I love every second of this. Honestly kind of blown away you made this complete feelin experience in the length of time you did. The only thing I can really say is I'd love for this to be made into a larger experience. Brilliant work overall.

Theme feels a bit tacked on. Other than that, everything is really well polished, great graphics and sound.

The graphics are incredibly polished! I like that the dice are multi-purpose, not only determining where you can go but how you fight and train, it makes the game feel cohesive. I didn't have a strategy in mind but I enjoyed playing this game :)

So polished! How did you finish all the task in just 48 hours!
As so polished it is, the manchinic is also original. I wish there will be a longer version of that.

@gwhyang Heh yeah, not my first rodeo! 😅 I actually kinda over scoped a bit and didn't get to do as much polishing (which is pretty much my favourite thing to do in game dev) as I usually try to do. My main target is to almost done state in the first day and then dedicate the second day pretty much fully to adding audio and polish. And that didn't really realize this time and a big chunk of the second day too was spent on just adding the required mechanics.

But hey, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna do at least a bit of a post-jam version with all that "missing polish" and more content in a form of more variety in items, enemies and boss affixes at least, so your wish might come true... 😉


Super impressive! Very polished, as usual. I really liked the dice battle-mechanics!

I absolutely loved everything about this haha. The idea was super fun, the character design was adorable, and the color palette was really cute too! The whole game just has so much personality :turtle:.

The song was so good too!!
And the gameplay had me hooked, I had to finish it haha.

Seriously, amazing job 👏 I’d 100% play more of this!

Really cool! Well scoped. Only complaints are that I often struggled to travel (maybe give travel more options to pick from), and I didn't realize my inventory space was limited.

Super polished game, love it.

Amazing concept with the dice and love your style! With some gameplay polish this concept could go far :)

Really Good Game!

Great job! Feels like a good way to teach kids to do maths actually. Nice game feel.

Surprisingly very polished, the art, animation, and all the effects really hit the spot. The gameplay is interesting and definitely has a lot of depth to explore. I did get a bit stuck when I realized you need to hit the exact points to progress, and with only a few items in the inventory, it was tough to manage other numbers without losing health. Still, overall, this is really solid work. The dynamic audio and music are especially satisfying and make the combat feel engaging. Nice job!

Also, just random question but what do all the Chinese characters mean during combat and on the intro page? They seem to hint at abilities descriptions but not quite directly lol

@foursay Most of them mean the exact same thing as show next to them in english too. Some of them like heal and dodge aren’t quite literal but more flavour. Bone collecting is an old cantonese tradition so that’s why they’re there.

Really nice looking game and fun to play!.

Wow really deep play you got there, really plays, I was confused for 2 rounds, start understand things another 2 maybe, then start appreciate this, really brilliant design, simple and deep, that's all I should say. Plus everything is so complete that's amazing.

But, as an actual Chinese local human being:nerd:, I must say those Chinese charactor choices are a bit weird, like weird weird, sort of google translation back 10 years ago and applying for 10 times that kind of weird, sorry. It's just all kind of uncommon combinations and such, like the dodge charactor you used: 奠, means dead people monumenting, is sort of a symbol that always shows up when people dies, on there funeral.

Also, 喇（la）as a interjection is only used in Cantonese, rather rare, I didn't know this till I though it could be cantonese and googled. Other Chinese people would recongnize it as a music intrument(a horn), or even some Tibet relic related thing. More common choice is 啦 or 了

拾骨 and 金塔 are both kind weird but makes sence, just not giving the native feeling, or feels like a dialect thing, same as 喇 in Cantonese, are they? Because they pronounced in uncommon ways.

Overall only the 奠 thing is really weird, others are kind of fine or can be considered as some kind of flavor, design direction, a touch of some kind of niche dialect such, I'm kind confused, are they by design or just mistake?

Update: I googled 拾骨, it's 拾骨葬, A Cantonese and 闽南 culture thing! Haha, you taught me something I did know about Chinese, so 金塔、拾骨、喇 are correct usage just being niche, and all things has this interesting culture backgroud, interesting. (奠 is still weird though)

@wo-ri-gou-le Haha, thanks! I have indeed pretty much zero knowledge of Chinese language. Everything is pretty much lifted from Wikipedia, starting off from the article for "bone collecting" and branching off from there. A lot of them were like old traditions etc so I guess they might not make that much sense in modern Chinese. And for dodge, I couldn't find anything super appropriate and didn't want to retort to google translate so I pretty much took something. I think it indeed was something akin to "pay respects to the dead".

Hope it doesn't come off as "cultural appropriation" or being disrespectful in that "call of duty writing arabic in the wrong direction" way...

