Die by the Dozen is a dice roguelike for android and iOS. it’s balatro by way of yahtzee, set on a doomed medieval pilgrimage: twelve passages, a fistful of dice, and a whole lot of ways to come up short on the road.
you roll a handful of dice by shaking your phone, and they actually tumble and generate haptic feedback via our real physics engine built in flutter. you keep the ones you like and reroll the rest, then submit a combo. but this ain’t your swashbuckling grandpa’s dice game: you collect dice and game augments which buff and boon your throws to combat environmental, challenge, and boss effects.
the pilgrimage
a run is twelve passages, and each passage is three trials: a gang to face with a lesser foe, a greater foe, and a boss at the end of the road. each foe is a low poly, psx style character, creature, or monster, and each of them cheats just a little differently.
every passage happens at a canonical hour at a specific place on the map, and both of them bend the rules while you’re there. odd dice might pay more, throws that sum to thirteen crap out, the lowest die might get barred. the deeper you go on your pilgrimage, the more the road curses you.
the sanctuary
between trials you stop at the sanctuary and spend your coin. you polish and seal your dice, carve runestones into single faces, hire charms that break the rules in your favor, level up the combos you already own, and buy whole new families of combos to chase. this part’s roguelike-inspired, where a run stops being luck and starts being a plan.
how it’s made
Die by the Dozen is vanilla flutter on a pure-dart engine running beneath a fragment shader.
the art and world are the medieval plane i feel like i’ve been living in for 800 years. low poly models, dithered textures, and late 90’s ui, that we hope make you feel like you’re playing a blursed copy of an AMIGA game, from the future, that never existed.
oh, and i almost forgot to mention the most important part. a custom soundtrack by Trent Manson, composed with the KO Medieval and PERIOD ACCURATE acoustic instruments.
where it’s at
the game is pretty much done, and right now we’re building out our gangs, rendering foes, writing our lore and taglines, and we can’t wait for you to try it. but don’t take it the wrong way if we say that we hope you die…by the dozen.