That was probably the first step towards making the bigger plan. So I told her about this dumb dice game I was really excited about, and asked if she was up for doing the music. I went to the games festival AMAZE in Berlin a couple of months in, and Niamh was there, and I’d been looking for a reason for the two of us to work together again for a long time. Like three or four versions, so a couple of months. I feel like I knew this at one point but probably forgot: how long had you been working on the prototype before you decided to start looking for other people to work on it? Yeah, there are a lot of little references in there! I like to be pretty open about my inspirations.
You know, I only played Dream Quest after we had finished making Dicey Dungeons – it was funny playing through and connecting all the threads. It started as simple as that, just like: what can I do in this Dream-Quest-inspired space that hasn’t been done before? And from there, it just took off. I really wanted to do something different in this space, and I thought working with dice would be an interesting unexplored avenue for thinking about these kinds of systems.
It’s become a much bigger genre now, so I guess I got pretty lucky with the timing. I wanted to try and make a roguelike deck builder in the vein of Dream Quest, which at the time was a pretty underexplored space. But: Dicey Dungeons started as a seven-day jam game in early 2018. Hi, yes, ok! So we’re all heard this story a lot, sorry. Let’s start at the beginning, I guess? Which is Terry, and a little 2018 game jam… So, do we have any sort of plan here? Are we just gonna go for it? Speaking are: myself, Terry Cavanagh (game design) Marlowe Dobbe (art) Niamh Houston/Chipzel (sound and music) Justo Delgado Baudí (programming) Holly Gramazio (writing) and briefly, Will Lewis (some of the voices). Warning, this is pretty long! And it’s maybe only of interest to people who are really interested in how Dicey Dungeons came together! It’s been edited together from a couple of different conversations we had. Since we’re finally wrapping things up, we thought it’d be nice to get the team together to have a big chat about the game, to reminisce about its development, and what it felt like to come back to our weird gameshow world. This Thursday, we’re releasing Dicey Dungeons Reunion, a huge DLC that’s been in the works for about a year, which follows our big walking dice back into the Dungeons for six final episodes. Hey! So, it’s almost three years since Dicey Dungeons came out.