Halls of Torment: Prelude news & patch notes

Hello Adventurers!

In just one week, Halls of Torment will enter Early Access! Later today we’ll stream a bit of gameplay, answer any of your questions, and respond to your feedback. Join us on Twitch (17:30 CEST / GMT+2) - If you can’t join, don’t worry, the VOD will be available later on Twitch and Youtube. If you’d prefer to see more professional video content, also don’t worry, we’ll be sending out the first keys to content creators within the next 48 hours! For that we are preparing an update of Halls of Torment (not the PRELUDE) which is a preview of the Early Access version. However, there might still be rough edges, since we’re in the midst of finalizing and polishing the game for the EA release. If you are a content creator and would like to request a key, please contact us via [email protected] or via keymailer

EA Content Overview

FORGOTTEN VIADUCT

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• A new stage with new enemies, bosses and characters to unlock
• It’s the first stage in which we want to try out different layouts and enemy behaviours.
• Enemy behaviours are tailored to the stage geometry.
• Forgotten Viaduct can be unlocked by defeating the 2nd boss on Ember Grounds.
• A new NPC to discover. (work in progress)

Balancing is still work in progress and might not be final until the release.

CHARACTERS

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• 4 new unlockable player characters
• Cleric: Built around debuffs and regeneration, has a magic short range attack that deals its total damage evenly spread among all hit enemies.
• Warlock: Can exchange health for attack power and focus on summons. Attacks with summon type projectiles that are chasing enemies.
• Shield Maiden: Has a shield besides her main weapon which she can also use to attack and knock back enemies. The attack of the shield scales with her block strength.
• Sorceress: Queen of Thunder, can cast Chain Lightning to either focus single enemies or spread it among the enemy rows.

STAGES GENERAL

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• Ember Grounds enemy spawns got adjusted for new boss encounters.
• Increased number of Abilities that can be found on Ember Ground.
• Haunted Caverns have an upgraded look and design, making it more spooky.
• It’s possible to unlock starting abilities on all stages.
• Power ups can now spawn on stages. (work in progress)
• Hand of Greed now has a marker displaying its location.
• Each stage starts with a Hand of Greed spawned.
• The relative gold drop on stages has been reduced.
• Stages now reward gold based on defeated enemies and time survived.
• XP Curves have been adjusted for a more consistent levelling experience.

ABILITIES

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• Added 4 new abilities to the game. (Radiant Aura, Clay Golem, Kugelblitz, Meteor Strike)
• Abilities can be unlocked by finishing character quests.
• Changed the traits for all abilities, there are now 6 paths for each trait type.
• Each ability starts with 2 trait types unlocked, additional types must be unlocked.
• Abilities can be ‘levelled’ 10 times. The possible trait types for each level vary.
• When abilities reach level 3 and 6 they can be upgraded with ability scrolls.
• All abilities have currently 2 upgrades, most upgrades must be unlocked.
• Damage dealt and max. DPS reached for all abilities are now listed at the end of each stage.
• Damage from effects are listed separately as they stack and can influence each other.
• Added a new damage type: Lightning, which can cause Electrify status effects.
• Electrify deals damage based on the applied stacks. The tick time reduces with more stacks and the stack amount decreases with each tick.
• Abilities will now include information about important functions and have their types listed.

QUESTS

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• Added over a hundred new quests
• All quests are tied to achievements on Steam
• New Icons for quests (work in progress)
• Locked quest boards are no longer displayed
• Quests without unlocks now reward gold
• Additional information about completion rate
• Completed quests are now displayed at the end of a run (work in progress)
• Endscreen also displays suggested next quests (work in progress)
• Bonus XP from quests are now displayed on the quest board and as a buff

ITEMS

• Added several new items with more to come over the next few weeks.
• Not all planned items are in the game for the current progress, yet. Expect more over the next few weeks.
• Added rings to summon minions to fulfil your need to play summon focussed builds.
• New items around the new Lightning damage type.
• Several other new items to be discovered.
• We are rebalancing items to avoid having totally over- or underpowered items. This is work in progress and we’ll adjust them over the coming weeks.

