So I’ve been playtesting

I’ve spent the last few weeks sending my game to people and get feedback. Getting feedback and knowing weither or not to act on it is very difficult and I’m still learning.

With this game, I got inspired by board games I like, where dice building matter and manipulating dice is important. Troyes, Roll for the Galaxy, or even Quarriors. Unfortunately, the first version of my game didn’t have that. You had dice, and you could manipulate them, but there was not much to do, you had a bad roll, you would reroll it.

The feeling I want to give people playing my game is “I have this good dice roll, but if I took a little more risk, I could make it better”.

Weirdly, the games I cited don’t have this element, they’re all about making the most of your random roll. But one classic game has it and it’s Poker Dice/Yahtzee. It is played by throwing 5 dice and trying to make figures (pairs of the same value, numbers following each other etc…). It is played in 3 rounds where you choose what you will launch and what you will keep.

So I added that. Now players have 3 rounds of launching dice, before being able to manipulate them. You have figures to make that give you a bonus. You can win if you’re lucky, but you can win much more if you fill those bonuses. Each roll is a bit of a surprise and the game is more exciting.

Plus, I added those combinations on weapons, so each weapon pickup you take is a bit more interesting and exciting as well, as you might get a combination that really helps your build, despite having dice you already have.

Plus, I could implement this system of combo for the enemy as well, giving them sort of random special abilities, but much more personality.

I think it was a great idea and I’m happy it’s better.

But…

The game is still not there, it’s still missing something. You can make those combinations really too easily with the current skill system. Right now, you can repeat skills indefinitely, as long as you pay dice, so you can reach a combination of 1 or double 1 consistently every turn.

Other players complained that the game was a bit too easy, you can reroll for free giving you still a few reasons to manipulate the dice, if you can just get 4+, relatively consistently.

I can fix those problems by the following:

• Remove rerolls. Very scary, but would force players to manipulate dice to change their luck. I don’t think people would love it if they got 2/3/4 bad rolls in a row.
• **Add a cooldown on skills. ** Easiest solution, it just makes them unable to reach combinations by spamming the same skill.
• **Add a resource to spend. ** Funnily, I removed this before even making people test my game. I felt like, I needed something simpler first. Weirdly, I got numerous testers, asking for a resource to spend. I guess, it makes sense. It’s what they expect from a videogame, and in the context of crawling a dungeon and having limited resources, it raises the stakes. Do I spend my energy here, to save HP or do I keep it for later, even though I do not know what awaits me?

Because it involve the player making a choice in the long run, between different combats, I chose the last solution for my current build. Now I have to balance it a bit, and launch new tests!

Changelog:

Gameplay

• Spend energy to reroll and use skills!
• Poison status now always appears when poisoned
• Poison and Vampyr effects have their own animation
• Combat hit visual effects is more readable and consistent
• During combat, the selection of dice is more pronounced with a glow effect on the physical dice and a big highlight on the icon
• Add hints on the minimap when you activate a button
• Add varying noises when text is read
• In the first puzzle hole section, add a visual hint to tell where to fall
• Add numpad to the default mapping

Performance

• Add a setting to deactivate shadows which takes a lot of resources
• Remove unnecessary vertexes on walls

Visuals

• Add a background to the minimal
• Gobby has now different faces
• Fighters during combat, move in front of each other
• New Font
• Make map and minimap bigger

Sound

• Add some sound effects to combat
• Add a separate mixer to individual SFX, to be able to reduce loud sound.

BugFix

• Fix bug in the inventory where you could unequip stuff visually, but it would not be unequipped during the game
• Fix bug where stick motion would make the buttons lose focus in the pause menu
• Fix bug where the map menu would have missing tiles
• Fix bug where the dice would be read as 0 when you reroll or use a skill
• Goblin name is now correctly displayed
• Fix map menu and chest to be responsible on screens with a high amount of pixels
• Fix settings showing wrong values on startup at the title screen
• Fix some z-fighting
• Add placeholder on skills that didn’t even have a placeholder
• Fix bug where player would be stuck after bumping stairs
• Fix issue where textboxes would become transparent if you mashed
• Fix issue where the camera would not be looking at combat, during mimic fight
• Fix issue where you could not click on the dice to select them
• Fix issue where dice icons and results would not be shown when Mimic impersonates you
• Fix issues where a special action would look fulfilled even tho it was not anymore
• Fix bug where setting a dice on a face, would not give you the right result
• And many others…