excellent game! so so fun. i'm gonna be replaying this for a while i think x)
bit of critique:
like PandasFly mentioned below, knowing how much damage enemies are going to do would be very very helpful with this kind of game. at it's core, this game is about strategy, and strategizing how to take the least amount of damage would add just a bit more thought into a player's turn.
in Backpack Hero, a similarly strategic game, you can clearly see how much damage an enemy is going to do and how much they will block for. this changes the way you approach your turn. do you deal the most damage you can, to help your next turn? or, do you block as much as you can to take less damage? i believe this kind of system would be perfect for Die in the Dungeon.
another bit of critique, a much smaller one: when i played this for the first time, i didn't immediately see where the button to end my turn was. it has a similar style and colour to the 'board' so it blended in. it didn't take long at all to find it, but i think this may be a small teeny problem with clarity?
with how small the numbers are i think it makes a difference to show it. even you listed what could arguably be a broad range of numbers!
there's a big difference if you're like, fighting 3 fly guys and each of then do 1 damage, than if they all did their max. you could block 3, or 9! that's a massive difference in how you're gonna approach the situation. 9 is just short of half the starting hp, and 3 damage feels like "eh, i'll heal it next round." y'feel me?
and yeah. the purple fly guy sucks. i hate that guy >:(
I mean also what you can do is really quite limited and you can always act as though they'll do their max (prioritize blocking if you can't finish em off). Also you at least have an idea of what you're risking! For me it's the biggest problem with the violin guy who copies you.
I think I found glitch. When you have 18 dice, you can still find "golden room" (not room with skipping floors) where you have 2 options: you can take gold die and you can ignore.
Love the game, i feel that it has a lot of potential. A small detail that i think would be very helpful (for strategy and all) is to know how strong the enemies are. :) just a suggestion.
Also, maybe an exit button on the download version :)
on my second run I got a good start thanks to an event and ended up steamrolling most of the floors with heavy attack and defence dices plus a golden mirror on my third run it started decent but on queen got an unlucky draw, and got one shot
I would like to be able to see for how much each enemies attack The player would be able to prioritize the most damaging ennemies and better understand how the enemies abilities increase their attack
After playing a bit more to try to master the game, I got disapointed by it's randomness
The problem is not the dices, but the events and upgrades between fights
You have to get lucky to get positives events at the right moment like replacing or discarding 3 dices, replacing dices is even more luck dependant, you rarely find something worth it in shops and picking one more dice is usually detrimental, and you rarely get to choose between a shop and discarding a dice, so half of the time you can't do something useful
It can be fixed, maybe events could have a patern like 2 positives one negative across 3 floors, the two choices could be forced pairs of shop and discard or heal and +3health, we could pick between 3 options instead of 2, and an option to replace one dice could be nice to see too
to summerize, I think that anything that reduce both the odds of busted and trashed runs would be nice for the game and give more importance to strategizing, and would allow to make every run counts
The game itself is good, but one of the things that I see wrong is that the enemies have 2 actions, for example the one that shields and the one that heals should not be able to attack and then use their ability, I think they should choose between doing one of the 2, but when those 2 touch you in the same room plus another enemy it is impossible to beat them.
This game has legs. It feels like it could be a 9.99 Steam Game.
If you added gamepad support, I’d buy it for sure. – It’s a disability thing for me, I can’t use the keyboard/mouse for super long periods. – Not asking for anything special, just let us move a cursor between the squares on top and bottom, and use A to grab or something… I think Unity has a way to bind keyboard and gamepad to the same inputs so it would be easy to test and implement.
Would also be nice if we could see the properties of dice by hovering over them when they’re already on the board (right now it only shows their properties if they’re still in your hand).
Maybe add a couple of unlockable characters with slightly different starting hands/stats? – Or maybe a special ability? – Maybe a few more bosses or something…
The bee marks double the dice's value but only using bee dice. Example: If you add a 6 defense dice on a bee mark then you must use a bee dice to double in 12!
Yeah, the crown places get x2 for each honey you put on it (so 2x, 4x, 8x) – but for any spaces that don’t have a crown they get divided by two (so 1/2, 1/4th, 1/8th). – It makes it easy to stack up your health, shields or damage once you figure it out.
