Echoes of Myth Development Blog

In the series of " topics I never even considered prior to seriously working on planning for a commercial game launch ," one of the biggest surprises has been managing player expectations. I touched on this in Finding the Hook: Lessons from Echoes of Myth , but a particularly tricky aspect is choosing the right emphasis in marketing—ensuring that player expectations align with the actual game experience to avoid negative backlash. I've personally refunded plenty of Steam games after realizing they felt very different from what I expected—despite watching reviews beforehand. Why does this happen? And more importantly, how can I, as a developer, prevent players from having a similar reaction to Echoes of Myth? The Expectation Gap and Its Consequences Many factors contribute to refunds and negative reviews, but one of the biggest is misaligned expectations —what players assume about a game based on its name, visuals, trailers, descriptions, and tags . This is further shaped ...

Game development wisdom—especially for indies—says you need your key and audience-validated game hook in place from the very beginning. Ideally, this means creating multiple prototypes, testing them with players, and identifying which ones have real potential based on actual feedback. For first-time commercial developers coming from a hobbyist background (like me with Echoes of Myth ), a common failure mode is starting with a vision, working on it for years, only to realize there’s no audience. I learned this the hard way. In Game Development is Iteration - Pivot, Pivot and Pivot Again , I outlined the history of Echoes of Myth ’s pivots. I believed I had a strong vision—fusing genres that hadn’t been combined in this way before. My thinking was, “I'll refine the details along the way.” A Diabloesque ARPG with Soulslike elements and deep RPG narrative. But after multiple pivots, the core mechanics changed significantly. Only in the last year, with a self-imposed release deadline ap...

In this blog post, I outline the current design for how players progress in power within a single roguelike iteration in Echoes of Myth —and the key choices they can make, along with how randomization shapes each run. Each iteration begins with the player choosing a class. I've narrowed the initial launch target to three classes, with Mage and Sword Saint currently implemented. This choice largely defines the available core playstyles. The game then randomizes the player’s starting divine treasure, selecting from the tier 1 divine treasures they have previously looted. Higher-tier divine treasures may also become starting items later, with an upgrade system yet to be designed. This is the first major power factor. By killing enemies and completing trials, the player draws upon the world’s essence and taps into divine echoes (experience → level-ups → talent choices). On level-up, the player is presented with a randomized set of three divine echoes and selects one. Previously shown a...

Many people get into game development as a hobby, dreaming of one day going full-time without realizing the massive gap between hobby dev and creating a commercially successful game (or at least truly aiming for it). I've been making games as a hobby for 25 years, but only in the past two+ years have I been working on Echoes of Myth as my first commercial game. The difference is staggering. In hobby projects, you don’t need to care about target audiences or whether people would actually pay for your game. You can focus on small proof-of-concept ideas and quick demos. Marketing, store presence, achieving high polish, player outreach, and playtesting aren’t necessary. Most importantly, scope is rarely a concern. There’s no external pressure to finish, no rising player expectations to meet, and no real consequence if you never release the project in a finished state. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but learning everything needed to complete a commercial release and attract paying p...

My preference has always been for roguelites—games with meta-progression , where players can gradually grow stronger across runs. Pure roguelikes rely entirely on player skill, but roguelites introduce a layer of long-term progression, making each attempt feel like meaningful progress. This ties into game enjoyment, target audience, and how difficulty is structured. For a long time, games trended toward being more accessible and streamlined - and too often just too easy . That shift went so far that it helped fuel the rise of games like Dark Souls , which pushed back with a more traditional approach to difficulty. Now, I feel we’ve hit another extreme—some games lean into "difficulty for difficulty's sake" , catering to a niche audience but often alienating more players than necessary. Mastery and accomplishment are major motivators—most people don't enjoy a game that’s too easy all the time. Roguelites handle this well by baking adaptive difficulty into their core de...

One lesson I’ve learned from looter-ARPGs is that over-balancing can kill the sense of player agency. If every area has the same drop chances and no clear way to target specific rewards, it can make loot feel meaningless. Developers have started addressing this—games like Last Epoch and Diablo 4 now include deliberate target farming in endgame design to give players more control. While roguelites don’t have loot farming in the same way, the core idea still applies: player agency within randomness . Roguelikes and roguelites are built on unpredictability, but well-designed ones ensure that skill and decision-making matter just as much as RNG. Games like Hades and Slay the Spire excel at this by offering enough variety for skilled players to adapt, even if their run doesn’t go as planned. This requires soft synergies , which can be tricky to design. My latest pivot has been to fully embrace divine domains as the core system for both synergy and player agency. Everything—talents (divi...

Game Development is Iteration You can’t just lay out a plan and follow it to the end—at least not if you’re making something even remotely new. What seems great on paper often falls apart in practice. Player feedback, unexpected interactions, and key details can push the entire project in surprising directions. This constant need to adapt is a core part of the process. It’s even more pronounced in solo development, where balancing multiple roles means constant trade-offs and reassessments. Echoes of Myth has gone through several major pivots. The original vision was an ambitious mix of Diablo-style ARPG mechanics, Soulslike combat, Metroidvania world design, and a narrative-driven single-player RPG. That scope quickly proved unmanageable. The first big change was dropping the narrative-driven RPG angle in favor of a Diablo-style rift system with a few handcrafted levels. That still wasn’t quite right—some bespoke content was clearly necessary. After experimenting with larger handcrafte...

Welcome to the Echoes of Myth Dev Blog I’m a solo game developer from Finland , and this blog documents my journey in bringing my first commercial game, Echoes of Myth , to life ( https://www.echoesofmyth.com/ ). 🚀 What is Echoes of Myth ? A roguelite action RPG set in a fractured, ever-changing fantasy world where the gods have fallen silent. Pick your class, battle through dynamic enemies and bosses, gather unique loot, unlock talents, and permanently enhance your character. Die, learn, and rise stronger. 📅 Target Release: Q3 2025 | Platform: Steam / Windows What You’ll Find Here This blog is for both gamers following Echoes of Myth and fellow game developers interested in design decisions, technical challenges, and solo dev struggles. I’ll be sharing: Game development progress & feature updates Design insights into roguelike ARPG mechanics Challenges of solo development—what’s working, what’s failing, and why Occasional deep dives into specific systems & decisions I...