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A jam submission

Roll of the Dice's CottontailView game page

Puzzling fun with at least 7 degrees of freedom!
Submitted by LukasWho — 5 hours, 20 minutes before the deadline
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Roll of the Dice's Cottontail's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Gameplay/Design#94.0004.000
Fun#123.7503.750
Audio#173.6253.625
Graphics#233.6253.625

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

What would you like feedback on?
Pretty much everything, but mostly comments on the level design / difficulty progression and user experience.

What did you update?
A lot! A ton more levels, animations, new game elements, an undo system, an options screen, etc. etc.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

It's an interesting concept. Keeping in mind that I don't typically like playing puzzle games -- they're just not that fun to me -- I think that the early levels were too easy, and there were several instead of just a couple. I kept wanting it to build on the difficulty, then the difficulty ramped up, and by that point I was struggling to keep engaged. Again, not really a fan of puzzle games. Overall the sound design was nice, but I didn't like the "hurray" when I finished the level. I just found it oddly jarring to hear a voice when up until that point, there was none. I think you could add a little prompt with the cinematic that lets people know that you need to click to advance. But I did like the graphics and that cinematic is a nice touch, maybe needs a key sound effect playing when you advance the story tied to what is being shown. Apart from that, when the bunny moved, it was not that clear it was hopping along, especially when moving down stairs -- it looked like it was just lerping position and not animating. To be clear, I do think there is an interesting puzzle game here, I'm just not your audience.

Submitted(+1)

This was super interesting to play.  I like the style, reminds me a lot of children's storybooks, but AI think it fights against the Rubik's Cube that looks pretty generic. Changing up the colours or edges might make it look more coherent. 

I think at times it does get a little difficult because of the need to continuously spin the cube around, so having an option to give a hint or guidance, it would be useful. As for the spinning mechanic itself is well done, but the way the player interacts with the cube could be improved, for example, clicking to zoom in and out, and being able to drag to solve, rather than having to click buttons. 

I think the biggest thing that would be important to implement is being able to jump rather than having it done automatically. I thought it was pretty awkward that I wasn't able to jump being a rabbit, and it might introduce some alternative ways of solving each puzzle. 

Overall though, I think that this was a really cool way of approaching a puzzle that incorporated a Rubik's cube. It was really cute and had me thinking for a few levels^^

Submitted(+1)

Wow, what an awesome idea for the game. I got kinda stuck on the "No way out?" level. I guess there was much easier solution, but after beating that i felt like i solved a rubik's cube. This was pretty satisfying experience. But then next level is 1-mover. I either couldn't find the right solution or the difficulty ot the game isn't progressing right. Controls felt a bit cluncky. Clicking the arrows is quite tedious. Maybe adding some kind of button controls (4 for choosing a side 3 for choosing which part of a cube you want to move) would be good addition. That or some kind of a swipe detection. 

This game lacks mechanics. That need testing ofcourse, but since this is a platformer, some usual platformer mechanics like jumping platforms or spikes could add to a depth. Right now, the game gets boring as soon as you finish 1 hard level. You need to have some kind of progression during playthrough to keep people engaged. I would definitely recommend you make it more obvious which blocks are traversable and which aren't. Maybe adding some kind of an edge to them.

Music is good but gets annoying pretty fast, so few more musical compositions would be nice. Voicelines sound rather unprofessional. Its ok for the jam but I'm already thinking of this game as a full realease, so I'm a bit too crititcal here.

Overall, this is really cool idea for a hypercasual game. Good job

Developer

Thanks for the feedback!

You did indeed solve "No way out?" in a much more complicated way than necessary, as the intended solution is also just a 1-mover. You're not the first one, though; for some reason, quite a few people we observed as they were playing also had a lot of trouble with this level. In the future, we want to either add a PAR score or a hard rotation cap (and maybe some connected gameplay mechanics) to encourage players to solve levels more deliberately.

The game does have more mechanics, but I suppose they are hidden too far away and a decent amount of players lose interest before they reach that point. We might introduce more complex mechanics earlier in a future update.

I see your point about the controls being a little clunky. Not a huge fan of swipe detection, to be honest, as I feel like more often than not, when games try to use swipes for 3D rotations, they fail. Maybe a combination of button presses could work.

