Narratively, Viren is one of the premier villains, pushing war against the elves, capturing souls into golden coins, and using corrupting Dark Magic which sacrifices the life force of other beings to fuel great power.

In making this character, I wanted players to feel villainous and overpowered (while being balanced). To accomplish this, I designed the character around regularly-occurring massive power spikes as his premier damage source, balanced out by downtime that supports his theme of draining the life essence from his enemies.

Additionally, I tied his soul coins into his kit as a powerup that lasts the rest of the mission. The powerup modifies his resource management for the rest of the match, as it allows him to get to max resource significantly faster, but going mad with max-energy lightning strikes is dangerously corrupting.

Speaking of corruption, Viren wasn’t the only Dark Magic character. I designed Corruption to be a resource used by each Dark Magic character, while fitting the narrative implications of Corruption. Narratively, using Dark Magic for the first time was quite harmful and disorienting to the user, but afterwards they were more attuned to it and could use Dark Magic quite freely unless they went overboard. Designing around this, powerful Dark Magic abilities would cause a fixed amount of Corruption based on their power. Corrupting abilities used at Low Corruption would cause a self-slow, at Mid Corruption they’d benefit from a damage bonus, and at High Corruption they’d still benefit from the damage bonus but would inflict self-damage based on how corrupting the ability is. Corruption wore off over time when not gained recently, and some abilities could decrease it directly.

This allowed Dark Magic characters to categorically follow the narrative around Dark Magic where their abilities are especially powerful, but must be mediated due to risk to the user. However, unlike cooldowns, the resource puts that mediation in the players’ hands, allowing them to take damage to rip back-to-back powerful spells if they deem it worth it.

This video shows Viren’s tooltips for his abilities, resource, and level-up bonuses

This video shows Viren’s abilities in a controlled environment (training dummy)