Thank you!
We made the game in GameMaker. And for the dice thing, I responded to someone else asking about it here:https://itch.io/post/6454789. Hope that answers your question too!
It's fake 3D! It's based on a hand-drawn frame by frame sprite animation. Reaktori drew the art for it and programmed the initial implementation.
The die sprite looks like this:
But then it's also rotated so it'll look something like this (this gif here is a bit janky, sorry):
Then on top of that die sprite we draw the faces of the die. The faces are just static sprites and they're drawn on the die 1) positioned and scaled depending on which side of the die it's on and which frame of the die animation is currently being drawn, and 2) rotated to the same angle as the die.
The reason why we used GM for this jam game (and all other jam games so far) is that we're the most familiar with it compared to other engines and we know that we can create stuff fast in it because of that.
I hesitate to give advice on which engine you should learn, because I'm not super familiar with engines besides GameMaker and Unity. But I will say that if you want to make 3D games, GameMaker doesn't have great support for that, so you'll be better off learning Unity, Godot, Unreal or any other engine with proper 3D capabilities. If you do want to make 2D games, GameMaker is great!
