Book of Faces was made for Miz Game Jam, where the theme was to use a specific asset pack provided.

I’m not really a huge fan of pixel art, so the assets were a bit disappointing. I spent about an hour working out where to go with it. I settled on “Dice” because the images were all squares, like the inventive man I am.

I very briefly fleshed out the mechanical game concept. I went for a mash-up of Slay the Spire, Quarriors and Dice Forge. 

StS is a deckbuilding roguelike - from this I wanted to take the steady progression, fighting opponents, and addictive game loop. 

Quarriors (2011) is a board game I played 8 years ago which is approximately Dominion but with dice, and I wanted to take the idea of building and refining your dice pool. 

Dice Forge (2017) is another board game where the hook is literally adding and removing faces from your dice, which tied in nicely with the gradual reward structure of the Slay the Spire-esque loop.

At this point, I set down my goals.

• Actually finish the game
• I’ve never finished and published a game before. Biggest priority.

• Make it look good
• I wasn’t a fan of the pack, so this is important for me.

• Make it feel good
• I’m a big fan of exciting UX in games, and 

• Make it “Fun”
• The gameplay side of a dice game is almost entirely crunch - that is, numbers and maths. I’m comfortable admitting that there is no way I can make an exciting, fleshed out combat system that is balanced with only- but I think I can make a system with potential, which is good enough for me.

All of that done - onto the development!

Phwoar. Look at those dice roll, eh?

An idea I took from Hearthstone was having 3D objects as part of the UI, as it would be easier to animate a dice rolling without having to faff about with frames and weird perspective. 

Once they were rolling, I wanted to make it slightly more exciting.

I wanted to dice to feel like they were exploding with energy, and the white glow helps towards that. Ideally they’d vibrate and sparkle too, but I’d spent a while already and was conscious of not having achieved any gameplay. “I’ll come back to it later,” I said to myself, full of confidence.

My very smart and not at all a bodge dice roll animator.

The separation of data and the visual display of the game was a big part of making the game extensible - by having a data layer the UI looks at, it meant that modifying and replacing dice would be easier and not require me to make sure I had the correct instance of the die existing. The core game loop all runs in the background and the UI updates to reflect it.

I spent most of the rest of day one putting together basic combat.

Ten hours in- the end of day 1. Dice roll, can be locked, and then we beat up on this poor king. The rewards screen is currently a beautiful placeholder.

Day 2

Time for things to get weird. I’m a big fan of unusual takes on things, and was trying to work out how to make the game less generic, whilst also struggling with having to make an inventory and an overworld map.

I needed a theme, and an excuse to make less stuff.

At this point, I’d written “Face” about a thousand times in various different classes. Dice have faces. People have faces. Maybe we’re collecting faces? Why are we staying in one place whilst collecting faces?

They’re all in a book? Sure. And so, Book of Faces was born. You’re a man, who has no face, trying to find his in the book, and along the way beating up faces that want control of your body and turning them into Dice Faces! THEME WITH GAMEPLAY WOW

I spent the rest of the day on aesthetic.

The big three sprites. A chain, some walls, and some more walls.

These are the sprites that make up 90% of the visual design of the game. I turned the corners of the right hand block into a 9-Slice to use for panels. The middle block I shoved together and added some particles to. The chain I stretched a lot.

The big step I did today was make lanterns that wibbled slightly.

Day 3

I have less screenshots of day three. I’m beginning to panic. Systems hurriedly thrown in include:

• A rudimentary inventory
• Making the reward scene do something
• Next combat selector.

A lot of the day was fixing problems with poorly set up listeners, crashes, and general layering issues. All of the screens in the game except for the main menu were in the same Scene and just layered canvases which would have been fine if they weren’t a mix of overlay, world and screen depending on what was contained in them.

I spent two hours trying to implement this effect.

I did not succeed.

Day 4

The finished book.

I spent day four actually building the game >.>

Up until this point, I had a very pretty nothing box. There were 3 different dice faces. So I spent these 10 hours slapping at my keyboard implementing dice, finding images for them, trying to make them work. A portion of this was spent on building dice pools for bosses.

The rest of development is an extended 8 hour bug hunt, catching all numbers of crashes with the helpful of brother who would playtest and tell me that the boss was cheating. In fairness, it normally was.

I added in a rushed ending, and whilst you could originally quit to the main menu and play again, that caused the game to break, so I just made every button that quit the game quit it permanently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Revisiting Goals

• Actually finish the game
• It's finished enough! There are a thousand and one extra things that I could do to make it better but 48 hours and done.

• Make it look good
• I'm happy with this.  Again there's still a load of areas for improvement - using transparent sprites for faces, adding some variety to the book, adding special effects.

• Make it feel good
• The dice don't explode, it's not always clear what's going on. The sound I think works very well though. 

• Make it “Fun”
• You can see how it could be fun! That's a success in my book.

Cheers for reading.