Made the start of a game, but it's just not fun

Dev diaries
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So I made craps rogue-like game. I was inspired by balatro. But after I got all the mechanics working, I don’t like it’s fun to me. So I’ve been sleeping on it for a while hoping for inspiration. Now I’m ready to move on to a different game.

I mean it’s not all wasted time as I learned a ton creating this, especially about shaders and 3D objects in defold.

The game used real 3D dice. And you can upgrade the dice as you play. I have 4 sided, 6 sided, 8 sided and 12 sided dice. And you can upgrade the face values so for example, the 12 sided die could theoretically have all 7s on all sides. That was a huge learning curve for me to figure out as well.

Plus you can upgrade the table as well and increase the payout odds.

So my question is what do you do when you find your game isn’t fun? Should I just release a bunch of code to the community? Release the whole game to the community and see if someone else can fix it?

Or continue to sleep on it and see if inspiration hits later? Here’s a brief video of the project.

https://youtu.be/fq0xXZvOk3M

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I personally choose to share with the community. I make a lot of prototypes, mostly just for fun. If I see something that could benefit others, I try to clean it up and package it as best I can before sharing. There are lots of mini projects still waiting in line…

From what I can see, your project has a lot of interesting logic, and it could be useful for many people.

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If you’re looking for feedback on this particular project, here are my thoughts:

  • I think the betting mechanic slows down the game too much. I think you want to minimise the time taken per round. It should be a snappy roll → gain rewards → buy upgrade → roll
  • People are loss averse, so for something relatively casual like this I would focus on granting rewards rather than avoiding losses. Worst case outcome would be gaining nothing in a given roll. That is to say, remove the betting mechanic completely.
  • The table feels very busy, I suppose the upside is it implies depth but I would still try to simplify.
  • There’s no juice. I go against the grain of mainstream advice here (which recommends avoiding juice because the prototype is supposed to be fun anyway). I think juice is such a key component of fun that I think it should be implemented to some extent even in prototype stage.

So my summary is:

  • Streamline
  • Simplify
  • Juice

After all that, it still might not be fun. If so then I would look at the core mechanics. Is it fun to just upgrade numbers? If it was my game I would incorporate custom die faces (maybe like Jokers - I say that not having played Balatro so not sure the comparison holds). Basically outcomes that have weird and wonderful special effects. And then I would go for creating cool chain reactions and combos, with lots of juicy effects and particles etc.

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Thanks. Yes I was going to do custom faces, but I honestly felt the juice still wouldn’t save the game at this point. I appreciate your feedback. I’ll take that in as I think about how to make it more fun while I work on my next game.

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Very well said. It really makes sense, even for prototypes.

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