Dicefire Update - Sprites, Sprites, and More Sprites...

Where are we?

This past week’s main focus has been on finishing the core rulesets and getting going on game UI design. Happy to say the core ruleset is complete enough to playtest and things are looking exceptionally promising. The more work we did, the more the shape of the end game started to really take form. We are currently set up to programmatically stress test the rules and catch niches and nuances that might otherwise slip by.

That said, our next mover has been sprite assets. It became clear fairly quickly that I may need to invest in a game designer for pixel art. Not that I’m lacking in skill, but certainly lacking in hands. For now though, just to get a shape of the idea to work off of, I’ve had the likes of Claude and GPT help me put together an asset studio so I can at least make level maps in a fun, graphical drag and drop sort of way. The assets that were created though? Garbage! I’ll be working with a healthy dose of tedium to get things dialed in. I attempted to get some AI agents involved, but they made some things a cinch and some things noticeably worse, to the point where progress was reverted in areas.

I’ll be looking for more hands, soon.

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What Worked, What Didn't?

• The rules are well dialed in. The core functionality is there, barring roll tables and game mechanics tables. Those have placeholder inventories to be addressed post testing.
• Programmatic stress testing went better than forecasted!
• Pixel art is hard...
• Progress takes focused prompt engineering to make the best of your time and not burn tokens going the wrong direction. Sometimes, even with good prompt engineering it can still steer off a cliff if you're not careful.

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What's Next?

For the foreseeable future, we will continue our efforts on Dicefire. We’d like to be running it by end of Q4 this year, or mid Q1 2027 worst case scenario. That is, at least as far as engineering work goes. For planning we have a couple irons in the fire.

• Vigil is getting some planned logic with multi-banking and receipt snapshots as it nears its free to use repo debut!
• Trance will be getting some finalization designs planned out as it nears its chrome extension debut.
• Sargasso will be our next major project after Dicefire to get some love and attention.

That’s just a small tidbit of what we have road mapped at the moment. Again, this is all planning work. It’s a little better than wishful thinking but not quite design and blueprint adjacent.