FEATURES

• Added the option to target while auto aim is on to override target direction.
• To override with the mouse, clicking the left mouse button is necessary.
• Added the affliction effect that makes enemies more vulnerable to damage over time effects.
• Upgraded endscreen with statistics and completed quests.

OTHER CONTENT

• New Blessings (Duration, Lightning Damage, On Hit Chance, Block Strength)
• New Traits (Lightning Affinity, Channelling, False Blessing, Multihit & Piercing Wind II, Demonic Exchange, Bulwark)
• New Pickups (Attack, Attack Speed, Invincibility, Food) (Work in Progress)

BALANCING

• Gold values will increase, more gold will drop and be rewarded in general.
• Blessings and Items will cost more gold.
• Some general base traits have been adjusted for more well rounded balancing.
• Critical Hits and other chances can now exceed 100% and be applied several times at once.
• All effects have increased chances to apply and can stack multiple times to increase effectivity

Don’t forget to wishlist the game if you haven’t done already: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2218750/Halls_of_Torment/ Also follow us: Twitter, Discord, Youtube, Twitch

- Cheers Chasing Carrots

Hello Adventurers!

We’re happy to announce that Halls or Torment will launch into Early Access on 24th May with a price tag of $4.99 | €4.99! During the next couple of days you might see a bit more activity on our part again. Prior to the release we’ll be streaming the game on Twitch on Tuesday, 16th May. We’d love to see you join us over here: https://www.twitch.tv/chasingcarrots

Wishlist now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2218750/Halls_of_Torment/ If you’re a streamer, content creator, or from the press, we’re going to start sending out keys for you on 17th May. Contact us either via email [email protected] or via keymailer. To all our players out there: Thank you for your overwhelming support! 94% of the 763 reviews have been positive! Over 45 000 of you have tried the PRELUDE and given us valuable feedback, bug reports, and suggestions. We’re thrilled to see the success Halls of Torment has had so far and we’re eager to bring you new and exciting content throughout the upcoming Early Access phase.

What new stuff is coming with the EA release?

• 4 new characters (Cleric, Warlock, Sorceress, Shield Maiden)
• 4 new abilities (Radiant Aura, Summon Golem, Meteor Strike, Kugelblitz)
• 2 major upgrades for each ability
• all abilities will get more and better specialized traits
• an entirely new stage, the Forgotten Viaduct
• new bosses in Ember Grounds and an updated look for Haunted Caverns
• a new elemental effect which can be a powerful boss slayer: Electrify
• many new quests that will be all hooked up to the Steam Achievements
• a new NPC in trouble on the Forgotten Viaduct
• many new items to discover and retrieve from the halls
• a couple of new quality of life features

And afterwards?!

We’re planning to update the game regularly. There are many ideas for new characters, abilities, items, stages, NPCs, enemies, game modes, and many other features. We do not have a fixed roadmap and we’re not planning to establish one. Instead we’d rather stay in touch with our community and figure out what would be best to add next.

Short FAQ for newcomers and interested:

What is Halls of Torment? A roguelite horde survival game, similar to Vampire Survivors but with a strong inspiration from classic action RPGs Who are you? We are Chasing Carrots, a handful of developers from Germany. We’ve been making games for over 10 years. https://www.chasing-carrots.com Which platforms are supported? Windows, Linux, and Steamdeck. In which languages will HoT be available? For now it’s English only. It’s possible that we’re going to add more languages when releasing the 1.0 version. Where are you active? Steam & Steam forums Discord: https://discord.com/invite/chasingcarrots Twitter: https://twitter.com/Chasing_Carrots Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/chasingcarrots Mail: [email protected]

- Cheers Chasing Carrots

Hello Adventurers, Over the weekend there were two issues found with the game that we want to address. 1.) The third map was available, but without any content, so we locked it. 2.) The ability if projectiles can be blocked was reversed for the player and enemies. Stay Fresh - Chasing Carrots

Hello Adventurers!

