The controls make it ABYSMAL to play the game.
First of all, rolling the dice. I HATE it. In some games where you need to roll say on a ball, you control the ball's speed by standing on one side and such. In this game, it's horrible. You can barely control how far the dice needs to go, either causing you to be stranded by spikes, falling into the spikes, OR be able to pass the level. Pushing the dice to give it some speed is awful because it's often either you push it too much so you can't jump on it or too little so you might fall off and die or gain speed by standing on it's very edge. It doesn't help that the die are small enough to make this issue be more apparent, and no, you can't use the ball like a platform to carry you, meaning you either have to HOLD either LEFT or RIGHT or DIE.
Second of all, the controls. Why do I need to use the down key when I'm using either the WASD keys OR the arrow keys so I can propel myself with a die? Why not just map the thing to "When the player presses Space mid-air, and after the first jump, do the dice jump" to the SPACE key instead of having TWO buttons to do basically the ONE thing that every platformer I've played, like Drawn to Life: The Second Chapter, has already done before? And I don't wanna even imagine HOW to do a dash because if it has to revolve around the dices and it's some other unnecessary button combinations, I'm dropping the game completely.
Author Comments
For the best experience play the game in full screen.
Useful Keys:
Hold X: Skip Dialogue
Press R: Reset Room
Press E or Escape: Pause game or return to level select
Creator Commentary:
5 dice is a game I have been working on for over a year now. It was a submission to the GMTK game jam 2022 under the theme "roll of the dice". (It didn't do so well). 5 Dice at first was a complete buggy mess of a game with the worst controls you could think of. However I worked very hard and received lots of feedback to make it into the game you are playing today! I am hoping to release a version of this game on steam with much more content and an interesting story. I am starting here on newgrounds in order to receive feedback on this project and also so I can see if people actually will enjoy this game I have spent so much time on.
If you are interested about how the game was made and the thought process behind it I encourage you to check out these videos I linked below!!!
I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy 5 dice. I will take somethings you said into account. I don’t think you were playing the game as intended however. You don’t need to use “S” or down to do a dice jump all you have to do is hold the jump key while placing a dice. Pressing S is to put a dice under you but not to dice jump. I’m surprised you made it so far without doing the jump right, I could never lol. And don’t worry I made the dash mechanic easy to grasp too. I have been trying to fix the dice rolling for ages and just can’t.
The difficulty of the game isn't the problem, but the lack of design and tutorialization / onboarding is. I don't mean telling the player how to play, but the gameplay itself should introduce new mechanics slowly to teach the player through gameplay. If you love Celeste, I'd suggest you look into some of the talks the devs have done on how they made their game feel challenging but also fun and fair.
Two suggestions you could make without looking into that;
1. get the player back into the level faster. You shouldn't be toggling through beginning of level speech every time you die.
2. Make your controls feel snappier. The floating jump makes gameplay longer and more difficult without feeling good.
And as a reminder- you will always be the best player of your game. If you think it's just hard enough, it's probably too difficult.
And if you find yourself thinking, 'the people who are playing this game aren't my intended audience', you're ignoring valuable free playtesting feedback.
Thank you for your advice. I didn’t add much tutorials since I thought the player wouldn’t want to go through “tutorial hell” and figured it would be more fun to make the player learn how to play with basic instructions. I am aware of the dialogue problem and have actually patched it I just haven’t released the patch yet. I know how challenging the game is and have watched many people play. Most players seem fine with the difficulty but from your advice I might try to ease the player into the game s little slower.
Absolutely Brutal. I got to the part where the music speeds up considerably. I kept wanting to tab out but there's something to its unforgiving design that made it more interesting than it other wise would have been. It asks you to grasp new mechanics and master them in the exact same breath. I'm leaving the window open to try and see if I can actually get to the end later today. Atmosphere is solid. The music sets a neat mood.
Thank you for playing it! Your experience is exactly what I was trying to go for! I made the game super challenging and unforgiving due to the fact that each challenge should only take like 10 seconds. I wish you luck on beating the game!
The game mechanics seems to be improved, but to be honest, I still find this "riding the rolling dice" kind of annoying part. But maybe it's just for the casual player like me, I'm not really good at those tricky platformer stuff
The dice rolling mechanic requires alot of skill and timing to master. I made the game as a love letter to the platforming community and it is not made for a casual audience. I wanted the difficulty of the game to match that of Celeste. Thank you for testing out the game again!