DICEBONE

WELCOME TO....THE DICEBONE ! THE FIRST FRACTAL DICE / DUNGEON DECK (UN)BUILDER !!!! THE ULTIMATE ROGUE(LIKE/LITE/WHATEVER-U-WANNA) OF DEATH.. THAT EVEN YOUR MOM WILL PLAY! REMEMBER: YOU WILL NOT DIE TODAY... YOU WILL... DICE! A single die falls into the darkness and lands on a six? Then six others break away from it and crash onto the stone, one ring further on. These roll. Their children roll. Somewhere in that rattling you stop reading numbers and realise you are looking at a floor plan. The dice are rooms. The bone strung between them is a corridor, a gallery, a gullet. The whole spreading thing did not exist ninety seconds ago and you drew it out of your own hand. There is only one problem with that. "MY children." They were never yours. Every die you breed down here belongs to the Dicemaster, and he lets you breed them because he wants a bigger brood too. He is perfectly happy to watch you work. He simply does not intend to let you leave with any of them. "I WILL NOT LET YOU GO WITH MY CHILDREN." ============================================================== THE WHOLE GAME IS THIS ARGUMENT ============================================================== Every rule in DICEBONE is one side of a conversation. Here it is. YOU > I GROW. HIM > Then there are more of my children. Breed all you like, thief. Every one you make is one more I get to keep. YOU > I GROW again. And again. HIM > Do you feel the door getting further away? Each ring you add is another corridor between you and the stairs. The cost to walk out is written on your screen. It is going up. I do like watching people read it. YOU > I OSSIFY the road home. HIM > Sensible. Expensive, and sensible. That corridor is stone now and I cannot touch it, so I shall go and break the beautiful branch instead, the one you were so proud of. HIM > I CRUSH BONES. YOU > You'd kill your own children? HIM > Rather that than watch you carry them up the stairs. HIM > I FREEZE. The exact die you were counting on for this ring. Seized, one turn, right when it mattered. HIM > I DRAIN. The purse that was going to buy your walk home. Opened. Emptied. HIM > I WATCH. That one is free. Which means when watching is all he does, he is broke, and his poverty is the only honest thing about him. YOU > You're bluffing. I DOUBT you. HIM > Perhaps. Guess right and my word rots for the rest of the run. HIM > Guess wrong and you simply paid to be wrong. AH AH AH. YOU > Then I SELL the branch. All of it. HIM > ...that was forty of my children. YOU > That was the fare home. YOU > I WALK. HIM > Too slow. The rings are running out and you are still inside. YOU > I BANK. I ring the bell. HIM > Now? With that little? You could have had twice as much. YOU > I could also have had none of it. HIM > ...yes. Yes, you could. That last exchange is the entire game. Everything else is how you got there. ============================================================== AND WHEN YOU GET GREEDY ============================================================== Clear the threshold by a wide margin and the surplus comes back through your own marrow. Your finest children are the likeliest to break the arms carrying them. You must beat the layer AND survive what you took out of it. The exit has never once been impressed by a big number. "YOU ARE STILL INSIDE." And when the clock runs dry before you END TURN, because the clock tightens with every ring and late rings are decided rather than considered: "TOO SLOW. AH AH AH." That laugh is real, incidentally. We built it out of vowel formants for no reason beyond wanting the thing to be able to laugh at you, and we have made our peace with what that says about us. ============================================================== OR SIT IN HIS CHAIR ============================================================== Take the other side of the table and the argument runs the other way. You hold the purse. You choose what to announce and whether any of it is true. You mark which of your children die tonight rather than leave with a thief. You watch someone spend four rings raising something beautiful, and you decide, at the very end, whether it stands. "YOU ARE HIM." Against the game, against a friend, or one keyboard passed back and forth until you find out which of you is worse. ============================================================== TWO GAMES, ONE ENGINE ============================================================== ARCADE. Chess needs no backstory and neither does this. No lore, no cutscenes, nothing between you and the next decision: the tree, the threshold, the gaoler, and a clock that grows meaner with every ring. Early turns you think. Late turns you commit. Runs take minutes and ruin evenings. "TOO SLOW." LUTONIA. The same fractal, entered on foot and slowed down until the place starts talking back. Taran reads thresholds and smells a bad room through the wall. Maevig mends dice with her hands and won't look too long at her own reflection. Luto sees one ring further than anyone alive and still never sees the future. Chato ignores the whole objective and carves out territory instead. Altars transmute a die and keep the price of the gesture. Crypts close a shape and make it heavy. Wells read only the strata you already grew. Nothing down here invents a prophecy. Leave someone behind and they do not vanish into a log line. They calcify into the route. You walk past them on the way out, and they are part of the wall now. Something older than the Dicemaster runs beneath all of it, in the veins of the place and in the memories it hands back to you slightly wrong. You will not fight it. You are standing in it. "HE HUNGERS." ============================================================== WHAT YOU GET ============================================================== > Ten designed layers, then an endless descent that stops asking whether you win and starts asking how deep you got > Seven verbs, six special dice, eight upgrades, one increasingly unpleasant rival > Play the Escaper, play the Dicemaster, or hand the keyboard back and forth and ruin a friendship > Six-character run codes: paste a friend's, get their exact dungeon, bone for bone > A 3D ossuary you can walk through afterwards, to see what you built > Not one texture, mesh or sprite. Every bone and every sound is generated at runtime. The Ossuary is maths wearing a skeleton. > Offline. No account. No telemetry. ============================================================== IN DEVELOPMENT, OUT LOUD ============================================================== Two questions we genuinely can't answer without you. HOW DO YOU WANT TO SEE A FRACTAL? Flat plan, isometric dig, or first person inside your own galleries. All three are being built as one switchable view. The plan is readable and cold; the 3D is gorgeous and buries the information you need. Somebody has to settle that, and it isn't going to be us alone. HOW FAR CAN LYING GO? The Dicemaster already bluffs. We're testing dice that lie too: a face that shows you one number and rolled another, until something drags the truth out. The one object at the table you assumed was neutral. Candidates, not promises. What survives ships with the reasoning. What doesn't gets cut with the reasoning.