Really enjoying the game, but it feels a bit unbalanced to me. It's possible I'm still not good enough at the game to form these opinions, but I've played quite a few runs, so I'll try to elaborate on what I felt while playing:
Not being able to see enemy intentions makes it hard to understand how much damage they can deal and plan accordingly. I think their damage is a bit on the higher side, too. Low roll dice are pretty damn low and you're stuck spending energy in order to get rid of them. Those make it feel unfairly difficult to face certain enemies because you low roll and must face tank 10+ damage early on. The bee queen one-shot me even though counting shields I still had about 27 hp, so it feels very unjustified to just die because of a low roll when enemies deal so much damage. That also makes enemies that have sustain like heals/shields take too long to fight and makes the fight rather unsatisfying, especially in certain enemy setups. I'd recommend either improving low rolls or reducing the insane damage enemies deal across the board. A way to discard dice would be nice, but maybe glass dice could break if discarded.
Minor criticism would be that the random events could be improved imo. The one where you lose a random die or half hp feels like too much, while another, like the one that skips floors, I probably avoided about half the time. They feel either too punishing or just uninteresting, and I think it's more a conceptual issue than a numbers issue. Post-battle options can be a little unsatisfying more often than not, so maybe 3 choices could be good, if alongside a larger pool of options to possibly get. I'm less confident on this paragraph's suggestions as a whole though lol, just think these aspects could be improved is all.
In terms of general feel I think it already feels pretty good, but I'd suggest 2 QoL improvements: Confirmation if finishing the turn with energy left (and a less discrete Finish button), and a way to swap a die with another by dropping it on top.
All that said I've been enjoying the game a lot. Thank you!
This was the best update I have been following from the start and this is really starting to take an amazing path of potential. This was really great super excited to play the game more and might even make a fan poster.
I started playing just on a whim, and my monkey brain wasn't picking up on how the game worked. Whoops! But after slowing myself down and carefully taking note of the mechanics, I found myself hooked onto this game! It's very rare I find myself enthralled with strategy based games. But the elegant design and easy to understand rules made this a very enjoyable experience. I very much adore the art direction here as well. Along with the sound design. Overall, a very well done game!
Click on G and P when you're playing they are such fun little add-ons for the gameplay ^.^ I am still a little stuck on beating the Queen Bee: Do you have to put the honey ON the spot til it's x2 or put the honey IN the spot to stop the 25+ dmg?
This is an example of depth without complexity. I really like the combat system and the art style. My only little gripe is that its not quite well communicated what you have to do in the boss fight, and its an instant loss if you don't do the right thing, so my first death felt cheap. Anyway, the game es outstanding and very well done!
Gameplay is interesting and unique, the sprite work is cohesive and crisp. This deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. I hope getting this on steam is on your radar, it deserves to be the next Slay the Spire.
Very, very good game, despite its admirably steeper learning curve. The mechanics are refreshing and easy to understand. The RNG is implemented just enough that a skilled player can navigate and manipulate it to their advantage yet still grant the same rewarding feeling that RNG is associated with. I can honestly say I put more hours into this than some triple-A games and it is by far a better use of my time in comparison.
If the developer can grant me one wish, is to publish the formula used to calculate the game score. I would like to break the 10000+ score mark, but so far my attempts can only approach it like convergent series; getting ever closer, but never arriving.
Thank you for such a great game and the joy it brought me!
I wish that if a block had a status like hollow or heavy that if we turn it into a heal block that status remains when the fairy comes... and maybe the level dice block it is remains the same... ex: a gold heavy attack becomes a gold heavy heal
It would be lovely to reconsider battle rewards:
e.g if I chose to add a dice and I like none of them, I should be able to decline (maybe even chose the other option, but that is extra).
It would make the game easier, so some rebalancing might be required.
I bet it could feel better to discard useless die in some way?(I'm not sure if I've missed some relics or not.) In many cases I have to use healing with no effect to search for my powerful die.
I like the game. It’s my favorite genre, with dice! Which I am also very fond of. However, I have only one critique. When you pick a new dice there is no way of telling what the different attributes do. You can see only see it when you have acquired the die. It would be even better if you would be able to see what are the effects of said attributes.
