all of them technically "work" from a functionality standpoint (no bugs, controls fine, there's a start, middle, and end) they're lacking a unique gameplay hook to draw me in and keep me engaged. 

I think you would best be served as a designer by taking a step back from simply making games that "work". Go study some other successful games and try to pick apart the reasons why the design achieves what it does. Try to understand what makes a game like Voidigo or Enter the Gungeon tick, not just from a "can I code this" perspective, but as a holistic design. 

Then take that design, strip it down to as few systems as you can, and try to make something with its own identity. I guarantee you it will do better than anything else you've made thus far.

If there's anything I don't want to be controlled by random chance, it's the key mapping. It yields no interesting gameplay, only frustration.

Not sure what I was playing. I tried to control the plane, but I kept falling out of the sky and crashing into the ground. The word "aerial" is spelled as I spelled it. You're referring to the font. Overall the controls seemed a little too extreme, like a small amount of pressing a key to go left made my plane rotate over on its side.

Just try to reign it all back. Take out the dice stuff and try to make a plane flying game that feels good to control. You won't be able to make the rest of it work until that part is crisp and clean.

It's Galaga with procedurally generated scripted events. You go into a menu whenever one of these events occurs, and it rolls a dice (just so you know we're on theme!).

In most games, they wouldn't interrupt the gameplay to do the procedural events. They would just run the calculation in the background, and then you would get whatever event you get, which is the better design choice. However, in an attempt to superficially fit in with the theme, this game exposes the procedural event generation as a "feature," and the gameplay experience is interrupted. 

If you're going to do procedurally scripted events, just take out the dice rolling screen altogether. It doesn't add anything.

The name "Endless Space" is probably a trademark owned by Sega, the company that owns the Endless Legend franchise, which has a 4x title called "Endless Space." I'm no lawyer, but this might be trademark infringement.

The guns shoot too slowly and the action is generally too slowly paced for a Galaga-like. Galaga is fun because you move quickly and shoot quickly. Compared to Galaga, this feels like molasses.

Overall the gameplay feels pretty flat. In Risk, the territories you pick determine how many new armies you get and they also determine your vulnerabilities / offensive options. Here it's kinda grey and neutral. You don't get that choice and simply have to play out the less interesting part of Risk, which is the individual battles. 

I also don't think it adds much to sit through the AI battles. I want to get to the part where I'm making choices because that's what's fun.

I love puzzle games, so you've already hit a soft spot in my heart. 

I think the hard part about the design you've picked is the fact that I can't see the other sides of the dice when it's sitting on the board. 

I know that I could get a physical dice piece, put it front of me, and rotate it that way. I could also try to mentally rotate it, but that's pretty taxing on my feeble 42 year old brain. 

As a puzzle it becomes a lot of hard manual work that's outside of the game's intended design space. Instead of focusing on the puzzle, I would need to look at a reference dice, look back at the game, look at a reference, and that's not fun. I want my attention to primarily be on the game in front of me. 

I generally feel that way about a lot of these rolling Sokoban style puzzlers, with the exception of Stephen's Sausage Roll. That game gets away with it because the sausage only has two sides, and you can see if a side is burnt from all viewing angles. 

If I were to redesign your game, I would take out the dice and replace it with something simpler, like a sausage, something where you can see its entire state from all viewing angles. Then design from there.

I think this is a solid entry, especially for something where the full scope of the game needs to be designed inside of a three day time constraint. 

Interactions are focused and clean, if a bit simple, but there's room to grow it in a more sophisticated direction later. I'm not sure a more developed version of this game would have the appeal and depth to do well on Steam, but it's an excellent game jam entry.

I got a little confused about wanted patterns. I intuitively thought that two wanted dice meant I needed to match that pattern, but it actually meant I needed to shoot either or separately. I think that could have been communicated more clearly somehow because I thought it was a bug and then looked it up later to find the rule.

I'm giving this one my highest rating so far because it's so simple, clean, and focused.

It was fun to play with the fire stick. Something about the animation and seeing all of those fireballs had me somewhat captivated. That was the best part of the game.

The rest of it is fairly disorganized and random. I'm not sure why I spawned as a wizard, cowboy, and astronaut. It's kind of all over the place.

