4: What inspired Dicey Dungeons?

Phew, late one tonight! It’s been a busy week!

7 – What’s changed since the last alpha?
6 – How big is this game anyway?
5 – Who are all these enemies you’re fighting anyway?
4 – What inspired Dicey Dungeons?
3 – What’s it like working with a team?
2 – Have you ever made a game like this before?
1 – Launch day

Today’s question:

Dicey Dungeons started as a game jam game for last year’s 7 day roguelike. I had a pretty simple ambition: I wanted to make a “dreamquestlike”.

I’d been replaying Dream Quest a lot at the time after rediscovering it again, and I was really interested in trying to make something small and different that was a bit like it, but with my own spin on it. I figured it’d just be a tiny 7 day thing, so I didn’t think about it much more than that. I tried using dice instead of cards, just as a random prompt to give me something different to do with the genre, and gosh, it turns out, that was a rabbit-hole that I’m still exploring.

So, Dream Quest! Let me tell you about DREAM QUEST.

Dream Quest is one of my all-time favourite video games, ever. I, uh, may have mentioned this a few times.

Okay, so it looks a bit wonky, I get it. And actually, it plays a bit wonky too. At times, it feels ridiculously unfair and unbalanced! That’s actually a huge part of what I find so refreshing about it.

For me, there’s sort of a galaxy brain meme thing going on with this game – from first impressions to second impressions to still playing it five years later impressions, I feel like I’m always finding something new in it. Dream Quest challenged the way I think about game design, and gave me with a whole new paradigm for thinking about what I actually find fun in what I play, and what a good game “is” for me. I can’t think of another game off-hand that’s had more impact on how I think about what I do.

The closest experience I’ve had to this is discovering pop music in my 20s. As a moody teenager, I’d always been super into rock music and metal and dance music and things like that, and low-key dismissive about pop music. I used to really care about certain concepts that I thought were important: “authenticity”, “auteurism”, that sorta nonsense. Letting go of that? It opens up this whole new dimension of ways to care about music.

What I’m trying to say here is: Dream Quest is the Girls Aloud of videogames.

The thing I love about Dream Quest is that it’s WAY more interested in letting you find cool combos and discover things, and in letting wild and astonishing things happen, than in being fair, or in being neatly designed. It recognises that it’s more fun to understand and master the mechanics of its systems, to learn how to unbalance and break it, than it is to try and balance everything so that it feels broadly the same every time.

I love that Dream Quest just has playstyles and strategies that are clearly better than others. That is has the guts to be so unbalanced! It’s clearly deliberate – it presents you with different choices, all of which sort of work, but some of which really work once you learn the ropes. It also has other choices, which don’t work nearly as well, but if you know what you’re doing you can make them work anyway.

I think this demonstrates a huge amount of respect for the player, and leaves breathing room for them to set their own goals and explore this little universe, in the same way the designer did. It makes the game feel wild and free and playful and open. More than anything else, this is what I loved about Dream Quest, and what I wanted to explore with my own work.

Dream Quest, of course, isn’t my only inspiration for this game – it’s also influenced by gameshows, by the many RPGs I played as a kid, by Undertale, by Adventure Time, probably loads of other stuff that I haven’t even consciously realised yet. If you ask other members of the team they’ll have their own answers for what inspirations they brought to the project too.

I’m a big believer in talking openly about what’s inspired me, and I think more people should do it! Everything anyone *ever* makes is inspired by what’s in their head – what they’ve played or read or encountered or thought a lot about. Creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum – everything is a remix! You start with the ideas you love and obsess about, and go from there to make something that’s uniquely your own.