Hello everyone, it's Caleb again, back to talk about a feature of the game: Script Stealing.

Script Stealing is the core mechanic of Corrupted Castle; it's the unique gimmick that combat and puzzles are built around. When coming up with the original design for the game, we went through loads of ideas on what this mechanic would look like, but the consistent idea was being able to take a behavior from an object or enemy to use yourself, which would cause the object or enemy to change its own behavior because of it.

Initial ideas involved taking the force from a cannon to gain a dash ability, or taking the flames from a flaming orb that spawns enemies. Eventually, the focus became enemies, and taking their behavior. This idea was then further refined to three enemies, each with an elemental script that could be taken, and each changing based on the element being taken. See the enemy devlog for more information on that.

Because it's so related to the enemies, I was tasked with programming Script Stealing. The programming started with trying out a few different UI designs for how Script Stealing would be visualized, starting with a 2-slot design that would require opening a menu to equip scripts. There was a slot for combat and a slot for movement, and each script could only apply to a single slot. Due to only having 3 elemental scripts available in total, this design was switched to only a single slot that impacted all behavior. Another change was removing the menu, and allowing the player to directly steal a script and equip it.

Puzzles all utilize elements in their solutions, which means the player must use Script Stealing to solve them. To steal scripts, the player must attack an enemy, but this led to an issue: enemies began to be treated as a source for scripts, and would be avoided after their script was taken. The idea was then discussed about adding a type of mana, which would be gained by attacking and killing enemies and would power the script the player had equipped. This would mean the player would need to engage with enemies in order to use their scripts, rather than taking a script and ignoring them. This indeed solved the problem, and the combat and puzzles in the game both felt intertwined.

There's a lot more I could discuss, but that would ruin the fun of experiencing the system yourself! Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy Corrupted Castle :)