Who are all these enemies you’re fighting anyway?

There are seventy or so different enemy creatures that you fight against in Dicey Dungeons: a cheerful jester who co-hosts the game show, figures from Irish mythology, a tiny terrified cactus, an imperious bee.

When I got involved most of these characters existed already, in the form of Marlowe’s illustrations and animations, and Terry’s decisions about what equipment they have and how they fight. So the questions to resolve were:

Why are they in these Dungeons anyway?

Do they say anything? If so, when?

And… what?

We decided they were a mix of enthusiastic game show minions who’d signed up for their jobs; people who blundered into the Dungeons by accident and got stuck there; and previous competitors on the game show who lost and who are now stuck in the Dungeons for ever. This last one turned out to be a super useful decision in terms of providing a threat to hold over the heads of our six dice heroes: if they didn’t make it out, they’d be trapped as minions for eternity.

To establish this, though, the enemies needed to be able to talk. Not all the time, of course, because for a start we just didn’t want there to be that much writing for people to read through (and for the translators to translate - it really helps keep the word count down when you’re conscious that for every sentence you write, a dozen people will be translating it!).

We settled on each enemy having a line or two (as the game developed, this grew to three or four) in stock, and perhaps they’d say one of those lines if you beat them - just occasionally. Most enemies would be silent most of the time, but maybe you’d hear from one of them every 10-15 minutes, and if you played for long enough maybe you’d get a bit of a sense of who they were.

So what do they say?

So the enemies have maybe three or four lines each, total, which isn’t much. But those lines needed to get across a personality, and to fit with their animation and design, and to be meaningfully distinct from all the other characters.

It turns out it's pretty challenging to think of seventy-odd different types of response that a fictional character might have to being beaten in a fight! I started classifying the characters into different categories, to make sure that we ended up with a good variety: some Friendly, some Supportive, some Competitive, Wistful, Snooty, Annoyed, Bored, Weird, Grandiose, Threatening.