What are we building?

Magicave is a game development company, set up to create digital hobbies, based around beautiful, playful, collectible virtual items. The first product range we are building is called dNo (short for ‘D-Number’).

dNo can be thought of as akin to a hobby like Warhammer or Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) – but is entirely digital. When someone walks into a Warhammer/Games Workshop store, they are greeted with all the ingredients of a multifaceted and sophisticated hobby. There are the games – rulebooks and boards, collectible dice, miniature figures along with paints to decorate them, campaign manuals – which detail the game worlds and the stories that take place therein. Importantly, these stores nurture communities, running game nights where people get together to play. A game like D&D appeals to different people in different ways – from the detail-oriented fan who loves to learn every statistic in the game, the creative type who likes to decorate figures, the dungeon master who creates and narrates the worlds and stories people play through, and those who primarily enjoy the social and role-playing aspects of the game.

That’s what we’re building – a hobby, based around digital collectibles, games to play with them and a community of players and creators.

Players use collectible, digital dNo dice – like the ones you’d play D&D with. There are free sets but players can buy others, which are made of different (virtual) materials, have different carvings, fonts, items inside and behaviours.

These dice can be used to generate characters – players drag different dice into the dNo Character Creator, and new characters are generated taking on the characteristics of the dice. Drag in a set of wizard dice and you’ll create a magical character. Add in some warrior dice and you might improve their fighting skills, physical strength or replace that magic wand with a sword. Add in some rogue dice for stealth, and you’ve created yourself a unique new hero!

The dice and characters, along with what we call ‘tiles’ and ‘worlds’ (which are built from the hexagonal tiles) form the foundation of the dNo universe. On these foundations, we're building a whole hobby ecosystem – with games and apps not just developed by us but also by any members of our community who’d like to get involved in making something new and exciting.

The first game we are building is called 'Beneath The Six'.

Beneath The Six

Beneath The Six is a turn-based roguelike game (when we say ‘roguelike’ we mean literally ‘like Rogue’ the classic turn-based game dating right back to 1980 – ‘roguelike’ has come to mean lots of other things since, but our game owes its inspiration back to that original).

Beneath The Six is a mixture of exploration, combat and storytelling. Players create a character using their dNo dice and descend, either alone or with friends, into dungeons filled with treasure, traps and monsters. Every day, a new dungeon will be generated for players to explore. The player who gets the deepest into the dungeon will be that day’s winner, taking pole position on our Discord channel’s leaderboard.

Players are encouraged to experiment with different characters – made from different combinations of dNo dice. Characters come with their own skills, intelligence, strength, dexterity and equipment. A character that’s great in one situation might not be the ideal choice for another. One dungeon might benefit from pure physical strength and fighting ability, another from magic prowess and another from the stealthy skills of a rogue character. Players might choose to enter the dungeons together, sharing the risks and rewards, perhaps choosing to play as characters with complementary skills.

Blockchain and AI

At Magicave, we’re fascinated by the way that new technologies might allow us, as game designers, to bring new experiences to our players and community. In particular, we love the idea of players being able to play, create and build within those worlds, to invite friends to join them, to run their own tournaments, craft their own dungeons, write their own lore, even make whole new games and apps for the community to enjoy.

We’re excited about how we can use blockchain and AI to make something that just wouldn’t be possible without. We think there’s something amazing about being able to take a digital item from one place, and put it somewhere else – whether that’s over to another player’s world, into a different game or even offering it for sale on a marketplace. As game designers, we’re in the business of make-believe – whether it’s making the screen shake when you veer off course in a racing game, or drawing particles on the screen when you cast a magic spell, we’re all about trying to make the pretend feel more real.

Similarly, we love the idea of every player owning their own unique characters and worlds – which evolve over time as battles take place, treasure gets looted and heroes and villains die. Of unique stories, lore and history, people and places becoming more real, more richly detailed, more meaningful to you the more you play with them. AI and procedural generation technology allows us to create and evolve these characters and environments, unique to every player, changing every day. We can use AI to help generate stories unique to every player, to narrate their progress and bring the dNo universe to life, for everyone.

At the same time, we’re not blockchain (nor indeed AI) purists. We’re interested in using these technologies only where they can help us, and our community, to make better games that enrich the hobby. We're building Beneath The Six in a way that allows players to play and fully enjoy the game whether or not they choose to engage with any of the web3 elements we may add over time.

We believe that AI technology represents a great opportunity for small game teams to develop more efficiently and to punch above their weight in terms of creating high-quality games to rival those from larger teams. One area we're using AI is to generate a narrator who will talk you through your world as you progress through Beneath The Six. Because we're generating whole new worlds every day and, eventually, plan to generate unique new worlds for every player, only with the power and scale of AI generation could we hope to generate a potentially infinite amount of lore, stories and narration. It's a really exciting area for us and we're fascinated to see where it leads.

Platforms

Initially, we'll launch on PC and Mac – but we plan to bring dNo and its games to a mobile audience in future too.

Players… and Creators

We love the modding scene that has grown up around certain games – from Minecraft to Stardew Valley. These are great games made that much greater by the support and creativity of a dedicated community not just playing but adding new content and features to the games they love. We think that we can take that a lot further with dNo, and are interested in how blockchain and other technologies can help us do that.

