Dice Dice Baby

Hey! It’s been a while! Time for a quick news update:


Dicey Dungeons is in Beta
(“Me and the boys going to fight Lady Luck” by mellodillo)

Since the alpha ended, I’ve been busier than ever before. Actually, I’m back doing weekly builds, like I was at the very start of the project! But this time, for a small beta testing group – we’re at beta v0.6 and counting.

Just this week, I’ve finished up the last Parallel Universe episode. Parallel Universe episodes are a game mode where all the status effects do different things, and all the equipment you find is different. They’re easily my favourite part of the game now – the episodes double the amount of equipment in the game, and contain some of my favourite items of all. I’m incredibly proud of these episodes – I seriously can’t wait to share all this new stuff when the game finally launches.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but here are some screenshots of the new episodes:


(click to view)


(click to view)


(click to view)


We were at E3!

A few weeks back, Marlowe and Niamh went to LA to show the game at E3, as part of indiecade’s showcase!

It sounds like it went great! We got a couple of really nice writeups about it (like this one, on hardcoregamer!), and showed the game to lots of new people. This is the very last show we’re planning to do now before launch.


So when’s the game coming out, Terry?

Summer 2019! Yes, in the northern hemisphere! We’re really close now. I can’t wait to share it with everyone <3

If you haven’t already, just a reminder that you can wishlist us on steam or sign up to my mailing list, and you’ll get a reminder when the game comes out!

5 Comments

Let the good times roll

Hey hey! Let’s check in on the latest Dicey Dungeons news!


The alpha is ending real soon

Hey hey hey, listen!

In case you missed it: we’re ending the alpha in a few days! Starting monday, the game will no longer be on sale (until we launch officially later this summer). This is your last chance if you wanna get in early!

If you’ve already picked up the alpha version on itch: thank you so much! I think Dicey Dungeons is by far the best game I’ve ever made, and this whole open development thing has been a big part of that. I hope you’ve enjoyed playing, and enjoyed seeing the game come together one version at a time!


The final alpha version is out now
(drawing by mike // echinodillo)

The final alpha, v0.17, features a big new Warrior episode, Parallel Universe, as well as new updated hard modes, new enemies, and lots of big art improvements. I also uploaded a small bug fix update last night, to v0.17.2, which cleans up a few rough edges and fixes a few bugs.

(If you own the game on itch, you’ll continue to be able to download and play it, even when the game is removed from sale on Monday!)


We’re in Indiecade!

I am super proud to say that the game’s gonna be part of this year’s Indiecade E3 showcase! If you’re at the show, come say hi at the Indiecade booth!

This is the very last show we’re gonna do before the game launches, gosh. Nearly there now.

0 Comments

AGALLAMH: Terry Cavanagh – forbróir cluichí ríomhaireachta Gaeilge

Recently, I talked to nos.ie, in Irish, about Dicey Dungeons and its Irish translation by Ríomhacadamh! For anyone who’s interested, here’s the interview in English – (thanks to Mícheál Ó Meachair for all of his help with this!)

Bhí an t-ádh liom labhairt leis an bhforbróir ríomhchluicí Terry Cavanagh le déanaí. Bhí Terry ar a bhealach go San Francisco agus sinn ag caint ar líne toisc gur ainmníodh a chluiche nua Dicey Dungeons do ghradam dearaidh Independent Games Festival an domhain.

I was very lucky to have the opportunity to speak to the games developer Terry Cavanagh lately. Terry was on his way to San Francisco while we were talking because his new game Dicey Dungeons was nominated for a design award at the global Independent Games Festival.

Bhíomar ag caint le chéile mar gheall ar an gcluiche céanna toisc gur seoladh leagan Gaeilge de Dicey Dungeon ag tús mhí an Mhárta, ach ní bhí neart rudaí spéisiúla eile le rá ag Terry.

We discussed this very game because an Irish-language version of Dicey Dungeons was released at the beginning of March, and Terry had loads of other interesting things to share with us too.

NOS.IE: Conas atá agat, Terry. Ar dtús báire, ar fhaitíos nach bhfuil aithne ag léitheoir éigin ort, cé chomh fada atá tú forbairt ríomhchluichí agus cén sórt ríomhchluichí a chruthaíonn tú?

How’s it going, Terry. First of all, in case any of the readers don’t know you yet, how long have you been developing games and what sort of games do you make?

    TERRY: Tá spéis agam i bhforbairt cluichí le fada fada ach is 10 mbliana ó shin, nó mar sin, a bheartaíos triail a bhaint as cluichí a fhorbairt go profisiúnta. Jab a dhéanamh den spéis. Bím ag obair ar an-chuid rudaí beaga de ghnáth dáiríre. Is é sin, gur maith liom cluichí íosta a bhfuil coincheap láidir iontu a chruthú. Anois is arís, déanaim rud éigin níos mó as na hiarrachtaí beaga nuair atá cuma na maitheasa orthu.

    Tá an-chuid cluichí foilsithe agam ach is iad an dhá chluiche tráchtála a d’fhoilsíos ná VVVVVV, ar litir ghrá é do na cluichí a d’imríos agus mé ag fás aníos, agus Super Hexagon, cluiche sciobtha íosta agus lán le haicsean atá AN-dheacair!

    I’ve always been interested in making games, but about 10 years ago, I decided to have a go at doing it professionally! I tend to work on lots of different small things – I like minimal, concept driven games. Sometimes, I try making something bigger out of the ones that seem most promising.

    My two commercial games so far are VVVVVV, which is kind of a love letter to the games I grew up playing, and Super Hexagon, a fast paced, hard as hell, minimal action game.

NOS.IE: Ar fheabhas! Agus cén sórt cluiche a d’imir tú agus tú ag fás aníos? Cé acu ab fhearr leat?

Excellent! And what sort of games did you play when you were growing up? What was your favourite?

    TERRY: An-chuid rudaí éagsúla! Bhíodh Commodore 64 again sa mbaile nuair a bhíos óg. D’imreoinn na cluichí téipe a mbíodh greamaithe le clúdach Commodore Format arís agus arís agus arís eile! Dá bharr seo, d’fhéadfá rá gur chaitheas an-chuid de m’óige ag imirt cluichí aisteacha mar seo a cruthaíodh ar bhuiséad beag. Ceann acu a ritheann liom anois agus sinn ag caint ná an cluiche tiomána seo ina raibh ort carranna eile a sheachaint agus cloí le rialacha an bhóthair! Ní cuimhin liom cén t-ainm atá air, ach bhí sé thar barr!

    Lots of different things! We had a Commodore 64 at home when I was very young, and I used to play the games on the monthly Commodore Format covertapes over and over again. That basically meant that most of the games I played growing up were these kind of weird budget platformers. The one that springs to mind right now that I remember really liking was this driving game where you literally just had to dodge other cards and obey the rules of the road – I forget what it was called.

NOS.IE: Is é Dicey Dungeons an cluiche is déanaí uait, agus tá sé ar fáil as Gaeilge. Abair, cén sórt cluiche é Dicey Dungeons?

Dicey Dungeons is your latest game, and it’s available in Irish. Tell us, what kind of game is Dicey Dungeons?

    TERRY: Is cluiche ról-imeartha é Dicey Dungeons, cineál cosúil le Pokémon nó Final Fantasy. Roghnaítear ceann den sé charachtar, arrachtaí troda, agus téann tú sa tóir ar sheoda éagsúla a dheinfeas níos láidre agus níos láidre thú! Tá na haoinne den seisear carachtar ag imirt le mian a gcroí a fháil; áit ar sheó cluichí leis an mbandia Lady Luck.

    Tá an cluiche sciobtha spraíúil agus cé go bhfuil sé éasca ar dtús, tá doimhneacht leis na meicnicí bunúsacha a chuireann an-éagsúlacht leis an imirt. Caithfear gach carachtar a imirt ar bhealach iomlán éagsúil le go n-éireoidh leat, mar shampla. Cruthaíodh an cluiche ar phionsabal sách bunúsach, is é sin tús simplí agus an-chuid féidearthachtaí éagsúla ag fás as an tús sin.

    So, Dicey Dungeons is a roleplaying game, a bit like Pokemon or Final Fantasy! You pick from one of six characters and explore a dungeon, fighting monsters, finding treasure and getting more and more powerful! Each of the six characters is playing to win their hearts desire on a game show hosted by the goddess Lady Luck.

    The game’s fast, fun, and easy to get into, but below the surface there’s a huge amount of variety and depth to the basic mechanics – each character plays the same game in radically different ways. The game’s all about taking a really basic premise, and going in as many different directions as possible.

NOS.IE: Is breá liom sin – Simplíocht agus doimhneacht leis! Ar lean tú cur chuige nua le Dicey Dungeons, nó an bhfuil sé cosúil leis na cluichí eile a d’fhoilsigh tú?

I love that about it – simplicity and depth too! Did you take a new approach when developing Dicey Dungeons, or is it similar to the other games you’ve released?

    TERRY: Tá sé sách éagsúil leis an ndá cluiche tráchtála eile uaim. Bhí spéis agam riamh sna RPGs ach ní dóigh liom gur éirigh le m’iarrachtaí eile roimhe seo dáiríre. D’fhéadfá rá go bhfuil breis agus scór samhail RPG cruthaithe agam le himeacht na mblianta, ach ní rabhas sásta leo. Cé nár sheolas cluiche mar seo cheana, táim ag spraoi leis an smaoineamh agus leis na meicnicí le fada.

    It’s pretty different from my other two commercial games. RPGs like this are something I’ve always been very interested in, but until now, my attempts to make one have never worked out. I must have made dozens and dozens of half-working RPG prototypes over the years. Although I’ve not released any games like this before, I’ve been playing around with these mechanics for a very long time.

NOS.IE: Dochreidte! Tá tú á fhorbairt le fada, ar bhealach. Tuigim gur comhtharlúint atá ann gur sheol tú Dicey Dungeons as Gaeilge thart ar thréimhse Sheacthain na Gaeilge, comhtharlúint iontach dála scéil, ach abair linn canathaobh gur roghnaigh tú Dicey Dungeons a logánú don Ghaeilge?

Unreal! In a sense, you’re developing it a long time, then. I know it was a coincidence that Dicey Dungeons was launched in Irish around the Seachtain na Gaeilge period, a fantastic coincidence by the way, but tell us why you decided to localize Dicey Dungeons into Irish.

    TERRY: Bhí sé i gceist agam rud éigin mar seo a dhéanamh le fada. Níl mo chuidse Gaeilge go maith in aon chur – níor chuireas aon spéis inti ar scoil agus níl mórán agam anois dá bharr. Ach caithfidh mé rá go gcruirim an-spéis in aistriúchán profisiúnta cluichí toisc go gceapaim go ndéanfaidh sé difear don teanga. Dá mbeadh cluichí a thaitin liom ar fáil as Gaeilge agus mé i mo dhéagóir, cuirim i gcás, measaim go gcabhródh sé go mór liom féin an teanga a fhoghlaim agus a úsáid.

    It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. My own Irish is pretty terrible – I didn’t take much of an interest in it in secondary school, and I don’t have much of it now. But I’m really interested in getting my games translated to Irish professionally because I think having this kinda thing available in Irish can make a difference. I know when I was a teenager, if games that I liked were available in Irish, I think I might have taken more of an interest.

NOS.IE: Aontaím go hiomlán leat. Bhí áthas an domhain orm nuair a chuala mé go raibh tú ag obair linn sa Ríomhacadamh ar logánú do chluichí. Labhair Kevin Scannell i gCaisleán Bhaile Átha Cliath cúpla bliain ó shin faoi sprioc a bhí aige bunchruach ríomhaireachta iomlán Gaelach a bheith ar fáil don phobal. Tá sé ag obair air seo le fada dar ndóigh, ach bhunaíomar an Ríomhacadamh tamall gairid ina dhiaidh na cainte seo leis na hiarrachtaí logánaithe ar fad a thabhairt le chéile agus is é logánú cluichí an chéad chéim eile sa phróiseas seo measaim. Measaim go dtagann ár bplean leis an méid atá á rá agatsa ansin.

Agus léitheoirí Nós ag imirt do chluichí amach anseo, cén chomhairle a gcuirfeá orthu lena gcuid cluichí féin a fhorbairt?

I totally agree with you. I was over the moon when I heard that you wanted to work with us at An Ríomhacadamh on this localization. Kevin Scannell spoke in Dublin Castle a few years ago about his goal to provide a complete base-stack for computing in Irish. Of course he has been working on this for a while now, but it wasn’t long after this talk that we established An Ríomhacadamh in order to centralize these localization efforts and I believe localizing games is the next step in this process. That’s basically why I think our plan agrees with what you’re saying.

Anyway, after Nós’s readers playing your games in future, is there any advice you’d give them if they wanted to develop their own games?

    TERRY: Is tús maith tús beag! Ní gá go mbeadh gach cluiche ollmhór agus casta cosúil leis na cluichí a dhéanann na stiúideonna. Is féidir leo bheith beag bídeach, pearsanta, greannmhar, agus éadrom. Cosúil le píosa ceoil nó píosa scríbhneoireachta, nó aon sórt léiriú cruthaitheach.

    Ní gá duit a bheith i do ríomhchláraí ach oiread. Tá an t-uafás uirlisí ann anois le cluiche beag a chruthú san aon tráthnóna amháin agus na bunscileanna cruthaitheacha a fhoghlaim. Molaim féin Twine, Bitsy agus Puzzlescript mar phointí tosnaithe cuardaigh.

    Rud eile a luafainn ná Game Jams, ócáidí dhá nó trí lá ag a ndéantar cluichí beaga gioblacha. Is bealach iontach iad preab a chur le do chuid foghlama, mholfainn go mór iad. Cuardaigh “Ludum Dare”, sin ceann na samplaí is clúití rathúla díbh.

    Start small! Games don’t have to be huge, involved things made by big studios – they can by tiny, and personal, and funny, and slight, just like music or writing or anything other form of creative expression.

    You don’t necessarily need to learn to program, either! There are loads of great tools for making tiny games in an afternoon and learning the basics. I recommend searching for Twine, Bitsy, and Puzzlescript as good starting points.

    Finally, Game Jams, which are short 2-3 day events where people make quick, scrappy games, are a great way to jump in and get started, and I’d recommend them to anyone who’s curious. Search for “Ludum Dare”, which is one of the big ones.

NOS.IE: Ar fheabhas! Bainfidh mé féin triail as sin! Is tusa an saineolaí sa réimse seo, ar mhaith leat aon rud a chur leis an méid atá pléite againn?

Excellent! I’ll try that myself! You’re the expert here, is there anything else you’d like to add to what we’ve discussed so far?

    TERRY: Cinnte, cúpla rud faoi Dicey Dungeons agus an ceangal idir é agus Éirinn. Seans go gcuirfeadh daoine spéis sna Finscéalta agus sna Miotais a cuireadh le Dicey Dungeons. Is í Scáthach duine de na basanna, agus is í Aoife duine eile acu. Nuair a bhíos níos óige d’imríos an-chuid RPGs, an-chuid cinn Sheapánacha, agus caithfidh mé rá gur fhoghlaim mé an-chuid faoin tSeapáin uathu agus an oiread sin tagairtí iontu do mhiotais na Seapáine. Ní insítear scéal mór fada sna cluichí seo ná gar leis, agus a scéalta comhaimseartha féin sna cluichí, ach déantar tagairt do na miotais iontu agus bíonn siad ina dtúsphointí nó ina mbunús do scéalta na gcluichí. Go bunúsach, is cuid de dhomhan na ríomhchluichí na finscéalta agus na miotais, agus is breá liomsa sin!

    Mar Éireannach ag cruthú RPG, bhíos i gcónaí ag iarraidh tagairtí do scéalta m’óige agus m’oidhreachta féin a chur le RPG. Ba bhreá liom é dá gcuirfeadh daoine spéis sna scéalta faoi Scáthach agus Aoife tar éis Dicey Dungeons a imirt, agus go n-aimseofaí scéal Thochmharc Eimhire na Rúraíochta dá bharr sin nó scéalta eile mar é má thuigeann tú mé!

