I started this project last August, pretty much immediately after playing the witch in Dicey Dungeons for the first time. I had some loose notes for this game written out already, but something about this character clarified some pieces missing in my notes.

For those out of the loop, Dicey Dungeons is a dungeon crawling "card"-slinging roguelike where you collect dice-powered equipment, instead of cards. In a typical card game roguelike, like Slay the Spire or Dream Quest, randomness comes from the order that you draw your cards. In Dicey Dungeons you always have the same equipment available to you, but the dice rolls affect what can be done each turn, simulating a different kind of randomness. It's a clever system.

The witch flips the whole game on its head, though. Your equipment gets re-branded to spells which need to be prepared before use each combat encounter. Each spell takes up a spell slot that correlates with one of the six sides of a die, so rolling a 5 would allow you to prepare the spell in the 5th spell slot. I would go into more detail about why this is such a good system, but you should just play the game yourself!

9 Till Void also features its own sort of spellcasting system, but first let's do a quick overview of the basics. 9 Till Void is played in levels, where each level is a 9*9 square board. You always start and end each level at the exit door in the center, which is unlocked by collecting all keys on a level. Ideally you also kill enemies and collect as much money as you can along the way.

You always have 9 spell slots, one for each row on the board. You can only cast a spell if you and the spell occupy the same row on the board. So when you start a level, you can either cast the spell in the middle slot, or move up or down towards your other spells. The randomness comes from the board layout. Coins, mana, actions, keys, hearts, and enemies are randomly strewn around each level. The composition of a given level will affect how you approach it with your current spell loadout.

There's obviously a lot more nuance to the game than I'm leading on, but it's hard to explain so much with only some text and a single screenshot. Maybe I'll have more to show and tell for the next devlog...

-Ben