To start, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background before Dice A Million? What experience did you have with video games and game development prior to creating this project?
This is actually my second game ever! (the first one to be released). I’ve always been a super creative person, involved in a lot of different artistic projects like music or shortfilms, so given my immense love for videogames, it was only a matter of time until I made one myself… I even managed to include bits of my other sides onto the game. The music part, well it’s obvious, as I’ve made the OST myself too, the shortfilm part… well, let’s just say, some people will know what I’m talking about.
Going back to that other game I made, it was too big and too ambitious for a first game ever, so I just went with an easier side project for a while, which eventually became the monster that Dice A Million is nowadays. Will that other game be released some day? Well… I guess it’s a 50/50 gamble on whether it happens or not.
One thing I’m always curious about as a developer: how do you test late-game builds in a game like Dice A Million? Some combinations probably only appear after hours of gameplay. Do you have debug tools or shortcuts to jump into those states, or do you sometimes end up playing long runs just to see if a build works?
I actually have both. I do have debugging tools and shortcuts to easily test out every moving part in the game, but I also have my own save file which I tried to complete before launch… but only got to 71%. Most of my testing hours though happened while playing with my friend Carlos (the one who gave name to Carlos’s Die!), we both love deckbuilding roguelikes like DaM so having a new game to play with him was honestly one of the reasons for me to make this game in the first place… Those debugging tools I used for development are also avaliable for the public to make mods, online content, or just for having fun breaking the game. People who wanna use them will know where to find them!
One of the most interesting aspects of Dice A Million is the huge combinatorial space created by dice and rings, where certain interactions can lead to surprisingly powerful builds. How do you design and iterate toward these kinds of meaningful synergies in such a large system, and how do you decide when a die, ring, card, or mechanic is strong and interesting enough to stay in the pool?
One of the things that helped me design and come up with so many crazy concepts for dice and rings is item families. If you pay attention, you’ll notice there are a bunch of dice with similar themes and effects. For example, Translucid D4 and Translucid D6. Their mechanical theme is giving mult on area according to its face. So I’ll just make a couple of variations of that concept, and that constitues a family. One golden rule I followed while developing the game was making sure everything had its place and there were no “direct upgrades”.
Sure, there are dice that are almost always better than others, that’s why there are rarities like Uncommon, Rare, Legendary, etc, but none are direct replacements. In the Translucid dice example, D6 can potentially give more mult since it has 6 faces, as oposed to 4 on the D4, but as a tradeoff, its area of effect is a lot smaller than its counterpart, making both completely viable choices depending on the type of run you’re having. Then it was just a matter of thinking of multiple build archetypes like raw mult, extra value, dice copies, exhaust, etc, and making sure every one of them had enough tools to build around with.
Dice A Million contains a huge number of interacting elements, more than 120 dice, 80+ rings, cards, stamps, bosses and modifiers. Did you build a data-driven system to define and combine these effects, or are many of them implemented manually in code? I’d love to hear how you structured the underlying system to make adding new dice and interactions manageable.
As I said before, I’m pretty new to coding in general, and I basically learned for my previous project a couple of years ago, so my system was based on pure intuition of what I felt was the best at the time… Items are stored in large dictionaries containing their characteristics like number of faces, sprite, ID, etc. Then, at the time of triggering any effects, the code just goes over a huge wall of if/else statements… I know that may sound horrible to any actual programmers reading this, but let’s just say a certain card game inspired me to do it this way, and if it worked for them, why wouldn’t it work for me?! I have friends IRL who are actual programmers and I’ve convinced them that having a good idea and passion about a project is worth a thousand times more than knowing your way through the code… (though it definitely helps a ton lol)
And now a personal request :D after rolling the dice, when the score is presented I personally struggle to actually understand what happened. The numbers flash by so quickly and then disappear. Have you considered adding a feature to review the last roll or see a log of how the final values and synergies were calculated?
There’s already a feature that helps with that! Over on game settings, if you enable “Manually confirm score”, the roll will pause before giving you the final total amount, so you can see what happened before dice disappear from the table. However, a lot of people have suggested having some sort of log that explicitly explains how you earned your pips. I definitely have that in mind for the near future, as I’m working on a lot of balance and QoL updates and I think this could be a nice addition :)
Third-party sources like Gamalytic and SteamDB trackers estimate Dice A Million has sold roughly 20k–30k copies since launch, with strong early activity and positive reviews. Can you confirm if that’s roughly in the ballpark of your actual sales figures, and which events, showcases, or promotional pushes (demo periods, Steam Next Fest, creator coverage, launch discounts, Xbox Game Pass presence, etc.) had the biggest impact on those numbers?
The game just hit 30,000 copies sold exactly one week after its launch! Being my first game, I had no idea what to expect, but after I got contacted by the Xbox Game Pass team I knew I had something good in hands… and it even blew out my expectations! Seeing a lot of people reach all the hidden corners I’ve put in this game feels me with a immense amount of joy and excitement for what’s to come. Steam Next Fest and the Game Pass announcement were great and made a great amount of wishlists, but honestly, the thing that I feel propulsed this game the most is when Northernlion covered the demo back in summer of last year. He called it “top 3 demos he played recently” and brought a lot of eyes onto the project. That being said, he hasn’t covered the 1.0 release yet, and I’m sure he will love it if and whenever he does so…