Rogue Dice
Rogue-like, but with dice!
Created by Harrison Burns and Caitlyn Fouché for the GMCC (2025) Game Jam
About
Rogue Dice is a single-player turn based game about defeating waves of enemies and becoming the hero of the valley! Your dice are the power behind your attacks, and also decide whether you’re able to block your enemy’s attacks and live another wave. Roll high enough, and you just might be able to win; roll too low, and you’re at risk of starting again, this time stronger and smarter. If you really aren’t fond of your odds, you can reroll – it will cost you though, and you will need to use coins gained from winning.
If the adventure is getting tough, don’t worry; there will be potions and artifacts to help you along the way, and they might give you an edge in the powerful boss battles. These can be bought after each battle using coins, and can be levelled up throughout your adventure by buying it again. Be decisive though – each artifact or potion you level up will cost more the next time you want it to become stronger. There are many different effects to choose from – experiment with different strategies and you might just be able to defeat all your enemies!
Mechanics and Controls
Each part of this game is controlled by left mouse click.
Dice
Roll the dice to determine your attack. Your enemy will also have dice to roll, so watch out! If you choose to attack, and your roll is higher than your enemy’s, you deal your full damage to them. If not, they attack you. If you choose to block, their attack will not be as strong, or it might not hit at all. Your enemies may also block your attacks; if your roll is higher than theirs, you can still do a little damage. If not, bad luck – your attack bounces off them.
Artifacts
There are 8 artifacts to choose from. One purchased, they will exist on the battlefield for a number of turns, and perform an action each turn.
Axe of the Calm Wolf – Increases your damage every turn.
Critical Roll – Increases your damage significantly on high rolls.
Bag of Midas – Additional coins are added after every enemy wave.
Fairy Queen – Heals you after you block.
My Neighbour’s Gargoyle – Steals your enemy’s health and gives it to you instead.
Fangs of the Calm Wolf – Inflicts your enemy with damage over time.
Get Blocked LMAO – Blocks will always succeed for a number of turns.
The Great Void – It might help you greatly… but it could also hinder you significantly.
Potions
There are 4 potions to choose from. Once purchased, they can be consumed at any time.
Strength – Increases your damage dealt.
Resistance – Increases your blocking power.
Health – Restores your health.
Loaded Reroll – You can reroll your dice with better odds.
Developers’ Note
Currently, there are a couple items that aren't working as intended:
- fangs of the silver wolf
- critical roll
- uno block
- void
These will be fixed in the coming days~
Feel free to leave us some feedback! This is our first ever game and we had a lot of fun making it. Hope you enjoy our lil project!
Comments
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I can definitely see the vision of this game. Easy to understand UI. Personally for me, I don't think the dice function any differently than the background random number generators used in typical turn based battle games. The battles are a little easy to win. I found myself clicking attack every single time and won every single battle without needing to use the items. I appreciate the effort that went into the art - the pixel sprites are very charming.
nice dungeon crawler.
some feedback:
-the healing artifacts can heal over max health. not sure if intended.
drinking a potion resets it to max health.
-the critical damage artifact doesnt work.
Thank you so much for your feedback!
Right now it's coded that potions will heal up to your maximum health and not further (i.e. for times where health goes from 97/100 -> 100/100 instead of 97 -> 102), but I never implemented that for other healing sources, I'll need to change it to occur for all healing! Similarly, critical damage wasn't implemented due to time constraints, but it will also be implemented as soon as possible.
Harrison
For your first game, and considering you made it in a very short time, I would say the game is pretty good and there aren’t many things I think you could improve in this situation. Because of that, I’ll separate the feedback into two parts: the first one covers what was possible to do during the game jam’s time span, and the second will be general feedback for games you plan to spend more time on.
Game Jam
The pixel art is pretty good, and the gameplay is heading in the right direction. It was a good idea to show what each item does when the mouse hovers over them, and the description of what happened on the last turn—although simple—was an efficient way to save time and still make the game understandable.
The main issue I have is the total absence of any music or sound effects. I think that if the game had at least sound effects, it would be a lot more enjoyable. I recommend using the site Freesound for sound effects, but for music I suggest you try making it yourselves. (However, I must note that if you don’t have time to compose music, there’s no problem in using Freesound for that as well—just remember to only use sounds tagged as Creative Commons.)
The tutorial has a minor issue: the part where each item is described feels a little redundant, since the player will see a more detailed description during gameplay. Still, adding an in-game tutorial was a great idea that many new devs tend to forget.
Bugs
I found a few bugs while playing. The most impactful one was that all artifacts displayed “number here” instead of the actual number of their effect—this only happened on my first playthrough for some reason.
The second bug is that enemies, when healed by the player’s attack, were able to increase their HP above the maximum HP.
General Feedback
Everything I praised or criticized earlier still applies here, but there are a few extra points I couldn’t mention before because this is your first game and you had a very short development time. So please take the critiques in this section as suggestions for future projects, not direct criticisms of this game.
First of all, I think you could use visual effects to greatly improve the game feel—things like particles and screen shake would make it much more dynamic. You could also add animations to both the player character and the enemies to further improve the experience.
Making the enemies more mechanically distinct from one another would be good too. Even though they looked different and some had more HP than others, it still felt like I was always fighting the same enemy. If you plan to use this idea in future game jams, I recommend giving each enemy a simple, unique mechanic instead of aiming for something overly complex.
Lastly, I just want to wish you good luck in the future—you have potential, and I’m excited to see your next games
Lead developer here,
Thank you so much for enjoying our game! Your feedback really means a lot to me.
The [NUMBER_HERE] bug was fixed pretty much right on the deadline, I think it shouldn't occur in the future. The health issue was an oversight though, it will be fixed as soon as possible.
In regards to the enemies, they are coded to have different damage types (snake poisons, jelly cube hits multiple times, dragon burns etc.) but I just didn't get around to implementing these before the deadline. And using Freesound is a good idea, I'll use it in future game jams!
Otherwise, I think you nailed perfectly what I would love to improve about this game / future games. Thank you so much for your feedback!
Harrison