Today we are releasing just a small patch for the PRELUDE. We are still in the middle of getting ready for Early Access. But we have some additional information for you regarding Early Access today. We’ve already mentioned a couple of things about this during our DevStream on Tuesday. If you’ve missed it you can watch it here on YouTube The Early Access will start with 7 characters, 11 abilities and 3 stages. We will expand upon abilities giving you the possibility to upgrade or evolve them, depending on how you want to call it. Each ability upgrade should be roughly as powerful as the initial ability itself. Ability upgrades can be chosen instead of a new ability when for example picking up the Scroll of Mastery. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43687819/bfa4856a03fa7744991a21ce848f54f1a01643e3.png But our main focus has been on playable characters. The 4 additional characters for the Early Access will be:

• Cleric (Debuffs & Regeneration)
• Warlock (Summonings)
• Shield Maiden (Blocking & Crowd Control)
• Sorceress (Lightning Damage & Electrify Effect)

For more information, we recommend looking into the DevStream. We’ve played all characters during the stream and gave a first glance at additional abilities. Please be aware that we played a development build, so many things are not finalized, yet 😉 But now for today’s changes on the PRELUDE

Change Log 2023-04-27

POLISH & QOL

• Updated effect markers (Slow & Fragile).
• Burn effect damage numbers are now displayed differently than normal damage.
• Rats from the rat ring have now proper sprites

BUG FIXES

• Stun is now also setting the attack speed of enemies to 0.
• Fixing the Bogged Boots, they actually slow down now.
• Rat ring can’t be used to spawn endless rats anymore.
• Arrows and Swordsman hits with fire damage are not unblockable anymore.
• Fixed an issue that allowed item duping.
• Settings wouldn’t save on the first start of the game.
• Adding backup save games in case of corrupted save games, so not the whole progress is wiped.

What's Next?

We are currently working on a lot of new content and finishing features for the EA. This includes ability upgrades, changes on ability traits, the third Level “Forgotten Viaduct”, and much more. In mid May we’ll have a bigger update on the EA and what will be included in the release. We’ll probably share a date and update plans afterwards. When releasing the EA we also intend to update the PRELUDE to match the changes of the early game in the EA version.

Stay Fresh! 🥕 - Chasing Carrots

Hello everyone,

We are making good progress towards the EA. We’d like to show you the most recent progress and talk about it in our next dev stream. If you can’t join us live, don’t worry - you’ll be able to watch VODs on Twitch or YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJQDnWBP6oKKQt56riGw_9T9gNQcxVeGT Also, for later next week we intend to release a Patch for the PRELUDE with some additional QoL items and Bug Fixes. Some of this will be shown during the stream. Stream Date: 25th April 2023 Stream Start: 17:00 CEST | 15:00 UTC | 08:00 am PST Link: https://www.twitch.tv/chasingcarrots We hope to see you there! - Chasing Carrots {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43687819/efec83a197b7b5149b069799fa2ac5f8e2942e44.png

Hello Adventurers!

We are doing good progress on the Early Access version. We are still aiming for a release in Q2 this year. However, we very much prefer to make a solid game instead of pushing a hasty release. We’d also like to thank everyone for joining our latest dev stream and hanging out with us while talking about Halls of Torment. The next stream will be announced a bit earlier than the last one, promised! If you missed it, you can watch it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLqME7PbSGc In this update, we’re focusing mainly on bug fixes, polish, and QoL features. There are still a couple of known issues on our list which we will tackle in future updates. Your feedback helps us to determine the highest priorities when it comes to improving the game experience. We will keep on reading through forums and our discord channel and keep in touch with you.

