Dice Defenders

Inspiration

Dicey Dungeons meets Age of Empires meets Tower Defense. I've had this idea for a city builder where your dice are actually your workers. This adds a nice little layer of randomness and strategy to a genre that is usually very straight forward. Every placement matters, getting that 6 feels good, but it's up to you to choose between spending it on your town center to level up faster, getting that tower to level 2 for some extra defense, or on that farm to get that food you need so badly.

What it does

It's a short but replayable tower defense game. Roll your citizens and put them to work. Build buildings that either defend your hamlet, manipulate your die rolls, or help you collect resources to improve it. This is the balance of the game. Economy versus Defense. You need both, but you start out with only four citizens so every placement matters.

How I built it

Claude all the way. The idea was pretty well formed in my head, and I used Claude to workshop it into something small and buildable for this hackathon. After that I took it to a Claude Code session in Visual Studio Code. Some light Design work for the logo/wordmark, but that's about it!

Challenges I ran into

Balance! Tower defense is all about the numbers and luckily Claude helped me speedrun balancing through efficient simulations of different play styles.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Getting my vision to a playable state this fast. I actually really like the game. The town feels alive, there are tons of buildings and specialist dice already and I feel like there is so much more to do with this.

What I learned

Tower Defense was a new genre for me, and by adding the economy management I got to learn about designing two genres at once. Also trying to make something as abstract as dice feel alive and fun to play with was a nice challenge.

What's next for Dice Defenders

More roguelike mechanics. I could add permanent die face upgrades, more facets, more relics, more enemy types, more biomes, level sizes, campaign progression. I can easily see this becoming a full sized game!

Built With

• claude
• html5