Creating characters for a midcore battler

What matters more to players when choosing heroes: flashy visuals or stats that help them dominate in the arena? After three and a half years of working on Kingdom Clash, we’ve learned there’s no quick or simple answer. We’ve gone from “Wow, cool idea—let’s do it fast” to “Let’s think this through and put it on the six-month roadmap.” In this article, we’ll break down how heroes and units impact not just gameplay, but the overall economy of the project.

Where we get ideas for heroes and units

In the early stages of a game’s life, one of the most important things is grabbing the player’s attention with strong visuals. Units need to look original, and their active abilities should feel impactful on a mobile screen. That’s probably why most midcore battlers lean toward fantasy settings—other genres just don’t leave enough room for visual imagination.

We originally wanted a dark medieval setting—minimal magic, more Game of Thrones than high fantasy. But once we started designing units, it became clear: there’s only so much you can do with swords and bows. Every new iteration added more and more fantasy elements. Today, Kingdom Clash includes three full factions: humans, mages, and the undead.

At the same time, there’s nothing wrong with having some genre staples, especially among Tier-1 units. Infantry, archers, catapults—these help players get familiar with the basics: melee vs. ranged combat, AoE, positioning, heroes, abilities, and so on.

From the start, we wanted most heroes to feel unique on mobile. We pulled references from all over, including classic PC hits. One example: the Air Mage, who summons a battlefield whirlwind that pulls in nearby units. That idea partly came from the cult PC strategy Age of Mythology.

Another legendary hero is Drake, Master of the Seas—a pirate with an octopus on his back who summons a massive ghost ship that glides across the battlefield. It’s a clear nod to Kunkka’s ult from Dota 2.

The goal was always to make heroes memorable: striking visuals paired with standout abilities that looked great on mobile. Meteor swarms, tornadoes, ghost ships—we leaned into spectacle.

Game designers and people from the art team would go through dozens of popular titles—not just battlers—and jot down ideas for heroes, powers, or combos for the producer to look at. Then we’d review them as a group and figure out what fit, what didn’t, and what could be adapted to our mechanics.

At first, we were sure players mostly cared about impressive-looking abilities. But over time, we saw a different pattern. Players actually valued buffs, debuffs, and control effects more than we expected. Doubling your team’s attack might not look as exciting as a flaming tornado, but it helps you climb the leaderboard—and players noticed.

A few hints on creating new heroes

For a game to grow, its hero and unit rosters have to expand. After Kingdom Clash found early success, we laid out a bigger plan for new hero creation. One of our goals was to make passive abilities—what we call talents—available to all heroes. Rares and epics would get one; legendaries would get two.

But in practice, that was tough to scale. Making and testing all those combinations would take too long. So we limited talents to legendaries only. Later, when we introduced a new mythicl rarity, we gave those heroes talents too.

Over time, we settled into our own approach. These days, we define talents for upcoming heroes well in advance. That way, they fit cleanly into the game’s balance and economy. Before that, things were more reactive—we’d see a cool ability somewhere, give it to a new hero, ship it, and adjust on the fly. 

In general, it’s more worthwhile to invest in new heroes than to constantly rework old ones. First, it expands the roster—and that matters. The more heroes there are, the slower players burn through content.

Back when the game launched, we had just three heroes. A new player could get a legendary and level them to 10 in about a month—even with only a 5% drop chance from chests. Today, with over 30 heroes in the game, reaching level 10 on your epic might take six months.

Second, new heroes give you an opportunity to build out offers and boost monetization. But that’s a broader topic—and one we’ll cover in another article.

Key takeaways

• To draw players in—especially early on—cool, unique hero visuals matter. Don’t be afraid to pull inspiration from outside your genre.
  
• Creating new heroes is more labor-intensive than reworking old ones, but the payoff is far greater in terms of metrics.
  
• If you’re adding heroes impulsively without a long-term roadmap, you’ll end up spending a lot of time firefighting balance issues.

Increasing long-term retention in a midcore battler with PvE

Usually, players come to mobile battlers for PvP combat, while the campaign mode mainly handles tutorial and farming tasks, introducing newcomers to units, heroes, and core mechanics. For those who stay longer than a month, it’s almost always about competing in PvP to climb the leaderboards.

