Hey everyone, Phillip here again, Game Director on Dimraeth. Today’s focus is character creation: race, class, archetypes, attributes, Personas, and how all of these pieces are wired together under the hood to support the kind of long-form, theory-heavy character-building RPG we’re trying to make.
In Dimraeth, character creation is one of the most important decisions you can make. It’s the point where you choose your race, class, persona, and appearance – and that choice becomes the beginning of your character-building journey, which sits at the centre of Dimraeth’s experience. This update is a look at how those pieces fit together, and why we’ve built the system the way we have.
Your first major decisions are your race and your class. These two choices are the seed from which your character will grow. The combination of race and class defines your archetype, and every archetype gets its own unique skill tree – built as a blend of race, class, and that archetype’s identity.
These archetype trees are where you’ll find spells and passives that no other archetype can use. They are the anchor of your build: the core set of tools, synergies, and power spikes that you will build around. What we want to achieve with this system is simple: give you strong anchor points that encourage theorycrafting, and let you branch out into hundreds of possible builds while still feeling like your character has a clear, distinct identity.
In combat, your race isn’t just flavor, it’s your base kit. A Minotaur will always be a heavy, axe-wielding frontline presence, even if you lean into a more ranged class; a Fairy will always fight as a staff-wielding caster, even if you choose Brawler. The combination of race and class is what decides whether you’re dashing into the thick of it, kiting at the edge of the fight, or setting up control from the back line – your entire default playstyle flows from that first choice.
Your race and class also define how your attributes scale. In Dimraeth, it costs XP to level up your attributes. The XP cost of each attribute is primarily determined by your race–class combination. That means it is significantly more expensive for a Fairy Magician to raise Strength than it is for a Minotaur Brawler, and if you spend a lot of XP pushing into your “off” stats, you will end up with fewer total attribute points by the time you reach max level.
The goal of this attribute scaling system is twofold. First, we want every race–class combination to have clear strengths and weaknesses, so that different archetypes naturally lean into different build paths. Second, we want to encourage thoughtful attribute distribution: you will need to manage breakpoints and plan around specific spells or items you care about. Maybe you want a physical-based spell on your Fairy Magician, or a key magical spell on your Minotaur Brawler – you can do that, but you will have to weigh the XP cost of reaching those minimum requirements against investing more heavily into your primary attributes.
There is a third element tied to your race–class combination: the archetype passive. This is a simple passive that adds an extra benefit to one of your attributes. For example, the Minotaur Brawler (a Vanguard archetype) gains bonus stamina whenever they level Strength, whereas other archetypes do not. Effectively, each archetype has a “primary” attribute that gives you the most value per point, pushing you toward certain builds while still leaving room to experiment.
In co-op, the archetype trees and attribute scaling are where party identities come from. One player might build a Minotaur Mage (Earthshaker) around spreading fire and proccing passives whenever enemies are Burning, while another builds a Human Mage (Elemental Ranger) that turns any existing fire on the field into high-impact single-target nukes. The result is a party that doesn’t just “have two mages,” but a coordinated Burning engine – a build that only exists because of how those archetypes, passives, and attributes stack across players. We want parties to feel like carefully tuned machines built by their players, where the most satisfying moments come from combos you planned ten levels ago finally snapping into place.
Once the heavy systems are out of the way, we come to character customisation. As a pixel art game with a large number of races, adding customisation has not been trivial, but we knew it was important for players to be able to see “their” character in the world.
We’ve added colour customisation for hair, skin, and clothing across all races. Within the constraints of our art style, this lets you tune the look of your character in a way that still respects the visual identity of each race. It’s not a full 3D morphing system, but it’s enough to make your character feel like yours.
One of the more unique elements of Dimraeth is the Persona system, which acts as your character’s personality layer in dialogue encounters. Your choice of Persona adds flavour to your dialogue options in conversations, giving you more room to role-play and adding variety when you’re playing in multiplayer.
Choosing a Persona does not lock you into a single style of dialogue forever. Instead, it increases the frequency of certain types of responses. If you decide you want your character to shift over time, you can simply start choosing different types of options, and your “behaviour” in conversations will trend in that direction. Long term, our intent is to let Personas evolve, allowing combinations and more unique dialogue patterns to emerge from how you actually play.
In a tense conversation, this shows up immediately. A Joker persona might cut through the tension with a sharp, ill-timed joke, while a Stoic persona brushes past the emotion of the moment and goes straight to the point. You are still choosing your lines, but your Persona biases which kinds of options appear more often: the Hero leans toward principled, sacrificial answers, the Scholar toward probing questions and analysis, the Joker toward irreverence, the Stoic toward blunt clarity.
Right now, our Persona options include Hero, Stoic, Scholar, and Joker. Each of these influences how your character tends to speak, how they respond to situations, and how they come across to other characters – without forcing you into a single rigid archetype.
When you put all of these variables together – race, class, archetype skill tree, attribute scaling, archetype passive, appearance, and Persona – our aim is to provide a huge amount of replayability from the very first screen. Dimraeth is built around the idea that understanding the system is itself a power fantasy: the more you internalise how stats, archetypes, and passives interact, the more you can bend the game around a build that feels uniquely yours. With our intended 1.0 roster of 8+ races and 6 classes, that already gives us at least 48 archetypes, each with its own unique tree and passive.
Our hope is that you will feel encouraged to try new archetypes with friends across different worlds, explore different Personas, and push into strange or “off-meta” builds just to see what happens. Character creation in Dimraeth is not just a cosmetic step; it’s the foundation for the kind of character-building RPG we’re trying to make.
So now for some broader development news. Over here at Mudtek we’ve been heads-down in content production, building out the areas, enemies, quests, and archetypes we want to showcase in our upcoming demo and, beyond that, our Early Access release. We’ve already made updates to our tutorial region and are in the process of adding a whole new area, along with a new batch of enemies: the Goblins. There isn’t too much we can share in detail just yet, but expect more concrete updates as we get closer – especially as we move into the new year.
If you’re interested in what you’ve seen here, please consider wishlisting and following Dimraeth on Steam if you haven’t already – it genuinely helps us a lot and makes it easier for us to keep building the kind of RPG we’ve outlined above. And if you’re curious about other aspects of the game, or there’s a system you’d like us to cover in a future post, let us know in the comments.
You can also join our Discord at https://www.discord.gg/dimraeth to talk builds, theorycraft archetypes, and follow development more closely alongside the rest of the community.