016 - Do or Dice

Down south, in the middle of a bayou that only exists in old wives' tales and folklore, in the sticky sweltering summer heat, there is a lopsided curio shop standing on crooked wooden stilts. An unsuspecting front for sure; lo and behold, this humble shop is the gateway to the South's very own "Devil's Casino", where money trades hands faster than birds fly from trees when startled, and shady deals are done with the establishment's owner, the eponymous "Devil". Everyone here (including you and me, buster) in the "Devil's Casino" has one thing in common: desire. Money, love, revenge, power; that is what allures people to the seedy underbelly. One other rule unifies the patrons of this fly-infested, sandpapered place: never upend the Devil's deal.

Do or Dice is a top-down 2D action roguelike with a focus on dice. In this game, everything about your character is represented by dice: your character's stats, their abilities, their weaknesses, and their attributes are all shown by the faces on each of their dice. You can swap out the faces of each of these dice to change what they represent. You can also roll these dice to enact the effects on each of their faces. Just as you have dice that represent your power, the master of each wing of the casino has their own dice that detriments your progress as you enter their domain. Level up your character well by crafting strong dice, and use them to take down each master and ultimately triumph against the house!

Minute-to-minute gameplay for Do or Dice is shooting enemies in a top down, 2D setting. Your character can move in 8 directions, but they can only face forward and shoot forward. Each character has a unique forward shot, secondary shots, and bombs. Levels are composed of pre-made rooms arranged in a random order. At the end of each level, you will fight the master (level boss). A run is composed of a few of these levels back to back. Dying results in all of your progress in that run being lost (as is standard for roguelikes). Between runs, you can use currency collected between runs to customize your starting dice for each character, open new card packs that grant you new faces to place on your dice, and purchase other pertinent upgrades that carry over through runs. Do or Dice will lean on 1900s Americana and conventional American folklore; think banjos and revolvers instead of science fiction guns and magic.