On the player side, rituals are performed through "ritual sites", which need to be discovered by following "leylines" created with Unity's spline package. I achieved a search-and-follow mechanic by creating a shader that calculated the player’s distance to a configurable radius cutoff from the nearest point along the spline.
Exploration felt natural this way.

For example, I separated the ritual system's data from its behavior using ScriptableObjects and SerializedReferences. This let designers create and tweak ritual effects through the inspector, which reduced bottlenecks and having to rely on engineering changes. 

I focused on making systems flexible for designers and intuitive for players to speed up iteration speeds and make gameplay mechanics feel natural in-game.