itch.io

Interesting core with good accent on narrative and management of resources. 

TBH this type of narrative driven games is not my piece of cake and I felt lack of depth to the gameplay. The narrative is communicated primarily through optional(?) dialogues, and I for some reason should waste my gameplay core resource on them. I think it would be less intimidating if the dialogues would be portrayed more as a reward, not as investment, and therefore be free (resources spent on them are reset after the scene anyways).

As for the core:

• Fights seem random, I would prefer a battle encounters that placed on the map, so I can not only choose from 2 "mid level 2 quarter of time" encounters with the same gameplay consequences but can try to be sneakier going around the battle encounters, or fight my way through them. 
• City looks the same, the core could work without it, or with Cyberpunk 2077 styled map background. Now it only creates visual noise. 
• Fights look cool, good visualization (but the enemies sometimes hard to see, maybe less transparency to their material would fix it). 

Great work on translating the game for 2 languages and giving the player option to choose (and then change) the language. It is clear that you care about the user experience.

Overall very polished and well-made entry. Keep up the good work!

The game feels very polished and offers a well-thought tutorial sequence. Art is great, sounds and music is atmospheric and relaxing. UI is good. Also loved the touch with rating on the wall. Core problem I see is a pretty simple core that becomes less fun with repetition. 

1. Tutorial sequence

All the UI was covered and core loop was pretty clear starting out. The only thing I see to improve here could be slightly changing the tutorial section about the quest acceptance. It is phrased like you would always have 2 options — Accept or Decline, but in the game you more frequently encounter A or B quest, not Yes or No. Maybe it is covered somehow, but it was not clear to me. I would suggest putting less emphasis on the type of quest, and more on the "making choices to help the characters".

2. Core gameplay

Gameplay feels fun, with all the immediate consequences (and smart writing, leveling up the drip is legendary). But it becomes stale after the first week when I already played through a lot of encounters and didn't really see a point to keep playing. Maybe some long-term goals could solve this issue. The only thing I wanted to see after a week was the promised upgrade (which only improve the visuals but doesn't add to the gameplay as far as I can tell). Also some new encounters or even phase of Day can make the loop more fun. Like petting a cat / spending money on it or dealing with other innkeeper's stuff like placing the quests on the wall. 

3. Quest communication

To make clearer what quests are about you could use more functional writing (aka Kill the Lich King with subtext — The foe of a great power or smth like that) or tagging quests by their type (aka DnD encounter types: Combat, Exploration, Social) or even suggesting a characteristic check it would involve (but be careful, it can ruin everything cause it would be too clear). Maybe some iconography could help, but still remain not obvious and direct. 

Overall

Good game with a potential to become more than a Jam game, if enough work is put towards keeping the player engaged with different activities that suits the theme. Choices are fun, but only making choices between two options becomes less and less interesting as you play. "Papers, Please" is a great reference on how overarching narrative and long-term goals can support the simple core. Maybe you'll find some more inspiration in how they tackle difficulty curve to always raise the stakes. 

Hey! Played through the first five or so levels — fun idea!

The concept of controlling the sword and not the character is interesting and has a lot of potential in my opinion. Your prototype has some good variety with different options to use the sword and sword/human dynamic.

The main issue I see here is not enough attention to the feedback — I don't know if my slashes even count, cause when I slice around my enemies they don't die right away. I would suggest adding the health bars to the enemies if their HP is more than DMG of the basic sword attacks, or changing their color when they are hit. Also the flying damage numbers should fit. It can be further improved with some OnHit SFX (even on the prototype stage they can convey some useful info).

I would like some more attention to the difficulty curve, as it can help the player understand the abilities better through predesigned first levels that teach basic mechanic (for example the first level can have only one static enemy and only slash available, and the second is one dynamic enemy within the small box to get used to repel).

And as a UI artist I think the HUD UI deserves some work with hierarchy and visibility. If you have only 2 important stats so far — make them a bit bigger and closer to the focus point of the player. I would suggest not placing them together in the far left corner but rather placing the kill counter on the top center of the screen with some bigger font option. As for the Hero HP — it is hard to understand it in such numeric values. HealthBar on the bottom center of the screen would help, or you can try to place it above the hero, as the player would be focused on what's going on on the actual level as they're playing (mind that the hero's healthbar should differ from those above the enemies, if you choose this approach).

Overall — clean prototype that can become a pretty solid game core. Good work on your journey!

