Howdy Cowboys!
We have been working hard the past few months and we wanted to share part of our development.
Erosion is a dungeon-crawling roguelike where each death makes time skip forward 10 years. The world ages and so does your kidnapped daughter who you’ll try to save before her whole life erodes away. While the overworld has characters, villages, and minigames to explore, the core of the experience is in the underground dungeons.
An otherworldly marble pillar seems to be source of mysterious happenings. For decades, it has been chipping at anything and anyone in its way, like a river through a canyon. But when a suspicious gang of misfits asks for a ride to the central pillar, it opens with a gate of light. Your daughter is taken inside so you must follow.
With that brief intro to the background lore, I wanted to explain the core of the roguelike mechanics in combat. As you progress through a run, you can modify your primary weapon, secondary weapon, passive ability, active ability and add loads of modifiers on each of those.
Primary and Secondary Weapons
When you start a new run, a random primary weapon will be waiting for you. This could be a machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle or even a chicken that shoots eggs out of, well you know where. The primary weapon has limited ammo which you’ll need to manage as you progress. You can even find an elemental bullet modifier like lightning or frost that will make your primary weapon even stronger.
But if you want to conserve your primary weapon’s ammo, you can use your secondary weapon. This has unlimited rounds but is much weaker. You’ll start with a pistol and as you progress through the open overworld, you'll find other options.
Active and Passive Abilities
The dungeons also contain several passive abilities. These can provide situational boosts like a bar of soap that increases movement speed after each roll or summoning turrets that add to the artillery mayhem. In this clip, I’ve got a drone supporter bot that duplicates whatever I’m using as my current weapon. Since I’ve got the powerful sniper rifle, this drone is clearing mobs while I can idle bop up and down in peace.
Active abilities have powerful effects that you can activate whenever they aren't on cooldown. This can be firing 10 homing rockets at once, emitting a shock blast aoe around you or even doubling all of your stats and speed at once.
All of these effects can combo for maximum impact. In this clip, my Primary Weapon machine gun is firing electric shock rounds that do extra damage to other shocked enemies nearby. I have a Passive Abilitiy that increases the number of bullets that my primary weapon fires to spread the shock more effectively. Finally, I've got an Active Ability that grants invincibility so I can lure all the mobs and get out safely.
With all these different mechanics, we know there’s a lot that will need to be tuned to make an awesome roguelike. We’d really appreciate your feedback and if you’d like to play Erosion way before we launch.