itch.io

I was in a similar place (figuratively not literally) a few years ago. Your thoughts reminded me of my thoughts back then. I haven't met anyone who could relate to my struggle but now I feel like I have. Thank you for sharing this with the world.

(mild spoiler warning)

A beautiful puzzle within a world that's more than meets the eye. I got stuck a few times, but the next step was always in view and that enticed me to keep trying, to keep asking, "what if I try this?" Many discoveries were literally groundbreaking; they completely shifted my mental model of the world. Theorems -- mental shortcuts -- I had previously established about the world, now had to be thrown out the window and re-evaluated. This was not frustrating; it was liberating, if that makes sense. I really enjoyed those moments. I wish I could erase my memory of the game so that I can experience uncovering the world once more.

In the beginning the platforming was frustrating because I often knew what I wanted to accomplish, but I frequently fumbled the jumps, which either slowed me down (which adds up when I'm repeating the same section many times while I'm testing strategies; perhaps a fair punishment for my lazy unwillingness to visualize the steps in my mind) or I end up in the wrong section of the world and I can't go back without restarting. I eventually mastered the platforming, but only after stepping away for a day. I realize that the platforming is an homage to Atlantis no Nazo, though, so I understand it was intentional and I respect that decision.

I'm reminded of Spelunky. In that game there is also a secret path that occupies the same space as the main path, but is "unlocked" by a combination of knowledge and items. In both games, I appreciate how the worlds fold back onto themselves, each layer separated not physically but temporally. Hidden in plain sight, as it were. You could say that all Metroidvanias have this quality I suppose, but I think there's more to say about the flavor of this particular game, so let me make an additional distinction. There are "hard" obstacles, the kind that require a specific item to reach a specific area, but it's pretty obvious what needs to happen (like, say, a keyhole). There are obstacles of obscurity, which require only knowledge (like, say, a secret door, or see interactive fiction 9:05). Then there are "hybrid" obstacles, requiring a non-obvious usage or combination of items, and thereby some global knowledge about the world. This game has a lot of that, and on top of that I think it's fair. Like it would be really easy to devise a sequence that no one could reasonably figure out on their own (I think Spelunky is like that), but you made discoverability feasible, somehow!

I could go on but anyway that's a lot of words to say you made an awesome game that made me think, and then made me think about my think. Thank you for making it.

Also, what other games should I check out if I liked this one? (edit: now that I'm playing this game more, two games come to mind: Go and Slipways)

Very well made game. It's fun when the solution falls into my lap, which happened often in the early levels since my choices were limited, but finding that solution comes down to a lucky guess (a roll of the dice if you will) when the possibility space branches just a couple of times. The gameplay is essentially trial and error because it's not feasible to plan more than 1 step ahead. I don't feel like I have the ability to find the solution through thinking alone.

The sound effects add a nice emphasis to the steps. Makes me wonder if there are more "mnemonic" melodies or rhythms that can be associated with each number. Not explicitly suggesting this but an anecdote that comes to mind is the idea of rhythmic solfege, which associates different sequences of syllables with different rhythms (say "ta-ki-ta" for triplets or "ta-ka-di-mi" for a group of 4 notes, etc.) A melodic approach might be:

1. root
2. root-fifth
3. root-third-fifth
4. root-third-fifth-octave, etc.

Or maybe there is a pre-programmed song in the steps and the player essentially controls the pacing of it through the act of walking to the goal, which would add some tension and release to the gameplay, increasing the satisfaction of reaching the goal. Anyway, neat submission.

I like the idea that difference die faces have different physical properties, and that you can use those to solve puzzles. But if it's really just a tool for solving the puzzle, then I don't see why it has to be random and in fact it is frustrating to get the wrong die face when there is only one outcome I'm looking for which will work for what I'm trying to do. Issues of controls aside, on the whole I like the puzzles and world you put together and it was fun to figure out how to solve them and I appreciated the snappy sound design and moody ambience.

Very satisfying to play. High score: 49

Cool puzzles! I think the last level would have felt a bit more within reach if there was an earlier establishment of the crucial behavior. That being said, I was still able to understand what the level design what gesturing toward, so I was able to sort of infer how it would play out. Also, you nailed the music for this particular style of game. Nice work.