Change Log 2023-04-06

FEATURES

• Character traits now have two variations for each level so will be able to further customize your build. This has been applied to Swordsman, Archer, and Exterminator in the PRELUDE.
• Multistrike & projectiles can now be partial. Those partial additional attacks are applied regularly on each n-th attack.
• Block Chance is superseded by Block Strength which will determine the Block Chance of a character based on incoming damage. Block Strength can lead to a 100% Block Chance for attacks with a power of ¼ of the Block Strength.
• Auto-aim can now be toggled with buttons.
• Ember Grounds now has its own soundtrack.

CONTENT

• New Double Slash Trait (I) has been added, additional levels will be made available through quests later on.
• The Scorched Giant elite in Ember Grounds is now a Scorched Giant Thrower.

BALANCING

• Ashen Wyrms now stay longer overground and wait a bit longer before attacking.

OTHER CHANGES

• Lord of Pain now casts homing projectiles with the death curse. (In the future we plan to add a quest item that allows you to cancel the curse projectile. Originally, it was not intended to beat this encounter by reviving)

POLISH & QOL

• Added more descriptions for traits
• Added special info for Additional Attacks, Block Chance and Defense in the stat-tooltip
• Added an input delay to trait and ability selection
• Added graphics to the final screen
• Character Stats can now be navigated with a gamepad
• Items have now indicators to show if they have been retrieved or bought

BUG FIXES

• Auto-Aim and Auto-Attack is now properly saved and applied
• Power Hitter quest can now be completed

What's Next?

Holidays! But joking aside: We are currently working on the third stage and we might show a few glimpses of it on social media or the next stream. We are also working on further abilities and characters. Simultaneously we are working on fixes for outstanding issues and any bugs you report to us. Unfortunately, some bug fixes we originally wanted to add didn’t make it into this update. This also includes the slow effect that is speeding up the enemies. We hope we can get those in on the next update. Stay Fresh! Chasing Carrots

Hello everyone, First, we’d like to thank you for all of your feedback and reports! When we launched the PRELUDE, we didn’t expect it to become so well received. This week we don’t have an update for the PRELUDE version. Instead we’re going to be live on stream playing the game and talking about future steps and changes. We invite you to join us for one or two cozy hours of Halls of Torment talk and play. Ask us any questions and celebrate the progress of the game with us! Stream Date: 30th March 2023 Stream Start: 18:00 CEST | 16:00 UTC | 09:00 am PST Link: https://www.twitch.tv/chasingcarrots We hope to see you there! - Chasing Carrots

Hello Adventurers!

Greetings from the team! We’d like to thank you once more for your support. We reached over 15 000 Wishlist entries for the Early Access, still rising. There are over 100 discussions in the Forum going on, a wiki is getting started, a subreddit has been created and we have great activity on the Discord Server. Also a huge thanks to all content creators and streamers for sharing their joy about the game. We are reading and watching through as much feedback and impressions as we can. Development is moving forward quickly and it’s time for another patch!

Change Log 2023-03-23

FEATURES

• The Flamedancer, first boss of Ember Grounds, got two new attack patterns.

PERFORMANCE

• Improved performance of monsters
• Improved player upgrade performance
• Improved Abilities performance
• Improved of XP Gem performance

STABILITY ISSUES

• Sometimes on pickup the game would crash.
• Fixed a freeze when an item chest was collected while the player was dying.
• Fixed that loading of stages could be triggered multiple times.

OTHER CHANGES

• Visual Upgrades to Ember Grounds
• Visual Upgrades to the Overworld
• Updated all trait frames
• Added several new item graphics

POLISH & QOL

• Added general description to undiscovered quests
• Changed item stash location and sprite in the overworld
• Improved sprite visibility of Ashen Wyrms in Ember Grounds
• Auto-Aim will now target on breakables
• When reviving an effect is shown

BUG FIXES

• Bullets would not properly react to: Sparking Tips, Ring of Fire, Shockwave Core
• Sparking Tips projectiles would not set enemies on fire
• Firewalker Boots and Bogged Boots no longer react to the attack speed modifier
• Dragon’s Breath could trigger burn endlessly on hit
• Dragon’s Breath and Ring of Fire now make the Fire Affinity trait appear (if unlocked)
• Fixed quest description for monster type kill quests
• Added monster types to all monsters on Ember Grounds (mostly Scorched and Imps)
• Items could be picked up multiple times from chests
• When re-entering a level, values on the right side should be properly reset now
• Quests’ hidden state will now be saved properly. A patch will unhide all falsely hidden quests.