We deliberately added a lot of easier levels early on to ease players in after getting a lot of feedback during the jam that the levels were too hard. I guess we might have overdone that a bit. In the end, I think that's also a question of target audience.

Better visual indication of walls is a good idea and on our to-do-list for the next update. More music is also on the to-do-list.

Submitted(+1)

You could actually solve the problem by showing the intended amount of rotations for solving the level. 

"I guess we might have overdone that a bit"

Probably. I just gave the game another shot and gotta admit, its quite addictive. I spent like 20 minutes on it and was pretty good at it this time :D (can't believe how many levels there are). But on the other hand, it doesnt progress at all. Its quite cool how you managed design so many levels with simple rotations of the cube, but I guess it also confuses a bit. 

I really believe that this game has a huge potential and wish you best of luck :D

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

This is a wholesome, fun and family-friendly puzzle game.   I love the story and how you tell it with pictures at the start - also, I'm a big fan of the hand-drawn art style. The music and sound are excellent. The bunny's voice adds to the charm of the character. 

The game controls felt intuitive. I liked how the first few levels were simple, and the more complex controls / moving the cube around were introduced later to ease the learning curve. I appreciated having the option to restart the level and that the camera goes back to the player when returning to 2D from 3D.

In terms of difficulty,  I found some very simple to solve while others took me a long time to figure out. To make the game enjoyable for more people, you may consider adding optional hints/tips.  

I noticed some of the levels had both a regular egg and a golden one. While I decided to stick to just the regular egg, having them there adds a bit of curiosity and extra challenge. I love how you give players the choice of which one they want to try to get - and still let them continue on with the regular egg. 

Something I felt was missing is a strong sense of progression. After solving many levels, I wondered, how many more levels are there? To better set players' expectations, you may want to consider ways of communicating this. Such as adding additional information to the start of the level when you show the title, "Ruby's Attic: Up the Stairs (level 1 / 15)". 

Even though it's mentioned that you can hit ESC to go to the menu,  for my first play, by the time I watched the story and played the first handful of puzzles, I didn't remember what was written on the "how to play" screen or itch page  - so didn't realize that there was the menu (and level select screen), until going back to the read the itch page to see if it said how many levels.  

Since the title screen only shows the level selection option if there's saved data,  other first-time players might miss this as I did. I would have liked more guidance around accessing the menu and how many levels to expect. For example, perhaps the first thing shown after the story is the level selection screen, so players learn that it's there and see up front where they are in the grand scheme. 

Suppose you feel that right after the story would interrupt the flow of things too much. In that case, another idea could be to show the level selection screen upon solving the first puzzle. When the player selects the next level, there's an opportunity to tell the player about the menu screen (similar to how you currently tell the player how to press space to go into the 3D mode).

Overall very fun, cute and polished game! Well done :-) 

Submitted(+1)

Really cool concept & the visuals are really cute. Using a rubiks cube as a base for puzzles offer a lot of possibilities in term of level design, which you exploited really really well in the later levels.

in terms of feedbacks, it's hard to think of something that haven't already been said bellow. ^^

My main feedback would be that the controls to rotate & shift the cube only with the mouse is a bit frustrating, making it painful to solve some of the levels where there is a lot of rotations involved. I feel that could discourage most players to go forward in the game, though I have no idea how you could go to improve that part given the large number of inputs that would be needed to control the whole cube with a keyboard or controller (or even just a face). Maybe using both stick of a controller to shift the sides of a face would make it more pleasant to handle but I can see how it would be complicated to handle also.

I also felt that the first levels to introduce how the game works felt a bit too easy & they were many of them. maybe cutting some of them to go faster in the interesting puzzles would be a good idea. but that might be a matter of personal preferance (so don't take only my word for it). Once the first few levels done the difficulty progression is pretty well balanced already. some puzzles could be swapped to make it even more smooth but mostly I didn't really feel like there was huge gaps in term of difficulty.

The sfx and the music are nice. Though I would lower the music a bit by default so you can hear the sfx a bit more.  (the click on shifting a face is a satisfying touch)

All in all, It's a really neat concept for a game & with a bit of polish and rework around the contrlos it has a really good potential. Great job :)

Submitted(+1)

the game is so cute! from the art to the music and the sfx.  the gameplay offers a lot of possibilities for level design and i see that you have tried exploring these possibilities extensively. i had to stop after cliff diving but i will definitely return to finish the rest of the puzzles. great job!

