define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);{"id":4459,"date":"2016-01-09T14:54:53","date_gmt":"2016-01-09T19:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unfocus.com\/?p=4459"},"modified":"2016-01-09T15:44:11","modified_gmt":"2016-01-09T20:44:11","slug":"introducing-quint-dice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.unfocus.com\/2016\/01\/09\/introducing-quint-dice\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Quint Dice!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been working on a game for the last few months in spare time. It’s a dice game called Quint Dice<\/a>, a social dice game. What makes this different from so many dice games out there is that it’s based on dice that have color pairs, and you can play it with more than two players.<\/p>\n

What I’d like to avoid with Quint Dice is pay to win forms of revenue. Currently there are no bonus rolls. I’ll eventually add some, but you won’t be able to buy them or stock pile them to gain advantage over your opponents. I think I’ll add one bonus roll per game, and if you don’t use it in that game it goes away. I may also add a second bonus type – an extra dice. The idea is to add a level of strategy and flexibility to the play, without allowing a fundamental shift in advantage for one player or another just because they paid for an advantage.<\/p>\n

The only revenue source built into the game at launch is a small banner ad at the bottom. I’d also like to add custom dice packs, and maybe some full on themes. I’m hoping this will be enough to turn this into something that pays for itself. I may also play with interstitial ads, but only as a voluntary way to earn points to buy custom dice packs and themes without shelling out cash, for users who prefer that route. I like this better than pestering players with involuntary interstitial ads as a way to get them to pay. Annoying players is not my favorite model, no matter how common it is in mobile gaming. Finally, there will eventually be an option to remove the ads.<\/p>\n

I built Quint Dice with Meteor<\/a> and React<\/a>, and I would like to eventually port to React Native<\/a>, but I’m using Cordova<\/a> for the time being on Android<\/a> and iOS (soon!). Like so many of the projects I play with under the unFocus banner, this has mostly been a learning exercise. But I’m happy with the results, and thought I should probably dust off this blog, and may start to share some thoughts I have as I develop these things.<\/p>\n

To kick that off, I’ll share a couple of things I learned while getting this out the door, in no particular order. If you’d like to know more about any of these items, please leave a comments, and I’ll see about writing a follow-up post.<\/p>\n