That was fun! I liked randomly getting a double attack, and reactively following that up with an area-of-effect attack for tons of kills (I mean... tons of diced rolls). Good use of "input randomness" there :)

As others have said already, it's hard to plan ahead because it is just hard to mentally visualize 3D rotations of a cube especially when you combine rotations on different axes. The visualizations you added post-jam help a bit but ideally the player should be able to plan several moves ahead, or you just can't expect players to have any sense of self-direction or volition as they're solving any given puzzle.

Many commenters also asked for a grid; to clarify, I think the underlying problem is that the tile art is visually confusing.

My first read of this is that it was 6 tiles wide, so I was surprised to find that it's actually 4. The 3/4 perspective is not helping with legibility either, because at least in my head I start to expect that the squares should be wider than they are tall, due to the perspective skew, which further messes with my ability to accurately measure grid squares. For a puzzle game like this readability is way more important than nice art. For example this is way more readable:

\

I'm curious if you explored the simpler premise of navigating the dice from point A to point B with the same rules but just in an open area, without the added limitations of bottomless pits? Was that too easy? Too open-ended?

I'm also curious if you explored using smaller numbers? 6 is a little too many squares to reasonably expect anyone to be able to eyeball, but 1 or 2 is fine. Can you still make interesting puzzles with say, just 1, 2 and 3? Have you explored using different rules for how the values change as you move? Maybe the value just increase by 1 every move, wrapping around after it reaches the maximum.

This game is essentially rock paper scissors because if you could know your opponent's actions in advance you'd be able to counter them perfectly and win (assuming you have equal dice rolls, and here you definitely don't, so it's even less fair than rock paper scissors). So I can see why you decided to hide them, but this unfortunately makes the game feel like it's mostly being driven by "output randomness" (a la Mark's video on the subject).

I can see this game being more fun in its intended setting of a tabletop, played against another real person, because you could start playing mind games (e.g. "what would my opponent do in this situation") just like you could do with rock paper scissors. I wouldn't play rock paper scissors against a computer though.

There's something nice and simple about this format of fighting on a 1-dimensional axis, and I'll bet you were planning to introduce different weapon types that have different spatial advantages, but I feel like you can explore introducing more "input randomness" so that there can be more player agency and expression. Or maybe randomness is just altogether not right for what you're trying to achieve. Subset Games struggled with the same problem when they were designing Into the Breach, maybe you could look there for inspiration, but of course there are many ways to go about this.

I like the clarity of the UI. The consequences of my actions are immediately obvious, which is perhaps a small thing but I appreciate it.

Took me a while to figure out that I was attacking the enemy checkers. Only realized when one of my pieces disappeared. I was too busy wondering why I couldn't jump over the enemy pieces, like in regular checkers.

This was just the right amount of challenging. Good job curating an interesting subset of similar but distinct and relatively simple images. I would love to read more about your process of selecting inputs to feed into DALL-E. Playing this game has led me to wonder how sharp my mind's eye really is, as well as reflect upon the innate hallucinogenic properties of my brain. I feel like my horizons have been broadened as a result of playing this game. Thank you for making it.

Nice minimal art. The dice rolls did not feel terribly consequential to the outcome of the game, though.

I enjoyed walking around and experiencing the ambiences of the different areas. Very creative!

Spent some time speedrunning the game for fun. Pretty happy with this sub 2!

Lovely game. The platforming was unwieldy at first but it really grew on me. It's fun to go fast.

Right now the RNG is deterministic. My guess is you didn't seed the random number generator with a different value each time the game starts. Usually people do that by seeding with the system clock time.

These puzzles really made me slow down and think, in a good way. They're very tight; I usually find 1 or 2 key insights for a puzzle and when I find those it feels like a lightbulb turns on and the level cracks open. For example I realized that if a dice can't traverse a numbered space, it will never be able to traverse it no matter what fiddling I do beforehand, because all loops on a grid are of even length (unless it gets pushed by another dice :0; a brilliant solution to open up the possibility space further). That being said, I didn't end up pushing one dice with the other in order to solve levels 1-3 (but maybe we'll see that being necessary in levels 4-6 :0). Really looking forward to the final levels.