BALANCING

• Reworked Transfixion ability: lower chance for the debuff but significantly increasied damage
• All burning effects: 10dmg/0.2s for 2s -> 25dmg/0.5 for 5s
• All burning chances have been generally halved
• Flamewalker boots trigger distance: 2.5m -> 5m
• Flamewalker boots burn chance as been reduced by 60%
• Sparking Tips damage 5 -> 25
• Shockwave Core range: 1.5m -> 2.0m
• Exterminator’s projectile damage falloff: 30% -> 25%
• Dragon’s Breath cooldown traits: increasing attack speed bonus
• Potions heal now 25 + 5% health
• Potion and Hand of Greed drops have been increased by 20%
• Invincibility time after spawn of slimes has been reduced to 200ms

What's Next?

For the next few weeks the balancing and bug fixes will be reduced as we are back concentrating on creating additional content and working on new features to work towards the Early Access launch. We’ll still update the PRELUDE every 1-2 weeks ahead of the Early Access launch for adjustments. Feedback especially on performance and stability would be appreciated!

Cheers! - Chasing Carrots

Hello Adventurers!

Thank you for your support! We had an awesome first week with the PRELUDE and we are glad that you’ve found enjoyment in the Halls of Torment. We’ve read through your feedback and issue reports. Today’s update will mainly address the problems we could fix until now and smaller changes to the game.

Change Log 2023-03-15

FEATURES

• Full gamepad support has been added and a steam default configuration has been set.
• If you have any input problems, please reset the gamepad to default settings for the game.

BALANCING

• XP distribution has been modified among monsters, giving early monsters more XP comparatively.
• Completed quests now only give 0.5% additional XP instead of 1%.
• Astronomer’s Orbs now have a smaller starting distance.
• Range modifier affects Astronomer’s Orbs less.
• Size modifier of Astronomer’s Orbs has been reduced.
• Second orbit of Astronomer's Orbs now spawns closer to the player.
• Disabled the automatic difficulty scaling (Torment Rank) for now.

OTHER CHANGES

• Piercing Wind trait unlocks only when the player has an attack that requires Piercing.
• Mouse cursor will not be hidden anymore. This should fix disappearing cursor issues overall.
• More Linux versions should natively be supported. Anything newer than Ubuntu 18.04 LTS should work.

POLISH & QOL

• The Wellkeeper cage location in Ember Grounds is indicated with a marker.
• Opening the pause menu will always open the character view first.
• Main menu can be opened without selecting a character.

BUG FIXES

• Weapon Proficiency is now using roman numerals.
• Blessings and stages are now unlocked without having to restart the game.
• Quests requiring certain damage now include critical hits (e.g. Power Hitter).
• Killing 50 000 enemies with effects quest is now properly tracking progress.
• Lord of Pain kills are now properly recognized by the quest system.
• Character selection via gamepad has been fixed.
• Runner Shoes movement buff has been fixed and should be now permanent.
• Corrected the description of Spellcaster Gloves: it increases all direct damage.
• Scorched Skeletons in Ember Grounds dropped way too much XP.
• It should now be possible to equip the right ring slot properly at any time.
• Health of monsters now doesn’t increase over time in Ember Grounds.
• Fixed stats display of pickup ranges and health regeneration tooltips.

PERFORMANCE

• Optimised environments
• Optimised Imp behaviour
• Optimised performance of destructible objects

STABILITY ISSUES

• Fixed: Certain monsters could cause crashes on death events.