    An rud deireanacha a déarfaidh mé na go mba bhreá liom ceann de na scéalta seo a ath-insint trí ríomhchluiche lá éigin.

    So, a thing that might be of interest to Irish audiences: the game lightly touches on Irish myths and legends in several places – one of the bosses is Scáthach, and another is Aoife. When I was younger, I played a lot of RPGs, many of them Japanese, and I came away with this kind of background understanding of Japanese mythology, because these games were so full of references to those old stories. Those games don’t have a huge, deep retelling of these myths or anything, that’s not what they’re going for – but they name drop, make reference, have it in the background. They’re just kind of part of the universe, and I think that’s great.

    As an Irishman making an RPG, something I always wanted to do when making an RPG of my own to fill it with allusions to the stories of my own childhood. I would love it if people came away from playing this game wondering who Scáthach and Aoife are, and ended up discovering Tochmarc Emire.

    Someday I’d love to do a real retelling of one of these stories as a videogame.

NOS.IE: An-spéisiúil – d’imreoinn an cluiche sin agus imreoidh mé féin Dicey Dungeons! Go raibh míle maith agat as labhairt liom faoi seo, slán tamall!

Very interesting – I’d play that game and I’ll be playing Dicey Dungeons! Thanks a million for speaking to me about all this. Chat to you later!

    TERRY: GRM, slán tamall!

    Thx, cya!

Is féidir Dicey Dungeons a íoslódáil anseo: https://terrycavanagh.itch.io/dicey-dungeonshttps://store.steampowered.com/app/861540/Dicey_Dungeons/. Faoi mar a dheintear le cluichí indy an t-am ar fad, tá lascaine ar fáil dóibh siúd a cheannaíonn leagan den chluiche go luath! Tapaigh an deis go tapa!

Dicey Dungeons can be downloaded here: https://terrycavanagh.itch.io/dicey-dungeons or https://store.steampowered.com/app/861540/Dicey_Dungeons/. As is the way with Indie Games a lot of the time, if you buy an early version of the game you can get it at a discount! Don’t hesitate to take advantage of this opportunity!

0 Comments

The Dice are Cast

Hey hey! Time for another Dicey news post. What’s been happening lately?


Hey, we’re on twitter

Did you know we had a twitter account? I made it ages ago and kinda forgot about it for a while, but recently Niamh, Marlowe and I have all been making more of an effort to actually use it and post interesting stuff about the game and what we’re working on. Check it out here if you’re interested!


Dicey Dungeons world tour

If you’re wondering what’s taking so long with v0.17, it’s mostly this: We went on tour! We showed the game at three shows in a row, back to back – GDC, PAX East, and then EGX Rezzed in London, trying to tell everyone we could about our little dice game.

(People warned me that PAX East was the big one and YIKES they weren’t kidding. It was great, though!)

I kinda enjoyed doing the whole convention thing a lot more than I expected to, tbh – but it’s pretty draining. It took me a week or so to really get back to feeling normal afterwards. I feel super proud of our little team for managing to pull this world tour thing off, though.


There are mods for Dicey Dungeons now

Since v0.16 rolled around, Dicey Dungeons modding has started to take off in a big way! I’d like to bring your attention to two in particular:

More Fluff by Jackeea: Adds more than 100+ new pieces of equipment into the existing episodes of the game!

Megaquest by TheMysticSword: Adds 11 new quests to the game!

Both of these are a work in progress, but they’re already super fun! Go check em out!


Let’s play Dicey Dungeons

Since I last did a news update, Dicey Dungeons has really taken off on youtube and twitch! I watch a lot of videos of the game, and in particular I’d like to highlight the following people who’ve been doing great series lately:

Angory Tom has posted more than a dozen videos of the game now, including recently some videos of some of the stranger episodes like You Choose, You Lose and The Inevitability of Rust. His videos are tightly edited and great to watch – I particularly loved the Witch run from the embedded video above!

Retromation’s amazing series is at 46 videos and counting – including multiple attempts at some of the really hard episodes, like Classic Hard Mode Robot. I particularly liked this recent attempt at Expect the Unexpected – but then, I just love it when people play Witch. She’s the best character both to play as, and to watch.

I’ve also been enjoying Olexa’s series on the game, now 17 episodes in. Olexa is pretty great at narrating what he’s thinking, and as a maybe slightly less hardcore player, he’s pretty fun to watch and cheer for!


We’re working on v0.17, and the final version

I’ve mentioned this in the notes for the last update – but the next alpha will also be the *last* alpha. There won’t be a v0.18 – this is it. After v0.17, the next version is gonna be v1.0, and we’re finally gonna launch this thing for real. It’s pretty exciting!

I hadn’t planned to make the next alpha a big one – mostly I wanted it to be a “stable”, reliable build. Still, it seems like I couldn’t help myself – there is a bunch of exciting new stuff coming soon, including redesigned hard modes, more episodes, and a bunch of new music and art. That hopefully should be ready sometime in the next few weeks!

After that: we just have to finish the game. It’s so close now!


The alpha is coming to an end

I usually end these news posts with a boilerplate reminder that you can wishlist us on steam (you can, right here!), or buy the alpha at a discount on itch.io (right here!), but I have one extra thing to say this time: the alpha won’t be around forever. Sometime shortly after v0.17, we’ll be bringing the alpha to an end, and focusing all of our energy on having a big big launch. If you’ve already gotten it on itch, you’ll still be able to play, of course, but after the alpha ends, it won’t be on sale for a while.

I think the game’s an absolute bargain right now at $7.50, so if you haven’t already, grab it while you still can!

0 Comments

Design Diary: The v0.16 Enemy Audit

Way back in v0.9 of Dicey Dungeons (last June!), I shared something I wrote up – an audit of every enemy in the game – what was working, what wasn’t, and my plans to fix them. I shared that on pastebin here for the dicecord, which you can read if you like!

For v0.16, I figured I was due a fresh look at all of the enemies again, so I did another audit. I figured I’d share it too. (Warning: a very, very long post ahead, with detailed familiarity with Dicey Dungeons assumed from the get go.)

This time, I had a slightly different focus:

  • I wanted to try tuning the game a little harder.
  • I wanted to try a first draft at a new system – Super Enemies.

Really happy with how the new enemy designs in v0.16 are going down – for the most part, enemies have gotten harder, and more interesting to fight as a result. Also, Super Enemies – rare encounters where an enemy appears one level higher than normal, with remixed equipment – are working out great (though will probably need another iteration or two).

Things that I didn’t change this time around: Old “Hard” Enemies (enemies with upgraded equipment – this mode is getting changed, so not a priority), and elemental resistances (I’m currently playing around with a new, simpler “type” system).

Ok! Let’s jump in!

Level 1


FROG
  • Level 1, 2 dice, 10 hp
  • Good Turn: 8 damage, 3 shield
  • Bad Turn: 3 damage, 1 shield

What’s Good:

Probably the hardest level 1 enemy – even if it rolls two 1s, it’s gonna do 3 damage at least. And it can hit pretty hard with that broadsword when it gets lucky.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

So, with only 24 HP now when starting out, a Frog can theoretically kill the player in three moves, which isn’t ideal. Let’s slightly reduce the HP of the enemy to make that a little less likely. The shield helps protect them health wise, anyway, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Though, in general I think I want level 1 enemies to hit a bit harder, so I’m not too worried about the power level here. This is a nice, simple, scary enemy.

Actions:

Reduce HP to 9.

Super variant:

Let’s try a two handed sword instead of the broadsword! An extra dice too, to make that extra slot work.



GARDENER
  • Level 1, 2 dice, 12 hp
  • Good Turn: 6 damage + weaken
  • Bad Turn: 1 damage

What’s Good:

Has a single shovel, and two dice. Shovels weaken if you use a six on it! Gardener has come along way since they were the “builder”, with two bumps. The simplification has helped a lot, and I think this ended up being a very good enemy.

I really like this enemy as an introduction to the weaken status – it can do six damage, which is, I think, the minimum amount level 1 enemies should do with the new level up pacing.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Eh, it’s fine. No changes needed here.

Actions:

Nothing.

Super variant:

Hard Gardener was one of those cases where it made no sense – upgraded shovel just got smaller. I think Super Gardener needs to hit harder, and do more status effects. Hmm. So, I could give them an Echo Blast (in addition to the Shovel)? With that one change, they could do 11 damage per turn and three weaken on a good turn, or, more usually, do two weaken. But that’s *maybe* a little rough, to have so much status on a level 2 enemy. Two shovels is interesting too, as extra raw damage – and it’s a simpler change with less status impact.

Yeah, ok, let’s try that. Also, an extra dice. I am a little worried that too many of the “super” enemies will just amount to duplicating equipment, but let’s take it one enemy at a time and see what happens.



HOTHEAD
  • Level 1, 2 dice, 14 hp
  • Good Turn: 6 damage + burn
  • Bad Turn: Has a 25% chance to do *nothing*.

What’s Good:

Hmm, I like the design of hothead, and in general I like level 1 enemies to have a single piece of equipment, but”¦

What’s bad, and how to fix:

But it’s not ideal to have enemies that *often* do nothing. With two dice, that’s only 25% of the time, but still. His best case scenario is rolling a 6. It’s tempting to come up with a new piece of equipment that evens this out, but I think it’s ok.

Yeah, I don’t think I want to give them more equipment, or complicate fireball. So I’m left with considering something new. Whip? Maybe, but then they become very similar to Gardener – and also, I think I’d want them to inflict burn more or less every turn. I’m almost tempted to just make fireball unrestricted.

Actions:

I think, leave them as is for now.

Super variant:

Ok, well, HERE I think I can give them more equipment.

They could use the new Jester attack, Flame Blast, perhaps? In which case, they’d need some more firepower. Nah, that amounts to too much “stuff”.

Giving them a bump insures they can always use fireball, but that’s not enough of a buff to make them scary enough to be a super enemy.

Ohh. How about inferno? It’s two raw dice damage, and ensures a burn. It’s a nice upgrade! An extra dice would be needed to prevent shock locking, though.



MAGICIAN
  • Level 1, 1 dice, 9 hp
  • Good Turn: 5 damage
  • Bad Turn: 3 shield

What’s Good:

This one’s great – the even/odd thing leaves them feeling very different from other level 1 enemies, they can do decent damage (5 per turn, 50% of the time). Having two equipment with 1 dice make shocking them interesting – you force them to use “the other thing” – essentially making it so that they have a 50% chance to do nothing.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

They’re a little weak, but that’s probably ok. They are level 1, after all! 9 hp does feel low, but since they can shield, it’s probably best kept that way.

Actions:

Nothing.

Super variant:

Since Magician is like a “trainee” Witch, it seems appropriate to give them four spells and two dice. Another Magic Missile and Infliction means that they can do between 10 damage or 3 damage + 3 shield, which works. It’s also different feeling enough from Sorceress with her Hex.



ROBOBOT
  • Level 1, 2 dice, 16 hp
  • Good Turn: 4 damage.
  • Bad Turn: Nothing!

What’s Good:

Robobot is a much stronger theme than the old one, Goblin – so, progress there!

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Probably the worst enemy in the game! In the last audit, I defended the simplicity of this enemy – it adds texture to have a few simple enemies in the mix – but I’m not finding that very convincing right now. As time’s gone by, each enemy in Dicey Dungeons has really honed on their own “thing”, which I love. Robobot, by comparison, has no real mechanical identity.

Having 16 health at level 1 is much higher than normal, and is part of what’s meant to be distinguishing – but I think it basically doesn’t work. They’re just kind of a slog.

I think this enemy needs a complete rethink, so I might just remove them completely until I can think up something new and interesting for them to do.

Actions:

Robobot needs to go on holiday!

Super variant:

Wait until you’ve got a new design ready for them.



SLIME
  • Level 1, 2 dice, 14 hp
  • Good Turn: +3 poison
  • Bad Turn: Nothing

What’s Good:

Incredible art design. Look at that little slimey guy, hanging out in a wafer! So cute. Also, hey, a level one poison enemy, great!

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Slime *should* be pretty scary, right. Why aren’t they? Because 25% of the time they don’t do anything, and they’re dead too quick for the poison they inflict to have much impact. Even in a best case scenario, they essentially do 4 damage on turn 1, 7 on turn 2, 10 on turn 3… but they never get to turn three, usually. Compare with the Frog, who will do at least 3 damage on turn 1, but CAN do 8, which Slime can’t reach even in a best case until turn three.

Hmm. The other issue with poison stuff in general is that all these basic items are super similar:

  • Poison Spell – Needs 4, +4 poison (upgraded: +5 poison)
  • Poison Dart – Needs 2, +2 poison (upgraded: works on EVEN dice)
  • Toxic Ooze – MAX 4, +d6 poison (upgraded: works on MAX 5)
  • Poison Slingshot – Needs Doubles, +3 poison (upgraded: Countdown of 10)
  • Claw – MAX 3, Sword damage +2 poison (Upgraded: works on MAX 4)
  • Acid Arrow – EVEN, +2 poison (upgraded: works on any slot)
  • Liquorice – Double size, countdown of 3, +2 poison (upgraded: +3 poison)

Yeah – there are definitely too many *similar* poison attacks. There are other poison equipments that break the mould a bit, though:

  • Poison Needle – MAX 2, +1 poison, Reusable x3 (Upgraded: Reusable x5)
  • Poison Cloud – Needs Doubles, +3 poison to everyone (upgraded: +4 poison)

Poison cloud I’d actually totally forgotten about! It used to the be the Guardian skill, back when the Guardian was a thing. I actually quite like that as an attack for a level 1 enemy! They poison you a bunch, but also themselves, which will kill them? Hmm. Nah, it’s just too awkward to have enemies that kill themselves, and I don’t want to reintroduce immunities into the game.

Toxic Ooze was meant as a slightly overpowered poison attack that would be enemy only, but it made it’s way into the player pool at some point, confusingly.

Let’s try to distinguish it a bit. We want it to do more consistent damage, and also build poison up. Why not make it an “on six” equipment?

Yeah, I like that! We’ll make it size 2 to compensate it a bit, but also, let’s maybe take another look at the generators and clean some of this stuff up.

Actions:

  • Change Toxic Ooze to be a size two physical attack that inflicts +2 poison on a six. Like a big claw with less reliable poison output!
  • Remove Poison Dart. Poison Spell still works, as a hard to use/good payout type equipment.
  • Poison Slingshot is a little odd too. Revisit that one when we’re looking at Dyrad.
  • Acid arrow and Liquorice are kind of player specific ones that are balanced around those characters, so maybe they can just stay.

Super variant:

Two toxic oozes plus an extra dice is a little predicable, but would definitely work. Let’s try it!



SPACE MARINE
  • Level 1, 3 dice, 14 hp
  • Good Turn: 10 damage!
  • Bad Turn: Nothing

What’s Good:

Basically perfect. Like I said last audit, the big countdown is a great tutorial thing, and although ten damage seems scary, it’s actually no big deal – you can survive three hits from the space marine when at full health. Ended up using this guy as the very first enemy in the tutorial!

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Nothing, they’re great.

Actions:

Don’t change a thing.

Super variant:

Give em a bunch of extra dice so they can get that countdown off almost every turn, bwahahaha.



VACUUM
  • Level 1, 1 dice, 12 hp
  • Good Turn: Drain 4 life
  • Bad Turn: Nothing

What’s Good:

An enemy with life drain is a really nice thing to have in the level 1 mix! Also, has some nice level 1 properties – a single dice, a single piece of equipment, a simple concept…

What’s bad, and how to fix:

But it’s another enemy who can have nothing happen on bad rolls. Also, Vacuum has this thing, especially with characters who start out weak, of just exchanging blows back and forth until finally your luck outpaces theirs, which just feels really bad, you know?