At its simplest, this might mean players creating new characters by combining their dice in unique ways, and choosing to ‘cast’ those characters. When you cast a character, it gets stored, permanently, on a blockchain. Once it’s been cast, you can do whatever you want with it – we’ll store its history which will become richer with every quest. You can upgrade it, learn new skills and spells, take it from one game to another (as and when other games are built!) or even sell it to someone else. Maybe you’re someone who enjoys decorating miniatures and want to give it a custom paint job… perhaps you’re so good at it, you can sell your wares to other people.

You might be more of a dungeon master, and want to own and build your world. You’ll be able to create your own unique world and, again, choose to ‘cast’ it onto a blockchain. You’ll be able to use tiles to add to your world. Tiles might contain traps, treasure, monsters and more. Build a unique dungeon and invite your friends! You could even become a professional world builder and sell your creations, or run your own competitions therein – plant a chest full of loot at the end and see who, if anyone, is brave, and smart, enough to win it.

If you’re a developer, whether a first-time hobbyist or an established studio, you might want to build something in the dNo universe. That could be your own game, an add-on for one of our games, a cool utility the community might like – whatever you want! You might want to give it away, or charge for it… again, whatever you want to do, you can do it.

We see our role as providing the starting point for the hobby, but we’re not the end goal. We’ll make the dice, provide tools that make the characters, the worlds and the tiles but, just as importantly, we’ll provide our SOLID SDK, a set of libraries anyone can use to make their own games and apps within the dNo universe.

Using blockchain / web3 technologies allows us to ‘decentralize’ the hobby. That is, move aspects of it beyond our control, and into the community’s hands. Why do that? We believe that something like dNo will thrive when lots of people are bringing their talents to it. The more cool stuff there is to do with dNo collectibles, the more our players will enjoy and engage with the hobby. What can happen in a ‘closed’ game is that the developer or publisher of the game makes all the decisions – what to add, what rules to use, even when to stop supporting the game altogether. With a decentralized game, over time we can pass more control over to the community, allowing them to modify, add to, host servers and guide the direction of development.

What other games will there be?

The first game we’re developing is Beneath The Six, but we’ve also prototyped some other apps and games. These include:

dRoller – a simple dice roller application that allows you to play with your dice
Dice Goblins – a mashup of dice rolling and card battling

We plan to release demo versions of these to the community too at some stage.

The exciting thing for us is to get other people building too. We recently ran an internal game jam, splitting the team into 3 mini teams for a few days to prototype up some new ideas. Even in this short time the teams created 3 great, completely different game prototypes (see screenshots below) – a dice rolling fighting game, a space shooter and a real-time multiplayer ‘capture the flag’ game with dNo characters. We can’t wait to see what else people manage to build.

What have we built so far?

We started with dNo Dice – we wanted to make beautiful, tactile, collectible digital dice. Things people would want to own but which, crucially, have a use – or ‘immediate utility’ as we call it. We’ve built technology combining hand-crafting, procedural generation and AI to make these dice.

We’re working on the character creation – where you combine dice together to create a unique character, taking on the traits of those dice. The traits affect the appearance, stats and skills of the character. A lot of this work is complete, but there’s a lot more we want to add before we launch the full Beneath The Six game.

We’re also working on world-building technology – generating the dungeons you’ll explore. These big, infinitely deep dungeons come filled with monsters, traps and treasure. We’re using AI to bring the worlds to life with stories and lore – unique to every world.

Then, we’re building the core of Beneath The Six – the combat system. This is actually the first thing we’ll launch publicly. While the full Beneath The Six game is a mixture of combat, exploration and storytelling, we want to make sure the combat is just right before layering exploration on top. We see the combat system, and its rules, as forming the foundations for the whole dNo hobby – they could be used in many other games if that’s how the hobby evolves, so it’s important we get it right.

With that in mind, we’re currently focusing on ‘The Arena’. The Arena is designed as a combat test, where players find themselves in a small, self-contained dungeon filled with monsters. They must use their weapons and skills to defeat all the monsters in that dungeon, to open a portal to the next level. Killing a monster reveals a ‘shard’, which can be used to buy new equipment in the game’s shop. We’ll generate a new daily set of dungeons while we’re running the combat test, and whoever gets the furthest each day will top our Discord leaderboard.

Beyond the Arena

Once we’re happy with how the Arena is playing, we’ll release it to the public for a limited time, so we can see what people do and don’t like about it. Sometime after that, we’ll launch a multiplayer version of the Arena to see what difference playing with others makes – to people’s enjoyment of the game as well as to their play styles and choices.

During the combat test, we’ll let players play with just a limited range of dice and characters. These are a tiny fraction of the varieties we’ll make available eventually – just enough for us to test things out and learn a bit about what people do and don’t like. There won’t be a huge amount of variety at this time in terms of the characters – but there will be different character classes (Mage, Rogue, Warrior), different weapons, skills and armour.

A while after that (we don’t have a firm timescale for this as much depends on player feedback), we’ll launch the next version of the game, which will add some exploration on top of the combat.

We’ll also be adding in the first elements of web3 functionality – allowing players who are interested in this aspect of the game to buy their own digital dice, and to cast characters.

We have big plans for what comes after that, but really, the direction we go in will be very influenced by what we learn along the way.

What we do hope is that you will share our excitement and vision, and get involved in the journey as we create this new hobby together with our community! You can follow our progress day-to-day on our Discord server (http://discord.gg/dnodice) or on Twitter (https://twitter.com/dNoDice).