Ok so here is my unfiltered review. The game is really fun, a bit difficult with a lack of proper tutorial but it is fun even if i did need to die 6 times to fully understand the game and 3 more for a good strategy. Good game with one major issue. The Floor 25 fight. The boss is annoying as all hell to beat, I am running a more defensive build where all my damage comes from boost, mirror, and terrain die so the boss has become impossible to get past its second form. the first form took me 10 minutes to beat, a lot of that due to a visual glitch where the enemies die would appear places they aren't and appear to be other die, like a heal die secretly be an attack die or a boost die secretly being a blank space, such a obvious bug that I'm astonished it went past testing unless i am incredibly unlucky and this is a rare bug but I've had it happen 200 times in a row for me, this with the fact the boss has scaling healing and defense is making this so horrid to play, its impossible for me to beat the boss anyways because of the fact it just heals back up and any buffs you place it will place a heal die on it so you just heal the enemy more, pre level 25 8/10 at lv 25 0/10 I am honestly just disappointed and I wanted to beat the game too, spent hours of my life to do so but simply cannot. please please please in the future do more bug tests and balance tests before you release an update or playthrough or a good game can become a shit one real quick.
I know game jam games aren't always updated alot but i would love more content to explore. the game is great due to the uniqueness i loved the feeling of finding new and different dice (and was kinda mad that the names were just names) but all in all great replayability and a joy to see in my recomended 10/10 would play again
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excellent game! so so fun. i'm gonna be replaying this for a while i think x)
bit of critique:
like PandasFly mentioned below, knowing how much damage enemies are going to do would be very very helpful with this kind of game. at it's core, this game is about strategy, and strategizing how to take the least amount of damage would add just a bit more thought into a player's turn.
in Backpack Hero, a similarly strategic game, you can clearly see how much damage an enemy is going to do and how much they will block for. this changes the way you approach your turn. do you deal the most damage you can, to help your next turn? or, do you block as much as you can to take less damage? i believe this kind of system would be perfect for Die in the Dungeon.
another bit of critique, a much smaller one: when i played this for the first time, i didn't immediately see where the button to end my turn was. it has a similar style and colour to the 'board' so it blended in. it didn't take long at all to find it, but i think this may be a small teeny problem with clarity?
anyway, good game!! love this a lot.
after you play a couple times you get a sense of how much they'll do.
regular fly: 1-3
arrow guy: 1-3, 2x
heal guy: maybe one hit of 1-3, and also a heal
shield guy: one hit of 1-3, 2 shields of 1-2.
then there are higher levels of each, and some others. The worst is the purple fly guy. that guy sucks.
with how small the numbers are i think it makes a difference to show it. even you listed what could arguably be a broad range of numbers!
there's a big difference if you're like, fighting 3 fly guys and each of then do 1 damage, than if they all did their max. you could block 3, or 9! that's a massive difference in how you're gonna approach the situation. 9 is just short of half the starting hp, and 3 damage feels like "eh, i'll heal it next round." y'feel me?
and yeah. the purple fly guy sucks. i hate that guy >:(
I mean also what you can do is really quite limited and you can always act as though they'll do their max (prioritize blocking if you can't finish em off). Also you at least have an idea of what you're risking! For me it's the biggest problem with the violin guy who copies you.
I think I found glitch.
When you have 18 dice, you can still find "golden room" (not room with skipping floors) where you have 2 options: you can take gold die and you can ignore.
How'd you get a score that wasn't an F, just assumed it was a bug that I couldn't get any outher score than F
Just pass floor 25
easy enough to understand, hard enough to feel great when you understand
Love the game, i feel that it has a lot of potential. A small detail that i think would be very helpful (for strategy and all) is to know how strong the enemies are. :) just a suggestion.
Also, maybe an exit button on the download version :)
Really good
a really nice game
on my second run I got a good start thanks to an event and ended up steamrolling most of the floors with heavy attack and defence dices plus a golden mirror
on my third run it started decent but on queen got an unlucky draw, and got one shot
I would like to be able to see for how much each enemies attack
The player would be able to prioritize the most damaging ennemies and better understand how the enemies abilities increase their attack
After playing a bit more to try to master the game, I got disapointed by it's randomness
The problem is not the dices, but the events and upgrades between fights
You have to get lucky to get positives events at the right moment like replacing or discarding 3 dices, replacing dices is even more luck dependant, you rarely find something worth it in shops and picking one more dice is usually detrimental, and you rarely get to choose between a shop and discarding a dice, so half of the time you can't do something useful
It can be fixed, maybe events could have a patern like 2 positives one negative across 3 floors, the two choices could be forced pairs of shop and discard or heal and +3health, we could pick between 3 options instead of 2, and an option to replace one dice could be nice to see too
to summerize, I think that anything that reduce both the odds of busted and trashed runs would be nice for the game and give more importance to strategizing, and would allow to make every run counts
Well with a bit of luck in shops, I have beaten the second boss
I wish the boss did not end the run
I still like the game ;)
Very nice, well-polished game. It would be a strong contender for being a commercial game with a bit more content. Cheers...=)
this game is very cool
Just a nice small and consistent deck i wanted to show off
I play this game as a hobby when I have to kill time, I improved unintentionally. I'm waiting for more updates.
