Cardback Dicing

hammers 2018-08-13 19:08

Lovely idea, and a lovely game. You art and animations are great, and I'm a big fan of board game style RPGs!

While lovely, the dice animation could do with speeding up just a teeny bit, as battles can go on for quite some time, especially in the beginning when your dice are fairly evenly matched against the enemies. Felt like I was battling one vampire forever! I'd love just a bit more choice throughout. Quite often felt like I was just hitting spacebar to continue playing.

But yeah I really enjoyed it. Great work!

monstr 2018-08-13 19:21

The graphics in this game are great. At the beginning I thought I might get bored quickly but as I gathered more dice and the battles went quicker it got more enjoyable. I would have liked a few more options while playing. It felt a bit monotonous at times but that's the type of thing I'd expect later. As a Jam game it's very good!

datyak 2018-08-13 19:25

Great game, gotta agree with @hammers though, about dice roll speed, can be a bit tedious to sit trough the rolls. Loved the pixel art. A great take on the rng/card deck based game genera. I could totally see buying a set of this if it were a real card game! (What do the weird blue sticks do... I picked two up then I had 10 defense dice and the bosses couldn't hurt me)

oadt 2018-08-13 19:28

Nice entry. It would be nice if you can compare the stats of weapons or see the stats of enemies to make meaningful decisions (but you get a feel by playing). The player seems a bit overpowered but I had fun playing the game. (Is it possible that 3 is sometimes taken as sucess?)

chillen 2018-08-13 19:30

Great ideas there, and really enjoyed the art style. I played a few rounds, and I will say that it felt like there wasn't a ton of meaningful choice; most of what you're doing it move and attack. I think it's caused by the lack of feedback. Maybe it was there and I missed it, but I didn't notice much information that would help make your decision. For example, what an item would boost, what the stats do, or how much attack/defense an enemy has (determining if you should quaff or not). If it is there, maybe making it a bit more obvious would lead to more decision making? Also limiting the number of, "You flipped this card, deal with the consequences", because those felt pretty random.

Another feedback piece that could help: Letting the dice sit for a second. I agree with hammers that speeding up the animation's good, but at the same time, some of the dice would disappear so fast or merge so fast that if I stopped paying attention for a sec I'd miss what was going on. When I first started playing and noticed the dice disappearing I was like "Oh no! Why did those disappear!". It didn't immediately click that they were failed rolls. Then having the dice merge at the top, I didn't quite catch how many successes I had. A bit odd, but not unplayable.

All that said! It was a really fun concept and I really enjoyed playing through. Aside from some player feedback and maybe having more "make a choice" cards, the implementation's great. I could really see myself blowing hours into a fully built out version of this, where you could navigate a dungeon, move forward in it, make pathing decisions, and have a bit of an indication of where you're going. Really good stuff!

literallyjosh 2018-08-13 19:31

@hammers @datyak You're totally right about mashing space to get through battles. I actually threw the combat potions in the game last minute to give some more choice.

@datyak The weird blue sticks boost your stats (which don't get used much unfortunately). Every 2nd point gives you a dice in attack or defense though.

Thanks :)

jackou 2018-08-14 23:44

I liked the concept you developed here. It is a quite interesting game, however I do agree that it is maybe missing some feedback to the player. Even though I played some more rounds to get the idea of what actually was going on and where I could make some impacting choices I did not really get that feeling.

However, that could certainly be achieved with the underlaying system you have here. Again I like it, it may just need some more tweaking to get to its full potential.

Good job overall. I actually quite like the artstyle!

simon-rahnasto 2018-08-15 21:12

Fantastic entry, expecting this to place highly :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Foxx3EAixpw

nightsong 2018-08-15 21:15

Feels a bit odd to navigate the menu with space and no enter. I might have been lucky but I played through the whole game without taking any hits. Got sword, weird staff (later replaced by lucky charm) and a buncha pots. Not sure if the drops are random and if I happened to be really lucky with all that happened. I will give the game another go. I'm somewhat torn towards having items/powerups that you're not sure what they do before picking them up. But that's a design choice so I'm not gonna ask you to change it. However all in all it was a well rounded game. All of it fit really well together, sound/art/gameplay... Some good humour in it and a bit of random with the dices.

You deserve a good score on this! :thumbsup:

roidz 2018-08-20 22:50

Really original game. good job, i liked it.

deaymon 2018-08-24 16:12

This game was really cool! It lasted the just amount of time before becoming repetitive. Great job with this one! :smile::thumbsup:

cptalbertwesker 2018-08-25 17:27

Haha loved it!! I won and beat the avocado too :D really liked the monster design, the fact that rolling more dic made more noise and the concept in general was so simple and effective. Favourite game I've played so far! It's a bit of a stretch on the theme, but I still love it!

randomphantom 2018-08-26 17:50

Pretty fun gameplay, and it feels quite complete a game, appreciate that you had the time to put in a boss battle too. Quite random though and it kind of feels like there's little in way of strategy. How the dice is used in battle could be better shown as well as I couldn't quite understand how it was used to determine damage.

lamossus 2018-08-27 10:20

I'd suggest adding items that add new abilities rather than just change your stats. Something like an item that lets tou reroll 2 of your attack dice or something like that. A bit more information about the items you pick up would also be pretty nice. And combat felt too slow, so maybe you should speed up some animations

2018-09-03 16:33

Lovely enemies! I included it in my compilation video series of the Ludum Dare 42 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/CCzYoSZIQ24