Fate of the Dice by Joror

Tiny Dice Kings unite~
- 🎲 Tactical squeaks guaranteed!
- 🤔 Think and Fight
- 👼 Collect new dice~
- 👿 Defeat the Archdemon
| Link | https://joror.itch.io/fate-of-the-dice |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/fate-of-the-dice |
Ratings
| Overall | 180th | 3.95⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 72th | 4.067⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 125th | 3.883⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 856th | 3.2⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 605th | 3.583⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 289th | 3.517⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 460th | 3.6⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 39🗨️ |
Loved the in-depth tutorial, way to go the extra mile!
The visual and audio were really entertaining, and the tutorial was a must have, glad you added it.
Good job !
Really sad it was so short. Thanks for the detailed tutorial.
The only complain I could have is that it could be tedious to look at all the enemies dices for a full fledged game, but maybe once we are used to the type of dices it is fine.
Well done!
Which is one of those funny 'I almost beat it and then left the rest for tomorrow' moments.
As always, I like the vibes and the implied story -- I really wanted to see where this one was going. The PC seems to be some sort of new god -- I always like how you often play powerful (or if not, somewhat unique) characters in your games, but you always find a nice way to tie it into them being new at the job too.
I think part of the fun for me around this time is that I hardly ever play this type of game, but I do seem to enjoy them a lot whenever I do try them. -- Also that you really needed to understand the game or at least some of the tactics to beat the 'final boss'.
I think combining dice into the draw/placement game really gives it the extra kick it needs, in addition to the creative placement things you can do with 2 triangles facing each other (the sneaks where my favourite).
More critically:
It's cool that the placement of your dice affects where the opponent can attack given the type of their dice, but you can't really see that before you've placed your own.
I think the archers might be a little underpowered, compared to the others. Maybe if the 7-away face was also 2 hits?
I'm not sure why the dice that where considered more powerful (well, mostly) had to have more faces -- in a way, that makes them less predictable, so also weaker tactically (the one angel you can select for example).
These following are more general remarks w.r.t. your games (not sure if I've voiced these before):
While on the one hand I think it's a good idea to have everything in games 'hoverabe' -- even if you forget the brief tutorial, you can always find your way back to understanding the whole game.
However, I think there's 2 problems with this, at least in isolation (though the last few games don't suffer from the 1st as much, since there's a tutorial now too).
One is that I know how your games work by now, so I trust that I can find out basically all things I need to know that way. If you don't have that trust yet, I think it can come across as overwhelming (though you've gotten a lot better in this regard).
The other is that, since the way it works is not by clicking, but by hovering, and then you can get extra information by hovering over the thing the hover just uncovered -- you then need to be careful where you point your mouse going through the other areas.
For example, in the current game, if you get a pick of 3 possible dice (sets), and then you want to know what each individual face does, you need to finagle your way over there, without touching anything else hoverable.
Lastly, more specific to this game again; you seem to have thought of everything a player might be doing wrong (e.g. not placing anything, not placing a king, etc.), but the error message only shows when you hold the mouse-button when performing the wrong action.
Maybe a list of messages would work better there? I'm not sure, a lot of solutions are clunky, this is just a difficult UX problem I think.
And of course some nit-picks and bugs I found:
These two images show visual glitches I found, fortunately, they don't impact the gameplay at all (sorry to scare you with 'bugs' in the chat).
 
The arch-fiend (or whatever they are) says 'the rest should', but that makes them seem like they're giving a suggestion. I think you might've meant 'the rest would'.
On itch, you have one tag that says 'ludum-date-56', not 'ludum-dare-56'.
After you won the game you get back to the menu, but can't actually restart it (the browser is unresponsive? Browser inspection shows 'USER ERROR: Overflow in RID validator' / 'at: _allocate_rid (./core/templates/rid_owner.h:120)' both in in onPrintError and 'Uncaught RuntimeError: unreachable executed' in callUserCallback).
There are some unclear things in the UI:
- I did not immediatly realise I could see a description of all the actions and of all the dices in play. When you put your cursor over a dice, you see its actions, but when you move the cursor to the actions, it often passes onto another dice, which displays another serie of actions. I don't know how this could be solved in the UI, but I got a little confused at first.
- The ranged attacks are described as "1~>6". I thought it was an attack ranging from 1 to 6. But it's an attach of strength 1, at the range 6. The "1" of the strength should be put at the same place than it is on the other dices.
- It's not very clear, in the description, which attacks applies on one enemy and which applies on multiple enemies. We see it during the fights, but it could be better if we could know it before.
- Speaking of fight, a replay would be very nice. I guess it was hard to implement it in one week-end, but it could really help us understand what happens, which dice does what, how do they attack, etc.
- I'm not sure to have understood the healing process either. It looks like we can not heal twice a same dice, but later on I had a dice with two life points, I don't remember how I had it. (I didn't have any healer at this moment of the game).
- The choice of dice at the end of a match is not very clear either. It's written things like "3 x Choir Bard" and you get only one. There is also this visual glitch already mentioned.
But even with those unclear details, I had a fun moment and won the game. I also loved that you choosed a theme with angels & demons, instead of the so-dried fantasy theme with elves, knights and other sh*ts.
We want more! More dices, more fights, more moves, more game boards, more special powers, more cute little sounds, etc.
Great work!!