Rolling for Royalty

reminds me of Inscryption, but original enough to be fun

Loved it. Played twice, more aggro the second time, and ended up getting a x3 x4 3 damage to all enemies combo, which was funny to see. Some (long) notes for if this were ever fleshed out:

• Needs a way to disincentivize being overly-cautious and dragging a game out. Especially since you can only heal in battles, I'm always hesitating to take a few turns balancing shields to try to get a heal off before ending vs just getting it over with.
  • Of course the obvious solution is to just heal the player at the end of each match, but I thought it was kind of cool to manage health throughout.
  • Same thing could apply to gem faces. An even more extreme safety vs fun choice. I feel we are supposed to balance long term vs short term, but it could easily be a problem.
• Something about the x4, the multi-attacks, and the fire feel abusable in combination with each other. The end started to get surprisingly easy once I had more deliberate faces.
• On the other hand the gem faces don't feel necessary (potential spamming aside)- even without taking up a roll when you get them, they don't seem like they could pay off their values before you're already well-off enough in gems to buy whatever
• Might need some adjustments to make the lower value faces useful. I found it best to just save up a little and get expensive ones. So yeah balancing, difficulty.
• That said, I'm not sure how you handle players getting stuck, especially since they lose old faces by replacing them. What if their average gain in relative health is smaller than the opponents'? Of course just offering help when they're losing would feel cheap.
  • Do they get coins when they lose? That could work.
• Maybe if you finish a battle with a heal left it could automatically use it
• Might be good to add different color gems as payments go up, though it is satisfying to see them all spill in
• Coins glitch out of box at start
• For some reason I always want to click on the chest, mostly just to open it. Accidentally bought an item that way.
• On the other hand some animations could go faster, maybe getting faster as you progress in the game (opponents rolling, board dropping)
• It would be nice to see which face we're adding, to be able to check our die, cancel a purchase, maybe check the shop from the map.
  • To combine the first three, I'm thinking you just show the face at the top that you're currently adding and put an option to cancel.
• You can't always tell which die is which when they roll. Not sure how, but it would be good to indicate the other faces of a die so you know what your chances are when you reroll.
• I think I saw some rolling wonkiness- an opponent's die looking like it had rolled one face when it was just barely on another. I know one of mine ended up on an edge due to collision with another.

I got pretty nitpicky so don't worry if you're not trying to make it perfect. Just some thoughts.

I also honestly forgot this was from the 2022 jam because that's how caught up I was in it.

Luck? Where we're going, we don't need luck!

Great game. I loved the dice building mechanic a lot, though it was a bit easy to exploit. Adding less certainty to purchasable faces (only certain ones appear in certain shops, etc.) and giving opponents the ability to roll multiple dice or have faces that you just can't have would add a lot to the formula and make it a REALLY fun and engrossing experience.