So, one idea I had here is to do exactly what I’ve done for Slime, and give it a new “on six do X” equipment. That does solve this problem – more consistent damage output, and less healing (since the healing would only trigger on a six). But… I don’t want to overdo that one particular thing, and implementing that here would mean three level 1 enemies work that way. So maybe something else is a better fit.

I’m not sure. Let’s take the out for a while until I can think of something better here.

Actions:

  • Implement a life steal weapon that triggers on a six (Separately to this enemy)
  • Temporarily remove until you can figure out a better design.

Super variant:

Wait until you’ve got a new design ready for them.



WOLF PUPPY
  • Level 1, 4 dice, 12 hp
  • Good Turn: 2 damage and a shock
  • Bad Turn: Nothing

What’s Good:

Hmm. Wolf Puppy needs work.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Yikes, Wolf Puppy is seriously underpowered! A best case scenario has them roll doubles and an even and still only do two damage and a shock? Poor thing.

It sorta doesn’t make sense for Wolf Puppy to shock. It’s only the case that they do this because Shock *used* to be “Stun”, but that hasn’t been the case for a while. So let’s ditch the shock aspect of the enemy completely.

What should an attack called “Woof Woof Woof” do, then? It used to drop shields, going back even further, but that’s not really an important thing in Dicey Dungeons anymore. It’s too early in the game for curse – Maybe some kind of blessing?

Oh! What about Fury?

Yeah, that works! It’s the warrior limit break, so it’s not exactly obscure anymore – and the AI should be (or, at least, aspirationally WILL BE) good enough to handle enemies with Fury. It also makes more sense for a dog enemy.

Not thrilled about having four dice on a level 1 enemy, while we’re on Woof Woof Woof – (doubles need more dice to work, which is how I ended up with that). On the other hand, Fury should probably not be attached to cards that make it too cheap. Maybe let’s leave it for this iteration.

The bite could probably do a lot more damage too. If the Frog can do 8 on a good turn, maybe the Wolf Puppy can too? Let’s give the little guy 4 damage per bite.

Actions:

  • Change Woof Woof Woof to Fury instead of Shock
  • Increase Wolf Puppy Bite from 2 to 4.

Super variant:

I think all that needs to change here is more damage – so, let’s just replace wolf puppy bite with… hmm…

Bear Maul 😀

Uff, that’s potentially 16 damage per turn though, which is maybe too hard, as much as I like that joke.

An extra Wolf Puppy Bite changes the basic damage from 8 to 12, but only on a very good roll. Still, it’s more in line with what you’d expect from an enemy at that level.

Level 1 Summary

So, an overview of the level 1 changes:

  • FROG: Reduce HP from 10 to 9.
  • SLIME: Change Toxic Ooze to be a size two physical attack that inflicts +2 poison on a six.
  • WOLF PUPPY: Change Woof Woof Woof to Fury instead of Shock. Increase Wolf Puppy Bite from 2 to 4.
  • ROBOBOT and VACUUM: Temporarily remove and reconsider.

I was worried that some of these changes were a bit too dramatic, but looking at a summary, if anything I’ve been too cautious. Slime and Wolf Puppy were badly in need of buffs, this just brings them up to the level of the rest of the level 1 enemies (maybe a bit higher, but that’s ok). Let’s try these changes out and see how they feel.

Level 2


DRYAD
  • Level 2, 26 hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: 3 poison + 5 damage
  • Bad Turn: Nothing (but with four dice, it’s very unlikely that she won’t at least do 5 damage with magic missile)

What’s Good:

Hmm. I mean, the enemy *does* work. She’s not broken, in any meaningful way. But.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Ok, obvious things first: The four dice thing is weird – it’s literally just because poison slingshot needs doubles, so less than four dice makes using it too rare. But four dice on a level 2 enemy is really excessive.

It seems like I ended up in a weird place with this enemy? They used to be “Assassin”, which was a kind of combination enemy with magic missile, a sword and the poison slingshot. Gameplay wise that works, but the theme felt a bit weak. When Marlowe designed the Dyrad idea, I simplified the enemy, but now they’re – poison slingshot and magic missile? Uh, ok! But it’s a weird combination.

Is there an opportunity here for a completely new idea that fits better with the character?

Ok, you’re stuck with the slingshot, it’s literally in the animation. But you’re not stuck with poison, which maybe feels like a strange fit.

As a tree creature, perhaps something earth themed would fit better? Weaken is a very interesting status effect *to inflict on the player* more than the other way around, so I think it’d be ok if she became earth themed. A slingshot feels like it should be reusable, somehow, since it’s a “light-thiefy” weapon like a dagger. What if we made an earth version of Matchstick or Nightstick?

Ah, I dunno, that doesn’t feel right. I think I want attacks that feel more “woodland creature”.

Some kind of health drain? Hmm, maybe.

Pokemon had grass types do “paralyze” attacks – spores, etc. Dicey Dungeons doesn’t really have a version of that which fits the theme, though. (lock? shock? hmm)

Dungeons and Dragons has Dryads that use charm, teleport between trees and, uh, equip clubs, for some reason. Also, magic, which is where I ended up too.

Ok, I think I’m overthinking it – Poison is fine for the enemy – Trees are pretty poisonous tbh! Also, they’re actually the only level 2 poison enemy right now, so I should probably keep that. I think what I want to do is replace Magic Missile with something more thematic, and maybe simplify Poison Slingshot.

Ok: let’s try 12 countdown for 4 poison on poison slingshot. It’s quite powerful, but the higher countdown distinguishes it from other basic poison weapons I think.

As for the new attack: let’s use a green card and make something “Vine” themed – Hmm, I’ve been meaning to do attack + life steal on six, maybe this is a good place?

Actions:

  • Change Poison Slingshot to +4 Poison on a countdown of 12.
  • Change Magic Missile to a new card, Vine Whip, which deals damage, has MAX5, and heals 2hp on a five.
  • Maybe come up with a better name than “Vine Whip”, that’s kind of weak.

Super variant:

We don’t have an enemy that uses Detonate right now – let’s give that a try! We can replace the Vine Whip with the Detonate, and maybe increase dice and health too to make her a bit scarier.



BABY SQUID
  • Level 2, 26 hp, 2 dice
  • Good Turn: 12 damage.
  • Bad Turn: Blind 2 dice.

What’s Good:

Baby squid is pretty fun to fight! One of the harder level 2s.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Headbutt is fine when fighting the squid as an enemy, but being reusable makes it totally crazy if the player manages to get it. Let’s nerf it a little.

I’m a little worried about how similar Baby Squid and Kraken are, but I think that’s more of an issue to fix for Kraken, not Baby Squid, which is feeling pretty solid.

Blind isn’t really working as a status effect right now, but I have plans to lean into it more and make it more interesting for a future build, so I think eventually Ink Splat will be fine.

(Spent a little time there thinking about a possible new water status effect, but I can’t think of anything I actually like.)

Actions:

Make Heatbutt 2 uses per turn rather than reusable.

Super variant:

Definitely should blind you a lot harder, to highlight that element of the enemy. I think I’m going to make Camouflage cheaper to use, and just swap ink splat for that. As for damage, Baby Squid becomes a lot more scary if they’re more likely to get even dice, so… Hmm!

Actually, what if they had two bumps instead of the Camouflage? Kinda highlights what’s really scary about them better. We can go the other way with Kraken, and lean into blind instead.



STICKY HANDS
  • Level 2, 28 hp, 1 dice
  • Good Turn: Steals your gold
  • Bad Turn: Nothing

What’s Good:

Sticky Hands stands out from other enemies by being focused on a totally different thing – stealing your money, and running away! So that’s kinda cool.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

But, usually, they’re just annoying, rather than fun. Which is why they’re rare, and tuned so easy that you almost never have any trouble with them.

I don’t think I want to add damage to the enemy – I like that they feel different. I think they work fine the first few times you see them, and then they’re just a bit annoying, but not in a serious way.

Actions:

Probably just leave them, they’re basically ok.

Super variant:

Hah – well, a super Sticky Hands should probably steal a piece of your equipment and run away with it, right? Hah. Some extra health and that ability could be pretty nice. It also shouldn’t be so hard to make them use the stolen equipment too, possibly.

You could *potentially* get into trouble there by fighting it with one piece of offensive equipment, and then losing your only weapon – but since the super would appear as a level three enemy, I think you only have yourself to blame if that happens.



ALCHEMIST
  • Level 2, 28 hp, 3 dice
  • Good Turn: Turn into a bear, and do bear maul on you for up to 9 damage a turn
  • Bad Turn: Fail to use any potions

What’s Good:

The design here basically works, and the Bear remains my favourite little design detour in the whole game. It’s extremely sad that they’ve been broken for so long.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

I think the Alchemist is very close to working, but needs a few mechanical tweaks.

None of the potions are really scary enough to make sense. I think you could *double* the amount of damage that the spiky and fire potions do, and do 5 poison instead of 4 with the poison potion, and it would all still seem pretty fair and fun.

One thing I’ve considered with this character: they could have a non-standard layout! It could work to have a “deck” of potions, Jester style, that appeared on the screen, left to right. They’d all be cheaper to activate and use, and you’d see the more expensive “Bear Potion” come along, which would be a nice tense moment.

The downside of this is that you kind of give away the “deck” concept very early in the game, and it might be more fun to hold on to that and save it as a surprise for when you unlock the Jester. I think for now, let’s just stick with the standard layout.

Actions:

  • Increase Spiky Potion damage from 4 to 8.
  • Increase Fire Potion damage from 4 to 8.
  • Increase Poison Potion from 4 to 5.
  • Swap the order of Poison and Fire Potion.

Super variant:

I think this one’s easy – you just want to go “Bear Mode” as soon as possible – so the funniest thing to do is just remove the first three potions. Then they’re a bear right away! You can also give them a bit more health, maybe.



COPYCAT
  • Level 2, 26 hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: In theory, lots of damage
  • Bad Turn: In practice, they’ll steal a lockpick or something.

What’s Good:

Ok, Copycat isn’t really working, but on the plus side, I know how to fix them.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

They should just steal *all* your stuff, as an innate ability, with no “yoink” card needed. It’s way more interesting and fun to fight yourself than to fight an enemy that often just uses random dice manipulation.

This will make them a bit harder, but that’s no big deal – I’ll just bump them up to level 3, maybe even level 4.

Actions:

  • Remove Yoink, change to use an auto steal-everything mechanic.
  • They should have the same amount of dice as you too!

Super variant:

Interestingly, they self balance! One level up, they will automatically be more scary because *you* are more scary. They probably just need a little extra HP in the super variation.



MARSHMALLOW
  • Level 2, 28 hp, 1 dice
  • Good Turn: 6 damage + 1 burn (or 5 damage + 1 freeze)
  • Bad Turn: 1 or 2 damage +burn/freeze

What’s Good:

Marshmallow is basically great. The combination ice fire thing works, and at level two the layout of two equipment and 1 dice works really well.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

I’m not sure what type they should be? Actually, they kind of break my type system a little. They could use Scathach’s “immune to a bunch of stuff” type, I suppose.

There are no other mixed element creatures in the game, actually. Which is why I’ve been able to get away with not fixing the shock+weaken or burn+freeze bugs for so long, heh.

Actions:

Nothing.

Super variant:

Boring answer, but I think just three dice and double equipment makes em a scary super version of themselves.



MIMIC
  • Level 2, 28 hp, 5 dice
  • Good Turn: Maybe they draw inferno or something, and do 12 damage.
  • Bad Turn: Or, more likely, they draw a wooden stake and do nothing.

What’s Good:

Mimics are great, just, you know, in general. You think it’s gonna be a chest, but actually, it’s a mimic. lol. Classic.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

They’re not really that scary – they have the potential to do a lot of damage, but they normally don’t. Part of the fun is that they sometimes *will* draw a dud item, but I think they’d still be pretty good if you revisited the distribution of stuff they can get.

Five dice is really excessive. It’s because they don’t really know what they need, so they kind of need a spread. I think I can better solve this by changing up that distribution, though.

Actions:

  • Reduce from 5 dice to 4.
  • Have a look at the distribution of items that Mystery Box creates, and remove some of the duds.

Super variant:

If Mystery Box is fixed up a little, then all you need to do to make this enemy more interesting is TWO boxes. TWO! I find myself using this doubling trick for Super variants a lot, but it works, so maybe don’t worry about it too much?



SNEEZY
  • Level 2, 24 hp, 1 dice
  • Good Turn: 8 damage.
  • Bad Turn: Nothing (about a third of the time)

What’s Good:

I love the idea behind sneezy, and I think I’m pretty close to having something that works. They recently got moved down to level 2 because it’s not really scary enough for a level 3 enemy to miss 33% of the time.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

They miss 33% of the time 🙁

It seems too obvious, but you could just give them an extra dice? The problem then, though, is that they’d hit you for max damage almost every time! It also reduces the impact of status effects on them, which isn’t ideal. I think I’d like to keep Sneezy on a single dice.

I also don’t like the new “range” dice slots I’m trying out – currently, sneezy takes between 2 and 4 on the sneeze action, which solves the old thing of using a 1 on the slot for no reason, but… complicates the game in a way I’m not that happy with. It’s more stuff on the cards, innit.

Ok: how about this: We simplify Sneeze by making it min 2 – i.e. splitting any dice except a 1 into 1s. We then fix the design by making different SPIKE types. Perhaps instead of all being ones that take a one and give you a free 1, we can have two spikes that take two 1s, but do 3 or maybe 4 damage. So that would mean:

If Sneezy rolls a

  • 1 – Do 1 damage (previously: 2 damage)
  • 2 – Do 4 damage (previously: 4 damage)
  • 3 – Do 5 damage (previously: 6 damage)
  • 4 – Do 8 damage (previously: 8 damage)
  • 5 – Do 9 damage (previously: Nothing)
  • 6 – Do 10 damage (previously: Nothing)

Yeah, ok! Let’s try that.

Actions:

  • Change sneeze to MIN2.
  • Swap out two of the Spikes for “Sharp Spike”, which needs two 1s, but does double damage.

Super variant:

Ah – maybe we could work poison needle in there, somewhere? Two Poison Needles and Sneeze works, for sure, and is a nice variation.



SORCERESS
  • Level 2, 28 hp, 2 dice
  • Good Turn: 9 damage, or maybe 6 damage and a shock.
  • Bad Turn: 4 damage and a shock.

What’s Good:

This is another example of an enemy who’s basically solid, but who maybe just isn’t as interesting as it could be. I like that she mirrors the player Witch.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Having Magic Missile and Infliction mean that she has a very constant damage output. Unless she’s unluckly, she’s quite likely to do 9 damage a turn.

I’ve thought about mirroring the player even more heavily here – it’d be cool to have an enemy that uses a Spellbook, like the player witch – creating copies of spells, replacing existing ones, and building up for big damage. But… (a) that’s lots of work! Oh my gosh – UI work, AI work, Design work – and (b) even if I implemented that, I’m not sure it’d actually be all that fun to fight against. I actually feel like maybe it’s a little overcomplicated for an enemy, and that most players wouldn’t care about watching the move of an enemy that complex. Also (c) my same worries about using a Deck for Alchemist apply here too – the spellbook is a nice mechanical reveal that you don’t expect when you start playing, so it’s kind of a shame to ruin that surprise by having an enemy show you the concept.

So, maybe it’s best to stick to thinking about simpler improvements. Alternative concept that might be cool here: some kind of arrangement of equipment that will affect you differently based on sequence. This *sort of* happens a little bit right now with the even/odd spell in the mix, but you could get similar interesting things with just having four spells that have restrictions.

An aside: I’m not sure Hex actually ever gets used for anything other than Shock here – I’m not sure, but I think the way the dice rolls work out, Sorceress only ever uses it if she can’t use the Magic Missile. Oh well!