Thanks for your entry!

Things that I think are good:

• SFX balance is on point, sounds are familiar and coherent, feels like a part of Flappy Bird multiverse haha.
• Graphics are stylized and good, like the blockiness and color palette.
• Controls feel appropriate and simple, as they should be. They are also communicated properly. 
• Good UI that keep you focused on the core gameplay.
• Easy to replay.

Things that in my opinion could use some polish:

• UX stuff: bird moves very quickly and it is hard to time your "flaps", as it is hard to understand the 3D space from chosen perspective. As other commenters suggest — making the bird contain less space on the game screen can improve the feeling of movement and make it easier to aim. Also you can try and tweak the amplitude of the bird's vertical movement. Other rows of pillars distract from the main goal, I would suggest to use them more intensively from the start to "sell" the 3D aspect of the game better.
• Feels very hard to get scores. One wrongly timed SPACE button can ruin the run, no place for a mistake and I don't feel in control while playing. As if the placement of the pillars is more responsible for my score than skill. I had to grind for every point but could make it only to 11 pts.
• Game lacks some background music, which can support the experience.
• I would try to make something with overall visuals — as I said the stylization is good, but the same empty background with checkers make it feel a little bit repeatative. 

Overall:

Nice concept and good implementation of the core. With some polish and attention to some UX problems can be even more fun and captivating experience. Good entry!

Into the Breach is a great reference to the type of game you making! 

I do believe that idea has a nice potential, keep up the good work and good luck on your journey!

Very smart concept, playing this I always thought to myself is there an end and wanted to go just a bit higher to found another shadow with another man with another message. 

Audio bot is trained for russian language so the vast majority of the messages is very hard to understand. Consider switching it up for more international audience. 

I think this concept can be improved with more polish to the assets and overall scene (but not going too far from piece-of-art/definitely-not-a-game state it is now) and maybe a slightly more challenging mini-game to climb (like simple QTE with 2 buttons that you should press on queue) to make it the game of dedication, not only time-wise dedication of holding a button. 

The game feels very nice and I support the core idea with my full passion. Portraying humans as overexpanding threat is what games rarely do, but this is a very important message. 

The music fits the theme and tempo of the game pretty good. Art looks coherent and beautiful.

As for the game mechanics — it looks a little bit too random, as if the game lacks ways to communicate to the player when and where humanity will expand. I lost some games placing just a few tiles, and won some just randomly dropping the stuff on board. 

The overall logic seems understandable — mountains can cut off cities, cities would grow to adjacent tiles (sometimes?), rivers are op but you need to roll for them before tiles are getting used for other stuff etc. But I found it hard to actually strategically plan on what to do, as if random tiles are more responsible for me winning or not. 

I think that two main point on how to improve fun of the game are:

1. More clear communication on "human turn". When they will expand and where, so the player can act in advance and stop it. 

2. Less influence of random. To make more options in placing tiles and their types. Maybe simply expanding the number of available tiles from 2 to 3 will do, or changing the logic from total random to include some important types of tiles once in a while. 

Anyways cool concept and a very much playable prototype. Good work!

Oh, I forgot about the controls ><

They feel a bit strange on the start cause all other entities follow the grid. But it adds a new layer of difficulty to the whole game and without it the experience would 100% be less fun. Manipulating the snake and trying to escape the missiles is very comfortable, lack of inertia and "full control" makes you feel in control (sorry for the pun) and also feeling that player and their in-game decisions are the ones responsible for total score and deaths. Very good work on controls there!

This game is amazing! 

Let's get rid of obvious — the polish is excellent. SFX and Music balanced pretty good, graphics look appropriate, you have good feedback on changing a level, on eating bugs, on death and it looks very pleasing to the eye. Nothing looks out of place. Good job! Nothing comes to mind trying to pin-point a place or sprite that needs visual polish. 

About bugs — I found a lot of bugs, but snakes chased them (actually they chased me, but I'm sneaky) and ate them. Non actual game bugs were found. 

Talking about game design — the difficulty curve is very good to my taste. Big variety of different bugs with distinct looks and behavior. All of their actions were obvious and coherent. It feels like I'm playing a well developed game fighting the actual game mechanics and not their implementation. The feature for starting from the higher difficulty is an amazing touch to overall experience. 

Great game, great job!

