Dice & Destruction

Dice & Destruction
A game made for the GMTK game jam 2022!

Summary
Dice & Destruction is a top-down shooter with an arcade gameplay loop.
Everything in the game is determined by a roll of the dice: your enemies, upgrades and weapon.
The gameplay consists of quick loops where the content randomly picked, but you can influence the randomness by locking things.

How does it work?
The gameplay is round based, with every single round increasing the difficulty by adding another enemy roll.
Every two rounds the player will get an upgrade roll to combat the ever increasing amount of enemies.

Players can also lock a die so it does not get rerolled.
Found a weapon you like? Lock it!
Found an enemy you find easy to beat? Lock it!

Reflection on the jam
The jam was alot of fun (it was my first)! At the start of the jam I thought my scope would be too small, but as everyone always says, I was dead wrong haha. The mechanical scope was fine, but I would have liked to add more weapons, enemies and upgrades. The upgrades in the game right now are pretty generic stat upgrades, but initially I wanted to make ridiculous upgrades like projectiles splitting, random explosions etc.

Another big thing was playtesting. Before sunday (the last day of the jam) I didn't have anyone playtest. There were 'problems' in the game I knew about, but having someone else play gave me a very good insight as to what the 'real' problems were and how I could fix them while keeping it fun for the player.

Overall it was an amazing experience and it thought me a lot about just building systems and gameplay and letting someone test them, instead of staying in the technical concept area forever that we developers know and love :)

I hope you all enjoy the game as much as I did making it!