Devlog

Devlog and post-mortem for my game:The Next Roll
Created for GMTK Game Jam 2022
You can find and rate the game here: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-jam-2022/rate/1617185

Hi guys, I am back again with another devlog for my new game, The Next Roll. This is my first game jam with a relatively short time limit (2 days) and was quite worried about over-scoping and if I was able to complete this game jam in time, but thankfully I managed to do it!

Before the game jam, I knew I had to come up with some general ideas to start, especially with the short timeline. I drafted up some sample game ideas but spoiler alert, none of them was used in this game jam. When the theme was announced, Roll of the Dice, I was honestly struggling to come up with any fun ideas. I started drafting some possible interpretation of the theme, but eventually settled on the main gameplay loop literally just rolling the dice, and designing the game based on a popular boardgame that involves dice. After googling around, I eventually settled on the classic game Yahtzee. Now, for those of you who do not know what Yahtzee is, you can check out this website that covers the core gameplay.

Initial Attempt
The game jam started on Friday, 1am (local time) for me but I wanted to at least come up with a simple prototype first where I pressed a button to roll a dice. I went to the itch.io asset store and got a very nice dice animation, booted up Unity and started hooking everything up. Before long, I managed to get the dice rolling with a button click, and also added some of the score card UI and basic scoring system. Drawing inspiration from Yahtzee, I decided to create a scoring system similar to the game, but this time players roll 1 dice at a time and chooses which box to allocate the dice to. While the idea sounded fun in my head, when I started to draft out a basic game flow, I realized a huge problem: Too many rolls are involved. The standard game of Yahtzee involves rolling 5 dice up to 3 times for 13 turns. If I implemented my version, the user will be rolling a single dice each time and the whole game will be way too long and boring. I knew I had to head back to the drawing board with this game.

2nd Attempt
While playing around with my prototype, I realized that pressing the roll dice button and watching it roll is actually quite fun (weird, I know). After some thought, I realized some of the fun was due to me anticipating what the next roll will be during the animation, and feeling little bursts of joy whenever I got it right. Funnily enough, this reminded me of a drinking game I played before in college where we have to draw a playing card and guessed the suit/value. As it was already around 3am, I decided to retire and mull over the idea in bed.

The next day, I decided to use the drinking game concept and came up with a few questions. I then hooked the dice rolling up to 2 buttons (one for yes and one for no) and before long, the game The Next Roll was born! With a very simple gameplay loop like this however, the biggest challenge will always be the polish, which sets it apart from being just a clicker game to a game that people can enjoy. For the rest of the day, I went about adding sounds, music, animations, particles, and anything else I can think of to polish up the game. I slapped in a simple menu, uploaded it onto Itch.io and started finding play-testers to try out and provide feedback for the game.

On the last day, I went through a series of updates and managed to improve the game with more gimmicks and flourish. This was actually the first time I had gotten play-testers to try out my game beforehand and the feedback they provided was immense in helping make the game what it is now. There is really no better feeling when a stranger you do not know tries out your game and responded with a positive review. I would like to thank all who had helped in the play-testing once again and hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

Game Design
Here I will just detailed down some of the game design decision I made. One of the main considerations was that I had to disincentivize players from just spamming one button.

• Multiplier: I knew that I had to add more gimmicks to the game other than just guessing and thus came up with this multiplier design. As the largest limiting factor that stops a person from just guessing ad infinitum was the animation of the dice roll, I decided to tie the animation speed and game music in general to the multiplier. This means that the more you get correct/wrong, the faster you can guess again, thus adding more incentive to not spam a button and guess correctly.
• The Questions: At the start, the questions were actually a lot more 50-50 options instead of being skewed to one side (such as <4 or >3). However, when play-testing it, the randomness of the question hampered with my ability to enjoy the game as I could have just spammed a button and gotten the same results. Thus, I decided to skew the questions such that theoretically for each question, there will actually be a better option. Of course, due to the multiplier, I still kept in some of the 50-50 questions (such as odd/even) to ensure that there was still some randomness involved.
• Turbo mode: I added this mode in as a further 'gimmick', where the animation speed is drastically increased (2x) and will no longer be affected by the multiplier. This is to ensure that the music and game speed doesn't actually get too out of control and becoming unplayable. Furthermore, time additions and penalties from answering were also removed during this turbo mode as it can theoretically lead to a game going on forever if a player presses the button fast enough and gets lucky enough times (a niche situation I know).

Postmortem
While the game was technically published on the 2nd day, I continued to work throughout the 3rd to add polish and gimmicks to make the game stand out more. One thing I felt that I did well was the scoping of the game. With a small scope, this ensure that I have more than enough time to finish the core gameplay and thus more time to polish it up, making it more presentable and giving it a better game feel. One thing I felt I could touch up on was once again my planning. I tend to have a habit of code first, think later and this ideology have hurt me one too many time. Overall, I had a great time taking part in this game jam and would like to thank the organizers (Game Maker's Toolkit) for hosting this wonderful event. Thanks for reading this devlog and I hope you enjoy the game as much as I did making it!