The page for our first game, Diceworks Puzzle, is now up. To celebrate this event, here’s a little story about how Diceworks came to be and how the company became Dicework Games.
The concept for the game came up pretty quickly after me and Peter decided to go and form a company of our own. I played around with ideas for a simple puzzle game and, although the company wasn’t meant to do simple puzzle games, we decided that something that could be wrapped up fast would be ideal first project for the company. We had a new platform to work with and a more complex project would have soon ran into big trouble if developed while still trying to get the gist of all the quirks of both iPhone and the Unity3D.
First there were dice. I though having a grid of dice would be a nice basis for a puzzle game. Then, after going through different mechanics (switching two adjacent dice, rerolling them and so on), I felt like the best way would be to just find the combinations that are already on the grid, without actually manipulating the grid itself. It felt solid enough to begin prototyping.
It took me less than a day to come up with a working prototype, which I then showed to Peter (and to my beloved girlfriend, who liked the game enormously), and it seemed to work well. Even though there were little bits and pieces to be ironed out, the central mechanics of the game have stayed the same. You find a combination of dice (pair, threes, fours, straights and so on) from the grid and select them. Proper combinations disappear and new dice drop down from the top of the grid. And that’s about it, plain and simple.
In my books, the game falls to the same category as most of the casual puzzles out there: it’s a perception game. You have a bunch of symbols, and have to find certain combinations of those symbols, just like in any match-3 game. The spiritual predecessors of the game, however, are not Bejeweled and its kin, but word games like Bookworm.
Most of the perception games are timed challenges, where you have a limited time to find as many proper or possible (in game where you can manipulate the board) combinations as you can. We decided not to go into that direction. In part, it’s my personal dislike for games that have time limits, in part it’s because we felt it would hurt the feel of the game. Diceworks is not a game about anxiety of beating a challenge, it’s a game about having something fun to do for a while. That doesn’t mean the game can’t challenge you – try beating the best score anyone has had this far, somewhere over 11 000 points – it means it doesn’t lay the challenge on you if don’t want it to.
The fun thing about game in which you seek combinations on a grid design-wise is entropy. When fed with random tokens, the grid slowly and unavoidably descends into a state where no new matches can be found. This will happen sooner or later, depending on both the far-sightedness of the player and luck. This is to say, even if the game feels 100% luck, it’s not. There’s quite a bit of strategy involved.
