Following on with this weeks’ theme “old is new” I had some success with connecting my GoDice to my own Unity based game this weekend. A while ago a made a tabletop game that tracks playing pieces and enforces game rules, and generates random dice-roll events (by picking a random number from 1-6 or 1-12 or 1-20). I always wondered if physical dice could be integrated with it.

So a little while back I picked up some GoDice.
And had a look at the demo code for Unity – https://github.com/ParticulaCode/GoDiceUnityDemo

Spoiler alert: it’s a horribly written mess! And it doesn’t even work. So I took to running the dice just as generic bluetooth devices and decoded the messages they generate when they are rolled. It took two solid days. But this morning, I was delighted when I was able to convert each of the generated “vectors” from the dice into face values – and hit a 100% success rate reading the dice values when they were rolled.

The apps that come with the dice are pretty boring/rubbish – but I didn’t get them for that: I got them to write my own tabletop games and integrate them into it, and so far, it’s looking really promising.
Now I’ve just got to decide whether I can justify £40 on a few plastic shells, in order to be able to turn a single D6 into a D20, whether to bump it up to £50 and get another D6 and charger with a separate D20 shell, or sack the whole thing off and have a go at creating my own shells in Blender and seeing if I can resin-print my own.

I really like the idea of having a connected D20, and getting my own Unity code to correctly read a (converted) GoDice with D20 values. But it is also a) quite expensive and b) more likely to fail with 20 values to decode instead of just six.