Halls of Torment (tuxdb.com)

Halls of Torment is a casual roguelite action rpg presented in a pre rendered retro look reminiscent of RPGs from the late 90s. Choose one of many hero characters and descend into the deadly Halls of Torment. Fight unholy horrors from beyond and survive wave after wave until you face one of the tormented lords. Advance your hero with character traits, abilities, and items. Create a new powerful build during each run. Explore various underground expanses and find new powerful items that enable you to venture even deeper into the abyss.

Features

Quick and casual runs of maximum 30 minutes
Old school pre rendered artstyle
Quest based meta progression
Large selection of diverse abilities, traits, and items, all enabling you to create interesting synergies
Diverse bosses featuring unique mechanics and attack patterns
Items can be retrieved to the overworld and used to customize future runs
Dozens of interesting characters allowing many different playstyles
Unlock and explore multiple interesting and challenging underground worlds
Interactable environments: Use traps and hazards to your advantage!

Halls of Torment - Dev Journal #1

Welcome to the Halls of Torment!

Whats this, a new game? Indeed it is! And before I get into any details of what it exactly is and how its made, I think its important to explain how we got here in the first place. During the past five years weve made our previous game Good Company. Although it did find its wonderful audience and is still maintained, we felt a certain fatigue setting in. This journey towards the first 1.0 release was a taxing one and it had an immediate impact on how we thought about future projects. We want to learn from our past mistakes and achievements and so, long story short, we decided to do the following three things with our next game:

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Dont commit to a project until we have the core mechanics running AND said mechanics are fun on their own.

Know exactly where the game design is going as early as possible. We want to be able to describe a play session from start to finish in our own words as concretely as possible.

Limit the projected development time to a minimum and adjust the scope appropriately. In the ballpark of six months became our rule of thumb for a manageable project length.
[/olist]

Weve made many rounds of internal game concept pitching and prototyping. Many of our ideas could not satisfy the constraints outlined above.

And then Vampire Survivors came along and demonstrated how its done. Naturally, such a successful game would give rise to plenty of imitators. At first we hesitated. We didnt want to jump on the bandwagon. But the more time we spent with this newly hatched genre, the more it seemed like a very good fit for us. And so, we sat down, we made a plan, and we made sure its in line with our three goals mentioned above.

So *clears throat*
Game Description Image

As you mightve guessed already, Halls of Torment is a reverse bullet hell roguelite in the vein of Vampire Survivors and similar games with light RPG elements. However, we wanted to put our own spin on the genre. We are big fans of old school action RPGs and CRPGs. Those games from the late 90s with their specific pre rendered aesthetic evoke warm feelings of nostalgia in us, and were sure that many players feel similarly. We wanted to capture those vibes and include them in Halls of Torment. Our goal is to make a game you can play casually while still enjoying the rich atmosphere of these grandiose role playing games that used to consume a large chunk of our free time during our youths.

I hope that we succeed, and I hope youll enjoy it.

All the best!
Paul

[ 2023-01-24 17:25:43 CET ] [Original Post]