Demo Progress Day 1: Dice Mechanics

Intro

I haven’t quite decided how much I want to go into in these posts, but I feel like I need to do this to keep myself accountable. I’m on a little break from my normal day job, so I decided to take 5 days and work on a demo for this concept that I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

I’ve long enjoyed dice based games, and I’ve always loved how TTRPGs incorporate them. A personal favourite that started this whole idea was a boardgame called Dice Forge, which let you physically alter your die to fit your goals. I really loved that concept and have long wondered how to incorporate that into a game.

I’ve recently really gotten hooked games like Vampire Survivors and especially Holocure, and just love the leveling mechanics these games have, and how the customization works. I feel like they let the final ideas fall into place on how I want this to work.

The Idea

Real-time bullet heaven style doesn’t really fit my concept, but turn-based does, so the idea is dungeon exploration with turn based combat, looking for a boss room. Each room gives upgrades, bosses give new abilities. Explore until you die. Either make this roguelite where some things carry over, or just have some leaderboard; always start from scratch but try and make it furthest. Not sure yet.

You start as a D6, where side 1 is a fumble is side 6 is a crit, and these can’t be changed. Playing with the idea that these slots might be passive slots, and those are just the default starting values, but future problem.

Sides 2-4 are configurable, but have types. 2 is always Physical Attack, 3 is always Magic Attack, 4 is always Healing, and 5 is wildcard, you can slot any skill you unlock into that.

Since you don’t want RNG to completely ruin your game, you can choose a side that you are attempting to roll for, and the game improves your chances of getting that number, but does not rule out the option for others. So for example, under perfect random conditions, you have a 1/6 (16.6%) chance to roll a 2. But if you choose to roll a 2, the game will instead give you a 3/8 (37.5%) chance.

It also keeps a pity counter. If you try three times for a roll of 2 and the last two times you got something else, the game will give you your 2. This mechanic I felt was needed for let’s say desperate healing times. It would suck if you keep trying to heal because you absolutely need to, but then you never actually heal because RNG is not on your side.

Obviously, all this is open to change, these are my first attempts and balancing will play a big roll.

The Plan

Right, so I have 5 days. Well, half-days. The idea is to spend 4-5 hours a day for 5 days while I have my break, and I want a basic demo of the mechanics done. So what does this mean? The scope will probably change, but at the very least I need:

• Dice Roll Mechanics implemented
• Configurable Sides implemented and incorporated with the Dice Roll Mechanics
• A Player Sprite with a Health and Equipable Sides
• 2 or 3 different Enemies with Health and some Damage Dealing abilities
• 2 or 3 upgrades to Sides
• UI to demo all the concepts

If the demo goes well, and the concepts hold up, I’ll start working on the next phase of this.

Long Term

Ideally, I’d want a level up mechanic where you upgrade from a D6 to a D8, to a D10 etc etc, which will then change how many skills and types you can equip, increasing your HP, allows more passives etc. I want the base mechanics to work for a D6 before complicating things.

I’ve started by hard-coding most of the logic and the UI, and a lot of the dice rolling logic I did in my spare time a few weeks ago. Today, the first day of the five, I spent on hooking up a basic UI to show the rolling mechanics working.

For tomorrow (day 2) I want to create a Player and an Enemy, and work on the first of the turn-based combat mechanics.

If that goes well, then for day 3 I want to look at implementing the configurable sides, since at the moment, everything is very much hard-coded.

Well, that’s it for now. Excited to see where this project goes. Some video of the progress included.