Dear Community,
After a few weeks of development on the new room concept, we'd like to share our current progress with you.
The New Room Concept
The overhaul of the Dungeon Editor, which was intended to significantly simplify dungeon design, is unfortunately not working as well as we had hoped. The usability doesn't feel good, and switching between the different modes (rooms and units) is very confusing. Therefore, we've stopped this development and tried to revisit the original problem:
Rooms are difficult to balance against each other in the current version, as the monsters and traps in one room can have too much of an impact on the others – this is mainly due to the dimensions and connection points of the rooms.
Without having to intervene too much in the existing system, we've decided to adapt a few rooms. This is primarily done by replacing railings with walls, which prevents traps and ranged enemies from working on parallel paths.
This allows us to balance the old rooms in the old room concept with flexible room sizes.
Empty Rooms - Boring for Players and Spectators
These points have been raised several times, and we want to change this situation with the next update. Every room placed in the dungeon must be equipped with a minimum number of defense points.
This means that the more rooms you want to use, the more spread out the maximum available defense points will have to be.
Defense Points for Dungeon and Rooms
We received many ideas and comments on this point. We have decided that the defense points for the entire dungeon will be fixed by the player's level and will not change depending on the number of rooms used.
There will also be a change to rooms. In the future, rooms will already have the maximum possible defense points at level 1 – but each room will receive a maximum number of defense points that matches the available space. Room level upgrades will be slightly cheaper, and level upgrades unlock new default designs that can be customized for each room.
Healing Over Time
There have also been some discussions and comments on this topic in Discord. It feels wrong that players in a game like Tormentis have to stand in a corner for 20 seconds to fully heal. This isn't exciting to watch in replays, either. Therefore, we've decided to disable healing over time in the next update. At the same time, we'll significantly reduce potion cooldowns so they can be used more flexibly and limit the potions to a fixed amount that can be used in a dungeon.
New Rooms
We've developed 15 new rooms for the new room concept. Even if the new room concept isn't implemented as planned, we'd like to incorporate a few new rooms.
Conclusion
Even though we lost a bit of time with the new room concept and the editor overhaul, we've gotten some ideas for how we can incorporate an optional construction mode in the future, which should make placing rooms much easier.
As you read in our last Steam News, we want to expand Tormentis' functionality—not just revise and improve existing systems in the game.
We plan to release the new update in mid-July.