Came for the cat. Could not make any real progress, tried rolling, jumping, jumping and rolling, but just kept dying near the start. Really wanted to see the rest of the course though.

Hard to figure out the right sequence of moves. I gave up on the second level. The move limit feels very punishing though I get that you probably wanted to make the player slow down and think.

By the way, I couldn't get the game to install through the itch.io desktop client.

I played another jam submission similar to yours, maybe you'll want to play it: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-jam-2022/rate/1622407

Beat all levels. "Retried a level 13 times"

I like that you modified the behavior of dice to be easier to reason about. One thing I have learned playing other submissions is that I have trouble predicting the result of rotating a real dice but a move counter is much easier to reason about and more conducive to this format.

I have mixed feelings about the "conveyor" tile. It feels a little too OP, like once I get the dice to the conveyor I've essentially won because I can make the dice value whatever I want, which sort of feels like it breaks the game a bit.

Normally I would advocate for infinite undo for all thinky puzzle games like this but I actually felt that one undo was perfect for this game because it made me slow down and plan out the solution rather than just trying things without thinking.

I gave up on level 2. It's too hard for me to visualize the cube and I can't plan a path to the solution.

Cool puzzle concept. Brilliant usage of the paper-stamp analogy to explain the mechanic effectively. The progression of puzzle difficulty was very well calibrated. I personally don't have a strong intuition for the spatial properties of a dice, so in practice I ended up just rolling around in a 2x2 circle aimlessly until I got the face I wanted in the position I wanted. The kind of spatial intuition I'm talking about reminds me of Rubik's cubes. Since I don't have that intuition, the faces of the die could be in any arrangement and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Due to this lack of intuition I was not able to plan ahead, so I wasn't thinking much at all, but that didn't stop me from eventually stumbling into a solution. I was never forced to think carefully about what I was doing and how it would help me solve the puzzle. It's clear that you spent a great deal of time internalizing the theory of cube rotations in order to design these puzzles, but players of your game probably won't reach close to the understanding you have as the designer.

My first instinct was to walk into a carrot. That hurt so my next thought was to roll into the carrot. That didn't work either. So I ended up just running around trying to avoid the carrots. That's about as far as I got. Cute art.

Striking resemblance to Dicey Dungeons. Winning felt inevitable, but the randomness of enemy rolls and luck of the draw, well, made the process feel drawn-out. I wish I didn't have to do the extra click to confirm my action and I didn't enjoy having to wait for the button to become clickable. Dicey Dungeons just carries out the action immediately on dropping the dice, which I prefer. Cool graphics and nice layout. Just a few sound effects would have gone a long way, I feel.

Love the variety of cards, it was fun to be surprised by a card I'd never seen before. I wish I had more information to make strategic decisions, but as is I felt like I was more or less relying on blind faith for every decision. Cool concept, would love to see you expand on it.

Entangling and tackling feels really good. Eventually I just started hunting purple stacks. I wish I had more control over the spinning of the dice. Very creative game!

Shortly after this I tried pushing the big chunk into a wall and the game crashed :( with this error:

ERROR in action number 1 of Other Event: User Defined 2 for object obj_block:  PerformEvent recursion depth failure - check for infinite loops, check objects for parenting at gml_Object_obj_block_Other_12

Ran into a bug on the first big level, these blocks (the largest chunk and the S-shaped block) seem to be stuck together even though they're not touching.

Brilliant puzzle design. I've been stuck on the level with two red circles for about an hour but I'm still determined. Perhaps it is the simplicity of the puzzles that keeps me enticed.

It's not really clear from a mechanical perspective why the laces need to be part of the same shoe. It would have been interesting if the laces somehow influenced each other, like if they can't cross over each other, or if advancing one pulls on the other, etc.

I love combining things! It's so satisfying to smash them together. The mood of the game is really special. The music really fits the mood. Good stuff.

I like the mechanic you chose to explore, and I think you explored it well with your level design. I could tell that each level built on the last one, which provides a great sense of progression. However, I think the levels could have achieved the same or better effectiveness if they were smaller and had fewer steps. One example of redundant level design was having to rotate the ghost in a 3x3 room. I know I can do it, and I've done it before, but I had to do it several times in different levels for some reason.

