Building the Shrine
Thumb & Tomb has had meta-progression for a while: every run banks Souls, and you spend them between runs on new classes, gear and perks. Until this week those perks were three lines of text on a menu. I'd pictured something else entirely: a place. Doom Eternal's Fortress of Doom, the Space Rig in Deep Rock Galactic. Rooms where everything you've earned is out on display. So we built one.
A cathedral in four colors
The game is a first-person grid crawler: a raycaster drawing in four colors, Game Boy style, where a "room" is walls one cell apart. To make the Shrine feel big, its walls go three stories up, with tall pointed windows of moonlit glass and a ribbed vault overhead. It runs on the same engine as the dungeon, with the same controls, so you walk it a cell at a time.
The skull pillar
In the middle stands a pillar of skulls. It's drawn like walls rather than as a sprite, so it has real mass, with half-height mounds of skulls round its foot. Each side is a perk: VITALITY to the west, EMBERS to the north, FORAGER to the east. Face a side and offer your Souls. On top burns the same fire simulation as the title screen, and it grows with every rank you buy.
Laying it out
I wanted to shape the room myself, so a little map editor came first. You paint tiles on a grid and walk a live preview of the room in the browser, which runs a JavaScript copy of the game's renderer. When a layout feels right, it gets baked into the game. The hall you walk is the one I painted.
Depth
The stairs down in the dungeon already fake depth: the ray carries on past the wall into a stairwell behind it. The Shrine does the same for everything set into its walls. There are display cases with shelves you see the tops of as you pass, statue alcoves, deep window reveals, and a great arched door at the entrance whose rings step back into the stone. Walk past any of them and the insides slide against the frame.
Everything you've earned
Then came the trophy room part:
- Every class has a statue. A class you haven't unlocked stands shrouded, a dark silhouette. Owned ones are lit, and the plinth turns gold once you've won with that class.
- The display cases hold the weapons, each drawn from its own item art once you've found it, and an outline until then.
- The bone wall has a niche for every monster. Meet one and it stands in its niche, its idle animation playing. Every one of them is drawn by Theodore Roll, who did all of the game's monsters by hand.
- Pedestals hold the milestones: your first win, the dragons, the Heat, your deepest run. Each one's trophy turns gold when you earn it.
Cards
Walk up to any of them and press A for a card with its numbers. A class's card shows its runs and wins, its deepest floor, its fastest win, its streaks, and the monster that kills it most. To feed the cards, the game now records stats for every class, weapon and monster, starting from your next run.
The room changes
Finish a set and the hall answers. Own every class and the banners unfurl. Find every weapon and the cases gild. Meet every monster and the bone wall's sills turn gold. Light every pedestal and the great door stirs.
What's next
Each class is getting a statue of its own, and the cases will get more to hold. Thumb & Tomb is in development and coming to Steam.