Submitted(+2)

Wow, this has quite a number of levels, with the third and fourth worlds even exploring brand new mechanics.

So, this game's idea can result in some really clever and unique puzzle solving due to the immense complexity that a rubik's cube generates. As a result, you wind up with puzzles that can be solved in the easy "correct" way vs. the hard way. The danger with this though, is that due to the complexity of the cube, winding up on the hard path just takes deviating from the correct root for a few turns. Suddenly the puzzle becomes much harder, so at that point, might as well hit R. Yet this is of course the most interesting aspect of the game, so it's the kind of thing that has positive and negative consequences.

I think though that as you play more levels, worrying about winding up on the hard path becomes less of a concern, as you realize what the solution probably should look like. You then begin realizing things about the game that result in really interesting revelations about the mechanics. The best design choice here is that the bunny always stays grounded -- turning the cube doesn't change gravity for the bunny. This results in mechanics where you learn that you can never gain height without a staircase, no matter what you do. So it's really neat when you get the world 4 level "Defying gravity", where an egg is floating midair and all you have is a box, and it seems at first that this rule that you thought you learned would be broken somehow (I mean in the end it wasn't really). The simplicity of the puzzle in this case is also what makes it most interesting.

Though I do want to mention that a level like "Cliff Diving" probably should have been placed a bit earlier -- that level teaches you that you can't collect an egg midair in an intuitive way, but already by that point I had tried to do that (probably going on a hard path), and got confused why I couldn't collect the egg. Cliff diving also had an aspect where you had to know to rotate the center piece too, so that made it more complicated, so that's why I say a level like "Cliff Diving", just something really simple so players try and fail to collect the egg in a very clear and obvious setup that shows that that behavior's not a bug or oversight.

But in general the teaching of mechanics is done great and Jon Blow style. Especially in world 3 when portals are introduced, with learning about how portals are active and when they're not intuitively.

Obviously, being prefamiliar with solving rubik's cubes gives a player a pretty big advantage -- they already know certain moves like how to swap in swap out different tiles without moving the ones around them, and they understand that a center, edge, and corner piece are all distinct from each other and can never be in each other's positions. But still, you learn further here that pieces that are subdivided have rules too -- if a square has one corner filled in, that corner will never move, meaning a corner that's toward the center will always be toward the center.

I did have some minor difficulty at times telling if certain blocks were solid or not -- obviously darker squares are background squares, but different colors have different levels of luminosity naturally, so it's not always obvious. I think one minor thing you could do for that would be adding a subtle pattern to distinguish them -- if there's some way to make the non-solid tiles inscribed, or have the solid tiles looks shiny in a consistent way, that might help. Not a huge deal though, especially with the undo button.

I did experience a bug at one point -- I accidentally pressed back at one point (so I was very grateful for the level select), but going back to the level select the worlds seemed to glitch somehow and when I clicked on a level, it took me to the wrong one, in a different world. This persisted even when I went back to the menu and tried again, but when I refreshed the page, it worked (this happened btw on Mt Everest, which was a pretty neat level).

so anyway good job and stuff

Developer

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, very much appreciated! And I'm glad you seemed to generally like the game and the level design.

To start at the end, yeah, I've encountered that bug a few times, but I only have a vague idea what might be causing it and since it's so inconsitent to reproduce, I'm not sure how quickly I'll find a fix for it.

Yeah, the complexity of the game leading to a lot of open ended puzzles is definitely a challenge we haven't completely figured out how to handle yet. We have a few thoughts for possible improvements by either restricting the player's ability to rotate the cube (e. g. "control panels" that the bunny must stand in front of in order to be able to switch to rotation mode) or encouraging the player more to find the elegant solution (e. g. by giving a PAR score of rotations for each level). We might have to play with those options a bit and figure out what works best.

"Cliff Diving" was originally supposed to come earlier excactly to teach that mechanic, but during testing, it seemed a bit too difficult for that early spot. In general, I think W2 probably needs the most work right now.

Adding a pattern to the walls / background is something we briefly considered, but somehow I just didn't get around to implement it and it fell off our to do list. Thanks for the reminder!