Change is becoming a common theme, and now it's time for the class system. In our upcoming dungeon crawl, we will have 6 main, fully fledged classes with 3 specialties, each offering 10 skills for a total of 30 unique skills for every class. So far this is similar to how our first game, Depths of Peril, worked. The major difference is that instead of picking a full class, you can choose a hybrid class!

The advantage and disadvantage of hybrid classes are one and the same- you choose any 2 specialties you want from the 6 main classes. You have a lot of freedom to choose any combination, however, you end up with less skills than a full class has (20 instead of 30). It's the penalty of pursuing two completely different specialties at the same time.

Each specialty has 10 unique skills and/or spells, and also has a number of basic armor and weapon skills (these don't count against the 10 skills). So picking your specialties is a decision about what armor, weapons, and skills you want to be able to use.

Do you want to play a plate mail wearing mage type of character? You can do that. Do you want to have healing spells and be able to pick locks? You can! Do you want to summon fantastical creatures, but still stand toe to toe with monsters in a fight? You should be able to do that too.

Yes I am being a bit vague on the classes. I think I have settled on what the 6 classes and 18 specialties are going to be, but the skills are still very much in flux.

As an aside, with our hybrid classes, I just made what should be an easy interview question much harder. Often we get questions like "How many classes will your game have?" With Depths of Peril this is an easy answer-4. In Kivi's Underworld this question got harder. There are 22 classes total, but they aren't full classes. They each have 2 unique skills and work a bit more like a gauntlet character (they aren't meant to be full fledged character classes). In the dungeon crawl, the full answer is we have 6 main classes, 18 specialty classes, and a possibility of 141 different class combinations (6 full classes and 135 hybrid combinations that make sense).

As usual comments are welcome.

See part 2 here.

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