Our next game is called Rimelands: Hammer of Thor. The website for it is here, with more information coming up in the future, as we get the site design done.
At this point, the following facts can be revealed:
* It’s a turn-based RPG, not unlike a certain Rogue
* It’s steampunk with a frosty twist
* It’s more pulp adventure than fantasy epic
Ville of Horrorshow Arcade made a cool concept of what a Diceworks bartop arcade would look like.
Hopefully some day this could be real!
Diceworks is finally available!
Go get it!
You can now play Diceworks for free in the comfort of your browser!
Nothing is perfect. Not even our press releases.
We forgot one vital bit of information from the press release, which is the price of the product. So, here it is:
(drumming)
$0.99! (€0.79)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dicework Games To Release Their First Game On iPhone
Tampere, Finland, August 18th 2009 – Newly founded Dicework Games will release their first game, the self-titled Diceworks, in 28th of August. The company founders Arto Koistinen and Peter Finnberg, both of whom have former experience in the game industry, believe that strong vision and solid design are the key elements in a highly competitive marketplace such as Apple’s App Store.
“While I find it a bit naive to say that all you need for high sales is a good game, I strongly believe that a strong portfolio is something that will ensure the longevity of a development studio”, says company CEO Koistinen. “We are aiming to make Dicework Games a brand in which our customers can trust. As a small studio, we have the possibility to take risks and try new things, or go for less popular genres.”
Diceworks, while being in the popular genre of puzzle games, brings this thinking to practice in its visual design. The steampunk inspired art direction dodges the usual candy-like visual style of the genre and maintains a coherent tactile feel for the game. “We wanted the game to feel like a physical object”, the artist Finnberg explains. “The user interface is designed so that everything feels like a part of a clockwork puzzle box, I think it really brings a unique atmosphere for the game.”
Everyone who is not yet convinced of the game’s puzzle-y goodness can also try it on the company’s website, where a web-browser version of the game will be available.
The developers also see their choice of engine, the Unity 3D, as a definite strength. For a small startup company, a tool that enables the developers to concentrate on game-specific development instead of having to build a software framework from scratch, at the same time giving the possibility for multi-platform release, is a valuable opportunity.
As is usual for the game industry, only few things in the horizon look clear. For now, the games will continue to be published on the iPhone and they will be self-funded as with Diceworks. “Concentrating on our own portfolio is currently the most viable option. Of course, we are open to publishing deals and sub-contracting, should a viable opportunity present itself. To be honest, I’d still love to work on some great license”, Koistinen, who has previously worked with mobile license games, confesses.
Dicework Games
http://www.dicework.com/
company@dicework.com
We have (finally) submitted Diceworks to Apple!
Finalizing the game took a bit longer than we initally anticipated, but we are very pleased with the results. The game now includes three game modes, one played against a time limit and one against a turn limit in addition to the vanilla Diceworks. The basic mode will be available as an unlimited demo shortly before the release of the game. And the release date is 21st of August, of course.
Oh, there are also new screenshots available on the Diceworks page!
Here’s a sample (hint: it’s cool)
Sir!
Our Magnificient Department Of Spycraft has landed some information on the nature of the secret project under work on the hidden laboratories of Dicework Games. It would appear they are working on a some variety of an aviational device. Due to rough weather and massive hostile presence, our agents were not able to get images of greater detail.
We shall increase resources of the department to unveil further details on this intriguing enterprise.
An Airborne Contrivance
In the Inbox of the latest issue of Edge, a reader contemplates on the difficulty of translating literary classic into a game medium. Lately, at least two games, Dante’s Inferno and Rise of the Argonauts, have tried to bring into our screens works literature not usually associated with game fiction. It is in this association of the original work that the problem lies, since some classics have already been made into games (Lord of the Rings a common example), if not with quality then at least with such a vigorous quantities that they have been accepted as an ordinary source for game worlds.
It is the content and theme of Dante’s Inferno that raises suspicion of fitting into a game that looks a lot more like God of War than a disguised discourse into the values of medieval Church. Although fighting your way into Hell and back is nothing new in the fiction of games, one wonders if there would be other depictions of the eternal damnation than the one Divine Comedy, more suitable for an action game.
The façade of the game’s subject matter does little to conceal the true nature of the game, another third person action extravanza that seems to all but rule the console game market in these days. Is the true motivation for using an unconventional fiction for its basis just a gimmick to overcome the fact that the genre’s usual subjects are well covered and nothing truly new can’t actually be conceived anymore? And that given the raising costs of developing AAA titles, there is no option of making a game in a genre less stagnant and overpopulated?
