I make games, do arts and generally exist


nic
@nic

Another design diary day! Probably don't have any extra thoughts on this because I'm slammed doing other work, maybe by tomorrow my brain will have cooled off and I go on about how dice are scary or something.


nic
@nic

At some point in the hazard design in The Banished Vault, I realized I wanted to simulate the die roll with in game physics. In a game that's otherwise really quite deliberate, it does seem on its face a little goofy to make a hard turn into physics dice.

But I think something deeply underrated by videogames is that dice have drama! There is a ritual in having an object, casting it, seeing it move through the world, and letting it choose a path in your story. You see all the possibilities of other results flashing around, before the final number is set. In special cases, the die comes to a rest on an edge, and your breath catches as you see the result being decided in slow motion.

All of this is why instead of just a random number being decided for you in game, a whole ritual is constructed and built out for you. A new window appears in your screen, suddenly the deliberate world is given over not just to a purely random result, but the interactions of physics cubes. You can see the entire ritual being followed.


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