Let me tell you a tale of dice, patterns, and the sisyphean task of putting those patterns on dice correctly. Eli and his brother Sol have been working on a new game that I have tagged on to. They have named it Square Spells and it’s essentially a pattern building boss fight game built around teamwork and character synergy. It’s awesome, yall are going to love it! Since I live halfway across the country from them I have taken it upon myself to build my own version of the game based on their, and I say this with the utmost respect Eli, very messy design documents. This for the time being has been a good thing, as it allows us to create 2 independent games around a single mechanism, then take the best ideas for both and mash them together into an amazing game!
So the issue comes from a difference in how you acquire tiles in our respective versions. In the version Eli and his brother are making, the way you get pattern tiles is similar to Bananagrams or Scrabble, you grab them right out of a bag. This allows for them to have free reign in their tile design even making each tile unique.
The version I am creating randomizes tile selection via dice. Due to this I’ve had to simplify the tile design to reduce the number of unique tiles, this way a tile can appear on multiple dice, this also reduces variance and opens up some new potential strategies. Anyway, this is where the problems begin.
So I started with a simple ruleset on how to make the tiles and I created 14, thinking that I had made all possible patterns, I had not. I then went on to make dice, doing my best to evenly spread out those patterns across them all, which is another issue I ran into that I’ll entertain you with later. After making the first set of dice, I sat down with my pattern sheet and immediately noticed I had missed not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4 potential patterns. It was at this point that I decided I had had enough game development for that night and passed out.
Next morning comes around and I make some more dice, as they finish up printing I realize there are yet MORE PATTERNS, 2 to be exact. Now this presents multiple issues. One being, I printed the amount of dice needed for 18 patterns, so I might need to make more dice. This will in turn mess with the balancing of the game since the number of dice you get is a limited resource. The other issue is the fact that 20 is not divisible by 6, the number of dice faces per dice, meaning the patterning for the dice faces would become far more complex. For the time being I’m just pretending I didn’t discover those 2 new faces, which I find upsetting but as long as I don’t tell anyone about this it’ll be fine… wait…
Speaking of patterning, how do you do it? I ended up staying awake until 2am on multiple nights trying to get an even spread of the different patterns, so that all pairs of patterns appeared roughly evenly across all dice. I tried everything, modulation, random number generation, just counting up the line of patterns. I always had a poor spread, and I still have a less than adequate spread for what I’d like. Now this doesn’t matter so much for the prototype as I just want to make sure the mechanics work, but it’s important to be thinking of future problems early, and let me tell you, this is going to be my future problem. Just from the several hours of work I put into this without much luck I can see this patterning issue being the defining struggle for this game, and I am not looking forward to it.
So here’s what I would love any help from you people who are way smarter than I. First, how do I justify cutting the last two symbols, do I even need a justification? I personally feel like I do. Second, Is there a simple method for getting an even spread of numbers or symbols across multiple dice and if so what is it? Any and all help is appreciated.
