Balancing a game’s difficulty, especially one that’s meant to challenge the player, presents its own challenge for developers. Sometimes, the final game ends up being easier than some developers desired. Such is the case with Lost in Random: The Eternal Die, a roguelike spinoff of 2021’s Lost in Random that casts players as a remorseful queen fighting her way out of the ancient artifact that has trapped her.
“I do think the game is maybe slightly easier than I wanted it to be in the end,” Lost in Random: The Eternal Die director Martin Storm told Polygon over a recent video call. “I do wish we had made it just 10% harder overall.”
The Eternal Die is by no means as crushing as, say, a Soulslike, but it will test players in the same way that fellow roguelike Hades — which served as inspiration for developer Stormteller Games — challenges players. While a successful run across the game’s four levels may take around two hours to complete, success will likely only come after several failed attempts. Such is the nature of a roguelike.
Fine-tuning the difficulty of The Eternal Die took a lot of playtesting, and eventually Stromteller settled on differentiating the difficulty of each of the game’s levels to better serve the player experience. “The idea was to make the world one boss pretty hard. So it’s like you learn the game, have the most enemy variety in the first world. And then second world, let’s make that slightly easier,” Storm said. “So when you finally get to world two, you’re not hitting a wall […] So we’re like, ‘Let’s make world two kind of easy,’ to be honest. And then world three slightly harder again.”
Tinkering with the difficulty naturally goes hand-in-hand with developing The Eternal Die’s combat. Player character Aleks has several weapons at her disposal, but, of course, not every gameplay idea made it into the final build. Stormteller had to leave some behind that just weren’t working for The Eternal Die, like incorporating the original Lost in Random’s time stop mechanic, wherein Even would roll Dicey to freeze time and select an ability for Dicey to use in combat.
“We did try to convert that into [The Eternal Die]. That’s how we started out,” Storm said. “But the thing is it was too slow and it didn’t fit. So it was a challenge to find the room for the die and how much randomness [should be in the game].”
Ultimately, the gameplay loop coalesced with the addition of the Relic System, which allows the players to select bonuses and abilities and, by aligning same-colored bonuses across a grid, unlock passive stat boosts.
“Everything came together when we added the Relic system really, and just started removing things,” Storm said. “Because sometimes you just have to kill your darlings. We let the player decide how much randomness they wanted by choosing Relics that affect the die. And that’s kind of how we decided on the basic combat for Fortune — by testing what was fun.”