Dev Blog: Role Updates

Walk of Life released into Early Access with three playable roles, including the experimental Adventurer was who held together by duct tape and corn starch. Today, the game's roster features eight playable roles and even more that have yet to be announced.

While new roles are exciting, we decided that a polishing pass was in order for some of our existing roles to make them even more fun to play. Here are some tweaks and tuneups you can expect to see in your games along with the next update. These are aiming to increase the overall fun of the roles, the balance part will come later.

Workaholic

Steam post image

Often considered to be the most vanilla role in Walk of Life, the Workaholic has remained mostly unchanged since launch. Despite being simple to play, the role does boast some surprising depth, as demonstrated by normy's behemoth guide to the Workaholic. Even still, the role's high points can feel a little eclipsed by some of the newer roles, so we've decided to give it a fun new toy.

The Workaholic will now have a new combo bonus that is more rare than all the others, but combines all of their bonuses into one! That's right, when you hear the word: "Moolah!" you can expect to get some bonus cash, work XP, happiness, and food, all at once! Talk about workplace efficiency!

Shopaholic

On the other side of the vanilla coin is the Shopaholic who remains an accessible role for newer players to learn the ropes of the game. The role has always had some more advanced tricks available, usually to do with some sort of pawn shop or fishing shenanigans.

Players have complained about the role lacking coupon cards in the gym, so we'll be introducing one with the next update. We don't expect this to be a meta defining change, but letting it burn for free every once in a while should be nice motivator to get this consumerista into shape.

Senior

Steam post imageThe Senior is a bit of a weird one. While the role is often considered to be easy to play (this is backed by hard data), the role falls off at high-level play where it has problems keeping up in the score department.

With the next update, the Senior will be able to complain in two new locations: Vexcorp and the Arcade! Complaining about transportation at Vexcorp will have the tech giant throw you a piece of car to shut you up, while complaining about the state of modern video games will net you some tokens to use to possibly get a high score. Will these complain actions open up any new strategies? We hope so!

Mystic

The Mystic is a role we came up with while incredibly bored at a conference. Despite the twelve constellations seeming like a balance nightmare, the role has barely been touched since launch! We certainly were expecting more trouble, but even though the Mystic is balanced it still has room for improvement.

The Taurus sign (which mproves stress reduction activities) can feel very bad to get early on, before stress has had a real chance to accumulate. We want to make this sign stronger and less timing dependent, so in addition to improved stress reduction, the affected actions will also grant a health bonus.

These are just some of the changes we have planned, but we also have new toys and tweaks to the Adventurer, Scavenger, Drifter, and Hacker on our radar. Stay tuned to learn more about those in the coming weeks, and be sure to give us a Steam review and let us know how you like the game if you haven't already - it really helps smaller devs like ourselves.

We have some big news coming up in the next blog, so see you there!