Oh and I have started to make and post-jam version of the game with more stuff so if you have any good recommendations for mythical/folklore creatures to add as enemies (jiangshi seemed like an obvious choice) or even weapons/items, they'd be more than welcome! 😊

 

@antti-haavikko haha it is good enough for someone that knows little, I even guessed you having some cantonese friend or somelike that to go that much deep. (but 奠 is still weird, it gives similar feeling like gameover or you are dead, for dodge, the direct translation in traditional Chinese just looks fine, it's 閃shan, it is actually used in some games meaning dodge)

if you want more referances, check 山海经 the absolute old and good imaginative monster collection. Also, China has some deep impact by buddhism, 阎王, lord of hell, commonly reconglized here, is a buddhism god, you can follow this and probably find more interesting stuff. I know not that much about things, the Chinese culture is really rich and complex haha. Also Journey to the west, it has some bone related chapters, very classic, it's called 白骨精.

A solid entry! Was a bit confused at the start about dice, like why single dice usage not allowed etc

This game was hilarious! I LOVE the music and art, especially the way the music distorts with actions.

I ended up kinda invincible lol. By the end of the first round, I almost never took damage; by the end of the second, I just hit the boss over and over, healing or dodging when I couldn't use all of my dice up in other ways.

I'd love to see what else happens with this game!


I loved it! Favorite game I played so far. I loved the art, especially the animations which were really nice. Also I enjoyed bopping to the music. Picking the right dice was an engaging mechanic, I got into a nice flow state just listening to music and rolling dice. I hope you explore the idea more, but also keep the simplicity (I dont necessarily think like FIRE dice and EVIL dice that have negative numbers and whatever else gets added to a roguelike would make this more fun). Only negative note, I think I was able to cheese by rolling dice and healing in between battles. Great work!

@acartlidge Oh no it's no a cheese at all! It really doesn't matter whether you're in battle or not, rerolling still costs either a reroll or life. The current enemies don't actually do anything else besides be wall of hp you need to pass (until they have some special affixes too).

I thought it was necessary to throw out more than number, but the fact that you need only number that need make game harder

Loved the game! Especially good work with UI and animation. It's easy to learn how to play, understand what's going on and there's feedback behind every action (animation + a satisfying sound)

I played until the end, the final boss with 30-something hp took a long time to beat. The game balance felt a little bit out of whack though (probably not enough time to properly playtest the game + the map and rewards are procedurally generated).

I ended up filling my entire inventory almost immediately at start. I had 2 trains and 1 additional dice and just spammed basic punch, dodge and reroll, no enemy stood a chance... Because of that, the game felt a bit too easy, I just had to follow an algorithm without much thought.

One way to fix that would stop the player from stockpiling lots of rerolls and then having really long turns. Maybe rerolls could take inventory slots or there could just be a hard limit. But I just had one run and maybe I just got really lucky, just sharing my thoughts...

Interesting mechanic, had fun playing, but found it a bit hard especially whem boos is "mean".
I like how the music change the closer to defeat we are.

Great proposal that made me think a lot of Terry Cavanagh's Dicey Dungeon, but not the same... the execution is very cool, it works very well. Just the theme is a bit of a pretext, but very nice game, art is great. well done

Great concept. The combat system works very well, especially the way your possibilities expand the more weapon you get. However I'm not sure about the movement system. It feels a bit unfair to win a battle with 1 HP left, and then die because you couldn't get to the next stage and had to reroll. However that's my only note, everything else is amazing, from the art to the music, and the little details like the music getting pitched down when you get hit. Truly amazing!

@ghettobastler Yup, for sure! The map is way too linear and can really stunlock you if you don't happen to get the required rolls. This is something I've already improved on the upcoming post-jam version with a more branching map ie. less chances of getting stuck at any point. And of course there are lots of other things there too.

Opened up the game, and the first thing that hit me was the kind of epic soundtrack. The smooth bass with the eastern instruments made for a cool combo, and the pitch shifts were deranged and awesome.

The art is adorable, and I love how the collection pot seems to have a mind of its own. The only visual thing that was a little off was that sometimes it was a bit hard to tell which dice were selected or not. Sometimes the dice ended up in the wrong place vertically, but that might just be because the game lagged some on my elderly laptop.

Game reminds me of a roguelike version of something like Yahtzee or Farkle. It was neat having to plan out each attack based on the dice I had available. I think I got really lucky with the draws, because for most of the game I didn't know why the enemies weren't attacking me. Not until I got to the final boss and ran out of free re-rolls. Then I had an "ah!" moment where I had to lose health to re-roll, and the boss whacked me with his sword (ouch!).

Ended the game with four dice, a heal on 6, and a heal on 8, and plenty of ways to attack, so by the end it was pretty easy to guarantee that I'd never lose too much health.

I've never made a deck-building-roguelike-adjacent game like this before, so I have no idea how you're supposed to balance things like it. I'm sure it's weird having to weigh not overpowering the player, and also preventing the player from running into unwinnable scenarios. Maybe it'd help here to have less slots available to the player (maybe offset by a way to replace the items in each slot)?

