Amberspire Begins
Amberspire design diary #1 - see the other design diaries, wishlist the game, or subscribe to our newsletter.
In March 2023 I started to sketch out the next game after The Banished Vault.
As production on The Banished Vault came to a close, I knew I wanted to make a city builder. I also knew I wanted more dice. Dice are fun to work with and I felt would be a good way to immediately add a lot of interest and variety into a city builder. How exactly that would work was not immediately apparent, however. My goals were not to just make a city builder with dice attached to it, but to think about a city builder in a larger context. Dice produce random outcomes, and how would that affect how you played, or how your city was created? A city also does not grow in a vacuum so I knew I wanted some kind of interaction with the environment, and dice would play a role here. Likewise any other ideas that would present themselves in the future.
In The Banished Vault dice represent one element, your character's faith and their ability to overcome hazards. In Amberspire, what a dice represents changes depending its context. This broad but vague starting point meant working through a lot of different ideas for how they would work.
What Are Dice
My starting point was ‘every building rolls a die’. This leads to an obvious question: what are the faces of the die? They could be resources, or whole new buildings, or different kinds of ‘labor’ (also just a resource in a sense).
More questions: When players roll dice, do they roll every die their city can produce? Depending on the scale of the city this could be fine or so large to be meaningless. I wanted the player to build a large city, but conversely a small set of dice to be rolled, so that each roll and its outcome can be followed by the player.
And more: once a player rolls, can they use everything they rolled? If so, rolling dice might feel perfunctory; if not it might feel punishing. The middle ground here is extremely hard to find, less like finding the solution to one problem but a system that will cover every possible outcome, and remain engaging!
Tensions
I describe this as a tension put upon the player, which is simply giving them mutually exclusive goals or desires. A simple tension for a dice game: it should be appealing to both roll greater or fewer amounts of dice. For the player there's no right answer, just a best guess given their game and personality. Another potential tension: using as many resources as you can while also being efficient and pursuing one goal more directly.
A quick tour of some early ideas that didn’t pan out: dice have a 'quality’ based in a building’s 'morale'; unspent resources affect some kind of fatigue value; dice create groups of ‘labor’ that are combined with resources, etc. At the start of preproduction I didn't know exactly which ideas would work, but these did not express the game I had in mind.
Every Building Rolls A Die
The final version, as the game works now: each building has a die, and each face of that die produces a resource. Resources are used to construct and operate buildings. Some of the die results add a die to the weather roll, which happens every three times you roll a group of dice as the player.
I’ll elaborate on the nuances of this system in a future design diary, but it would end up satisfying the needs of tension, pacing, and approachability. As a pitch, it remains simple: each building rolls a die for resources, and you don’t know what resources you’ll have to build with.