Rollie's Forest

Submission for the GMTK 2022 game jam.  The theme was "Roll of the Dice"

Rollie's Forest is a deckbuilder roguelike where you collect dice from enemies. 

After you defeat enemies, you will roll to discover a new dice. You can then add that dice to your dice bags. 

The game rolls for you. You only need to decide where to allocate your dice. Everything is controlled with the mouse.

The music is by Steven Melin.

The sounds are from the free GDC Sound Pack

Everything else was made by me. A lot of the art is modified from my other game, Monster Girl Manager.

Post Mortem:
I feel pretty comfortable with where the game landed. I had initially planned to add artifacts that activate cool effects, like a pygmy foot that re-rolls ones or a pentagram that rounded rolls to the nearest multiple of 5. Didn't have time, but that's ok. The game feels fine without it.

I also wanted to make number  animations play during the rolls, to add some information clarity and add some polish to combat. Screen shake, numbers colliding, sums auto calculating. Stuff like that.  You don't need it, but it would make it easier to tell what is happening at a glance.

This is the first time I uploaded to html5, so there are some bugs with screen resizing and window swapping. For example, if you tab out of the game, it will only display black. Annoying, but I don't really plan to launch more games to html5 soon. It's good for free flash games, so maybe I can use it to make more prototypes. 

My biggest issue is the balance. Some of the dice, like the d20, have a huge range. So you could have a bunch of d20s, and still lose to a rat with a handful of d6s. This randomness can be frustrating. 

Combine that with event randomness, and sometimes you will never get the opportunity to collect higher tier dice. 

The death upgrade system was a last minute add to help with game balance. I find it works very well and was worth adding. It also makes the game far more enjoyable long term.

Overall, I'm interested with the concept. It manages to capture the addictiveness of deckbuilders roguelites even in this prototype stage. It feels like a "pure" representation of the genre. 

Maybe I'll make a mobile port for this as a test for my other games. This game feels like a perfect candidate for mobile.