Dicemancer · Press kit
Dicemancer is a little 1-bit dice roguelike. Pick your dice one at a time and the sequence you choose is the spell you cast: a d4 then a d6 is a Fireball, a d6 then a d4 is two small spells instead. Roll the top face and the die explodes and rolls again.
Walk a ruined road through six realms, beat a guardian at the end of each act, and relight the First Hearth.
Dicemancer is a 1-bit dice roguelike for Playdate. Pick six hidden dice in order, because the order is the spell, then walk a ruined road through six realms and relight the First Hearth.
You hold six dice, and you cannot see their faces. Pick them one at a time and the order you choose is the spell you cast. Every spell is a recipe of dice shapes: a d4 then a d6 is a Fireball, while a d6 then a d4 gives you two small spells instead. Cast, and the hidden numbers decide the damage. Roll the top face of a die and it explodes, rolling again for a bonus hit.
Choose one of six elements: Fire, Storm, Frost, Stars, Thorns or Mirror. Each brings its own dice and its own spells, from a tiny Ember all the way up to a six-dice ritual called Worldfire. Learn up to four spells and arrange your satchel so the dice you draw are the dice you need.
The road is a branching map of three acts and seven floors each, with a guardian waiting at the end of every act. Take fights, elites, mystery stops, markets, hearths and treasure. Pick a branch and the other roads are gone. Along the way, sixteen roadside stories ask what you will pay: bet against a raven, reshape a die at the smith’s anvil, or feed a spell to a very hungry book.
Twelve guardians, three per run, each rewrite the rules. The Dragon’s ward softens your hits until a four-dice spell cracks it. The Colossus caps every cast. The Hydra halves repeated spells. The Marsh Hag jinxes your biggest dice. Learn the rule, then rewrite your plan.
The in-game tutorial, “How to invoke”, teaches the whole battle in six illustrated pages: picking dice in order, the spell chain, damage as sum times multiplier, exploding dice, casting, and the market.
All 22 screenshots are in screenshots/1x (native 400×240, pure black and white, exactly as the device draws them) and screenshots/4x (1600×960 in the Playdate screen’s grey tones). They were captured from the game running in the Playdate Simulator.
The title screen theme.
Walking the map between fights.
The theme for ordinary fights.
The theme for act guardians.
The theme for the Dragon.
The merchant’s shop.
The tutorial theme.
Every sound is composed for Dicemancer. Previews are MP3; the 24 spells each have their own sound.
Dice are the oldest random number generator, and a Playdate is a small enough console that a handful of them fit in your hand. Dicemancer began with a question: what if you could not see the dice, and the only thing you controlled was the order you picked them in?
That one rule is the whole game. A spell is a recipe, the recipe is a sequence of shapes, and the numbers stay hidden until you cast. You plan around what your dice can be, not what they are, and a good plan feels like remembering a word you had forgotten.
The design follows the shape of the great deck-building roguelikes: a branching map, a shop between fights, relics and a small book of spells. It swaps cards for dice, and swaps a deck for a satchel.
The whole game is drawn for the Playdate’s 1-bit screen: detailed black-and-white pixel art for each realm, creature and roadside story, dice rendered with real lighting, and static illustrations instead of constant animation.
Pixel art is 1× at heart. Scale it by whole numbers only (2×, 3×, 4×) with nearest-neighbour sampling, so every pixel stays square.