Great game! The arcade cabinet games is not a popular genre but what you did in this entry is simply amazing! The idea fits perfectly, making the default arcade controls into the new layer of difficulty. 

The game lacks a little bit of explaining the core, as my first run ended with birb flying into the first pipe. Maybe one sentence introductory screen needs more diversification from control scheme, like putting them on separate backgrounds or highlighting the core sentence about dragging the pipes. But personally I would prefer small arcade styled infographic with pointer dragging the pipe and birb safely flying through. 

I would say that the resulting game is not easy, but because you chose to make it harder through specific control scheme. It fits well and the game is fun! I haven't tried it with mouse, but it feels like mouse control would make the experience less engaging and challenging. 

Overall polish is superb, waiting for an actual arcade cabinet port (jk) (unless...)

The game feels good once you get the controls! It is not obvious from the start that you play as both the galaxy and a ship, but overall narrative (youtube killing all your problems :D) and fun of the game make up for it. Controls are good enough for doing risk management and leaving some chaos and a chance for a mistake. 

The art style is fresh and great, but sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the damaging obstacles and background art. Not all things that kill the player looking dangerous. 

I've survived for 35 years or so and game becomes more and more interesting. Good work!

Nice game! Liked the sprite for the main character and all of the sprites animations! VFX and PostFX after the twist also adds to the overall experience!

I found player movement to be a little bit rough, especially the gravity modifier after the jump and inertia. It creates some cool power fantasy if you time your jumps and slides correctly, but once you hit the wall — the whole speed is dying and recovery doesn't feel great. 

The idea for the game is really cool! I wasn't that great in my first attempt and I could meet the requirements for the end pretty easily, but it feels like the game could benefit from more mechanics, levels and even characters. Good job!

Just fixed the bug with Shield and added some polish to the other things! 
Thanks for the suggestion and your feedback!

Very polished game with a very nice scope for a Jam!
Really nice take on the theme. It does work insanely good for a city builder mechanic. Seems appropriate and interesting enough to construct a game around it. Art is good, game tutors itself, controls are flawless and the music is just right!
Great entry! Had fun playing!

All the feedback below haven't affected the rating.  
As a main point of improving the game after the Jam I see adding of some kind of challenge and punishment for the player. Maybe turn wise (random encounters messing with your buildings or dice to play around it) or more weight to the skipped turns (taking money away or use the decay mechanics every turn, not the successful ones), or even restricting a player by tiles (you cannot place all buildings, some of them are just too big).

Can’t be happier watching your game getting broken like that tho <3

This is just mesmerizing!

Any% looks incredibly fast and cool, and minimal jump run with only 5 jumps is something we haven’t even thought was possible. Thank you very much for the great effort!!

We are actually working on postjam update and will think about fixing some of the bugs leading to this incredible jumpskip techniques, but the input lag between animation will be taken care of too, so the speedlimit might actually get even higher… kinda terrifying :> 

We will be happy to reach out and have your opinion on some ways the game work right now, to not fix the fun out of our game speedrun-wise. Feel free to DM me on discord if you are interested! Thanks in advance!

Also, we will commit to speedrun friendly approach, fix timer, add record board and all that important stuff we couldn’t code in time for the jam. New levels too! We hope they will be as enjoyable to speedrun as current levels

Oh my gawd, I feel so happy watching this. Thank you so much! 
You are actually set the WR I guess :>

We can't imagine how hard it must be to control the dice as easily as it looks on your speedrun. It is actually mindblowing! Great job! 
Can we share the video with our friends or maybe even use it to promote the game? 

Thank you very much! 

We are so grateful for the first serious speedrunning attempt for our little game! Hope you didn't break your fingers figuring out some of the skips or optimal routes (we are really sorry :> )
We will consider making a speedrun.com page for the game and highlighting you there in some way (still gotta figure that out, though).

Unfortunately, we cannot watch the actual video, as YouTube marked it as private or smth. Is it possible to make it public? 

Astounding animations and even an opening cutscene! 
That's some Kingdom Hearts level of narrative and presentation, really good job! 
Also nice twist for a forgotten puzzle mechanic that connects it to the theme and makes it all even more fun. SFX and music really match the whole experience too. 

I think the biggest point of improvement is an approach to marketing and showcasing a game. You should really try to make some gifs for gameplay with your nice vfx and smooth dice rolling and the waving tiles animations and transition between levels... man, so much stuff to show and I am sure people will absolutely love it! 