I might just be dumb but it took me a few minutes on my first encounter to figure out the technique for getting both the fox and the ghost past a ghost wall. I think a small level with literally just a ghost wall would have been interesting on its own, because it's a deceptively simple setup with a somewhat tricky solution. But once you know it, you know it. Figuring this out was my favorite part of the game. Here's a minimal example of what I mean:

#=Wall, .=Open Space, F=Fox, G=Ghost, W=Ghost Wall, P=Portal
#########
#.F.G.W.#P
#########

The last few levels were hard, but not satisfying generally. I didn't feel smart after solving them, just more and more discouraged as they got more complex. I almost gave up a few times.

The last level wasn't super satisfying, which is a bummer. I didn't exactly make any insights to find the solution, it just felt like I was feeling around blindly and accidentally found the solution. The symmetry of the level kind of served as a red herring which helped to hide the solution, which is neat I suppose. I don't know how to describe it well, but it basically feels like the difficulty came from the complexity of the level and not the profundity of the mechanics. Anyway, once I got past the hard part, I instantly knew I could do the rest, but actually doing it was kind of boring.

The multiple ghost mechanic overall feels a bit contrived and unintuitive, and didn't feel fully explored. I feel like there's a lot of promising design space still left to explore with just the single ghost. Great work and I hope you decide to explore this design further.

Fantastic puzzle design. Each puzzle is the perfect combination of simple yet challenging in the best way possible. I was able to visualize the solution in my head before executing, which is a quality I like in a thinky puzzle game. The execution itself was smooth, intuitive and unsurprising, which is great. Each puzzle focuses very tightly on a specific and novel phenomena of the ruleset, which kept things interesting. The visual design is cute and highly readable. The last puzzle is a super satisfying conclusion. No solution ever felt like I was cheating the system in any way. Solving the puzzles made me feel smart. The music is charming yet unobtrusive. 5/5 all around.

Nice colors. I found the game pretty hard. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't really get a handle on the physics. Got stuck on the first level with two buttons.

Really cool concept. The pulse attack makes you consider the other player's positioning when lining up your shot, which feels like a relatively unexplored and exciting design space to me. The closest analogy I can think of is support characters in League of Legends. Often they'll have to line up their abilities based on their allies' positioning, rather than the enemies.

The tether is fun to watch but unwieldy. I think a straight line between the two characters would have been more reliable, easier to program, but still just as innovative. I'm sure you had many other ideas for abilities based on tether physics, but I think another cool area for exploration is enhancing movement instead of combat (e.g. Knuckles Chaotix, Ice Climbers Up Special in Smash Bros), and another random thought I had is the idea of timing a button press to return a pulse from your ally (e.g. Mario Tennis, Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker Phantom Ganon boss battle) for more power or something, etc.

Love the character designs. They each have their own charm and they complement each other. 

Cute game. I appreciate the variation in rock formations.

Up until Level 13, the puzzle layouts are generally pretty constricted, which limits the number of potential options at any given moment. Many of them are also somewhat "linear" in construction, in the sense that once I'm past a certain section I can stop thinking about that section. Perhaps there has to be some amount of linearity, but I personally like puzzles that feel more open-ended and "global" in construction.

Walking onto a gate as it is changing state is inconsistent. Sometimes I can walk onto a gate as it is opening, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can walk onto a gate as it is closing, sometimes I can't. In Levels 14 and 15, these edge cases showed up a lot, and I kept getting inconsistent behavior. This was pretty frustrating. I didn't finish Levels 13 and 15.

I often play games like this and I usually get an undo button and instant restarts. I did not find such a button. I realize it's a difficult system to implement, but it makes it way more likely for me to stick with a puzzle game. I gave up after making a lot of moves on Level 15 and then accidentally walking onto lava because I wasn't paying attention to all boards.

I vaguely recall playing a PuzzleScript game that also explores this same general mechanic, but I can't remember now what it was called. Maybe I just recall reading about this mechanic in the documentation.

I appreciate the nice pixel art :)