Eric

As stressful as making it has been so far, I'm really glad that I need make an actual playable demo of Virtue's Heaven for EGX. I've been mentioning before how I already simplified the main upgrade system for Virtue's Heaven into something where each upgrade has a passive and active mode, but as I was building the game's tutorial area, it still felt a bit weird. The System kind of worked, but it left a lot of other things kind of dangling in the air, that were sort of attached to the old one. Those bits were the game's "Hyper Mode" (a state where you spend your meter to do cool shit) and "Overzeal" state (which you get when you manage to exceed your meters current limit). Both were still kind of there and had their uses, but it felt weird to have three systems that interact with the same resource, but not with one another.

So after a long walk I had the very obvious idea to just attach your conviction's active state to those other two special states.

Now each equipped conviction always gives you its passive effect (for example in the gif above, you don't immediately die when touching spikes). However where before, their active state was tied to how much Zeal you have collected (meaning you would always end up with a mixture of active and passive powerup states), you now activate all of your equipped convictions via entering hyper mode.

The other way to activate your convictions is tied to the Overzeal state. A while ago I was thinking about how to deal with player failure and I kind of wanted to do something like the Bloodstain mechanic in Dark Souls, but I didn't really had resource that would work for it? Hollow Knight has a mechanic where you lose part of your magical energy reserves until you collect them again, which could apply here, but I also found it a bit too punishing at times. So what I did instead was that you do lose all of your collected Zeal when you die. However, should manage to get back to the place you lost everything, without dying in the meantime, the Zeal that you lost will get added on top of whatever you have collected on your way back. This is the only way to exceed the maximum amount of Zeal players can carry and if you do that you enter a state of being "Overzealous", which essentially a shorter version of Hypermode.

One thing I like about the Overzeal mechanic (and why I'm really glad I found this, frankly incredibly obvious solution) is that there's a potential that helps with the incredibly frustrating cases where you die at a specific spot over and over again, because each time you get back, there's a chance that you'll get an extra power boost that might help you get past whatever thing that blocks your path. It also has this very nice narrative aspect to it and that your character just pushes harder and harder against whatever obstacle is in their way.

Anyway, I need to change the Tutorial for the Demo a tiny bit now, but I think this is all at a state now that I'm happy with!