Dev Blog: The roles that didn't make it

I'm not gonna lie to you, guys, our office is straight up looking like a ghost time these days. Due to vacation days and injuries, the Porcelain Fortress is being operated by a skeleton crew. Thankfully, this skeleton crew was reanimated by a dread necromancer of great power and is therefore still working hard on new updates!

While we're not quite ready to show you the big features that we're working on, what we can do instead is show you what we're NOT working on! Because we scrapped it! Let's take a drive down the boulevard of broken dreams and take a look at some of our discarded ideas!

The Angler

We've covered this one before, but at the launch of early access, one of our planned roles was the Angler. Unsurprisingly, this role was centered around fishing, with progression systems such as the master pole and the magnetic pole that were supposed to help it scale into the late game.

There were a couple of issues. Balancing fishing to be somewhat viable for the other roles was tough when a new role completely warped the system and we didn't want to take fishing away as an option for the rest of the roster. The second and bigger issue was that the role was one-dimensional and not very fun.

The gameplay loop in our Angler design was quite boring and the role didn't interact with more than a handful of locations on the map. We ended up cutting the Angler into parts and making some of their features accessible to everyone.

The Trader

This role was lesser known as we never teased it ingame, only on our Discord. The Trader was a role that was supposed to interact with the Stock Market which was a feature we were planning on introducing at the time.

One of the mechanics of the role was that it was supposed to be able to gain information about the trajectory of a random stock each round, e.g to see if Bytecoin would rise or fall next round. The role would also have a government bailout mechanic where they would recoup losses from the stock market, allowing them to trick the rest of the lobby into buying a stock that was about to plummet.

While fun, these ideas also proved to be a bit too one-dimensional for a role concept, and while handing out secret information is no problem for online games, it doesn't quite work in local play (as you may have noticed with Secret Missions).

We did have ideas to have the role interact with Stress in a fun way, but so far nothing has come of it.

We're not sure how many roles will ultimately make it into Walk of Life. There is a chance that the Angler and the Trader will appear in the game at some point in the future, but they're currently at the back of the line as we have other crazy ideas for roles that we are much more excited about. We'll tell you all about them soon, and you might get to have a say on the future roles of the game!

That's it for now. We promise we'll have some juicy new content for you in the next blog, and please consider leaving us a Steam Review to tell us how you feel about the game if you haven't already - it really helps.

See ya!