What's Next?

We’re still looking into more issues. For now, it’s uncertain how many problems we’ll be able to fix in the near future. There’s one particular issue with the game’s input that seems to occur on certain setups which we’re working on right now. Alongside we’ll work on performance and stability improvements. But we also need to make progress for the Early Access release. Hence, we’ll start working on some additional features and content. We’ll continue to listen to your feedback about progression, difficulty, balancing, and more. Based on this, some changes may also find their way into the PRELUDE Version. We hope you’ll keep enjoying the game! Chasing Carrots

Hello Adventurers!

The PRELUDE to Halls of Torment has been released and we invite everyone to play! This is a stand-alone Demo version of Halls of Torment and can be played for free. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2316660/Halls_of_Torment_Prelude/ We hope you’ll join us on our adventure making the game by giving it a try and if possible leave some feedback along the way. The PRELUDE savegame will be fully compatible with the main version of the game and can be played on Windows and any Linux device, including the Steam Deck. Since the development of the game is in full swing, many parts of the game are still not fully fleshed out, yet. This includes bits that you can find in the PRELUDE. While development continues, we intend to update the demo version with bug fixes, QoL updates, and other changes that affect the content including the demo.

What can you play in the Demo?

• 3 Characters
• 2 Stages
• 20+ unique enemies
• 7 Abilities
• 100+ Traits
• 50+ Quests
• 30+ Items

Halls of Torment will have full gamepad support. You can already play it with a gamepad but we are aware of some limitations in certain UIs. This will be fixed in the upcoming weeks. If you enjoy the game, please spread the word, wishlist the main game and join our Discord to be part of our community. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2218750/Halls_of_Torment/ Cheers! - Chasing Carrots

Hello Adventurers!

Unfortunately, we didn’t have update notes on last week’s update. But we didn’t have many visible changes either. This week we have some more exciting changes that play big parts in the preparation for the PRELUDE version. An important note: Today’s update will reset your progress and remove the Shield Maiden character for now. Hopefully, we won’t need another save game reset, since we’ve sorted out the meta progression for the PRELUDE and don’t want to entirely redo it again.

Change Log 2023-03-03

FEATURES

• Gamepad support! It’s almost complete and all essential menus should be usable.
• Auto-aim setting for the main attack
• A powerup item that will collect all XP on the current stage
• New unlockable traits for each ability
• New boss: “FlameDancer” in Ember Grounds
• New enemy: exploding imps

BALANCING

• Unlocking the Wellkeeper will now add start items to the chest
• Torment rank build-up is now a bit faster
• Haunted Caverns progression is now a bit easier
• Ember Grounds now unlock by defeating the Imp Chieftain boss

OTHER CHANGES

• Quests can now be bound to specific stages
• Quests have been recreated with a new progression in mind
• Added many Icons for items & traits
• Added final assets for Ring Blades and Arcane Splinter

POLISH & QOL

• Additional sounds

BUG FIXES

• Fixed all those nasty crashes that happened by taking damage from stuff on the ground (like slime puddles and fire patches)
• Putting the well back on the Haunted Cavern once unlocked
• Initial shooting directions are set so that bullets won’t get stuck when entering a stage
• Abilities won’t continue to fire anymore in the revive screen.
• Radiant Aura trait description had negative values printed in green instead of red

PERFORMANCE

• Major changes to reduce CPU load
• Changed processing of physics and movement behaviours for better performance
• The general performance on all devices, especially in later waves should improve - please send us feedback about this!

What's Next?

Finalization of the PRELUDE! This means getting a proper Ember Grounds progression and some polish and finishing on different things. We will very likely keep the demo and playtest version updated once the PRELUDE is released until the Early Access launch. The PRELUDE will have limited content, but the playtest will not. But improvements, balancing, and finishing some content and changes based on feedback will go into the PRELUDE as well. We’re looking forward to your feedback! - Chasing Carrots