Very solid entry!

Very nice entry! 
Cards are tough and angry but the big dice gun do the work just fine! 
Creative and functional UI is always good, nice work too!

Thank you so much for this wholesomeness of a feedback <3

Kenny art assets is a life saver for sure! Helped us a lot to focus on other things like level design, definitely a must have for anyone going into casual style 3D! 

Thanks for the appreciation of the game page :3 We did tried our best! Yours looks very good too!
The thing under the play game thingo is an "Embed BG". You can find it at the very bottom of the "Edit theme" side panel. If it matches your Embed game resolution (you can configure it in Edit game menu) — then you can have some fun with creating cover art for it too! I would recommend making a screenshot of your game page to locate the Play button correctly first. And don't forget to tweak the Edit theme settings for the Embed BG as you put it in, as the art can be hidden behind the gradient by default. We turned all the settings down and designed the Embed to fit.  Hope this helps!

The true d6 dice always have 1-6, 2-5 and 3-4 on the opposite sides of each other, yes! This random fact sparked our imagination to find a way of using it as a game mechanic. A lot of folks don't quite like the pressure of constantly calculating the hidden faces of the dice, but we thought it can be quite fun! Very happy that you liked it! 

I guess our nice additions need a big chunky little rework, huh :)

Thanks for your feedback! We will punish our SFX and music guy for poor work (it is actually me and I’m kinda scared now) and lock him in the room with no AC until he makes it good…

Talking more seriously — sure, we are considering the total rework for SFX organisation in the project. That will solve some other problems and also fix the mixing. Your points really helped in getting the priorities right.

All the music stuff takes a little more time than I had in this jam, juggling more than I can handle. Kinda sad that the music didn’t get our full attention during the developing. Could do better. But didn’t. And it is sad. But now we have more time and I’ll get my hands on the proper OST as soon as I can.

Thank you for the great feedback!

Thanks for your feedback, Kaylee!

Yeah, the whole SFX thing in gameplay is kinda weird right now. We mentioned it in the Known issues section. We are gonna fix that by reworking all the audio system inside the game, accessibility is one of the key priorities for us and our noisy uncontrollable SFX really don’t help with that. 

We are happy that you found our game entertaining! Thank you!!

Thank you very much for all the kind words! Very happy that you liked it!

You are the first person to mention the repro for the double jump and we cannot say how grateful are we right know. We spotted it here and there, but couldn’t reproduce it consistently. We are definitely going to fix that in post-jam update. 

The thing with quick inputs is our “best we can do fast” way of making the grid system. You cannot move mid-animation. The window for not getting inputs is small but it is annoying, especially for speedrun intentions. It will require rewriting some of our core, but we will fix that too. Tbh already figuring out the best approach to it. 

Thanks for taking your time and effort (20 min is waaaay above average session length for our experimental controls, heh) to play the game and also pointing out crucial movement flaws. That really means a lot to us. 
Additional love rays from our programmer <3.

Hope you enjoyed the ride!

We never tried to make a puzzle game. Our initial design intention is the grid based classic platform game from the early days of the genre, but with a spin on familiar platform games controls, changing the perception of a levels and making a challenge on even a simple straight line walking.

Thanks for your feedback, hope you will enjoy our post-jam version, we will try to make FTUE less of a challenge and add some simple puzzle game mechanics to support the initial design decisions!

We are tried our best to bring the feeling of learning how to walk again through our game. It was our initial tweak to the platform game genre — to try to connect a simple platform gameplay and a constantly changing controls. When even your "walk forward" intention is challenged by a little puzzle before every move. We are actually quite grateful, that some folks found it engaging and fun.

We are very sorry to hear that it gave you that much frustration and lack of any other challenge that you would find satisfying enough. And thanks for pointing out various problems in our game. As our scope grew during Jam hours, we didn't manage to cover all bases. But as we decided to continue developing the game — your points are now our bullet points. Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks for the kind words! 
We have a lot of plans on making FTUE and controls easier to get, but unfortunately we didn't playtest it enough to really find this problem when developing. This is definitely in our "have to do it better" list now, thanks for a very precise feedback!

The most satisfying controls of the dice in this style of puzzles! Nice work!

Pretty tile assets too ^^

Woooah... With first arrow left/right the idea was absolutely sold to me! The most fun approach to the Tetris mechanic I've seen so far.

