What is Diceheart?
Diceheart is a roguelite dungeon crawler with tactical turn-based dice battles. You’ll fight your way through five stages of randomly-generated levels filled with bizarre monsters, acquiring dice upgrades and powerful items along the way.
The core of Diceheart’s battle is in dice rolls. You’ll roll dice and allocate them to attack enemies, or block incoming damage. There’s a lot more to it than that, though.
Elements: Dice are forged from randinium, which can manifest itself in a number of elements: five of them are currently in the game. Most of these elements can inflict devastating debuffs when used to attack, or can protect you from those debuffs when used to block.
Tricks: These are items crafted by the dicehearts of the Quantum Realm, capable of altering the course of the universe. You’ll find a multitude of these in your journey, ranging from simple health upgrades, to dice-rerolling devices, to explosive bombs. We already have 73 tricks in the pre-alpha, with plans for over 150 more.
And much more is yet to come. For a list of just some of the features we’re going to be adding later down the line, check out the planned features page.
What's the story?
Diceheart takes place in an impossibly large cave network known as the Quantum Realm, beneath a mysterious island that’s surfaced in the middle of the ocean for no apparent reason.
The island first appeared nearly a decade ago, and most of the expeditions who first ventured into the cave never returned. Those who did reported sightings of strange creatures, and what seemed to be compressed spacetime, accounting for the vastness of the caves.
However, one important material was discovered and returned to the surface: randinium. It’s a remarkable substance whose defining feature is its complete lack of defining features; it can exhibit a vast and unpredictable array of properties, hence its name. Most importantly, however, it appears to have influence over luck itself.
Almost as suddenly as it surfaced, the island abruptly disappeared for nearly a decade. As demand for randinium grew, rumours swirled that the first explorers of the Quantum Realm had not been lost, but had actually formed a society beneath the island in a paradise of randinium technology, and that the island’s disappearance was their doing.
But now, the island has reappeared in an even more remote location, a phenomenon that has yet to be noticed by the population at large. Gateways manifest in front of six individuals across the earth that lead them directly to the Quantum Realm. Some seek riches, others seek answers.
Whatever they find, we hope you enjoy!
Who are you people?!
Hello. We are Bad Impression Games.
Lord of Meat Jaz ‘Have You Heard of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure’ Sanderson came up with the idea almost three years ago, based on his love for D&D and Slay the Spire, as well as his desire for another chill roguelite you can play at your own pace.
Over the next few years, Jaz drew every single art asset for the game – despite not knowing how to draw, the absolute madlad. Along the way, he got Technical Godking Matt ‘Ginge’ Sijbers (who you should never call by his birthname) to hash out some code, and the Only Person Jaz Knows Who Can Put More Than Two Notes Together, Otis ‘Loreman’ Moorman, to make some tunes and generally corrupt the game’s direction. But really, nothing much was happening with the game.
Artist’s impression of Bad Impression.
Until September 2021.
We spontaneously decided to actually start development, and bash out a pre-alpha build within a month (ha ha! HA HA HA!), seeing as we had pretty much every single art asset we would need as well as most of the music and design in place. It also helped that Otis had just learnt C#, so Ginge would only have to program a paltry 99% of the game.
Needless to say, we took slightly longer than we anticipated, despite dedicating nearly all of our free time to it. Who would have thought game development is time-consuming? Not us, apparently. The trade-off is our pre-alpha is probably the most polished pre-alpha of anything ever in all of existence, so we’re pretty happy with it and are excited to expand the game further.
Plans for the future
The game has changed and been refined a lot from the initial design over the course of the pre-alpha’s development. We’re confident in the current direction it’s taking and are almost ready to show it off, in the hopes of receiving valued feedback from an elite task force of trusted testers. That’s probably you, if you’re reading this.
We’re acutely aware that we’ve made a pretty damn complex game, and in the current build, there’s not too many ways to learn specific systems unless you’re an actual braingenius. To ease you in a bit, we’ve made a nice wiki to explain some of the basic mechanics if you ever get overwhelmed. For those of you who are into roguelikes, especially Slay the Spire, or enjoy the quirkiness of the Mother series, we sincerely hope you enjoy our game.
If all goes according to plan, we hope to finish the game in 2022 lol making games is hard in 2023 and release it on Steam, and possibly on Switch in the future. We’re already on Steam, by the way!
For a list of just some of the juiciness we plan to add in future versions of the game, check out the planned features page. And please, please, please submit any feedback you have or bugs you’ve encountered on the feedback page.
Thanks very much for your interest, and good luck!