Here’s something to try: let’s give Sorceress Magic Missile and Hex for two Electric Shocks, and leave the rest. Electric Shock is an even spell, like Magic Missile, but unlike Magic Missile it’s based on the actual number you roll, so is more likely to be a nerf than a buff, even though it might look like a buff. I also like giving her Lightning as a way to give her a little more more personality…

Oh, huh! What if sorceress had slightly different equipment every time you faught her? She could have a 1/3 chance of having Burning Light, Ice Shard or Electric Shock, which mirrors the player really well and makes her a bit more unpredictable. Her type could change depending on which spell she has!

Ok, that’s really cool 😀 Ok, lightning witch:

  • Cauldron, Infliction, Electric Shock, Electric Shock (EVEN)
  • Good turn: 13 damage + 2 shock
  • Bad turn: 4 damage

Fire witch:

  • Cauldron, Infliction, Burning Light, Burning Light (MIN 4)
  • Good turn: 13 damage + 2 burn
  • Bad turn: 4 damage

Ice witch:

  • Cauldron, Infliction, Ice Shard, Ice Shard (ODD)
  • Good turn: 10 damage + 2 freeze
  • Bad turn: 4 damage

13 damage is a lot, but that’s a pretty rare outcome, so I think it’s ok – she’ll often roll lower. But, hmm, yeah. There’s maybe too much going on here now for a level 2 enemy – let’s bump up to Level 3. (Weirdly, this one started as a level 1!)

Actions:

  • Implement an “on encounter” script that runs when you encounter, and randomly choose a starting arrangement and type.
  • Change layout to Cauldron, Infliction, and two of either Ice Shard, Burning Light or Electric Shock
  • Move to level 3.

Super variant:

The Witch can get some very scary spells at higher levels, right? Let’s just give the Sorceress one of them! Either Meteor or Absolute Zero, at random, with maybe three other filler spells to give her some weaken defence.



STEREOHEAD
  • Level 2, 28 hp, 2 dice
  • Good Turn: 6 damage and 2 weaken
  • Bad Turn: Nothing!

What’s Good:

Stereohead is a fun enemy because they inflict lots of status without actually doing much damage – they feel more dangerous than they really are, I think.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

In general I don’t like for enemies to sometimes “miss” and do nothing. This maybe happens a little too often with Stereohead.

I could fix this by making sonic wave a little less restrictive – but that would mean making weakens much more common. Still, it feels worth trying. Let’s make Sonic Wave MAX4 instead of MAX3.

Actions:

Try making Sonic Wave MAX4 instead of MAX3.

Super variant:

Let’s give Stereohead two Echo Blasts, bwahahaha



WIZARD
  • Level 2, 32 hp, 1 dice
  • Good Turn: Best outcome for Wizard is to keep rolling 4s and poison you a bunch.
  • Bad Turn: Wizard can literally kill themselves if they roll 1s. A bad turn for Wizard is *very* bad.

What’s Good:

The basic design of this guy is pretty great – the 6 equipment slots, each matching a dice face, feels really interesting and different.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

They feel outdated. Which is because they are – Wizard was one of the earliest enemies in the game, back before I had most of the status effects, even. I like the design of the Wizard, but I think it’s time he got a new spellbook.

The existing Spellbook is:

1: Backfire

Ok, this one’s a problem. It’s a kind of funny idea – when the Wizard rolls a one, they lose health – but I implemented this before I had Freeze as a status effect, so it feels a bit un-deliberate now. I’ve actually had people report this as a bug. It’s also kind of a weird edge case for the AI, which is normally programmed to *never* kill themselves – so I’ve ended up requiring special rules for this enemy that require them to use all dice, in every case, which leads to some weird and buggy looking behaviour.

Let’s try doing something else here. Maybe some kind of freeze spell?

2: Flame Spell

This is 4 damage and 1 burn for a 2, which is a weird one! Like a proto-fireball. Let’s just increase the damage to 5 to make it a bit like Magic Missile, and try burn x3 instead.

3: Freeze Spell

Freeze Spell just freezes two dice – when you’re fighting Wizard, you usally have three. This feels a bit underpowered.

If slot 1 is become a new freeze spell, maybe slot 3 should be something new: Maybe a new weaken spell? Weaken 3 equipment +5 damage seems like a more fair trade for a piece of equipment requiring a specific roll.

4: Poison Spell

Poison spell works! Let’s keep it as is.

5: Magic Barrier

Having a defensive spell in there is neat, but shielding on enemies is a bit dull. The discord suggested Dodge, let’s try that.

6: Hall of Mirrors

Perfect! Let’s keep this as is.

Number wise, if fire, ice and weaken spells do 2 x status + 5 damage, then they should maybe be on the same row? Let’s try this:

  • 1: Freeze Spell Do 5 damage, freeze 2 dice
  • 2: Teleport Spell Dodge next attack
  • 3: Earth Spell Do 5 damage, weaken 2 equipment
  • 4: Poison Spell Inflict 4 poison
  • 5: Fire Spell Do 5 damage, burn 2 dice
  • 6: Hall of Mirrors Extra dice next turn

Finally: Wizard is 4 hp higher than most other level 2 enemies for no good reason. Let’s reduce that back to 28hp.

Actions:

  • Reduce hp from 32hp to 28hp.
  • New spellbook!

Super variant:

Hmmm. Not sure about this one. Just adding 1 dice makes them a bit scarier, because they start upgraded rather than needing the lucky 6 to get there. It’s a little minimal, but let’s try that.

Level 2 Summary

Ok! An overview of the level 2 changes:

  • DRYAD:
    Change Poison Slingshot to +4 Poison on a countdown of 12.
    Change Magic Missile to a new card, Vine Whip, which deals damage, has MAX5, and heals 2hp on a five.
  • BABY SQUID:
    Make Heatbutt 2 uses per turn rather than reusable.
  • ALCHEMIST:
    Increase Spiky Potion damage from 4 to 8.
    Increase Fire Potion damage from 4 to 8.
    Increase Poison Potion from 4 to 5.
    Swap the order of Poison and Fire Potion.
  • COPYCAT:
    Remove Yoink, change to use an auto steal-everything mechanic.
    They should have the same amount of dice as you too!
  • MIMIC:
    Reduce from 5 dice to 4.
    Have a look at the distribution of items that Mystery Box creates, and remove some of the duds.
  • SNEEZY:
    Change sneeze to MIN2.
    Swap out two of the Spikes for “Sharp Spike”, which needs two 1s, but does double damage.
  • SORCERESS:
    Implement an “on encounter” script that runs when you encounter, and randomly choose a starting arrangement and type.
    Change layout to Cauldon, Infliction, and two of either Ice Shard, Burning Light or Electric Shock
    Move to level 3.
  • STEREOHEAD:
    Try making Sonic Wave MAX4 instead of MAX3.
  • WIZARD:
    Reduce hp from 32hp to 28hp.
    New spellbook!

So, quite a lot of changes to this level, some of them major. They generally all make these enemies harder, too. Should be interesting to see what they’re like!

Level 3


KEYMASTER
  • Level 3, 34 hp, 1 dice
  • Good Turn: 2, then 4, then 6, then 8…
  • Bad Turn: 2, then 2, then 2, then 2…

What’s Good:

This ended up being a pretty good design, feeling very distinct from basically everything in the game.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

He’s a little underpowered. Two damage on turn 1 is tiny, and it takes at least 4 turns with lucky rolls before he starts doing serious damage. Let’s try increasing the keyblade damage.

There’s a minor AI bug where equipment is positioned incorrectly as he unlocks keyblades, which would be nice to fix from a polish point of view, but isn’t really that important.

Actions:

Increase keyblade damage from 2 to 3.

Super variant:

Having two dice would *double* his damage curve, which is probably already scary enough. Let’s try that!



BULLY
  • Level 3, 34 hp, 2 dice
  • Good Turn: 12 damage
  • Bad Turn: 6 damage

What’s Good:

Scary enemy! Why was this guy level 2 for so long?

What’s bad, and how to fix:

I still haven’t fixed that thing where he’ll use a 3 on a rock instead of on his fists. Other than that, I don’t think any changes are needed here.

Actions:

Nothing.

Super variant:

It’s rare that a Bully ever gets down to actually using all of his rocks. Since he’s already a big hitter, why not just give him a bunch of dice?

As for the fists, could maybe just change that out for something that doesn’t have the two uses per turn limit – a Knuckle Duster, maybe.



DIRE WOLF
  • Level 3, 34 hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: Curses you, inflicts 4 poison, and deals 6 damage (though, this is rare)
  • Bad Turn: Nothing (this is also rare)

What’s Good:

Curse is a fun status effect (but I am maybe *just about* on the verge of overusing it). The design is solid too – pretty good for an enemy that’s barely changed since they were introduced way back in v0.2, or whenever it was.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

I don’t think anything needs changing here. I don’t like enemies at this level that can “miss” completely, but in Dire Wolf’s case, that’s fairly rare. (Well, Hard mode is a bit broken, maybe, but let’s not worry about that right now.)

Actions:

Nothing.

Super variant:

More claws would probably work. An extra dice too, to ensure that they inflict curse.



HANDYMAN
  • Level 3, 32 hp, 3 dice
  • Good Turn: 9 damage + 1 shock
  • Bad Turn: 3 damage

What’s Good:

Lots of things! It’s really nice to have an enemy that demonstrates the power of the Spanner + needs 6 combo. I like that it mirrors the Inventor. And they’re lightning themed, which is great and honestly is much rarer than it should be. Finally, the visual design is really solid – and it even has a pun in the name!

What’s bad, and how to fix:

There’s an AI bug where they sometimes don’t use the Pea Shooter properly, which I should really fix. Otherwise, I think they’re solid! No changes here, I think.

Actions:

Nothing.

Super variant:

Let’s try two spanners, two hammers, and four dice! It’ll mostly manage to hit you for 12 damage and two shock, but not always.



FIREMAN
  • Level 3, 34, 3 dice
  • Good Turn: 12 damage and 2 burn
  • Bad Turn: Nothing (happens about 1/8th of the time)

What’s Good:

I like the joke of having a fire version of the snowman! The design is also fairly solid.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

It’s not ideal to have enemies at this level that can miss, and it’s not that unlikely for Fireman to roll three odd dice. That aside, the damage output of this enemy is about right.

It’s a little weird that Fireman and Snowman, who are at the same level, have different equipment. Fireman is much easier, basically. I guess my thinking at the time was that fire as a status effect is worse than Freeze – but it’s not much worse, tbh.

Still, I’m trying to tune the game a little harder, so… let’s at least give fireman an extra dice, to increase the likelihood of big hits, and decrease the likelihood of complete misses.

Actions:

Increase from 3 dice to 4.

Super variant:

I really like the hothead change of changing Fireball to Inferno, but here that would mean 4 raw dice damage, which is pretty extreme. Let’s instead double the fireballs and increase the dice to 5.



KRAKEN
  • Level 3, 38 hp, 3 dice
  • Good Turn: 3 on turn 1, 13 on turn 2, 24 on turn 3… (usually pretty rare, though)
  • Bad Turn: Blinds your dice, does no damage

What’s Good:

Overwhelm is an interesting attack that’s a lot scarier than it looks at first. Usually Kraken isn’t a problem, though, because the EVEN dice restriction makes a runaway overwhelm attack fairly rare. Kraken only really causes a problem on Hard Mode.

The blind status effect is tuned about right, and I think will work very well when I make the changes I want to make to blind.

(Oh, right, Overwhelm! I’d forgotten that this guy was basically a reference to Ruari’s OVERWHELM, huh!)

What’s bad, and how to fix:

So, they’re kinda too similar to Baby Squid – a blind attack, and a physical attack. In fact, Headbutt might actually be stronger than Overwhelm in short fights, which makes it a little odd that Kraken is at higher level. Let’s promote Kraken to Level 4, and commit to powering them up accordingly to help differentiate them a little.

As a level four enemy, I think they could probably inflict another status effect (especially since most of the status heavy level 4s are becoming level 5s, now.). Let’s give them a cursing equipment of some kind.

As for nerfing Overwhelm? I think it’s probably ok as is – I like how unexpectedly dangerous it is. Let’s keep it basically the same, but change the upgraded version, just in case that ever comes up again. I’m thinking – change to 2 uses per turn normally, and reuseable when upgraded.

Actions:

  • Move Kraken to level 4, and give them an extra dice.
  • Let’s try giving Kraken a “Shriek” too.
  • Change Overwhelm to 2 uses per turn, reusable when upgraded.

Super variant:

How about we just lean into the Overwhelm thing and *just* give the Kraken an Overwhelm+, with no other equipment. The super version of Kraken is basically a level 5, so that feels suitably terrifying.



ROSE
  • Level 3, 38 hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: 8 poison per turn.
  • Bad Turn: Nothing.

What’s Good:

Umm

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Ahhh, Rose is a challenge! People mostly just think they’re broken. I’ve tried a few different things here, and not been that happy with any of them.

Leaving aside the Petals around the Rose thing for the moment, they’re basically an enemy that *normally* doesn’t do very much, but can occasionally score a big hit. The hard mode change of giving the rosepetal equipment a free 5 is funny, but actually just makes them terrifying in a bad way.

I’m not sure what to do with Rose. It’s tempting to just admit that they’re not really a good fit for the game and take them out (which is a shame, since we have the nice animation), or repurpose the animation for a simpler enemy (eh, feels like admitting defeat). Or maybe, lean into the design even more – if there’s gonna be a Petals around the Rose enemy, maybe you should *actually* have to play petals around the rose? They roll dice, and ask *you* what their score is – get it wrong, and you get punished, or something. But that wouldn’t work – it’s just wrong for the game.

Ok, well, in any case, change the hard mode equipment, and probably also the equipment description.

Consider ditching poison, maybe? I dunno, I could just make the staff do raw damage, but I think that would just make this a confusing, ineffective enemy.

Not really that happy with this yet. Gonna make small changes for the next version, and reconsider it separately later.

Actions:

  • Change the description of the rosepetal equipment to better communicate that it’s working as intended.
  • Change hard mode to be a bit less broken.

Super variant:

Honestly not sure here. Let’s leave it for now.



SNOWMAN
  • Level 3, 34 hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: Uff, 20 damage and four freezes, if it’s lucky enough to roll 4 fives.
  • Bad Turn: Nothing.

What’s Good:

Generally feeling very solid these days! Snowman has come a long way since the days where snowballs *locked up* dice and did 1 damage, resulting in an endless war of attrition.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

I guess I’m a little worried about hard the snowman can hit, if he gets lucky… but in practice, it seems rare enough that it’s not something I’m worried about. I don’t think any changes are needed here.

Actions:

Nothing.

Super variant:

Interesting! I didn’t take the Inferno route with Fireman, but since Snowman is that bit harder, I’m interested in trying it here. Let’s try swapping the four snowballs to two blizzards – that’s four raw dice damage, potentially, but that’s only a bit worse than the current worse case situation of 20 damage anyway, and it’s a level higher. Also, players are likely to have some way to reduce the impact of this – Ice, Shock and Weaken are all very effective counters.

Level 3 Summary

An overview of the level 3 changes:

  • KEYMASTER
    Increase keyblade damage from 2 to 3.
  • FIREMAN
    Increase from 3 dice to 4.
  • KRAKEN
    Move Kraken to level 4, and give them an extra dice.
    Let’s try giving Kraken a “Shriek” too.
    Change Overwhelm to 2 uses per turn, reuseable when upgraded.
  • ROSE
    Change the description of the rosepetal equipment to better communicate that it’s working as intended.
    Change hard mode to be a bit less broken.

Very very few changes here – I think the level three enemies are working pretty well as is.

Level 4


HAUNTED JAR
  • Level 4, 44 hp, 5 dice
  • Good Turn: Steadily increase poison by 3 each turn, and occasionally double that
  • Bad Turn: Just reduce countdowns.

What’s Good:

I really like having a poison enemy with blight!

