We've been chatting with the developers about Dicealot and asked them some questions we thought you'd find interesting. Welcome to our new series: Behind the Dice! With each Behind the Dice, we'll be diving into different aspects of the game's development and design.
For our first Behind the Dice, we're exploring the burn damage mechanic. We asked the devs: What's been going well recently? Tell us about something you made that you're really proud of, or something that came together easier than expected.
Here's what they had to say:
Since getting some early feedback about this, I had wanted to include a way for players to deal damage and win fights, which feels quite different from the ''regular'' way of building PWR and striking. There are only really a few inputs the player has, so having this new DMG source react to one of those was important, and tying it to ''on roll'' meant that a build utilising it would focus more on rolling than striking.
However, since striking is generally the only time a player gets hurt, it was important to try and balance it so striking would still be necessary, and you couldn't just ''roll your way to victory'' without ever running the risk of taking DMG in return. We also added some stuff like cleansing all burn stacks on Farkle, to keep this new method tied to the underlying rules of the game.
I settled on the idea of building up large numbers of ''Burn'' on the enemy, and having them take damage every time the player rolled, but also losing stacks when they take damage, to prevent the values getting out of hand or making it too strong. Also I chose burn over poison because it felt a little more thematically appropriate, and poison is a bit boring (albeit more recognisable for most players.).
Here's what the burn dice look like:
Funnily enough, while our producers were testing the burn damage, we uh... realized it may need some more tweaking
Not a single strike was made and they have nearly wiped out the enemy which is pretty much what the devs didn't want!