A year and a half ago I was coming up with an idea for a dice roguelike. Combining elements of games I love like Balatro, The Binding Of Isaac or Inscryption, I quickly made a fun prototype.
Fast forward to today... and Dice A Million has sold +45k copies in its first month.
Thank you all for changing my life and making it possible for me to make games ;)
FIRST MONTH RETROSPECTIVE
So yeah, 45k copies sold is pretty crazy huh?! We're also almost at 700 reviews on Steam, and I have pushed +12 patches since release (that's almost 1 every 2 days!!)
Every single bad bug should have been fixed as of now, so there's only some balance left to do. I think most of the dice/rings are in pretty good shape now, just the bosses that clearly need some tweaking :)
Last week I pushed pretty big update including a boss reroll mechanic in a beta branch, and I'm still tweaking the feature as a lot of you weren't 100% on board with this interation. I'll definitely have some news on this on the following days!
Now, I know this is a game about numbers... but let's stop talking about them and let's see what have people been up to!!
roll by errickfoxy
Between lagging the fuck out of the game and breaking all of its little parts... I've seen some pretty cool plays around online!
The meta seems to be revolving around ET Die and Mono Token right now... which I felt were more on the weaker side when developing the game! That's a pretty beautiful thing about this game, it feels SUPER alive to me. Sometimes I get asked "countless how does this interaction go???" and I'm like dude I have no idea I've never tried it lol. Almost every element has a place in any sort of weird wacky build I didn't even think about, and I think that's awesome.
roll by crazyblade626
There's also an ongoing Youtube series by GothicLordUK that goes pretty deep into the secrets of the game, and I've been enjoying it quite a lot, so go check it out if you want some Dice A Million content before sleep!
I also released the OST a few weeks ago, free to download on Bandcamp, and also avaliable to stream on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Music, and every single music platform you can imagine!
FAN CONTENT
As well as putting dozens of hours into the game, some people have been creating some crazy content around it, so I wanted to feature some of it here!
These are some amazing character dice designs by kontayreal, they have a few more on progress you can check out on the discord server. They've also made a few more artworks I've featured here before, go follow them they make awesome art!!
IRL Schrodinger's Die by Netoch
This is a screenshot from a modding tool Jibinsu has been developing for you to be able to add custom dice to the game very easily! It's still early but here's a quick test die they put together. It will have a custom graphic interface where you will be able to write dice descriptions, add sprites and even custom functionality. As the developer of the game... I gotta say I have no idea how this works, feels like dark magic to me lol. News on this will be shared on the modding channel over on the discord server, so be sure to join in you're interested in that :)
And lastly, quick shoutout to Vivian (@JADEDH0LL0WS), who's writing a pretty cool fanfiction based on the game's lore and characters... 👀
NEAR FUTURE
So... what now?
First thing I want to do is close the game post-launch cycle, that means finishing off the boss reroll feature and any other balance changes left to do. I think that should take 1-3 weeks.
After that we'll focus on bringing Dice A Million to consoles and mobile. Can't give an exact timeframe for that since it depends on other people, but I want it to be as fast as possible! Luckily, the game engine I use (Gamemaker) makes it pretty easy to port the game to other platforms, so it shouldn't take a long time :)
Bringing the game to consoles will be pretty straight forward, since controller support is already in. Mobile is where we'll face more trouble, since a lot of UI elements in the game are very small to navigate with a touchscreen (I didn't think the game would become that big when I first designed everything ok?!), but we'll for sure find a way :)
Follow me on Twitter or Bluesky to be up to date with these versions if you're interested!
FAR FUTURE
So... what's AFTER that?!
After the game is out on consoles/mobile and stable and I get some very much needed rest over the summer... I'll maybe start cooking up Dice A Million 1.1.
I already have a clear idea of what this version would contain, as its main content is something I always had in mind, and once envisioned for 1.0 (even though it was unreasonable looking back now...)
That makes the update a whole lot easier to develop! Since I don't have to sit down and start brainstorming new crazy ideas onto a blank piece of paper.
Expect new dice and rings of course, new hand(s), new mechanics, new secrets, and a new ending.
Not sure when all of this will come out since my life has been and will be moving quite a bit this year, as you can imagine.
Besides... I also will be cooking something else... Which brings me to the next point...
FARER FUTURE...?
Dice A Million has kickstarted my career and made me able to do videogames for a living, and I couldn't be more grateful for it. But, as you may know if you've read some of my posts before, I have other stuff in the videogame world that I want to do eventually.
Dice A Million was a compromise. A compromise between what I like and what the market likes. It ended up being something a lot more special and big than I've anticipated when I started development... But my heart's still aching for something else.
If you've dug around Dice A Million, you may have found some strange stuff, some stuff that seemingly has no explanation. You know what I'm talking about, right...?
I don't know when, but I know it'll be coming, and I cannot wait for you all to be able to see it.
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Til next month, keep on rolling ❤️