As you dive deeper into the cavern, you'll get the chance to add new heroes to your party. Each class feels unique and promotes different playstyles due to their respective powerful abilities. While designing a game, it's important to make the player feel powerful. If an ability is fairly weak or too situational, most players will eventually catch on and stop using it. At that point you have to ask yourself what purpose does it have in the game.
Having a set of balanced skills is important because players will always find the path of least resistance (even if it's the most boring way to play).
Wizard
Originally the Wizard had the ability of being the only ranged hero in the game. I bet you can imagine how overpowered that sounds in a dungeon crawler but it was too much fun to cut it. So instead I added a chance for ranged weapons to spawn for all classes and implemented an electric discharge whenever the player passes a turn. This spell stuns nearby enemies and even knocks out sleeping ones but the floor breaks each time you pass turn. This prevents the player from abusing the skill and pushes them to keep moving forward into the action.
Trader
Adding random encounters to a roguelike isn't enough to keep its replayability high if every class feels the same. Keep in mind designing new mechanics can feel slow, but the cycle of designing, prototyping, and tweaking will pay off in the end. Originally the trader earned extra money when selling items, but that encouraged the player to never keep any of the cool stuff they found. Disarming traps and using them against other enemies turned out to be way more engaging.
Berserker
To help make combat feel more interesting, the player can knockback enemies during a fatal blow. This opens up the possibility of knocking enemies into traps or even other enemies. However, early on I noticed playtesters weren't using this skill, despite it being useful. This can happen if you don't fully explain a mechanic or motivate the player to use it. To fix this, I explained this move in the tutorial and designed an ability that is triggered by the knockback.
Early access for Firestone Saga will be available July 24th. Follow us on Twitter for more updates.
