Dino Dash - Race from extinction! Well... Maybe just your friends...

by pkb-games

Overall★★★★★★★★★★2.76

Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.67

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.44

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.74

See itch.io page for how to play instructions!!

"Dino Dash - Race from extinction!" is based horse race chess, Ludo, or Parcheesi. The basic idea is to get your pawns around the board before the others.

This is our first foray into pixel art (or game graphics really), and game programming (godot or otherwise). It will be immediately noticeable from the state of the submission. There is no sound, you'll have to manage turns yourself, and you might even need a microscope to see everything but all of the rules should be enforced and the game should be playable.

Please report any bugs you find either here or the linked GitHub repo.

Artists, feedback about approaches that can be taken so the art can be made to look good at correct resolutions would be awesome.

Devs, feedback for implementing turns or general code organization would be the best!

Ultimately, thanks for playing!

Tags: #board game, #dinosaurs

Genres: racing

Tools: Godot

Comments7

Rakthalekk7 Oct 2023, 01:55

Not bad for your first game! Unfortunately I didn't have anyone to play with at the time, but it was fun to mess around with and it's mechanically solid. I think it might be more interesting if the rolls were random rather than picking the number each time, as right now there's not much of a reason to not spam 6 until you get to the end.

ffffchai10 Oct 2023, 04:23

It feels like everything is random, but rolling the dice is addictive. The game is very precise and cute, might make a good tabletop game prototype, looking forward to simpler interactions. anyways, good job!

rongon11 Oct 2023, 20:49

It was super small window on my MacOS, so it was hard to see, but basically it's a game of Ludo.

Good job on finishing up the game for the event, but where is the "Limited space" theme here?
Regarding interface, it's weird to select the player piece from a dropdown menu, I would expect after rolling, I can click on the piece on the board to move it. And I expect the game to handle turns, after moving, the turn should automatically move to the next player, it's weird to have to change the player manually from dropdown.
Next time focus on the theme and make it more of a game, than board game simulator.

eeperdeheap13 Oct 2023, 17:56

Nice board game. It is cumbersome to be doing all the moves yourself and it is hard to notice the rules being enforced - apart from the dino just not moving. Maybe add an indicator about the rule. To manage turns you could probably add a component to the scene which holds the current player (color) and switches to the next after you have moved a dino. Replace the dropdown (color) with that component. Add the name of the current player to some UI element.

LDJam user 26536015 Oct 2023, 06:15

interesting little demo. If the issue is just the size, you could try messing around with a Camera Node (although zooming too far might cause issues on a low-resolution image). Not an expert at Godot by any means, but the general recommended organization is usually to try to keep scenes as self-contained as possible--if you haven't already, look up the concept of "call down, signal up." So, for example, maybe you have one big Scene where the board, the pieces, the dice, etc. are all children of a root parent node with a script attached to it. When a red piece finishes moving, it sends a Signal up to root node of the Scene, which lets that root node know to call down to the green piece and says it can move now. It gets more complicated than that, and you definitely don't have to follow the general recommendations exactly, but that's probably where I'd start.

Dan Str17 Oct 2023, 20:22

This game is truly captivating. I liked it a lot, and the idea is fantastic. Stick to your current trajectory, and you'll undoubtedly become a professional

LDJam user 24905020 Oct 2023, 08:27

Congrats on completing your game.

I didn't quite get the rules, you should probably write them down somewhere? I got the pieces to move by clicking random buttons.

Yoss has some good pointers for code organization.

> art can be made to look good at correct resolutions

If you're doing pixel art in godot, in your project settings set the default texture filtering mode to "nearest" to preserve the pixels at scaled sizes. In my entry for the jam, I set the strech mode to "canvas_items" and overrode the window size to be a multiple of the canvas size, this keeps the canvas at the same size instead of extending it to be wider as the window is resized.

The dinos are cute.