Keyboard Summoner by Andreas Roschal 2024-04-16T21:55:54Z
I liked it. The "play a little minigame to both select ***and improve***" your powerups between levels was a cool innovation!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Vivian
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 59 | Signal | 👥 | Plug n' Play | jam | 516 | 3.45 | 3.40 | 3.65 | 3.54 | 3.97 | 3.27 | ||
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | 👥 | Harvest Havoc | jam | 764 | 3.41 | 3.33 | 3.33 | 4.08 | 3.31 | 2.47 | 3.54 | 3.39 |
I liked it. The "play a little minigame to both select ***and improve***" your powerups between levels was a cool innovation!
This is delightful, and deserves to be expanded into a full-release. Seriously fun already. If this was the free preview of a larger game, I'd buy the game.
If you were planning to flesh it out, some features I'd like to see:
- Sort your available dice sides by cost, then by type.
- Stack duplicate dice sides.
- I encountered some graphical issues when repeatedly picking up and dropping dice sides in the available-sides-tray, when I was trying to manually sort it. The dice side in position zero ended up bugging out and displaying a mish-mash of two different images. (Graphical issue only; functionality not affected.)
- I had one dice roll land with a die propped between two others on its side. When the dice teleported back into their row, the tilted die rolled out of its square. (Graphical issue only; functionality not affected.)
- Preview what the "Boost" will do, when you're rearranging your dice. It took some trial and error to figure out what effect Boost would have on different dice. I think it worked normally for simple damage, healing, or armor. Split about 50/50 on bites, and didn't work at all for Charm, Slash, and Boost? I actually like that you can't chain-boost the same die, but it'd be nice to know that up front.
- An option to review what's on your dice during a round. I remember going "oh, I think Basic Attack is pretty bad for this die, but what else did it have? Can I even get anything better?"
- The "charm" hourglass on enemies persists a little too long; it makes it look like they're going to also skip a second turn. It should clean-up the charm icon when you start a new turn.
- The "bleed" debuff icon should list both damage-per-turn and turns remaining, not just turns remaining.
- I think you should probably play a round with simple pre-made dice before you do your first customizing, so there's a little less to learn up front.
Some misc. feedback, not really suggesting any specific change:
- It was counter-intuitive that you can stack HP above your starting amount, which surprised me.
- It was unclear how Whips worked. I assumed Whips work like "two attacking dice (attack, arrow, bite, slash, whip, maaaaaybe armor break?) need to have been played earlier in the current round", but I can think of several other consistent interpretations. E.G. order doesn't matter, or maybe the whip counts itself and so only needs 1 other, etc.
- It was mildly frustrating to have a couple dice "stuck" at 19/20 and have no 1-cost options to fill the last point.
- The depth of customization strategy was pretty great. At first I thought "get rid of all the 'nothing' sides", then "wow, silver sides seem under-budget across the board", but then I thought, "actually, make a big difference between the best and worst side on a die, so the rerolls matter more -- which really does make 1 silver better than 2 basics". Very cool!
> Some improvements could be done balancing the different summons.
Quite agreed! We ran into a bit of a time crunch at the end and lost some of the balancing work, which made things tougher. Which ones did you feel were too weak / too strong?
I admit defeat. Found three clues, and tried several patterns, but gave up in the end. 🤷♀️