Cardback Dicing by literallyjosh

Summary
A card and dice game where you explore a field of facedown cards but can't move back on yourself.
Pick up items and effects to collect more and more dice to fight enemies with.
When you run out of space to move the level's boss appears.
In combat both you and the enemy take turns attacking. When you're attacking you roll for attack while the enemy rolls for defense. A successful roll is a 4, 5 or 6 (though items make successes easier!). Successful blocks negate successful attacks and the damage is the difference.
If you have an attack or defense potion you can drink it to gain an extra 4 dice until the next round.
Controls
Up/down/left/right arrows Z or space to confirm
Controllers should also work just fine with analog stick for directions and A for confirmation.



| Source Code | https://github.com/josh-perry/ld42 |
| Windows | https://joshperry.itch.io/cardback-dicing |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/cardback-dicing |
Ratings
| Overall | 140th | 3.75⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 140th | 3.658⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 307th | 3.289⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 602th | 2.974⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 207th | 3.632⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 352th | 2.895⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 15🗳️ | 14🗨️ |
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!
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!
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!
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 :)
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Foxx3EAixpw
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: