Alright, so making games is kinda like cooking—sometimes you end up with something a bit spicier or milder than planned. Developers, they wrestle with this all the time, especially when the game’s supposed to challenge you, like smack-you-in-the-face hard. Take “Lost in Random: The Eternal Die” for example. It’s a spinoff of, wait for it, “Lost in Random” from 2021. This time you’re a queen (yes, a queen) who’s all regretful and trying to break out of this confounded ancient thing, some artifact trapping her. What a life, huh?
Martin Storm, the guy behind this game, mentioned in this chat with Polygon—was it a video call or some fancy hologram thing?—that he kinda wished it was tougher. By about, say, 10% more so. Funny, right? When you don’t even get what you want from your own game. It’s not exactly “Dark Souls” level, but it ain’t candy either. They took a page out of Hades’ book—I freaking love Hades—with levels that take you maybe two hours if everything goes well. But oh boy, you’ll fail a bunch before calling yourself victorious. Such is the roguelike life, my friend.
They went for this whole level-tweaking thing—some, um, playtesting magic, defining each level’s difficulty, which sounds fancy but basically means trial and error till it clicks. Martin, again, said something about making the first world a bit of a slap in the face, with a variety of foes. Just so you learn, then world two is like, “Phew, a bit of a break,” before ramping it up again in world three.
Combat’s a whole other beast. Aleks, your character, has some wicked weapons, but not every idea makes it. They tried this time-stopping mechanic from the original game—something about rolling Dicey to freeze time. But apparently, it felt like waiting for paint to dry. Too slow, not the right vibe. Figuring out where the dice fits in was its own little puzzle.
At the end of it all, they added this Relic System. Now, this is cool—it lets you pick bonuses and abilities and align things on a grid for stat boosts. Like a puzzle but with more oomph. Once they had that in, they just started ditching stuff that didn’t work. Slicing through ideas—sometimes you gotta let go of the stuff you love, heartbreaking, right? Players decide their own level of chaos with these Relics, turning the randomness up or down, and that’s how they pinned down the combat style. Just testing what brought the most fun to the game.
And there you go—gaming development, chock full of half-baked ideas and last-minute epiphanies. Who knew?