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Blight is a fun, scary thing, but Haunted Jar rarely actually pulls it off. Smog Cloud is also kind of a weak version of poison, and the blind and shock combo feels unfocused. They end up feeling very underpowered for a level 4.

Let’s try a simplification. I think I’d like this enemy more if it just poisoned you, more and more each turn, with the threat of blight ever increasing. So let’s try that!

Also, with less dice needed to power the two countdowns, I can reduce the dice from 5 to a more sensible 4.

Actions:

  • Try a new version of Poison Cloud that just reliably inflicts poison (as a replacement for Smog Cloud).
  • Reduce dice from 5 to 4.

Super variant:

Given how runaway poison can get even on easy enemies, it shouldn’t take much here to make Haunted Jar scary. Let’s just give them an extra dice, and an extra poison cloud.



CRYSTALINA
  • Level 4, 48 hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: 24 damage, and a bunch of status effects
  • Bad Turn: Nothing

What’s Good:

Crystalina is interestingly different from other enemies, with her four crystals that can be lots of different things.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

But! In practice it seems to take too long to “build” up, and never really ends up doing much damage. This isn’t helped by an AI bug that means they prioritise unlocking crystals over using them.

Occasionally they roll a “blank” crystal, which does nothing, and has to be recreated again. If this happens, they’re basically a gonner – it’s such a momentum breaker that they basically lose a turn.

I think all that Crystalina needs is a fix for that AI bug, and remove the blank crystal thing.

Actions:

Remove “Blank Crystal” from the list of possible transformations.

Super variant:

Now that I’ve got the ability to run scripts when you start combat, I can just have Crystalina’s four crystals start unlocked, which skips the building part of the process and goes straight to the scary part!



WICKER MAN
  • Level 4, 40hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: Deal 6 damage, 1 burn, and heal 9 damage.
  • Bad Turn: Heal 3 damage.

What’s Good:

Wicker Man is one of the older enemies in the game, and they’re unusual in being one of the last “healers” in the game. I also really like that wicker man is weak to the element that they use themselves – dealing fire damage, but also being weak to fire, which makes fighting them as thief cool.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Wicker Man has a bunch of problems, but I think they’re all fixable.

First up, a max of 6 damage per turn from a level four enemy is *ridiculous*. They should be able to do at least twice that, and maybe more.

Secondly, the AI really can’t seem to handle Wicker Man! I’m not really sure what’s going on here, but it’s just very bad at considering healing.

I think all I need to do to fix Wicker Man is replace the healing crystals. If, instead of the three healing crystals, Wicker Man had two of Dryad’s new Vine Whip, they would jump forward to doing up to 16 damage per turn, and occasionally healing up to 4. I’d probably reduce the dice down to 3 to make it so that they’re not just using staff every turn, though.

Actions:

  • Replace the healing crystals with two Vine Whips.
  • Reduce from 4 dice to 3.

Super variant:

I like for super variants to highlight something about the character instead of just increasing damage, ideally, so how about we give Super Wicker Man a serious health item? And maybe also an easier to use offensive item. Something like replacing Staff with Burning Light, and giving him a First Aid Kit could work very well.



YETI
  • Level 4, 44 hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: 10 damage, freezes all player dice
  • Bad Turn: Nothing

What’s Good:

Ice Age has ended up being a pretty great attack!

What’s bad, and how to fix:

It’s kinda odd that Snowman is harder than Yeti, actually? How did that happen? They both have four dice, but Yeti is less able to use good rolls. I think maybe I’ve overvalued Ice Age (which used to do damage as well as freeze all dice).

Maybe I could just… swap Yeti and Snowman? It also kinda helps deal with the issue of Fireman and Snowman both being level 3, despite Snowman being more powerful. I’ll swap the HPs too, while I’m at it.

Actions:

Bump down to level 3. Bump Snowman up to level 4. Swap the HPs.

Super variant:

If snowman is more focused on damage and is the higher level enemy, let’s use Yeti to focus on freeze. Giving him a lockpick is kinda funny, maybe? But… makes no thematic sense, hmm.

There’s a Scathach spell called “The Cold” which does 8 damage and freezes two dice if they roll a 4. That feels like a similar sort of “lucky roll” thing to Ice Age, but much much more devastating and likely? I reckon I’ll probably change that to freeze 3 dice instead of 2 anyway, so let’s try that! Could also swap the two snowballs for a single Blizzard, maybe – which could mean, hmm, 20 damage if you were really unlucky? Same as the Snowman, then. Let’s try that!

Level 4 Summary

General thoughts about level 4 enemies:

An overview:

  • HAUNTED JAR
    Try a new version of Poison Cloud that just reliably inflicts poison (as a replacement for Smog Cloud).
    Reduce dice from 5 to 4.
  • CRYSTALINA
    Remove “Blank Crystal” from the list of possible transformations
  • WICKER MAN
    Replace the healing crystals with two Vine Whips.
    Reduce from 4 dice to 3.
  • YETI
    Bump down to level 3. Bump Snowman up to level 4. Swap the HPs.

I’ve split the old level 4 into levels 4 and 5, and mostly put the enemies that were working in level 5 and the ones that weren’t in level 4 – so it makes sense that there were serious problems here.

Actually, worryingly, seeing some mis-leveled enemies on this particular tier have made me very aware that a certain amount of what might have been making the Dicey Dungeons late game “work” is actually coming from a bad place – some enemies doing more damage than they should, and some doing less, and the luck of the draw in which ones you get making it all even out, somehow.

Still, I think it’s best to just fix that and deal with the potential consequences, and iterate and improve things than it is to just ignoring the fact and treat the existing designs as precious. Even if this ends up causing problems, I think I’m moving in the right direction.

Oh, the other big level four issue: I need more enemies! Splitting the old level 4 pool in half has left a serious shortage here. Kraken’s moving up, so that’s good, but let’s fix Rat King, and maybe add one more new enemy too.

Level 5

For level 5 and boss enemies, I’m not going to do super versions just yet, until I figure out how they work at this level. (Level 5 supers would be bosses? Bosses supers would be, what – secret extra enemies? Hmm.)


LOUD BIRD
  • Level 5, 44 hp, 5 dice
  • Good Turn: Silence you, deal 5 damage, weaken 2 equipment and dodge your next attack
  • Bad Turn: Actually, they almost always manage to pull all of this off. If they’re unlucky they’ll miss one or two things from that list.

What’s Good:

Haha, I love this guy. They’re *so* annoying. CAAWWW

They’re a total pain to fight, but they’re actually less scary than they seem – yes, they silence you, locking up your class skills, and yes, they weaken two pieces of equipment, and YES, they dodge a move every turn, requiring you to have more than one piece of offensive equipment – but these are all things that you can plan around and adapt your build for, and ultimately, the most they can actually do to you is 5 damage per turn. Which makes them actually quite weak for a level 5 enemy. In a future iteration, maybe give them more damage, or reduce them to level 4.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

I think they’re great. Not gonna change a thing here.

Actions:

Nothing.



BANSHEE
  • Level 5, 44 hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: Silence, Curse and 12 damage, with an additional 2 freezes if they’re really lucky (they need to roll three sixes for that).
  • Bad Turn: 2 damage, if they were to somehow roll all 1s.

What’s Good:

This is just a super solid feeling enemy that is always interesting to fight. I feel like I really got this one right in the last audit.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Nothing serious, but I think Lament being the only “on six” card in the game that’s size 1 is a bit odd. Maybe let’s change that to size 2, and make the upgrade freeze 2 on six instead of just always freezing – that way I can work it into the regular rotation of the game a bit more.

This change will make the Banshee’s layout a tiny big uglier, but, eh, no big deal.

Actions:

Change Lament to a Size 2, change upgraded lament to freeze 2 dice on six.



CORNELIUS
  • Level 5, 100 hp, 0 dice, +1 dice each turn
  • Good Turn: 999 damage
  • Bad Turn: Reduces countdown

What’s Good:

Cornelius never worked as a boss, but since moving into the normal enemy pool and becoming a rare encounter, they’re working much better. Actually, they’re maybe the best enemy in the game. Very, very happy with how Cornelius has ended up.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Cornelius causes more a problem for slower characters than say the Warrior, but I’m not really worried about this. It’s a good thing if some enemies are more or less difficult for various player characters!

Actions:

Nothing.



PAPER KNIGHT
  • Level 5, 44 hp, 3 dice
  • Good Turn: 9 damage, lock 2 dice.
  • Bad Turn: Lock 2 dice.

What’s Good:

Dice locking is rare and interesting, and works very well here. The hard initial hit of 9 damage is scary, but you’ll likely survive the paper knight thanks to her diminishing weapon.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Paper Knight breaks my elemental type system a little – she used to be weak to Fire, but in my new system, that would mean she’d also be strong against Ice, which doesn’t really work. I’ll just make her non-elemental for this build.

It rarely comes up, but Cardboard Sword doesn’t work correctly if it falls below 1 damage. Let’s put a floor on it of 1 damage.

Actions:

Prevent Cardboard Sword’s damage from being less than 1.



SKELETON
  • Level 5, 44 hp, 3 dice
  • Good Turn: 10 damage + curse
  • Bad Turn: Nothing

What’s Good:

This is another enemy that ended up in a pretty good place after the last audit. They can hit pretty hard, but capping the slots of the sword a 5 means that it’s a bit rarer.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

If skeleton rolls a 2 and a 6, all it can do that turn is curse you, since they’ll always use that 2 on the Shriek, meaning they can’t use the sword anymore. This means that Skeleton’s odds of doing no damage are much higher than I’d like, ideally. There’s an argument for making them a level four.

This worries me a little, but honestly, they’re feeling *pretty good* right now, so I’m not sure I actually want to make any changes here for this build. Let’s revisit again later.

Actions:

Nothing.

Level 5 Summary

For level five enemies, I’m mostly taken the scariest of the old level 4 enemies, the ones that were already working very well. I’m going to give them all an extra 4 health, and make these minor changes – these are basically all great. Like level 4, I think I probably also want to do some new level 5 enemies, but that’s not as urgent (since you only see two of them per run, and we have five including Cornelius.)

An overview:

  • ALL:
    Increase HP by 4.
  • BANSHEE:
    Change Lament to a size 2, change upgraded lament to freeze 2 dice on six.
  • PAPER KNIGHT:
    Prevent Cardboard Sword’s damage from being less than 1.

That just leaves the bosses!

Bosses


GIRL SCOUT
  • Boss, 61hp, 5 dice
  • Good Turn: 1+2, then 3+4, then 4+5…
  • Bad Turn: 1, then 2, then 3, then 4…

What’s Good:

Girl Scout’s thing is to basically do the electromagnet trick of using a weapon which increases damage with each use with fury, which makes her very scary very quickly. They’re very interesting to watch, and it’s cool to have enemies that use Fury.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

AI sometimes gets Fury wrong. I should investigate that a bit and make sure it doesn’t happen. Otherwise, I think the design here is fine! The general planned boss HP increase should mean the player gets into danger slightly more, which is great.

The theme is kinda funny, but maybe it’s better to give her an actual name in the final version of the game. Let’s try that.

Actions:

Give her a name.



DRAGON
  • Boss, 65hp, 5 dice
  • Good Turn: 12 damage + 2 burn
  • Bad Turn: Potentially just reducing a countdown.

What’s Good:

Fire based boss is a solid enough concept, and this fight often feels bracing and fair.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

I think they got nerfed a little too much last time.

The once per battle attacks are a bit strange. The idea is: Dragon has a big initial volley, but settles down after that into an easier configuration. I liked (and still like) the big countdown as a kind of pacing thing, but Fire Breath doing just 7 damage on a countdown of 20 is weirdly weak.

Also, when I see someone fight Dragon, I always think it’s weird how little burning they do. Dragon should be burning basically all of your dice every turn, I think.

Thinking about something simpler: Why not just have four smaller attacks instead? You could have Fire Breath take a much smaller countdown, 4, say, dealing 5 damage and burning two dice. That would mean, depending on the dice roll, you’d either use all four (pretty rare! four 4+s needed) and do 20 damage, or more likely, less than that. Status effects would be pretty effective counters here, especially ice which would literally reduce the amount of Fire Breaths dragon could use.

Actions:

  • Try a different design for Fire Breath: countdown of 4, 5 fire damage + 2 burn.
  • Ditch Wall of Flames.


FOMORIAN
  • Boss, 61hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: 18 damage and 3 weaken
  • Bad Turn: 6 damage and 3 weaken

What’s Good:

Probably the hardest boss! I love that Formorian weakens 3 pieces of equipment, that’s super interesting boss behaviour. They hit super hard, doing as much as potentially 18 damage on a good turn, but normally do less.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

It can be a little unfair when Fomorian gets a good roll and does 18 damage. I don’t hear that much “Fomorian is bullshit” out of players though so maybe it’s ok in practice.

Basically, I’m just a little worried that Fomorian hits too hard, but since I’m tuning the whole game a bit harder right now I’m going to leave it as is.

The big problem I have with Fomorian is actually the name – obviously, they were originally supposed to have a different design, but because of how the whole art pipeline thing went, the character design changed and the name didn’t. I need to either (a) make a real Fomorian, and perhaps make this Gym Leader be a level 5 enemy or (b) just give this character a different name. I’m not that comfortable with the name/art mismatch right now.

Actions:

Rename to Gym Leader, or something.



CHAMPION
  • Boss, 55hp, 6 dice
  • Good Turn: 12 damage, then 24, then 36, if she’s very lucky and you’ve made a mess of things.
  • Bad Turn: Potentially nothing, but that’s rare.

What’s Good:

Champion is great – focusing on defence makes her totally different from other bosses, and even other enemies. There’s nobody else like them in the game, which I love.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

6 dice is more than anyone else in the game, but I’m sure I had a good reason for it. Eh. Let’s try reducing it back to 5, especially since she’s getting a small HP boost, and see how it feels.

Champion is a rubbish name for such a cool character. Let’s call her “Protector” or “Royal Guard” or… hmm, actually, since she’s a boss, so why not give her a name?

Huh. Since I already have a Scathach, how about Aoife? (aside from the fact that nobody is going to be able to pronounce that, but, eh, who cares.) But yeah! Especially since I’m losing my Fomorian, I really like that.

Actions:

  • Reduce from 6 dice to 5.
  • Rename her Aoife.


VAMPIRE
  • Boss, 65 hp, 4 dice
  • Good Turn: 4 damage, 4 healing, +3 poison
  • Bad Turn: None of that

What’s Good:

The Vampire’s twist, needing to give up a piece of equipment to defeat it, is super interesting. I really like this boss.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Due to a bug in v0.15, the Vampire would appear every single time you played as thief – so naturally, some players are getting a bit sick of him.

He’s a little bit of a downer, in some ways, because he means that you have to mess up your perfect build at the last moment. But I’m ok with that.

Interesting problem specifically for poison builds: because he usually heals back up on his turn, if you’ve gone for a pure poison build, you have to wait until you’re lucky enough that he doesn’t heal on that turn before you can finish him off. Easy enough fix, though: just have Wooden Stake do a little bit more damage.

I think Smog Cloud is *slightly* too weak, so I’m gonna try having it do more status effects – 3 shock instead of just 1, and let’s get rid of the blind status. I think more status rather than more poison is the way to go here, since the extra shock and extra HP will draw the battle out a little longer anyway.

Actions:

  • Have the stake take the last 5 HP from vampires instead of the last 1 HP.
  • Change Smog cloud to 3 shock instead of 1, and remove the blind status.


SCATHACH
  • Boss, 69hp, 1 dice
  • Good Turn: 12 damage + curse
  • Bad Turn: 2 damage + lock

What’s Good:

Has a very different design that’s very memorable. Can hit very hard, always inflicts some statuses to deal with, which makes her interesting to fight.