In Kingdom Clash, the Arena also became the key attraction and primary revenue driver very quickly. However, after years of experimentation, we discovered that focusing on PvE helps boost product metrics as well. In this article, we share some of the ideas that worked for us.

Bosses with special mechanics

To make players keep returning to PvE, you need to offer a unique game feel they can’t even get from winning the toughest PvP match. Boss battles are a visual and mechanical game changer. These fights also connect to the campaign, since they only unlock after level 300. To deal maximum damage to a boss within the time limit, players have to rethink their army composition—sometimes a lineup that dominates in the Arena turns out to be useless against a giant monster with unique abilities. Currently, Kingdom Clash features three such bosses.

The fight with the dragon takes place on a platform hanging from chains. Occasionally, the dragon tilts the platform, and you have to move your troops fast so they don’t slide off.

The spider summons swarms of smaller spiders. You can switch your targeting from the boss to these minions so they don’t wipe out your army while you’re trying to bring down the main spider.

The battle with the kraken unfolds on a ship’s deck. From time to time, the kraken grabs 15–20 of your units with its tentacles and tries to eat them. To rescue your troops, you have to time a cannon shot just right.

Yes, creating bosses takes a lot of time and resources, and it doesn’t typically yield an overnight surge in metrics. Even so, in the project’s third year, we can confidently say that adding boss fights has had a significant impact on long-term retention and monetization—not to mention how much the community loves them.

Diverse locations

Repetition is the main enemy of any single-player campaign. While you can hold the player’s interest for the first hundred levels by gradually introducing new units and modes, beyond that, other techniques come into play—including visual variety.

The game has three factions: humans, mages, and the undead. We try to design each level so it fits the relevant environment. For instance, at level 120, the Magic Forest appears—created specifically for the mage faction. Level 400 leads to Necropolis, which suits the undead. There’s also a level that features a full city in a classic fantasy style, plus seaside maps, wheat fields, and more. Each boss has its own exclusive setting as well.

Honestly, we can’t say for sure how much changing scenery affects key metrics, or if it’s even something you can track precisely. Mainly, we do it to maintain the atmosphere. We liked the results so much that at one point we decided to give the PvP arena its own unique background—a coliseum-like amphitheater. The first version had no spectators, but later we added jumping figures in the stands, reminiscent of old FIFA games.

Special heroes for the campaign

As in most battlers, Kingdom Clash divides its heroes by rarity—usually Rare, Epic, and Legendary, though we added Mythic recently. In PvP, Legendaries and Epics matter most, while Rares generally serve as extras. However, there’s one exception: Baron, a Rare hero that everyone wants, specifically for the single-player campaign.

Baron’s active ability creates a special aura around him, turning enemy units within that radius gold for the rest of the battle. They then drop extra coins, and the higher Baron’s level, the greater the multiplier. If you’d normally get 10 coins for defeating a certain enemy, a level 10 Baron raises that to 15. Because of this, even players focused on PvP will swing back to the campaign to farm gold with Baron and power up their PvP armies.

A few words on paywalls in the campaign

In the early versions of Kingdom Clash, campaign progression was structured like most battlers: the first 50 levels act as the tutorial, and then players hit a modest blocker, where they have to either farm a bit or buy boosters. In terms of timing, this lines up roughly with the end of day one for a new player, helping to drive initial in-app purchases and generally boosting monetization.

Later, we tried extending this approach with several more blockers between levels 150 and 500, but by that stage, it no longer had the same effect. Players tended to drop the campaign entirely in favor of PvP and side modes. Probably this happened because most modes become available at earlier campaign levels, and progression slows down a lot after that.

At the moment, we’re sticking to softer blockers in the campaign. Still, as the project expands and the campaign gains more perks, we’re considering bringing back blockers for higher levels. For instance, adding a leaderboard for campaign progress could motivate players to clear more levels, and in that scenario, new blockers might make sense.

Final thoughts

Naturally, the main focus in a mobile battler is developing PvP modes, but the PvE campaign also has a crucial role. Early on, it attracts new players and eases them into Arena battles, and later it becomes a key source for farming soft currency. Over the game’s lifespan, PvE remains important for player progression. If you want to keep people from burning out and encourage them to stick around, you need to keep refreshing your PvE content and introducing new features.