Castle of Vice – Development Diary #5 (Classes System and Fire Skills Rework)

Hello everyone,
I hope you all had a nice week.

A while back, when I was testing the game, I noticed that trying to move into one of the other classes — the Fire Magic or Ice Magic— could be quite a challenge. Not only do you need some luck for these classes’ skills to appear in the level-up skill selection window, but you also need them to be immediately useful; otherwise, you end up giving up another new skill for the mere chance of getting more skills of your desired class later.

So even though the option to branch into a different playstyle exists, most of the time, the safest way to progress as far as possible is to avoid these classes’ skills.

That’s why I decided to implement a new system in the safe room called Essence Paths (basically, a class selection system).

This window appears immediately after the Transmutation Knowledge window, and, at the moment, there are only two classes available: the basic one(Divine Maiden) and the Fire Magic(Agelessflame Conjurer), which is now fully implemented with 4 new fire skills and 2 new items that synergize with the class.

Here’s one of the new skills:

If you’re wondering how the second class’s progression works compared to the base one, the trait it adds to Annelise explains it well, so here it is:

On the other hand, the Agelessflame Conjurer class is locked at the start of the game, and it will become available once you have obtained the third upgrade for Fire Magic.

Moving on to the next point, there has been a rework to the Fire Magic Alpha 0.1 skills, with some adjustments here and there. However, the biggest change is that Burns no longer applies a flat damage bonus. Instead, each Burn now deals damage based on your Strength and Faith stats.

Well... that was everything I had prepared for this post.

I hope you’re looking forward to trying the new class system. I plan to add the Ice Mage as an initial class sometime in the future, but first, I want to add more enemies to see how the two available classes perform.

In any case, thank you for reading this post. Take care, and enjoy your weekend!