What’s bad, and how to fix:

Scathach is great. Gonna maybe take a closer look at the six specific spells she has:

  • (1) The Shadow: 2 damage, blind 3
  • (2) The Wind: 4 damage, lock 2
  • (3) The Ashes: 6 damage, burn all
  • (4) The Cold: 8 damage, freeze 2
  • (5) The Storm: 10 damage, shock + silence
  • (6) The Curse: 12 damage, curse

Yep, that all looks pretty good. I might increase the status on The Cold, freezing 2 dice when you probably have 5 is pretty weak – let’s make it 3. Also, which shock + silence is a good combo, you know what’s better? Shock ALL and silence!

I’ve been thinking it’s a little weird that I don’t have a shock all in the game – it’s very manageable and interesting, after all. But that’s a lot of damage to link to it. Maybe let’s swap the Storm and the Ashes, and change The Storm to do the shock all thing.

Actions:

  • Change The Ashes: Needs 5 instead of Needs 3, increase to 10 damage.
  • Change The Cold: Freezes 3 dice instead of 2.
  • Change The Storm: Needs 3 instead of Needs 5, reduce to 6 damage. Shock ALL and Silence instead of just Shock and Silence.

Boss Summary

An overview:

  • ALL:
    Increase HP by 8.
  • GIRL SCOUT
    Give her a name.
  • DRAGON
    Try a different design for Fire Breath: countdown of 4, 5 fire damage + 2 burn.
    Ditch Wall of Flames
  • FOMORIAN
    Rename to Gym Leader, or something.
  • CHAMPION
    Reduce from 6 dice to 5.
    Rename her Aoife.
  • VAMPIRE
    Have the stake take the last 5 HP from vampires instead of the last 1 HP.
    Change Smog cloud to 3 shock instead of 1, and remove the blind status.
  • SCATHACH
    Change The Ashes: Needs 5 instead of Needs 3, increase to 10 damage.
    Change The Cold: Freezes 3 dice instead of 2.
    Change The Storm: Needs 3 instead of Needs 5, reduce to 6 damage. Shock ALL and Silence instead of just Shock and Silence.

Apparently, mostly what I care about here is names. Hmm! Fair enough. I’m basically pretty happy with the bosses, to be honest.

In conclusion?

So, v0.16 has been out for about a week, and feedback is good! The harder enemies work, for the most part, and all of this is starting to feel more and more final. I’ll likely have at least one more audit before launch, but this is feeling pretty close now.

Phew, that was a lot 🙂 Thanks for reading!

(usual reminders: if you want to know when the game comes out on steam, then you can wishlist us here! Or, if you wanna try out the alpha version right now, it’s available on itch.io for a discount price of just $7.50!)

2 Comments

Design Diary: The Jester

Tom Francis said this smart thing about game design on twitter the other day – that it’s like “building fires in the dark”.

Basically, for him, the process of game design is like lighting a fire, taking a good look at your surroundings, and exploring what you can see. Before you’ve lit the fire, you don’t know what’s out there, but after you have, you can see everything clearly, and in highsight, your insights seem obvious, even mundane and not worth stating. Which makes taking about game design really difficult.

I can relate to this a lot!

I have a lot of trouble talking about design. I find it really hard to articuate how I work – anytime I try to explain a design decision, I end up just mumbling and saying something like “it just worked better that way, I dunno ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”.

I tweeted this, and added – “I’m a bit jealous of designers who can, like, build a model of how something’s going to play in their head – for me, it’s a process of trying a bunch of different stuff and hoping some of it works when I have it playable.”

I worded this very badly. Of course, all designers need to playtest and iterate to figure stuff out. Also, yes, when I’m designing something, I do have a plan for each step of the way! I try lots of changes that I think will work – sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. The thing I don’t really have, I think, is a good intuition for how each experiment is going to go. I’m frequently surprised by what doesn’t work, and I find I discover lots of things accidentally while trying out random things. Game design often feels a series of happy little accidents to me.

Someone on twitter responded that I should just keep notes, and, actually, I do! Meticulous ones! And I’m going to show them to you! This is how I recently solved a very tricky design problem, step by step.

Recently I’ve been trying to finalise the design of the last character for my new game, Dicey Dungeons. The “Jester” was playable in earlier alpha versions of the game, but they had a bunch of problems, and I wasn’t really happy with them – so, in the last update, I decided to take them out, and go back to the drawing board. I’m certain that there’s something really good here, but the character just wasn’t clicking yet.

(Uh, so, I’ll try to keep it snappy, but fair warning – unlike my big AI blog post, I’m not sure this post is gonna make a lot of sense unless you’re pretty familiar with Dicey Dungeons already. Sorry!)


Who is the Jester?

I unveiled the sixth and final Dicey Dungeons character in v0.13, and they’re very different from the other five.

The different classes in Dicey Dungeons are all about varying the basic rules of the game – each character gives you a different view on the same basic mechanics by varying some fundamental system or other. All characters have equipment with dice slots, and they roll dice which they can assign to those slots. But, for example, the Robot doesn’t actually roll dice on their turn like the other characters do – they have a “push your luck” minigame that they can play to gain the dice they need, and if they lose it, they lose all their equipment. And the Witch doesn’t collect equipment like the other characters – instead, she has a limited spellbook with equipment that she can summon copies of, and change out as needed.

One thing that Dicey Dungeons does differently from other deckbuilding games – it doesn’t have a deck. You find equipment as you explore the dungeon, and you can equip it – but it doesn’t change from round to round. That is, unless you’re playing Jester.

The Jester’s “thing” is that they don’t have a static equipment layout. When they find equipment, it’s added to a deck, which gets shuffled and dealt from. As soon as you use a piece of equipment, another piece is dealt immediately. This all works in Dicey Dungeon’s systems because of a “snap” mechanic, which lets you trade matching cards for an extra dice, which you can then use to play more equipment.


The problem

The Jester was kind of fun to play, but, yeah, there are some serious problems. Two in particular:

  • I was hoping that the “snap” mechanic would mean that you had to make interesting decisions about using your cards, or trading them for dice based on what you thought was coming up and when. In practice, though, it just ended up being more efficient to cycle through your deck as quickly as possible, getting more and more dice to use on the most powerful cards you had. This was the “big” Jester problem – it meant that every single round ended up feeling exactly the same, especially as you got near the end of a run.
  • The balance was pretty badly off. Levels 1 and 2 could trip you up, but by level 3 you were always basically unstoppable, and by level 4, you could often finish bosses in a single turn.

I made a few quick changes to the character for v0.14, but they actually made things much worse:

  • I had a problem where players would cycle through their deck and have a bunch of dice left over with nothing to do with them. This panicked me a little, since one of the things I try to avoid is the player having spare dice at the end of their turn – that basically always feels bad. So I tried out a “Finale Card” system – the last card in your deck is always the same, dice-hungry card. This just made the character even more unbalanced – there was an extra incentive to optimise your deck for cycling.
  • There was very little incentive to pick up bad cards as the Jester – which is a shame, because if you only ever pick up good cards, it’s a little boring. So, I added “Booster Pack” pickups where you’d pick up 3 cards at once – two good cards along with a bad one, mostly. Nobody was ever tempted to pick these up, though, since it was always better to keep a light deck of mostly matching cards than to dilute it with 3 different ones.

I ended up really unhappy with v0.14 Jester, so, in v0.15, they were gone.


Design diary

So, here it is! These are my actual notes from across the last month or so as I tried to figure this problem out. They’re lightly edited for clarity, but, uh, they’re still a bit of a mess.

My design process is mostly just playing through the game over and over again, which in my testing version of the game I can do at 5x speed, and seeing what happened.


The original boop card
10th January:

This was my first day of attempting to fix the character. I started out by identifying what the main problems were, and turning off everything that was making them worse, so I could hopefully see things a bit clearer.

Whenever you see a “-=-=-=-=-” in the notes, I’m probably playtesting!

Ok, Jester iteration 1!

– Let’s change Dice Cannon to Punchline, and weaken punchline.
– Let’s also weaken Dice Cannon, in case it comes up.
– Let’s also nerf Marotte to Max 2 and Max 4
– And completely remove the call for backup cards for now.

This is virtually a baseline. Almost no changes, except for some relatively big ones that should significantly impact the biggest problems.

Thoughts:
– The Jester needs more occasional big hitters to come up to make them work – they don’t really have anything that’s outside of the range of normal attack cards. That might give us something else to build a hand around, perhaps.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Ok, right away, I feel like there’s not much interesting dynamics happening in the initial Jester Hand. Let’s try something RADICAL.

I’m going to put Dice Cannon back, but as a nerfed card, dealing 1 damage per use. I’m also going to reduce the Jester hand to just three cards: Boop, Boop and Wind up Fist. Let’s see how it looks!

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Ok, that doesn’t work, but it does reveal some issues.

Finale cards are a *weird* concept that shouldn’t be in your initial line up at all. I’m going to remove them for now.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Ok, removing the finale card feels really good. Let’s run with that for a while.

Taking a walk and a coffee break.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Something I wanna try just throwing in there: cards that give dice on certain numbers, otherwise just damage. Let’s try it!

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Ok, nope, I tried out a gold and silver dagger which return dice on odd or even. They’re mostly just confusing, I think.

Let’s try one more radical thing: Snap removes cards, but gives no bonus at all. How does that feel?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

That kinda works. Gosh. I dunno though. Maybe worth considering an alternative to the basic snap mechanics here, though.

Here’s one I was thinking about: what if *snap* executed the matching cards for free? It would just figure out a magic dice to use for all the matching cards, and execute them simultaneously. It makes snap into something closer to Fury, only it does what you would expect snap to actually do.

What dice would you use? The best one – so the highest dice that fits. For very very rare cases, we can specify which to use in the spreadsheet, I guess.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I feel like I lost control of the Jester in v0.14. I reacted to player feedback and added two elements to try and patch fundamental problems, and I don’t think either worked – Finale cards and booster packs. I should have ignored that, and followed my own instincts and modified the core mechanics instead.

I think it’s ok, though. Implementing that stuff was useful to help me figure things out. Now that I have, I can try more new stuff and make more progress on all this.

So, end of day one: I’ve removed a bunch of stuff, and I’m starting to figure things out. The main thing I made progress on was realising that the Jester’s snap mechanics (where they traded matching cards for dice) was the key broken thing. Eventually I replaced that with something that works much better – a simple “discard” mechanic, where you just remove matching cards.

It looks like I actually even tried this variation out on that day, but ended up going around in circles before I finally figured out how much better it was.

I also had the idea for the “power snap” mechanic, where matching cards were actually “used” instead of discarded.


The power snap mechanic in action
11th January:

Day two! Before I actually started taking these notes, I implemented the new snap mechanic I’d thought of the day before.

Ugh, I have a cold. I *knew* this was going to happen. Soon as the schedule went all finalised, I’m sick.

Anyway, gonna keep doing this Jester design work. New snap mechanic is super exciting, but it breaks things a LOT. Let’s step through bit and bit and see what the problems are. I wanna see if I can make it work, because it’s really fun.

=-=-=-=-

Alright: the starting hand is gonna need to be rethought with the new Snap mechanic. Obviously if there’s no matches, it doesn’t work, and we need some way to be able to deal damage that’s comparable to other characters.

I tried having the five basics in the character’s deck (Boop, Deflect, Sweets, Liquorice, Buzzer), but that just feels noisy and unfocused.

Doubling Buzzer is way too powerful – Consider a Fire equivalent instead.
Boop dealing just 1 damage is super weak, but a deck full of them could be pretty fun.
Worth considering something that scales on Snap power too.

Ok: Let’s look at the other classes:

Warrior:
Starts with Sword, usually gets another weapon very early. Early damage range 6, and then 6-12.

Thief:
Lockpick and Dagger. Dagger is great and can deal raw dice damage if you’re lucky, but it depends on the roll. Anywhere from 2-9.

Robot:
Pea Shooter and Plasma Gun. Limit of 9 CPU at level 1, but can find other weapons early. Range 5-7, or 12 if you get a jackpot.

Inventor:
Just one Hammer is a bit weak at first, but you quickly find more weapons. Range 1-6, then 12.

Witch:
On a good roll, (which is most of the time at first), you can do 5 damage on turn 1, 7 on turn 2, then 9 on turn 3.

Jester:
To be consistent, it would be nice to figure out how the Jester might range between 4-8 or so from a starting hand.

The Jester could start with 3 different cards: something which does 1 damage, something which does 2, and something which does 3 – 3 of the first, 2 of the second, and 1 of the third.

Let’s see how that feels to start off.

=-=-=-

Ok! That’s a guaranteed 10 damage per turn, it turns out. Hmm.

Because Snap guarantees you can use the cards, it’s always best to just snap when you have a match. Nothing else needs to be considered.

Ok, here’s another variation: what if, instead, you had to use a dice on the snap button? Instead of an automatic dice being assigned to the cards, then, the dice you choose would get assigned to the matching cards. This could open up some interesting avenues, maybe?

Not sure, tbh, but let’s give it a go.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Uh, yeah, sickness got the better of me. Fell asleep. Curled up for the couch for a bit, feeling sorry for myself.

Anyway, small amounts of Jester thoughts:

The thing of adding a dice slot to the jester card seemed like a good idea earlier, but it leads to a bunch of ambiguities – like how to handle slot matching in a way that feels nice? (thinking it through, it just seems messy.)

Also, it does solve a problem, sure, but it doesn’t solve the *real* problem – that playing Jester just feels like going through the motions. So how do I solve that?

I don’t meant to sound bleak about it. Actually, I think it’s totally ok if the Jester ends up being this weird, slightly broken character that I can do fun things with. It’s not the end of the world if I never figure out a perfect design here. But up for trying a bit longer, at least.

The Jester is not the witch. A certain amount of going through the motions is unavoidable. What you want is for the dice to at least act as a randomiser on that.

So, probably more cards with more restrictions, at least. However! That leads to the other big problem with “snapping” – you end up taking difficult, hard-to-use cards and trivialising their usage by making them free. How do we fix that? How do we give interesting decisions back to the player?

Well, you could have multiple choices to balance – do you take more restrictive cards, or duplicates of weaker cards?

If I continue in this power snap direction, then Copy has to be very very rare now, I think.

We could have cards that depend on the number of snaps made per turn – kind of like a thief backstab multiplier. (the problem there, is, that’s not a decision – that’s just another “thing”).

Or, we could have cards that are better if they come first, so the *order* of your deck matters. Maybe it matters so much that you try to set things up in sequence. A card that increases the damage boop cards do is interesting, for example. As is a card that grants fury, or causes your NEXT card to be more effective in some other way. (grappling hook?)

Um, dunno. Sleepy and sick. Will do more thinking about this tomorrow.

So, it turns out? Having the snap mechanic use cards for free is super fun, but also super, super broken. It basically meant that you didn’t care what cards you got, so long as you found more than one of them. This direction ultimately didn’t work as the “core” Jester mechanic.

The other big idea from this day: try out cards that depend on sequence! This ended up being a really important mechanic that made building a Jester deck a lot more interesting.


The new conditional cards
15th January:

I managed to do a little bit of Jester design work while on the plane to PAX South:

On a flight!

It’s almost empty here – I’ve got a whole row to myself. I feel like I should probably make some use out of it and get a bit of work done. On the other hand, am on a flight, so maybe I shouldn’t stress about it too much.

Let’s think about the Jester for a while longer! Gonna need them to have at least two floors playable for PAX if I want to include them, so let’s give it a shot.

=-=-=-=-

So I’m trying to figure out this really basic puzzle with the Jester.

If snapping works like this: Cards that match can be played for free, with the required dice supplied.

Then what are some interesting gameplay consequences of that?

One thing, you definitely want to duplicate cards. Basically nothing is more powerful, in fact.

Problems I can’t seem to figure out:
– Playing as Jester is completely going through the motions, worse than before. You play whatever cards you can, hoping for snaps to come along naturally. Sometimes you selectively play cards if you see a snap coming up, but that’s about it. This is never really a “decision” in combat.
– There’s also never really a decision in picking stuff up. It’s mostly best to keep your deck lightweight, so… Just avoid everything, probably?