This game has legs. It feels like it could be a 9.99 Steam Game.
If you added gamepad support, I’d buy it for sure. – It’s a disability thing for me, I can’t use the keyboard/mouse for super long periods. – Not asking for anything special, just let us move a cursor between the squares on top and bottom, and use A to grab or something… I think Unity has a way to bind keyboard and gamepad to the same inputs so it would be easy to test and implement.
Would also be nice if we could see the properties of dice by hovering over them when they’re already on the board (right now it only shows their properties if they’re still in your hand).
Maybe add a couple of unlockable characters with slightly different starting hands/stats? – Or maybe a special ability? – Maybe a few more bosses or something…
This game is fun but the crown marked spots in the queen bee boss fight aren't explained well
I agree. This took me a bit to figure out.
Could you explain how it works? I feel so dumb :')
The bee marks double the dice's value but only using bee dice. Example: If you add a 6 defense dice on a bee mark then you must use a bee dice to double in 12!
when the crown marked spots are covered in honey (and not the honey die) a multiplier of 2x is put on any die placed there, this also stacks.
Yeah, the crown places get x2 for each honey you put on it (so 2x, 4x, 8x) – but for any spaces that don’t have a crown they get divided by two (so 1/2, 1/4th, 1/8th). – It makes it easy to stack up your health, shields or damage once you figure it out.
Really enjoying the game, but it feels a bit unbalanced to me. It's possible I'm still not good enough at the game to form these opinions, but I've played quite a few runs, so I'll try to elaborate on what I felt while playing:
Not being able to see enemy intentions makes it hard to understand how much damage they can deal and plan accordingly. I think their damage is a bit on the higher side, too. Low roll dice are pretty damn low and you're stuck spending energy in order to get rid of them. Those make it feel unfairly difficult to face certain enemies because you low roll and must face tank 10+ damage early on. The bee queen one-shot me even though counting shields I still had about 27 hp, so it feels very unjustified to just die because of a low roll when enemies deal so much damage. That also makes enemies that have sustain like heals/shields take too long to fight and makes the fight rather unsatisfying, especially in certain enemy setups. I'd recommend either improving low rolls or reducing the insane damage enemies deal across the board. A way to discard dice would be nice, but maybe glass dice could break if discarded.
Minor criticism would be that the random events could be improved imo. The one where you lose a random die or half hp feels like too much, while another, like the one that skips floors, I probably avoided about half the time. They feel either too punishing or just uninteresting, and I think it's more a conceptual issue than a numbers issue. Post-battle options can be a little unsatisfying more often than not, so maybe 3 choices could be good, if alongside a larger pool of options to possibly get. I'm less confident on this paragraph's suggestions as a whole though lol, just think these aspects could be improved is all.
In terms of general feel I think it already feels pretty good, but I'd suggest 2 QoL improvements: Confirmation if finishing the turn with energy left (and a less discrete Finish button), and a way to swap a die with another by dropping it on top.
All that said I've been enjoying the game a lot. Thank you!
This was the best update I have been following from the start and this is really starting to take an amazing path of potential. This was really great super excited to play the game more and might even make a fan poster.
This is nice.
This game fills me with rage and I hate it.
That being said I play it almost every day and I love it.
I started playing just on a whim, and my monkey brain wasn't picking up on how the game worked. Whoops! But after slowing myself down and carefully taking note of the mechanics, I found myself hooked onto this game! It's very rare I find myself enthralled with strategy based games. But the elegant design and easy to understand rules made this a very enjoyable experience. I very much adore the art direction here as well. Along with the sound design. Overall, a very well done game!