Overall this was a fun, vibey experience! I haven't really played a lot of games in the genre, but it definitely scratched that itch if there was one.

Even though you are saying this is not as polished as you would have, it's still much more polished than most entries. You did an amazing job as usual.

I am not a fan of dice-based games because they tend to rely too much on the RNG for my taste, but that's just me. I usually prefer skills vs randomness :smile:

Kova peli! (And back to English for the community:) As a hobby coder it's always humbling and inspiring to see what is actually possible in 48 hours with enough skill and experience. The level of polish is incredible and nothing screams that this is unfinished.

It seems that it's easy to reroll yourself to death but eventually I figured out the proper way to play -- either that or I just got really lucky with the dice -- and made it to the end. :sweat_smile:

So polished. It was very fun and addicting to play. The mechanics worked really well, love the upgrades, very enjoyable

Wow, I had to check (multiple times) that this is indeed a compo entry. It's incredible what has been done here in such timeline. It looks (and sounds) absolutely great. The music is easily 5/5, but this is such a great entry in general... Extremely good.

I played for quite a while and found that because there doesn't seem to be a key control, when I pick multiple dice, ast some point I won't be able to do a reroll anymore (this is my second run, after finishing once):

Other than that, I see no flaws. This entry feels extremely polished for a 48h of work. Besides, it's quite innovative (for me), I've had lots of fun playing it. Thanks!

Congrats on the entry!

@marudziik Yeah there is a bug on dice item ignoring the inventory size limit. I have fixed that already for the post-jam-version along with loads of other changes and content additions. Three more days to add even more stuff to it 😊, I'm going to patch/release it as soon as the rating period is over and the entries are "unlocked".

I'm not sure if I was playing incorrectly, but the early game was super punishing. I kept rolling mostly fives and sixes at a time where I needed to roll a 4 to punch, or something allowing me to combine into a 9 to dodge. That's just the way RNG can be sometimes, I guess. There were also sections of the game where I needed to reroll several times just to advance to the next tile on the board. I feel like a lot of this would feel better if you automatically got 3 rerolls at the end of a combat. Winning the fight, but then throwing three hearts away just to move on to the next fight feels bad. I see now, looking at screenshots from others, but apparently one of the rewards from combat was a bonus dice? Perhaps the RNG could be weighted a bit, because I never once got such an upgrade, and had to rely entirely on the three dice for the whole game. Unlocking "Trained" solved a lot of the issues I had with needing specific numbers and getting cosmically unlucky with the rolls though.

Eventually I collected "Wand" and suddenly all my problems were gone because I was healing an absurd amount. Way more health than I could possibly lose. I'm not even sure I could say this "balances it out" because I feel like I just experienced two clashing extremes. (Losing runs because of RNG, and having a single item carry the run) I picked up "Wand" when I had 2 HP, and healed to 10 before even moving on to the next level. I had about 20 HP when I defeated the boss.

I feel like I just got lucky picking up loot that covered most of the range from 3 to 10 by the end of the run. Knowing that it was entirely RNG what loot you get, what the generated map ends up being, and how the dices roll, it feels like I have very little control over how the run plays out. I saw a screenshot sent in the comment section here where a player found a shop. I never found a shop in any of my runs. I guess what I'm saying is, perhaps rely a little less on RNG and force some specific encounters. Guarantee the player gets at least one shop between fights 2 and 4. Gurantee the player has an option to gain an extra dice as one of the rewards. Make the player choose a reward after combat from a list of options, rather than entirely relying on a random number generator to pick exactly how the run goes for them.

I do see potential in this game, and I see you are working on a larger release of this. I hope my feedback isn't coming off as too negative here, because despite the issues I had, I enjoyed it. I love how the dudes on the title screen follow the mouse. I love how your guy visually gains the items you collect. There's so much to love about this, just like all of your Ludum Dare entires. I simply think the RNG is dictating a bit too much of how each run plays out.

Cool game, cheers!


@100th-coin Thanks a lot for the comprehensive feeback. And no, it's not coming off negative at all to me, this is exactly the kind of feedback I want (and pretty much give out to others too). ❤️

I just released the post-jam version I had been tinkering on for the past three weeks during the rating period. Lots of new content in the form of weapons, other items, enemies and bosses. And of course I did some balancing and tinkering to try to smoothen the gameplay and reduce the effect of complete randomness.

Probably not the easiest change to spot amongst the others but I did a quite major change on how the map is generated. It indeed now always has a fixed amount of shops and chests and also includes way more branching between them to allow for more player choices instead of getting locked to a single long path.

Of course the randomness is still there and I didn't want to "cheat the dice" to make them less punishing. Luck is still a big factor but it seems like you tasted the quite the extreme edges of that spectrum. Hopefully the new version plays a bit better in that sense with all the new tools to combat the randomness. At least there is more variety so even if you need to do repeated runs when your luck runs low, you'll still encounter new stuff.