So, on the first, I think I want to introduce a new class of cards, Jester focused, which are more concerned with ORDER. Any card that depends on existing stats is great. Existing cards like this are:
– Detonator (deals damage if you’ve poisoned the enemy)
– Shield Grip (deals damage if you have shields)

Let’s introduce both as Jester cards.

Also, let’s make these new ones:
Megaboop – Deal 1 damage for each boop card used this turn
??? – Deal 4 damage for each burning dice/frozen dice

Let’s also make more tempting clutter for the snap cards! Burns and Freezes are a great addition to the mix.

=-=-=-

Ok, those cards are great – they also make so much more sense for the Jester than for the other characters, thanks to the Jester’s non-linear deck, so they feel like they belong.

I’ve been making little tweaks here and there. Let’s check in on where I am:

=-=-=-

– Match three means any raw damage dice card can do about 18 damage when used with new Snap. Gosh. It’s fun, but it’s clearly way too powerful. I might need to change the limit break.
– I’m trying out just three cards for the starting layout – Boop, Infliction, and Magic Missile. This works, and gives me a nice starting hand that ranges between 4 and 8 damage.
– But the whole thing spirals out of control way too quickly. By level 2, I’m already on autopilot, with more nonsense in my deck than I can think about.

=-=-=-

Ok, changes:
– Let’s try a “wildcard” limit break instead of Match 3, to slightly nerf that.
– Instead of magic missile, let’s redo wind-up fist to do five damage – slightly more Jester themed.

=-=-=-

There’s some tech work to do to get that wild card working.

Wondering if it’s worth *trying* a single card use on snap mechanic? Having all the cards trigger is super overpowered, but using one for free might seem fair?

Alright then! Two tech things to explore!

Gonna take a break from all this for the rest of the flight, I think. Maybe watch some telly, or try to nap a bit.

Not bad for a flight! So at this point, I hadn’t quite given up on the “power snap” mechanic, but I’d figured out that it wasn’t going to work and was trying other things. I’d also figured out a clearer plan to have more cards that were sensitive to what order you’d played them on that turn.


An ice themed booster pack
23rd January:

PAX South went really well! It took about a week afterwards until I got around to iterating on the Jester again.

Yay, ok, landed and back in London.

Things are gonna be pretty full on for v0.16. I’m aiming for *next* friday, which is doable but really, really tight. Here’s what’s on the agenda:

– Finish the Jester
– Implement the starting tutorial
– Quest unlocking and progression
– Basic cutscenes

Obviously, the priority is the Jester. But I’m not having that much luck at banging my head against the wall trying to figure it out. So, instead, I think I’m going to just do an hour a day on that for the next week or so, and spend the rest of the time getting on with other things. Just enough time to, like, keep my subconscious on the problem.

Ok, let’s start now! Pomodoro 1!

=-=-=-=-

Alright, so, debrief of stuff I tried on a plane:

– I tried to nerf snap by having it just autoplay a single card. This felt really bad, and I think I’m going to undo it. I also tried making Match 3 and Match 2 to nerf it – that also feels bad. Let’s go back to Match 3.

– I tried Wind up Fist in the opening line up again, but I think I’m kinda past that point of design with the character. You need a big hit in the starting lineup, so instead I’m gonna try out some single use items, like Crystal Sword.

I think I need to *try* some dramatically new mechanics here, just to clear away the feeling of being stuck. I’m going to try ditching the new Snap mechanic, and seeing if I can make the character work without it again. So, back to the snapping cards for extra dice thing!

From this lens: All the characters have some basic mechanics to introduce *uncertainty* into the game, right? (I mean on top of what equipment you find and what dice you roll). For the warrior, you can reroll dice, the thief can split randomly with the lockpick, the robot has the CPU counter and the chance of errors, the inventor has to discard equipment, and the witch’s normal dice rolling uncertainty is multiplied thanks to her dependence on the spellbook.

The Jester gets draw order.

So, using *just* that, can I make the character interesting to play?

=-=-=-

Gonna make a list of different things to try that might go somewhere:

– Have cards that add more cards to your deck *as you play*. So, a card that adds a boop to your deck on an even dice, say.
– What are some *risks* that your cards could have? Why is it better to choose poison cards over ice, say?
– What are some chain mechanics that are less full on that I could explore? Less powerful duplicates, illuminates, etc.

=-=-=-

Ok! I made a card that adds infliction cards to your deck, that’s cool. It kinda works, too!

Let’s make it chainable – instead of infliction, let’s add cauldrons. That’ll mean your damage output is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 per turn. Which is a little low? On top of other things, though, maybe that’s ok.

=-=-=-

Ah! Ok, Marotte Machine is my new card. This is great.

Marotte Machine gives you a new Marotte for a countdown of 5, which gets added to your deck. They do 3 damage and reroll the dice, so as you get more and more they start to get really powerful, but it’s not a sure thing.

Ok, so Marotte chaining is fun, and somewhat powerful, but unpredictable. But that’s just one set of mechanics, so let’s think about some others that work with it:

– A lockpick basically ensures that you can use all of your marottes, and helps with chaining
– Illuminate is a bit confusing as Jester, but the idea of stashing dice until the next turn is very good. Some kind of next turn setup in general is worth thinking about.

Ah, ok, that was way more than an hour, but whatever, this feels like a breakthrough.

At the time, it definitely felt like I’d made a big discovery with the “Marotte Machine” card – but it ended up really not working. It’s gone now. Nothing I added on this day actually made it in.


The final version of the “Marotte Machine” card
24th January:

Still, I’d gotten back into the swing of things! This ended up being my most productive day so far:

Ok! It’s Jester hour 😀

So, biggest discovery from yesterday’s experiments: Marotte Machine is pretty cool. Great!

Still worried that powered up snap is way too powerful. With two marottes in your hand, it just does six damage and gives you two extra dice, which is super broken.

I dunno, though. It’s such a nice mechanic.

I def want to continue to keep it in the game in some form – but maybe not as the central thing? Varying snap mechanics is a super strong direction to keep aside for quests, anyway.

Hmm. Let’s get back to a new starting point.

So, as an experiment I’m back to the behaviour where Snap exchanges matching cards for dice, and the new Juggling Ball mechanic discovery as a pickup on level 1. (I renamed Marottes to Juggling Balls – it fits much better, and nobody knows what a Marotte is.)

The Jester lacks real *progression*. You start off underpowered, and end up crazy overpowered. You end up quickly burning through your entire deck every turn.

This indicates to me that things really aren’t so bad at the start, but that you need to figure out a way to pace the character better. Getting to the point where you can just burn through your deck should (a) be something you plan around and (b) be a choice, and one that’s an alternative to other choices, like going in heavy on damage dealing cards, say.

Anyway, from this starting point, let’s just play!

=-=-=

I’ve got the Jester with Wind Up Fist (newly reduced to 5), Two boops, sweets and Liquorice. Let’s change that to start:

Boop|Boop|Sweets|Sweets|Liquorice|Liquorice|Wind up Fist

My thinking is: having duplicates of almost all the starting cards gives you some strategy from the get go – if you don’t care about Poison, you can dismiss that for the extra dice. In practice, this means…

That you get five dice on turn 1, and ensures that you can use the Wind up Fist. Hmmm.

Ok, gosh. What if you didn’t get a dice on snaps? What if it literally just removes the cards?

=-=-=

Oh, huh! That’s interesting! It means you can focus on different things on your turn without it being the entire point of it. Right away it creates all these situations where you have to decide between using cards and advancing the deck for other, situationally more useful things. Huh!

=-=-=

Ok, this really seems to be working. Let’s try this instead for a while.

=-=-=

So, Match 3 is no longer useful as a limit break, in this world. What else might be?

Extra dice would work, but that’s a little dull. You could make it change to the execute snap behaviour, but that’s pretty overpowered.

In any case, you probably want *something* that’s Jester specific – that has to do with the card system.

=-=-=-

Hmm, ok, I can’t think of anything. Let’s just try making the limit break be the powered up snap mechanic! When in doubt, go for the fun, overpowered thing!

The issue with it is that it makes the limit break incredibly powerful, and probably encourages a limit break heavy strategy. But let’s see how much of a big deal it is.

=-=-=-

That limit break is AMAZING. Fucking hell. Yeah, this is super fun. It gives it this pac-man like feeling of briefly being super powerful, and then going back to normal.

So, main problems at this point: progression is all off. I would consider pushing all the levels back by 1, maybe. The Jester should probably find less “stuff” in the Dungeon than other characters do.

Anyway, I think that’s me hit against today’s hour, and then some. I’m gonna move on for today.

It took me a while to get there, but this version of the snap mechanic – discard cards to advance through your deck when playing normally, and use your limit break to change to the “power snap” mode – is the thing that worked, and is what I’m doing in the final version of the character.


The new “snap” limit break
8th February:

I took a break from the Jester for a little while here to focus on other things that needed to be done in the game. When I came back, I’d figured a few more things out.

(The notes from this day are a little all over the place, and mostly didn’t work out. Feel free to skim or skip ahead.)

Ok! With the tutorial basically good to go now, I’m focused on finishing up the Jester. I did a few hours on them last week, which I think helped, but I’m still not really feeling them.

By the end of today, I’d really like to have a plan, one way or another. Here are some stray thoughts:

– You’re missing the “building” from deck building
– Your current starting hand is awesome, when it lands
– Having the player decide what to add is very difficult
– Duplicates are the heart of the class, but there are several problems with it that I need to figure out

– You’re missing the “building” from deck building

Ok, so, the real heart of deck building is this: on turn one, you’re not that powerful. On turn 10, you’re insanely powerful. If you get to make interesting choices along the way, then great!

In Dicey Dungeons, this plays out over multiple battles, mostly. You start with 2 dice and a sword and a reroll, but by the end, with five dice, you’re unstoppable.

So for the Jester, I have an opportunity to do something else! Here are some mechanics that I haven’t been able to explore in Dicey Dungeons yet:

Thinning out your deck: The Jester, could, in theory, have a card that deleted a card from your deck forever, once per battle. If used, you could create a post-combat thing of thinning out your deck (including, if you were done with it, destroying this card.) You could do exactly the same thing with a copy and upgrade card.

Cards that depend on other cards you’ve played: Like Ascension or Star Realms – if you play a yellow card, then each yellow card is worth extra, or whatever. These are a bit complicated, but I’m trying them out right now with the damage based on burn/freeze and Megaboop cards.

Chaining: Cards that work in sequence: say three cards that will do X damage if you play them in order. Or cards that say, nudge a dice and then change powerup.

– Your current starting hand is awesome, when it lands

Two problems with the starting hand:

You just need it to contain certain thrashy things, otherwise you’d never pick them up.

You have enough in your starting hand to do real damage, especially with the limit break.

Thinking about limiting the use of the limit break to contain that a bit maybe?

– Having the player decide what to add is very difficult

So, here’s an idea: what if I just double up every single pickup as this class? That’s already supported in code, so why not? You never want to pick up single, difficult to use cards, but if they can be snapped or power snapped, then it becomes a more interesting choice right away.

– Duplicates are the heart of the class, but there are several problems with it that I still need to figure out

Some thoughts on this: I want to try properly embracing pairs. No single cards any more!

Snapping to “remove” cards feels so weak. It’s way more interesting to play, because you end up thinking of snaps as deck management rather than a move in and of itself, but I can’t get over the feeling of it being a bit “pointless”.

Would it be crazy if snapping hurt you for 1 hp? Maybe. What if it bumped a random dice? Too confusing. Do one damage? Maybe, but I dunno.

The limit break is *amazing* to pull off, and feels great. It requires just enough deck manipulation to be interesting, and is crazy powerful. Maybe too powerful, to be honest – I wonder if I could limit the power snap counter or something.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Ok, so, the opening set. The boops are good, but I’m gonna try removing Liquorice and Sweets. Instead, I’ll add Spark and Snowflake, and an extra wind-up fist. Let’s try that, and see how it feels!

=-=-=-

Not bad, but having such a full inventory is so excessive. I think ideally we’d just have four, to stop things feeling overwhelming. But then…

There are a whole bunch of confusing concepts: why discard cards? And if we don’t have any matches, what does that button even do?

Here’s another thing I’m thinking of: what if you get a free snap each round? That could be fun, but would make the character incredibly powerful again…

Let’s try this: We’re gonna start with just the following: Boop x2, Spark x2, and Slapjack (which gives you a power snap charge).

=-=-=-

Ok! That’s kind of fun, as a starting arrangement! It’s complicated, yeah, but in an acceptable way. I think all the pieces are there so that a player can figure it out.

The only problem is Wind-up Fist – I might just ditch it. Powerful spells this early just end up feeling broken.

I’m still a bit worried about people not picking stuff up – I guess I’ll just playtest that style and see what happens. It’s a fact: pick up as little as possible early on, and you’ll be more powerful later…

So, I’m going around in circles again, but what if you started with Boop x2, Slapjack, Spark and Snowflake, and we ditched the double pickup thing, instead adding support for booster pack style pickups in every situation. Then the first pickup could be Boop, Spark x2 or Snowflake x2, or even Liquorice x2! And any of them are justifiable.

=-=-=-

Ok! I’m feeling pretty happy with floor 1 now, yay.

On to floor 2, and it’s problems –

– The booster pack concept isn’t really relevant anymore, whoops.

– Juggling Ball is a nice piece of equipment. Probably worth starting with one, or getting one on floor 1, so that you know what “incoming” is going to do.

– Incoming should also transform into a Juggling ball for the rest of the turn, just to make the whole thing cleaner.

– Shield Grip + two deflects is a super cool pickup. Let’s add that to the mix again.

=-=-=-

Ok. Floor 2.

By the time you have 11 cards or so, things are already pretty confusing. So, I’m thinking maybe we push back the current level 1 rewards to level 2 – all you need to find on floor 1 is a juggling ball, I reckon.

Not sure about finding copy shop on floor 2. Let’s try 50-50ing with upgrade instead.

=-=-=-

Yeah, let’s just make that Upgrade instead of Copy.

Huh. It’s not clear to me that Incoming is really a good card, actually… It’s fun, but it kinda overwhelms and becomes the focus of each battle.

I’m gonna try taking it out. As for the Juggling Ball, let’s make it a level up reward.

=-=-=-

Ok, I think starting with a ton of matches in your hand is way more interesting than starting with mostly unmatching cards. It’s more fun to play off the bat, the discard mechanic makes sense, the level up makes sense, and I *don’t* think it’s that overwhelming. Gonna stick with this.

=-=-=-

Overlapping status effects for Jester continues to be a little annoying – you both freeze and burn dice a lot.

Gonna try swapping out Spark for Liquorice. Poison is a damage boost, but it takes away the status issue.

This day was a bit unfocused. I tried out this weird idea of having every single pickup be two copies of a card, but that didn’t work at all.

I also tried different incentives for the “discard” move, but none of them worked – any incentive or disincentive to use discard seemed to make the character less interesting to play, so I stopped that.

The other weird thing I tried today was having “charges” on the “power snap” mechanic – so using the limit break would give you three charges, which could carry over to the next turn. This was ok, but I took it further by introducing a “SnapJack” card which gave you a single power snap charge, and that was a mess. I eventually scrapped the whole concept of limit break charges, and the “SnapJack” card is gone now.

The big thing I did figure out on this day was the starting arrangement of the deck made more sense with duplicates of weak cards. I eventually reintroduced Dice Cannon at 1 damage per dice, and now the starting Jester layout feels really nice.


“Spark”, the new weak Fire card for Jester
9th February:

This day was mostly about taking what I’d figured out about the basic mechanics, and trying to make a new dungeon layout based on that.

Bit of Saturday work, still trying to figure this whole Jester thing out.

I did some thinking about quests:

Jester Finders Keepers (Losers, Weepers) –
Jester must take *all* equipment after each fight, yikes! Limit break allows you to delete a card of your choosing. (which is useful, because you’ll quickly fill your deck up with all sorts of crap). Discard becomes “Discard All”, maybe, I’m not sure.