The whole "you can turn dices in 3 dimensions" idea is really cracking my brain (but only in a good way). Don't know if I am patient enough to truly master it, but someone definitely is and I can already imagine how much fun can be watching a skilled player running it.

Blast VFX, overall SFX, graphics and animations are soooo well done. It already looks like a AAA tetris game. Can't imagine how far it can go after the Jam. Amazing entry!

Gameplay is engaging and fun, I wonder if there is a boss in the last wave, cause it would be super cool! Astounding art and music! And all of the amazing assets (appreciation for the HP and MP bar animations) are made in 48 hours. Great entry! 

It is too wholesome, shadow is officially spared <3

Thank you very much for your feedback! 

Thank you! Very glad you liked the game!

We will double check and punish our cheesy shadow so it won't lie anymore, but unfortunately only in post-jam update. 
About speedruns — that is definitely a direction we want to explore a lot more in a future updates. Starting out with more advanced timer and fixing small lock for inputs in-between movement animations. It would be cool to have a global record board too. Can't wait already!

Thanks for your feedback!

You can already control the character with the buttons from NumPad! Give it a try! Just don't forget to toggle (or untoggle) your NumLock button.

I personally prefer the usual 123456 buttons above the QWERTY, as you can lay your fingers on all of the buttons at once — with NumPad buttons it is a bit trickier (at least for me). But one of our game designers is actually prefers NumPad buttons. Fortunately, you can try it both ways and decide for yourself ^^

Thanks for your feedback!

Super impressive design and great game overall! 
Considering its playfulness, amazing art, matching music (Boss music slaps!) and clever implementation of a theme — I really don't know how it could be made better in 48 hrs. 

All the other feedback I have is only applied to the post-jam updates if you are planning to do any. 
1. [Already mentioned in other comments, sry] Bug (or feature) — you can sneak one more jump if you rolled bad on your first dice, when the knight transitions to a "type of action dice" position. It actually rolls both dices, rerolling the first one and rolling the second one for free. First reroll of the second dice will also be free in that case. 
2. Game needs a little better explaining of the main controls and mechanics inside the game. As the Z/X controls always visible — it makes me think that they are possible at any moment. Only after a few fights I actually got when I can use Reroll or Confirm and when I can't. Arrow keys were discovered through half of the run. Covering that base can make it enjoyable standalone game. 
3. I totally get that overall game balance is random for the theme, but if you are planning to evolve the game after — I think (humbly) that level of random should be decreased a little bit, maybe leaving a Shop outside of random core loop. 

As always, take this feedback with a grain of salt, as I played it through only once and my assumptions can obviously be wrong or don't match the direction you chose. All these points don't make a game even a bit worse as a Game Jam entry though. Truly incredible work!

Thank you very much once again for playing our game on stream from start to finish! 
You are truly a legend. And those mastered double-jumps... *chief's kiss*

Also thanks for the great feedback! We are planning to continue developing our game, and will definitely learn from your playthrough on how to fix some not so good level-design stuff you've stumbled upon! Your streams are very educational and your passion for every game you play is truly incredible. Keep up the good work!

Very nice game! It's so cozy and chill — my favorite type of games!  Controls are nice, puzzles are tricky enough to get your engaged but not frustratingly hard. And all in this game really fits each other — charming music, sticky sfx, transparent texture on the dice and small little puzzle woods. 
Great work! 

Thanks for your feedback!
The thing with sound controls is indeed a bug that we couldn't handle before the deadline, so we added it to the Known Issues list. Maybe we should rephrase this section to make it clearer though. 

We are completely understand your frustration, because it is what we were initially going for, commiting to this unusual control scheme. It should be challenging and require lots of mental energy to calculate every move. Not every game does this, but it was our design decision, so it is completely fair to not like this. We hope you had at least *some* fun getting used to our controls and learning again how to do familiar platform movement with our Dice King ^^

Thanks for playing through!

We kindly hope that's a love-hate relationship and not a hate-hate one <3

Very liked the game overall!
One of the most creative puzzles around the whole Roll of the Dice theme. All the music, SFX, UI, graphics and feel of the controls  are extremely consistent and good. 
Had hard time understanding the underlying mechanics as they become more complex and found myself brute forcing through the last two levels, but I guess that is the nature of the experience it should create. Don't think that there are much to explore beyond what you have done already, but nonetheless will be happy if the game will evolve even more after the voting period! Great job!