I see that you got some dice in there at the beginning to roll perks, but that's just kind of superficially acknowledging the theme without really making the game about dice. It adds nothing. Actually, it takes away from the gameplay experience because it interrupts me while I'm walking. You can remove that part.

Yeah all those deckbuilding effects require all this programming and balancing. It gets too complicated to manage in just three days. I'll follow you to make sure I get updates on your games. 

Art is beautiful. Platforming works. It's fine. Overall the gameplay wasn't all that engaging or novel, but it wasn't buggy and it worked.

The attempt to connect with the theme is superficial. What you have is a platforming game with six levels and some RNG in front of it to decide what level to play. You could have just made a platforming game with six levels in sequence, and I think that would have been a better design choice. 

Although dice are the theme, dice don't really add anything to this gameplay experience. They're just kind of slapped onto the front to say "look we're doing things with the theme." If you keep working on this game, just take the dice out entirely. 

One of the few entries in this jam that is actually trying to achieve a clean workable game design without taking the theme so literally that it gets in the way of gameplay.

I also made an attempt at a roguelike for this jam, and like you, I ran into the classic roguelike problems. This kind of game just doesn't get all that interesting until you have a ton of content in there, and it's pretty much impossible to get good content that has been iterated on several times through rounds of playtesting in just three days.  All you can you hope for is a design that hints at depth, and I think you've achieved that.

So far, this is the highest rating I've given a game in this jam.

I think the dice themselves could be more interesting. This game has quite a few generic dice. What you want are dice which have effects that combine with each other to give the player some real deckbuilding possibilities. You likely wanted to do this but ran into the time constraint and had to stop.

The shop screen has you buying potions, but you can't see your player character's portrait to know if you need the potion.

It's annoying to have to click on an enemy's effect to see a tooltip panel slowly scroll up from the bottom. Just show the effect right there or make tooltip text appear as soon as I hover over it.

Keep iterating on this one, especially trying to do something interesting with magic-imbued dice. 

Windows yells at me when I try to download this. Can you upload it as a .zip file please?

Keep at it. Having to integrate the Playgama SDK, in my opinion, runs counter to the spirit of a game jam. It seems like so many people spent the three days trying to get their apis working instead of doing game design, and that's unfortunate. Hope to see you in another jam where they don't have this requirement.

I enjoyed placing the blocks. That part felt good. Capsule art looks great.

Although you're working the jam theme into this game's design, I don't think the dice rolling adds anything of value to the experience. It's just an extra step getting in the way of placing the Jenga blocks. The block placing and making sure the tower doesn't fall over is the fun and interesting part, and the design should lean into that.

If you want to keep building on this concept, I would suggest taking out the dice roll step. It's superfluous. Maybe even take out the special blocks and just make a very fun tower building / stacking game. Then add in the extra layers back to give the game a bit more depth/variety.

Overall, I would say simplify the mechanics. That's my feedback. If you're still working on this after the jam, take away a bunch of stuff and get back to the meat of what's good with it -- the bullet hell. Everything else is just there to try and fit in with the theme, and I just don't feel like it works. Have like ten other people play it and see what they say too. I'm just one guy.

Controls are fine. Seems pretty buggy. Reminds me of dirty cartridges from the NES era.

Windows yells at me when I try to download .exe files. It's better if you put the executable inside of a folder with the other assets, and then zip it. At the moment I can't really play this.

Controls well. Enemies die when you hit them. Platforming is fine. 

The camera is zoomed too far out. Everything is very tiny inside of that web window. Everything needs to be much larger in the field of view.

Yeah, it's just tough because the dice rolling theme, when applied more literally, often yields gameplay that takes agency away from the player, and I'm usually not a fan of that. Overall I think games should be simpler with fewer parts on the surface, maybe one or two things you understand really well but the complexity is in the way the various elements of the game interact with each other. I shouldn't have to read a page of text to understand how the game works or what to do. The game should show that to me as I'm playing.

Not really my genre, but I think the game would be better with more player choice. I only got to choose a few things, and there was so much exposition to get through to arrive at those choices. Most of the game just felt like waiting for the evil guy to stop talking.

One more thing. The capsule art for this game doesn't give me a feeling that I will be playing a horror game. That can be dangerous territory because imagine some kid plays it thinking it's one thing but now they're in a room with a sadistic demon who is hacking their arms off. I wasn't expecting that. It totally threw me off guard, and not in a good way.