Expect the Unexpected –
Instead of a next up display, just have four cards available to play. Other rules remain the same.

=-=-=-

I’m going around in circles a little, but some notes on the starting distribution:

– Too many different cards is overwhelming
– But too few, and you don’t have good incentives to pick stuff up unless it’s really good
– More than two of a thing is good
– It’s really hard to explain the discard/snap mechanics off the bat no matter what you do

Currently trying two boops, a juggling ball and a two sparks, with the first pick either being another juggling ball, boop, or a spark|boop pack.

=-=-=-

Ok, The snapjack level up is insane (it gives you two snap charges instead of one) – that should probably have a higher countdown, and the level up should maybe just reduce the countdown again.

Upgrade is a bad call on floor two because you don’t really have any interesting cards. Copy is better after all. Switch it back again!

=-=-=

Playthrough!

Died on floor 3 to a Sorceress. Had an overcomplicated deck and just didn’t get as many discards or even snaps as I needed. Regretted taking the snowflakes.

Found myself wanting healing. Consider adding sweets instead of Spark.

Megaboop doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped. It kinda ends up hanging around your hand until you have a chance to use it, which slows down the rest of the run. OR! You have to use a dice to dismiss it, which is no fun at all.

How about we try making it a skill instead of a dice? So you press a button instead of wasting a dice on it?

Not sure what to give on first level up reward. Megaboop will increase in power if we make it a skill, so it can stay – but what else? Come back to that.

Level up progression still feeling too steep. Let’s slow it down again! I can push one of the level 1 pickups to floor two, and so on. In fact, here’s what I’ve got so far:

Level 1:
Juggling Ball
One of “Boop”, “Spark|Spark|Boop”

Level 2:
Copyshop
One of “Boop|Boop|Boop”, “Snowflake|Snowflake|Snowflake”, “Spark|Spark|Spark”, “Deflect|Deflect|Shield Grip”, “Liquorice|Liquorice|Liquorice”
Shop containing A delete, one of “Juggling Ball”, “Boop”, “Lament”, “Battle Axe”, “Hammer”, one of “Lockpick”, “Spanner”, “Bump”, “Glass Cauldron”

Level up rewards: Dice, either a megaboop or another Slapjack

Level 3:
Not really sure yet!

Yikes, ok, this is all way too much, too fast. Let’s slow this right down.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Quick aside: what equipment is *interesting* to power snap?

Dice creation equipment: power snapping dice creation equipment gives you free dice – a minimum of two, in fact. Using two spanners creates FOUR dice, Jesus. (two sixes in the two slots, which are basically just returned)

Charge based weapons: Electromagnet I guess charges the individual copies? Hmm.

Reusable equipment: AHHHHHH. Reusable equipment logically discards, yes, but when using snap, you can activate it over and over. So daggers will just do six damage over and over until you run out of charges, yikes.

Crucible: get unlimited numbers of dice? hah

=-=-=-

Playing through a whole run finally, and the main thing I’m finding:

– Unlimited Snapping is probably more fun than having a set counter, even if it’s a little broken. I’m planning my run around that anyway, so why not embrace that? It’s actually less powerful, in a way, to force you to try and do everything in one move, since that’s really hard to pull off.

The problem behind that is: you end up just being better off not picking stuff up, again. Uff. I can’t get away from this. I’m not interested in “deciding”-what-to-keep based gameplay. Should I consider some kind of mandatory pickup mechanic? Nah, that’d feel terrible I think.

Upgrades are basically pointless, I never use ’em.

Fighting Vampire as the final boss, haha. With Match 3 gone and no mechanism at all now to discard single unwanted cards, this is terrible. What if you picked up two Vampire Stakes instead of one when playing Jester?

Ok, yeah that’s pretty funny 😀


The final version of the “Megaboop” card, which does extra damage for each “boop” played
11th February:

Skipping ahead a little, on the 11th I did a lot more work on the dungeon layout, the level up rewards, and finally figured out a progression from start to finish!

The new card from today, “Miniboop”, eventually got renamed “Boop”, and the “Boop” card got renamed “Bop”. These are probably bad names.

Morning Terry! Some quick late night Monday notes:

– The starting layout is feeling pretty good now, with the Juggling Ball on the floor as an uncertain element, and the Boop x2 and Sweets x2. Sweets change is good.
– It’s a little too easy to just go through your deck entirely each turn right now. This leaves me feeling very unsure about adding stuff to it. I tried to buy the deletes to remove Detonator on the last playthrough.
– Detonator is too expensive to work as well as the spark or snowflake pick ups, I think. Poison is maybe strong enough already, though, so you could just combo it with another card, maybe. Let’s make Detonator easier to use! It’s in need of a buff anyway.
– Starting with 3 dice feels much better for sure, but picking up spare 3s feels really bad, since you’ll basically always get them and then end up chaining your whole deck. Maybe just be very, very careful with dice manipulation. I think it’s important to not break the dice balance, because that ends up making the character feel very play-by-numbers.

Good solutions to that are more restrictive cards, or powerful single cards that become decisions: do I use this now and end the turn, or do I attempt to keep going?

Turns out, this is very hard!

Dream Quest, for example, does this by using weak attack cards, which are naturally chain breaking. You can then get past this by deleting the attack cards, which makes chains more likely, or getting special cards that draw more cards excessively, boosting your chain.

Dicey Dungeons can’t do this, because the snap mechanic naturally leads to chaining!

Worse than that, because your limit break requires chaining, anything that gets in the way of that weakens the character. It is *always* the best move to try to chain your entire deck, regardless of what’s at the end.

Hmm. I’m not sure what to do here that’ll make things feel fun.

Anyway, bedtime. Monday’s problem!

=-=-=-

Ok! Let’s get back into this!

So after sleeping on the problem a bit, I realised that I’m missing the friction that comes from having more than one set in your starting deck to “discard”. In fact, my discard button is basically pointless until floor 3, because my lean starting deck means that I never even need to use it.

How do I fix that? I need more trash cards. Stuff that you don’t *want* in your deck.

I’m going to start with an extreme addition, add see how that plays out: Three cards that just do 1 damage. We’ll call it Miniboop for now, and see how things feel with it in there. Will I want to delete them? Probably! That’s a good thing!

=-=-=-

Hmm, well, Miniboops are the new “Sweets” now – a trash card I never want to play, ever. Maybe they’d work slightly better at 2hp?

=-=-=-

Quick maths:

I’m now offering Juggling Balls at level up, so, with a starting deck, it looks like this:

Max damage with 3 dice: Boop + Boop + Miniboop = 8 dmg per turn
At level 2 with 1 Juggling Ball: 11 dmg per turn
At level 3 with 2 Juggling Ball: 14 dmg per turn
At level 4 with 3 Juggling Ball: 17 dmg per turn

I mean, yikes, ok, these ARE best case scenarios. But the point is: a starter deck can do 17 damage per turn reliably by level 4 – without picking up anything. You could win the game on just that.

As a baseline that is JUST too high. I’m gonna remove the Juggling Balls for now. Level up rewards for Jester are pretty tough 🙁

=-=-=-

Could also consider making the Jester susceptible to bad rolls. What if boops were MIN3? Would make things much less automatic.

Eh, let’s quickly try that.

=-=-=-

Ah wow, that’s so so much much better!

Why did it take me so long to try that? Ahh it solves so many problems – it makes each turn far more “bumpy” and fun without weakening the actual damage output. It works with other equipment really well too – Juggling ball becomes a reroll with a 2/3rd chance of enabling you to use Boop. It makes you consider using the miniboops. It’s just a lot better in lots of different ways, yay.

=-=-=-

Ok, this is feeling much better now! Small problems aside that I’ll polish out later, I think I’m ready to move to floor three.

I am finding, with the amount of deletes I have, that I quickly get back into a play-by-numbers deck. Why not start with more trash cards and see how that feels? I’m gonna add another Miniboop and Boop and see how it goes.

Also, floor 4 is just the worst. I got offered a booster pack with trash and an absolute zero card, which is even worse than trash, somehow, because it’s basically unusable as Jester.

My ice attack thing is way too strong. I nerfed it a little. But worth rethinking?

So my fire attack is great: it’s just three times the number of fire damage on the enemy. That really works.

The ice one is different, though – bonus damage if the enemy is frozen. So it becomes about trying to set up the conditional. I had to nerf the actual damage amount a lot, since most of it was just based on raw dice damage.

Let’s instead change it to offer a single snowflake, and two conditional damage cards (versus two snowfakes and one conditional damage card) – so we can do up to 12 damage per turn if we get it right! This compares to six for fire, which somehow feels better? I dunno 🙁

Let’s just leave the distribution at two snowflakes + 1 ice shatter, then.

=-=-=-

Ok, good news! The extra cards, as matches, do not slow down the early game at all, so that’s great. Remains to be seen how they affect the late game…

=-=-=-

Ice thingy is still too powerful? Hmm.

Maybe don’t offer deletes near the end – they’re less useful, and I want people to consider buying some cards instead!

=-=-=-

That run was really fun! Let’s make those changes, have a walk, and try again.

=-=-=-

This is starting to get really good.

It seemed like a small thing at the time, but maybe the biggest discovery of the day was the new “Bop” card – a 3 damage card that has a restricted slot. It added a crucial missing bit of texture to the starting deck, and instantly made the character way more fun to play.


“High Voltage”, the lightning conditional card
13th February:

At this point, I’m coming to the end of the process – Jester is playable from start to finish, and works. It’s very exciting!

So, it’s way beyond what I had timed it for, but I should be wrapping up the Jester today. I think they’ve come out really, really well. In the end, the crucial insight was figuring out how delicate the dice balance was, and respecting that. This is maybe a lesson that other deckbuilders get to have much earlier in development, but static layout thing let me put off figuring that out, I think.

Anyway: all the big problems are solved, and I’m now down to the details, I think. I’m gonna do one last playtest, then move on.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Yay, Shield Bash is a surprisingly fun run. A smart player will upgrade shield grip, which means having a weaker deck for a floor, and then things become powerful but not too much. I like it a lot!

=-=-=-=-=-

Ok, so, weirdly, near the end, I’m finding the character underpowered. I’ve lost to Cornelius twice now! I think that means I’m missing a power card or something from between levels 2 and 3… Maybe adding a duplicate to the Deck would help? It might be excessive, but let’s try it!

=-=-=-

Yeah, the duplicates are a welcome power up, and the character’s still very interesting – died to the boss in the last test.


The New Jester

So, it’s the 18th of February now, and I’m feel really great about where the Jester’s landing. A quick summary of the changes (so far!):

  • “Snap” replaced with “Discard” – instead of changing matching cards for Dice, you just discard them. This sounds like it shouldn’t work, but makes the character much more interesting to play.
  • “Match 3” limit break replaced with “Snap”, which changes the Discard button to a “Snap” button, allowing you to activate matching cards for free on that turn. This is by far the most powerful limit break in the game now, and is super fun, especially when you pull it off and get 4 or 5 snaps in a turn.
  • Starting deck has changed dramatically – Wind up Fist is gone, instead you have four “Boops” (do 2 damage), three “Bops” (do 3 damage, MIN 3 slot), and two “Sweets” (get 2 HP, overhealing becomes a shield).
  • Finale cards are still around, but they’re much weaker. Dice Cannon does just one damage per dice now.
  • All the “Backup” skill cards have been redesigned.
  • In general, Jester is very careful about Dice balance – you get a single dice on level 2, and after that you get duplicate cards. There are some dice manipulation cards in the Jester pool, but they’re rarer and usually not the overpowered ones (e.g. Cauldron instead of Doppledice).
  • Pickups are larely designed around a new class of card where order matters – Flame Blast does damage based on how many burns you have on the enemy, for example. There are Fire, Ice, Shock, Weaken, Poison and Shield equipment paths, and they’re all pretty interesting to play.

Phew!

The thing about this iterative process is that things never feel done. Even though this is feeling really fun now, there are new things I want to try and tweaks I want to make. I think it’s important to make yourself stop at some point, though, or you can end up with systems that feel “overcooked”.

Oh my gosh you’re still reading, well done, that was a long one! I’m hoping to get this character finished and playable very soon – can’t wait to see how people get on with them 🙂 Thanks for reading!

(usual reminders: if you want to know when the game comes out on steam, then you can wishlist us here! Or, if you wanna try out the alpha version right now, it’s available on itch.io for a discount price of just $7.50!)

2 Comments

Dice related stuff

Hello! It’s been a while! Let’s catch up! What’s been going on?


More Dice Stuff

For now and probably for a while to come, pretty much all my news is gonna be Dicey Dungeons related. ¯\_(?)_/¯

This last month, in particular, has been really full on. It feels like a lot of people are discovering the game for the first time right now! This is probably because of some combination of our IGF nomination (!!!), our new gameplay trailer (below), and word of mouth now that we’re getting closer to finished.

But, far more than anything else, I think lots of people are discovering us right now because of Angory Tom and his awesome youtube series on the game (above!). If that includes you, hi! Thanks for checking out the game!


We went to PAX South

Ahhh, I’m back from my first ever PAX! (Check out our new gameplay trailer that we made for the show!)

I’ve exhibited my work at other shows in the past, but PAX was something very different. For one thing, it’s way more player focused than other conventions I’ve done (which have generally been developer focused).

And it’s huge – people kept telling me that PAX South was “the small one”, but it’s easily the biggest convention I’ve ever been to. It had what felt like an acre of *just* tables for people to play board games on. I heard there were talks and a jumbo stadium sized cinema screen somewhere too, but I didn’t even see that side of things.

I had a lot of fun demoing our game there! We had a *lot* of enthusiastic players come by and check it out, and took a lot of playtesting notes that are gonna make the next version of the game even better. Can’t wait for PAX East!


We’re hard at work on v0.16

The next version of the game is coming out pretty soon! I’m aiming sometime early February for this one, but no promises 😛

For this version, the focus is on finally introducing some light story elements into the game. I was a bit worried about this step at first, but seeing how well it’s coming together, I think everyone is gonna like it a lot. The story is really helping the whole thing feel more connected and complete, without feeling like it’s in the way.

I’m also tackling on a lot of design stuff for this update, most importantly, reintroducing the Jester into the game, and doing a full design audit on the enemies. Also planning to take on as much stuff as I can from this scary list!

It’s really exciting to be this close to completion. I’m not sure exactly how many more alphas we’ll have before the final version is ready, but we’re getting very close.

(usual reminders: if you want to know when the game comes out on steam, then you can wishlist us here! Or, if you wanna try out the alpha version right now, it’s available on itch.io for a discount price of just $7.50!)

7 Comments

On a roll

Hey all! Happy new year!

Out with the old

Around this time every year, I clean up my blog sidebar, move old completed projects into annual folders, make room for new things. But last year, for the first time since I started this system in 2008, I didn’t finish any new games. In fact, the only other things I even worked on were State Machine, and a joke jam game, which I didn’t finish.

I’m finding myself weirdly at peace about this. I guess I’m just not in a “small” game phase of my life right now? Maybe that’ll change again in future, but for now, I’m just really enjoying working on this big dumb dice game.

In with the new

In Dicey Dungeons news: we have a new update! v0.15 came out on Christmas morning, and it’s *massive*. It features the quest system, which is the big idea at the heart of the game that I’ve been so excited to finally share. It also showcases the new enemy AI (previously written about in detail here), as well as a bunch of art, tech and design improvements. The whole team worked really hard on this one, and I’m really happy with how it’s turned out!

Finally, I’m incredibly proud our game is up for an IGF this year, for Excellence in Design! We are, I think it’s fair to say, kind of a long shot – but it means a lot to me to even be in the running. I can’t even.

I still don’t know exactly when Dicey Dungeons is going to be finished, but we are into the final stages of development now, and things are starting to fall into place. Gonna be a very busy couple of months for us! Thank you for playing <3

1 Comments