Hello everyone! I hope spring has been treating you well. Personally, In Real Life Things have kept me very busy, but I have had some time to iterate on the corruption mechanic of Tombs of Telleran and wanted to share my progress.

Starting Point and Design Goals

Let’s start by looking at the last version of the corruption system and compare that to its design goals. Corruption is a resource the player can accumulate by using different items or interacting with the environment. In return, these items or interactions are more powerful than other non-corrupting options. For example, a corrupting ability might always hit and a cursed chest contains more loot than regular chests.

As corruption increases it progresses through stages of ’touched’, ’embraced’, and later ‘smothered’ which add progressively worse debuffs that reduce the player’s maximum breath (which is an ’energy resource’ required to take actions that regenerates each round). In an attempt to make the resource more interesting and not just a strictly bad thing to avoid I added a damage bonus in addition to the debuffs. This meant that for higher corruption levels, the player’s actions would be fewer but have larger consequences (take and deal more damage).

So what were the goals of the corruption system? I want it to create interesting resource management gameplay where you must weigh immediate rewards against future consequences when choosing to take on corruption. The implementation above was actually a fairly interesting system, and made corruption a resource to manage cleverly and not strictly avoid. However, I would also like corruption to be a tool you can use offensively, with weapons and spells that can inflict corruption on enemies (or the player!). And inflicting corruption on enemies just to have them get a damage bonus was not satisfying gameplay. So, I had a think, and then I thought some more, and came up with another much more interesting (and larger) system.

Tomb Corruption

In the current version of Tombs of Telleran, the tomb itself has a corruption level, just like the player and other actors do. The amount of corruption in the tomb affects how many corrupted entities spawn in the tomb. The corrupted entities are a new faction hostile to both the player and other tomb dwellers. The damage bonus for high actor corruption levels is now gone (corruption only has negative effects on your stats now), but it is replaced with an effect which makes the player part of the corrupted entities faction. This way, the player is punished for having high levels of corruption, but they will also get some potentially useful allies - at least until they get rid of their corruption.

Obelisks

So how does the player get rid of their corruption and how does the tomb corruption increase? The answer to both questions is obelisks. Scattered throughout the tombs are obelisks, which are connected to the tomb itself. There are currently two types of obelisks: essence and vessel. Touching an essence obelisk restores the player’s health, and touching a vessel obelisk transfers the player’s corruption to the tomb. Hence, using a vessel obelisk will let you restore your ‘corruption budget’ but it will also make future floors more chaotic and difficult due to more corrupt enemies.

Going Forward

I think the new system is pretty cool and adds another interesting layer of resource management. It also fleshes out the enemy variety and adds a new faction mechanic to play with. At the moment, new enemies are the only consequence of high tomb corruption, but I would like to add special biomes or rooms that only spawn at higher corruption levels to make runs with high tomb corruption more interesting.

Additionally I’m thinking about the implications of having a low corruption, or ‘pure’, run. I sense some balancing challenges around the corner to make sure engaging with the corruption system is rewarding and presents interesting trade-offs and does not degenerate into either ’take on ALL the corruption!’ or ‘avoid corruption at all costs’. I will think more on it, but the next update will focus on adding an identification system and scrolls.

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