The word Taflkast simply means "dice throwing game", and whilst many examples of dice games have been found at various Viking archaeological sites,
No real rules from that time remain. Thus, this game is only an idea of what games may have been played back then.
The dice were based on sets of dice found in Gotland and Uppland Sweden and were typically made out of bone or antler.
This single-player game was made in Unity for the GMTK Game Jam 2022
This game uses Unity's physics engine to have real-time dice rolling and scoring. Each die has 6 trigger colliders (4 for the long dice) which help determine the active face, and the scores of each player are then compared to determine the winner. Above you can see the four main game pieces in this scene - I designed the tokens to look as if they were hand-carved.
One of the challenges of creating Taflkast was streamlining gameplay - simply deleting the game-objects from the scene felt unrefined, so I created an animated shader that would dissolve the mesh away before deletion. Combined with the post-processing, this gave a really neat in-game effect. See the shader map below:
