In the recent HaxeJam, I created a small dice placement game call “Dice Kingdom”.

It took a lot of inspiration from games like Tharsis, Dicey Dungeons, Cultist Simulator, and a board game called Monolith.

I like the idea a lot, and have decided to take a break from ETA and expand on Dice Kingdom. It feels like a good opportunity to create and polish a smaller commercial game.

Expanding the game #

Reworking key mechanics #

In the original game, the game is kind of split into 4 areas; Core Action, Buildings, Locations, Events. Most part of the game revolve around the core actions, which in the game jam version were Birth, Explore, Build, Train, Eat.

Ambition (Win condition) #

When building the game jam, I somewhat decided to make it more of a high score game instead of one that allows you to win. The game will slowly get kind of hard and at around turn 40, the game is almost near impossible to survive. Events called DeatBed will spawn and requires 5, one of the rarer dice face to survive.

There is one hidden location Mystic Forest, which allows the player to train a doctor. Having multiple doctors is one way that allows the players to survive longer.

Having just high score means that the player does not know what to works towards to. This is the first thing that I needed to change when expanding the game.

There were also other concerns. For example, if the win condition is hidden, the player might not know that there is a win condition or does not know how to work towards it. Because of this, I need to make at least some win condition visible and obvious and provide a check list for the player to work towards to.

The way that this will be achieved is via a new type of Action; Ambition.

Ambition will provide goals which the players can choose to embark on. Some goals will be disabled / hidden until certain criteria are met. When the player placed a dice on the goal, they will not be able to changed and the Ambition area will become an area to inform the player on how to work towards that goal.

Removing / Merging Core Actions #

Some of the core actions are also changed. For example, Eat and Birth is merged into a single action Village. This area consolidates all the action involving dice and food.

Train is also removed and moved into the various other areas; i.e. Explorer are now trained in Explore, and Farmers are now trained in Farm.

Research #

Research and Science are also added to the game. This will provide different strategy and playstyles that the player can choose from. For example, instead of Farm, the player can choose other sources of food.

Progress #

Over the last 3 weeks (including this), the work is mostly on refactoring and setting up new systems to handle the new features.

The key systems that are added so far are

1. Save/Load #

Adding Save/Load is something that I wanted to do for ETA (my other project) for a long time. Due to it being a key part of most games, I wanted it to be generic enough that I can use the same implementation across different games. With Dice Kingdom needing a save system, I took the opportunity to just solve the problem for both games at once. This requirements kind of forced me to refactor majority of the code which took longer than expected.

2. Research System #

Research System is the key system that dictates actions is available to the player.

Each dice area can only show 8 dice slot at once. Because of this, I needed a way to show the available researches available to the player, which is more than 8 most of the time. I came up with 2 solutions.

The first solution is to create an extended UI, similar to how Cultist Simulator will open up a new window. This will allow me to show a detailed tech-tree, similar to Civilisation.

The second solution is to randomly choose from the available list, and display a subset.

I choose to go with the second solution, partly because I am lazy to add a new type of interaction, but mostly because it makes the game way simplier. Similar to Research, Build will also implement this solution as it may also face the similar problem. Instead of showing 8, I instead choose to show 4, which also provide some variation from run to run.

Final Thoughts #

The development is progressing quite well and I am expecting to finish the beta build in the nex 2 weeks. For the beta build, I am expecting to have a few win conditions, with a couple of secret win conditions. There are already 4 different types of food buildings, and I will likely add more when I think of them.

Eventually I would like to make this game a paid game, and limit the web version in some ways. Another way is to make it open source, with paid version, similar to Shapez.io and Aseprite. I guess I will cross the road when I am at that stage.