Yet another Designer Diary interruption! Our Kickstarter prelaunch page is now live, please check it out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/radical8games/die-of-the-dead You can choose to get notified immediately when we launch the Kickstarter, so you don’t need to worry about missing it! Thank you, and now back to the diary…
For the last post on the caskets, I just wanted to talk a little about their construction. Early on we were using large caskets bought from hobbycraft. These behemoths caught people’s eyes, but were needlessly large. Since then I spent a lot of time designing caskets which were fund to pick up and hold.
As a sign of considering the smaller things in the game, the caskets (and the steps, which we’ll get to later) stand out. They have a height of 3cm, with the dice having a height of 1.6cm. This means the dice will shake well, but they will never stack. One of the most annoying things in a dice game is having to unstack dice, inevitably knocking one, and the having a do-over. So the height of the caskets was intentionally made to prevent this.
The second thing is the height of the bases. Most containers have a short lid and large base. We’ve reversed this, and used the skull to emphasise it. This is so that when the dice are revealed, everybody can see the result straight away. The base is just 1cm high, large enough to keep the dice securely in, but short enough so we don’t have people peering into the casket. Just really nicely designed with thought and attention.