Click on G and P when you're playing they are such fun little add-ons for the gameplay ^.^ I am still a little stuck on beating the Queen Bee: Do you have to put the honey ON the spot til it's x2 or put the honey IN the spot to stop the 25+ dmg?
Stock up on good shield dice for Queen Bee. Use honey die to cover the Crown marked slots in honey, and it gives a x2 bonus to a die placed there.
Honestly my addiction to this game is not healthy
my wife is gone
13/11
I'm a big fan of your work
That's a great little game! Well done
This is an example of depth without complexity. I really like the combat system and the art style. My only little gripe is that its not quite well communicated what you have to do in the boss fight, and its an instant loss if you don't do the right thing, so my first death felt cheap. Anyway, the game es outstanding and very well done!
Gameplay is interesting and unique, the sprite work is cohesive and crisp. This deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. I hope getting this on steam is on your radar, it deserves to be the next Slay the Spire.
Use a honey die to cover that slot in honey, and it gives a x2 bonus to a die used in the honey-covered Crown marked slot.
Very, very good game, despite its admirably steeper learning curve. The mechanics are refreshing and easy to understand. The RNG is implemented just enough that a skilled player can navigate and manipulate it to their advantage yet still grant the same rewarding feeling that RNG is associated with. I can honestly say I put more hours into this than some triple-A games and it is by far a better use of my time in comparison.
If the developer can grant me one wish, is to publish the formula used to calculate the game score. I would like to break the 10000+ score mark, but so far my attempts can only approach it like convergent series; getting ever closer, but never arriving.
Thank you for such a great game and the joy it brought me!
I wish that if a block had a status like hollow or heavy that if we turn it into a heal block that status remains when the fairy comes... and maybe the level dice block it is remains the same... ex: a gold heavy attack becomes a gold heavy heal
just an fyi, when if you dont play fullscreen, it doesn't let you click on the pause button
i can click the pause button without playing in full screen
It would be lovely to reconsider battle rewards: e.g if I chose to add a dice and I like none of them, I should be able to decline (maybe even chose the other option, but that is extra). It would make the game easier, so some rebalancing might be required.
Other than that, I give it a perfect 5/7.
cool
I bet it could feel better to discard useless die in some way?(I'm not sure if I've missed some relics or not.) In many cases I have to use healing with no effect to search for my powerful die.
17:36
Finally, S-tier run. I can rest now.
Geez, you've been playing a while.
Great game! I do find it very hard to get to floor 20. I wish there were more options/choices after every battle.
if you choose to upgrade with all gold dice you get soft-locked (unable to continue/play) , same thing if you choose to discard without any dice.
I like the game. It’s my favorite genre, with dice! Which I am also very fond of. However, I have only one critique. When you pick a new dice there is no way of telling what the different attributes do. You can see only see it when you have acquired the die. It would be even better if you would be able to see what are the effects of said attributes.
But other than that it’s a fun game.
Ok so here is my unfiltered review. The game is really fun, a bit difficult with a lack of proper tutorial but it is fun even if i did need to die 6 times to fully understand the game and 3 more for a good strategy. Good game with one major issue. The Floor 25 fight. The boss is annoying as all hell to beat, I am running a more defensive build where all my damage comes from boost, mirror, and terrain die so the boss has become impossible to get past its second form. the first form took me 10 minutes to beat, a lot of that due to a visual glitch where the enemies die would appear places they aren't and appear to be other die, like a heal die secretly be an attack die or a boost die secretly being a blank space, such a obvious bug that I'm astonished it went past testing unless i am incredibly unlucky and this is a rare bug but I've had it happen 200 times in a row for me, this with the fact the boss has scaling healing and defense is making this so horrid to play, its impossible for me to beat the boss anyways because of the fact it just heals back up and any buffs you place it will place a heal die on it so you just heal the enemy more, pre level 25 8/10 at lv 25 0/10 I am honestly just disappointed and I wanted to beat the game too, spent hours of my life to do so but simply cannot. please please please in the future do more bug tests and balance tests before you release an update or playthrough or a good game can become a shit one real quick.
really cool game !!! congrats
is this supposed to happen
i think its bc the dice is basic when u upgrade it it stoped doing that
I know game jam games aren't always updated alot but i would love more content to explore. the game is great due to the uniqueness i loved the feeling of finding new and different dice (and was kinda mad that the names were just names) but all in all great replayability and a joy to see in my recomended 10/10 would play again