Play ZAR
ZAR's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Sound/Audio | #1 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Fun | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Overall | #2 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| User Interface (UI/UX) | #3 | 3.875 | 3.875 |
| Visuals(Graphics) | #4 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
DevLog Link
https://happysealgames.itch.io/zar/devlog
Developer Feedback Questions
Are the core game mechanics and gameplay loop fun?
At the moment, the game doesn’t have proper enemy/economy balancing, and the content starts to feel repetitive after a short while. But once these areas are expanded, how do you think the overall experience could feel?
Right now, we’re focusing on polishing and completing the core systems. After that, we’ll expand the main content—especially build variety and enemy diversity—and then start working on balancing everything.
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Comments
the bad:
Dice faces are super hard to read. consider making everything twice as big
points x mult is stolen from balatro, consider your own system
music a bit repetitive
the good:
lots of polish, dice types are fun
bosses are cool
text effects are awesome
Thanks a lot for the feedback! We really appreciate you taking the time to play and share both the positives and the negatives.
For the dice faces, once a die has settled, you can hover over it with your mouse and its current value will be displayed much larger. Because of that, you don't really need to read the numbers directly from the physical die faces during gameplay. That said, we can definitely keep improving the readability there.
Balatro is one of our main inspirations, and the Points * Multiplier = Score system is intentionally part of ZAR's foundation. We don't currently plan to move away from it. We see it less as copying the mechanic and more as taking a scoring structure we really enjoy and building a very different game around it with physical dice, throwing, collisions, Relics, Augments, and other systems.
For the music, we agree that looping tracks can naturally start to feel repetitive over longer sessions. Bosses, Elites, and regular enemies already have different music, and we've also split tracks into stems that react to different gameplay events to add more variation. There's definitely still room to improve this as development continues.
And we're really glad you enjoyed the different dice types, bosses, polish, and text effects. Thanks again for checking out ZAR and for the feedback!
Very very nice, love games like this. Lovely polish and great execution. The only thing I would say is maybe just start the player with normal dice. Starting with lots of varied dice can be a bit overwhelming.
Thanks a lot for the kind words and the feedback!
The progression and overall game balance are still not fully settled yet, and this is something we're continuing to work on. Our goal is to make the early game much easier to understand and help new players get into the game without feeling overwhelmed.
Starting with simpler dice and introducing more variety gradually is definitely something we'll keep in mind. Thanks again!
Looks very interesting!
Just went through the tutorial so far, but encountered some issues:
After throwing first lot of dice in the tutorial, and clicking through the explanation of score multiplier, I got an error, with an interesting bit of UI for showing details and offering to copy, but copying here (or in another log view I got to somehow) did not seem to actually copy anything to the clipboard.
(It was possible to close the error and continue after this.)
In browser log:
bunch of cross origin requests blocked
Trying to get length of sound which is not loaded yet. 20260908_AlphaDemo_v0.4.83.8_ZAR_web.framework.js.br:9:117041
(Bunch of warning level messages)
CombatController recovered stalled enemy-damage flow. Reason: Damage feedback handler 'PlayerScoreCalculationUIController.RequestCalculationFeedback' timed out after 15s realtime. Context: Stage=WaitingBeforeEnemyDamage, Room='Basic Enemy Room', Enemy='Lock Imp', Round=1, Throw=3, Score=11.5, BlankedDice=0, TimeScale=1. Damage flow will continue.
(Please try my game, Lockstep Arcade. Any feedback is appreciated!)Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!
A few other players have also encountered the issue you mentioned. Unfortunately, it seems to be specific to the WebGL version, and we’ll be looking into it further. The browser version is not currently the most stable build, so if you enjoyed the game, we’d definitely recommend trying the downloadable Windows version for a smoother and more reliable experience.
The error screen not copying the log to the clipboard also seems to be another WebGL-related issue, unfortunately.
We hope you enjoyed ZAR despite these problems, and thank you again for taking the time to report everything in detail!
We’ll also check out Lockstep Arcade as soon as we can. :)
Maybe you know about this already, but there's a thing with browsers not wanting to do things like interacting with the clipboard unless this happens inside a click on an actual dom element. (I had to spend a lot of time working around this issue.)