If one sees games as a medium that desperately needs action and violence in it’s fiction to function, I’m glad to point way into still blossoming adventure game genre, that’s distinctive in it’s wide variety of themes and genres of fiction. Adventure puzzle games are nothing new to incorporating works of literature, since the early beginnings of text adventures like The Hitchhiker’s Guide and The Hobbit.
A natural choice for the adventure games to draw inspiration from is the genre of detective fiction. There are games of Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew and even a Film Noir Discworld game. The content of detective novels is often the solving of puzzles, which translates easily into a game structure. That said, if I were to make a game based on a classic book, my choice would be to make an adventure game out of The Name of the Rose.
The biggest problem in adapting a classic novel is to make the game loyal enough to the original work to respect its fans, and yet at the same time make a game decent enough to respect its players. Also, a detective fiction is easily spoiled if you already know the murderer, which leads to problems if you try to accomodate players already famialiar with the book.
One way to solve this would be to make the game resemble the board game Mystery of the Abbey, which borrows its location and themes from the book, but not its actual plot. You could, in my opinion, make a good digital version of the game, even though it centers around interaction and conversation between the players, by using common adventure game elements. That would result as something truly unprecendented: a replayable adventure puzzle game (although I think adventure games are actually replayable in the same sense as you can re-read a book are watch a movie several times).
In conclusion, I think that games do well to adapt and use classic literature as a source of fiction, as long as it’s not just a thematic gimmick to guise a game that has already been done dozens of times before.
Roleplaying games are, more or less, my favourite genre of games. That’s regardless of whether they’re digital or not, but in this post, due to the nature of this blog, which, due to the nature of this site, which, of course, taking into account the nature of this company, I could actually be discussing either (there’s nothing to stop us doing pen and paper or board games, even if we find it currently in our best interest to develop digital games), yet I’m referring to digital games.
I’ve played a lot of roleplaying games on computers, consoles and lately on iPod touch. They have a lot of good features and I think some elements that are natural to the genre have universal appeal to gamers, like leveling structures. I’ve also always felt attracted to their epic themes and fantastic landscapes, even if I don’t see that a roleplaying game requires a fantasy or scifi setting. They’re just something developers do because they’ve always done so.
Elements that are part of rpgs by tradition rather than real gameplay value are also the bane of the genre. There’s a lot of stuff that most games do, without really thinking how it suits the rest of the game, or the platform the game is developed on, or, indeed, the actual player demographic. Some of them are as old as Yoda’s diapers, some of them quite new.
Well, actually, there’s one new thing and that’s imitating the 16-bit Japanese RPG look in (mostly) mobile games. Yes, I know it’s a style that fits well on small screens. But that means the game is going to be associated with the genre of JRPG, which frankly differs quite much from a western RPG. Your choice of art direction is tied inextricably to the expectations the players have for the game. And if the actual game doesn’t meet those expectations, the players are going to be disappointed, no matter how good your game actually is.
The first legacy element that plagues most of the western roleplaying games, but seems quite non-existent on Japanese ones, is the character creation. Yes, I know, it’s often an important part of the pen and paper roleplaying process, but the whole process differs greatly from the lean learning curve contemporary players of digital games are used to. If you have a character creation prior to the actual gameplay, your player has no way of knowing how the mechanics actually work. And, to be honest, personalizing the character’s stats makes a little difference in a digital game. Many MMORPGs do this well, having the player choose just the class, name and the visuals of the character. Others elements can be decided later, via level progression.
The second thing, a bit related the previous one, is the slow start. This can mean introductory cut-scenes that last for ten minutes, or wandering around in a village or another secluded place before getting to the real action. Often the player character is also given a little bit of money and told to buy something useful. As with the ability points, the player has no idea what actually is useful before getting into the real action. Additionally, too much of dialogue or cut-scenes in the beginning is a good way to get the player fed up with the story. Contrary to the previous point, this problem is more common in Japanese games.
In western games, the equivalent problem is often the rat-killing quests. Yes, you do get quickly to the beef of the game, but killing rats is hardly epic and underlines the fact how helpless your character is in the beginning. Frodo or Luke weren’t exactly kiling machines in the beginning of their respective sagas, but they nonetheless survived odds that felt much more formidable – even in the early stages of the story you could see they were heroes, not some glorified rodent exterminators.
This concludes the first part of our roleplaying game design series, more to come later!
