Cabin by the Lake: Corruption Redesign

What was corruption?

The original idea behind corruption points was that it was effectively a micro step of the larger corruption levels. You pushed a girl just a little further and that would build up over time.

This fed into how corruption was used as a currency to unlock new content and bonuses.

It also meant that, theoretically, each corruption point was only available at a certain level. Touching Alex is a rush for her at C0, it’s something new that will impact her moving forward. At C1, ramming her chest into your face is a standard greeting. Similarly, feeling her up more than once isn’t pushing her further. Which meant that there were multiple unlocks for each corruption point.

Corruption now:

As the game has evolved corruption has become less generic and is obviously no longer a currency. And really the game is better for that I feel. Things are complicated enough without having a meta currency, or searching through for overlapping points.

So what is corruption now?

As near as I can tell, it’s a marker that you got some sexy times. Even then, not all of those sexy times have a graphical marker, just being text. It is added haphazardly whenever I feel something new and sexy has happened.

And it seems that a lot of you are using it as a soft completion list. A character is more or less complete when all their corruption has been gotten. I do very much prefer that over total guide completion, which is a hassle… Although at the same time some branches aren’t in the guide because they don’t have a mechanical difference, despite being very tonally different.

Going forward:

Whenever you design any system, it’s important to design it FOR something. Like, if it doesn’t do anything, you take it out, it’s not necessary and will only get in the way of people having fun.

So, if people are using it as a completionist marker, what would that look like?

Well, firstly I need to look at what things you could be completing?
- Obviously there are adult scenes. If there is an erotic render you want to know where those all are.
- Permanent unlocks of course. Mail, corruption levels and such.
- But beyond that there isn’t just sexy scenes that are important. There are certain story beats or character moments that I might also consider important for “completing” a character
- Finally there may be relevant flow control events… these might be important for players to know about?

I could even split them into separate colours of corruption. At the same time though… that’s a lot of events to track. I don’t really mind from my end, but not minding is different from being the best option.

One of the issues with using guide nodes as a completion metric is that there are a lot of different paths, but knowing that number encourages you to explore every different one of those paths. And it’s too many paths, you would have to endlessly restart loops just to navigate through 4 different options, and while that might be something people have to do to play the game I do try to minimise it. I’ll probably be trying to streamline unnecessary checks over the rejigger as well.

If I do start tracking all these different things, it will massively increase the amount of things that I am encouraging people to hunt down. That is probably bad. It’s going to be a balancing act.

Or… Should it be used as something else entirely? Maybe, it should even be removed?

This is an open question, and I do not have the right answer yet. Left to my own devices I would end up over building this and end up with something that isn’t the best option.

So please, give me your ideas.