Hey, I love the visuals and music here, truely great work. I'm not sure about the economy, I played through for about 20 minutes and never had many issues either way. I think if I played it a few times that would become more obvious. I like the amount of gameplay twists you have, the amount of abilities. Overall, this feels like a very competent balatro like. I look forward to seeing how you expand on the game.
Thank you so much for your feedback! We’ve been developing ZAR for about 3 months now, and our current focus is on finishing the core mechanics and improving the overall player experience.
Once those foundations are in a good place, we’ll put much more focus on expanding the content, adding more build variety, and properly balancing things like the economy and progression.
We’re hoping to open our Steam page soon and release the Steam demo around Q1 2027!
If you enjoyed the game, we’d really appreciate it if you could leave us a rating on itch.io. You can also follow us on itch.io and our social media pages to keep up with future updates and support the development of ZAR.
Thanks again for playing and taking the time to share your thoughts with us! 🎲
Long story short:
1) The game is made on Unity.
2) It could be great if UI be improved: with more readable font and darker background (instead of the yellow one) could be much better.
3) Took a while to understand how to throw the dice.
4) Dice usage seems do not reset per encounter. Is that intentional?
5) Terms like "score", "points", "multiplier" seems not intuitive. These are just words in ability description that I can't read with these fonts. I did not understand how the game counts the damage, so I ended up just throwing any dice I have and then press "apply".
6) I lost the run for some reason.
7) Please make the dices bigger. They're tiny and I can't see the number clear enough.
Hi,
Yes, dice usage does not reset after each encounter. Every die starts with 3 uses, and this number decreases as you use it. It can also be increased through certain augments if used correctly. However, once a die reaches 0 uses, that die is permanently lost.
The Point and Multiplier system is tied to augments, relics, and character skills. The main idea is to find the right combinations to increase the Point × Multiplier calculation and deal as much damage as possible with the fewest dice throws.
You lose the run if you fail to defeat the enemy within the available number of rounds, or if you run out of dice. So if you still had rounds remaining, the run most likely ended because you had no usable dice left.
Regarding making the dice bigger: this can actually create other problems. As you collect more relics, the number of objects in the arena increases, so larger dice could still become difficult to read and would also have less space to move around. Currently, once a die has settled, hovering over it displays its rolled value in a much larger and clearer way.
That said, I agree that the UI, readability, and explanation of some of these mechanics could be improved. We’re currently working on improvements to the UI and fonts, and there will be more changes in this area in future updates.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to leave detailed feedback!
I really love it! For balancing, having two ambulance dices and one devil die makes everything else almost obsolete. Didn't have to use any other dice and didn't need the active player skill at all. But it's incredible how much content you already have! I would say it's actually already good to go for selling :)
Thanks a lot for the feedback! We’re hoping to improve the balance with some upcoming changes, while also adding even more content to the game.
Our current plan is to launch our Steam demo in Q1 2027, and we’re also planning to open the Steam page in the near future.
Stay tuned! :D
I beat the first level!
The core game mechanics and gameplay loop is fun!
I played this game around a month ago. I instantly saw the new relics, arguments, and characters. I also saw the the gold economy has changed significantly. I ended with 805 coins. In my opinion, the old economy was better. I like that the relics now have images. I also like the combo meter, but I could not get past C. I like the options for character (I chose blacksmith). I also like the new super hard enemies for the end of levels. They should be marked as bosses. I liked the ambulance dice.
I broke the dice. The black hole, golden dice, and ambulance was in the same corner. The golden dice activated 42 times and my dice has 9 uses. The next enemy was instantly killed with piggy bank.
It’s hard to say that the game has any real balance at the moment. We’re hoping to improve that before the demo, but every time we add new content for example, systems like character skills the balance tends to shift or break again even after we adjust it.
For the combo system, it becomes easier to get past C as the chaos increases. For example, if you have a bouncing die together with things like Bouncers or Mines that keep pushing objects around, you can maintain constant movement and build much higher combos. The current combo system is more suited to builds like that.
Once we finish the core systems, we’re hoping to spend more time improving and balancing everything, with the goal of releasing our Steam demo in Q1 2027.
Thanks a lot for all your feedback, and don’t forget to stay tuned for future updates!