Ludum Dare, the game jam for which I created this game for in a weekend, rating period draws to a close and the games made for it are again "freed" for updating and fixing. So it's time to reveal what I've been tinkering on slowly for the past three weeks.

The main idea for the game started from a very simple idea, rolling three (or maybe four) dice then having to use those dice to reach some specific target numbers as efficiently as possible. So that same mechanic became the main force in the game, behaving the same in combat, shopping and even traveling the map.

I did kinda over scope a bit, a thing that is very common in game jams. I did manage to finish everything I really wanted but the polish level was still a bit low in my liking. And there still was more ideas flowing around my head of things that could be added and would make the game better.

Amongst improving the game visually, I mostly focused on adding more content. And it really started off from adding more enemy variety. As the game had ended up on this old Chinese theming and already had undead skeletons as enemies, another quite easy to land into addition was another classic undead from Chinese folklore, the jiangshi. I also started reading off loads of Chinese folklore and mythology as an inspiration for more enemies and toads/frogs popped up few times there so I decided that it could be a fun addition that could fill up the classic poisoning enemy archetype.

There was loads of fun choices to be found from the source material I was consuming. Quite soon it even became more of a problem trying to come up with unique effects for the enemies than their visual representation. The current enemy count ended up being 11 enemies and 6 different bosses.

I also changed how the map is generated. It might not be the most easily noticed change but it really affects a lot on the perceived randomness and player choice. The maps now always have a set number of shops and chests relying less on randomly lucking upon them. The maps also offer way more internal branching between different nodes so that the end results aren't always that linear and players get more choices on a path they want. There are also miniboss nodes which might present you with a boss from a previous world or a beefed up normal enemy from the next world. 

Bosses and minibosses offer up more unique, powerful and maybe even game changing passive effect items that don't consume space in your inventory. They can affect how your dice rerolls happen, change word generation or give out flat buffs like increased inventory size amongst others. One thing I didn't really want to do is increase the initial complexity of the game so didn't really want to introduce new types of dice and such.

Hope you'd give the update a go! I'd be super glad to receive any feedback, found bugs, annoyances or confusing bits and of course even new ideas of things that could be added to the game. ❤️❤️❤️