Halls of Torment - Dev Journal #4
Hi there!
We’re currently working on the next update and we wanted to give you a quick preview of what’s coming and what you can expect. The upcoming update won’t be a huge one, since it won’t contain new levels or player characters. However, the new mechanics that are introduced will take about another week to be integrated and tested properly because they mesh in with a lot of stuff that’s already there.
Oh, and if you want to avoid any spoilers on what those new mechanics are all about, we’d advise you to stop reading right now ;)
So with no further ado, here’s what’s coming next:
There’s going to be a new addition to your overworld camp, the Cupbearer, a second NPC that unlocks special potions for you. Those potions don’t work like health potions that you pick up in the Halls. They are potions that you take with you at the beginning of each run and which are refilled each time you enter the Halls.
But what do they do? Well, they basically allow you to do what is most widely known as ‘reroll’ and ‘banish’ in this type of game. Two of the currently available potions serve these two functions in the context of traits. You can use the Strong Wine to reroll a trait selection or you can use the Potion of Oblivion to remove a trait (and all its follow-ups!) from the trait pool for the rest of the run. There are two more potions that allow you to do more advanced things with your traits: the Reverberant Tinkture and the Potion of Memories. We’d like to leave their specific functions to your speculation for now, but we think their names are already a pretty good hint.
After this update, the potions will only work for traits. But we do have plans to introduce new potions that allow you to have more control over abilities (or maybe even items) in future updates.
There are two types of unlocking mechanisms for potions. One unlocks a potion of a specific type while the other increases the available number of an already unlocked potion. You unlock new potions by finding the ingredients scattered across the levels. Ingredients are only visible when you’re wearing the Gatherer’s Charm, which luckily the Cupbearer will drop into your item stash as soon as he arrives at your camp. Once you pick up an ingredient, you don’t have to pass it through the well or anything. Currently they simply appear directly in the Cupbearer’s inventory.
If you want to increase the number of available potions, you’ll have to find appropriate bottles. Each potion has its own bottle type. They are dropped by certain enemies and need to be retrieved via the well. Once you buy them at the Wellkeeper they increase the available amount of the respective potion.
There’s still a ton of things in Halls of Torment we want to improve while at the same time providing additional content with each update. We get a lot of feedback from you regarding bugs and balancing issues and we’re addressing those things one at a time. For instance, summon builds remain less attractive due to their overall performance. We would like to give this part of the game a little bit more work. However, it might take a couple of iterations, since balancing summon based builds is a bit trickier than your typical damage dealing character.
Another area for improvement are the final lord encounters. While the Lord of Pain seems to be pretty much where we wanted him, the other Lords are still lacking the refinement we’d like to have.
Besides all that, there are still bugs to be squashed and in some parts the game is still missing audio. We won’t be able to address all of this in the next update, but it should give you a rough idea where we’re heading.
Thank you for supporting us!
Cheers
Paul from Chasing Carrots
We’re currently working on the next update and we wanted to give you a quick preview of what’s coming and what you can expect. The upcoming update won’t be a huge one, since it won’t contain new levels or player characters. However, the new mechanics that are introduced will take about another week to be integrated and tested properly because they mesh in with a lot of stuff that’s already there.
Oh, and if you want to avoid any spoilers on what those new mechanics are all about, we’d advise you to stop reading right now ;)
So with no further ado, here’s what’s coming next:
The Main Feature
There’s going to be a new addition to your overworld camp, the Cupbearer, a second NPC that unlocks special potions for you. Those potions don’t work like health potions that you pick up in the Halls. They are potions that you take with you at the beginning of each run and which are refilled each time you enter the Halls.
But what do they do? Well, they basically allow you to do what is most widely known as ‘reroll’ and ‘banish’ in this type of game. Two of the currently available potions serve these two functions in the context of traits. You can use the Strong Wine to reroll a trait selection or you can use the Potion of Oblivion to remove a trait (and all its follow-ups!) from the trait pool for the rest of the run. There are two more potions that allow you to do more advanced things with your traits: the Reverberant Tinkture and the Potion of Memories. We’d like to leave their specific functions to your speculation for now, but we think their names are already a pretty good hint.
After this update, the potions will only work for traits. But we do have plans to introduce new potions that allow you to have more control over abilities (or maybe even items) in future updates.
How are Potions Unlocked?
There are two types of unlocking mechanisms for potions. One unlocks a potion of a specific type while the other increases the available number of an already unlocked potion. You unlock new potions by finding the ingredients scattered across the levels. Ingredients are only visible when you’re wearing the Gatherer’s Charm, which luckily the Cupbearer will drop into your item stash as soon as he arrives at your camp. Once you pick up an ingredient, you don’t have to pass it through the well or anything. Currently they simply appear directly in the Cupbearer’s inventory.
If you want to increase the number of available potions, you’ll have to find appropriate bottles. Each potion has its own bottle type. They are dropped by certain enemies and need to be retrieved via the well. Once you buy them at the Wellkeeper they increase the available amount of the respective potion.
What else?
There’s still a ton of things in Halls of Torment we want to improve while at the same time providing additional content with each update. We get a lot of feedback from you regarding bugs and balancing issues and we’re addressing those things one at a time. For instance, summon builds remain less attractive due to their overall performance. We would like to give this part of the game a little bit more work. However, it might take a couple of iterations, since balancing summon based builds is a bit trickier than your typical damage dealing character.
Another area for improvement are the final lord encounters. While the Lord of Pain seems to be pretty much where we wanted him, the other Lords are still lacking the refinement we’d like to have.
Besides all that, there are still bugs to be squashed and in some parts the game is still missing audio. We won’t be able to address all of this in the next update, but it should give you a rough idea where we’re heading.
Thank you for supporting us!
Cheers
Paul from Chasing Carrots