I just played through Torment Hexus start-to-finish, and only took note of six things that needed to be fixed! I think the game's in an excellent state for its upcoming Early Access launch on August 18th! Here's a new enemy: the Holo-Secretary. She shows up in swarms in the top levels of the tower!

Balancing fights like: "Well, I can beat it, but I took a lot of damage. But I have less gear than you're supposed to have at this point. But also I'm the best player in the world at this game. So...add more enemies? I think?"

Today's bug: in very rare circumstances, particle effects can fail to be cleaned up when you die, and will still be present when you start the next run. Here one of the "mana energy" particle effects is floating around, waiting for an opportunity to be used that will never arrive.

This post was supposed to be showing off the cool new Graffiti Elemental you can summon, and how they lay down a series of random graffiti sprays in their wake...but this one just got absolutely pasted by the enemies AND walked on top of the Basilisk Spray I'd put down beforehand, so...RIP.

Recent work on improving legibility of the game's event texts. Some of the events have a lot to say, so I've been working on breaking them up into smaller pages, and adding coloration to help the eye track important words. The aesthetic precludes using high-res fonts, but hopefully this helps!

Today's bug: I added a "toast" widget for letting the player know when they learn new spells...and it activates whenever you delete your save, to let you know about all of the spells that are unlocked by default. Whoops!

And this, of course, is the Defiant from Deep Space Nine.

This is the Excalibur from Babylon 5: Crusade, but you could also look at the Kestrel from Escape Velocity, a shareware game that came out 3 years earlier. They have nearly identical designs, the Excalibur is just more greebled.

Today's big enhancement: the pause screen now shows the player's equipped spells and spell domains, in addition to their items. Implementing the gamepad navigation of this screen was not trivial!

Adding item synthesis to Torment Hexus, and of course there's a natural starting point.

Through input. If you use the "showdebug input" console command, you can compare the values generated by the two thumbsticks. Here's what I get when both sticks are being pushed towards the base of the gamepad:

I am pleased to report that, for the duration of the TooManyGames conference, every single time one of the pride items showed up, the player took that item.

I have taken so many notes from watching people play. Most of this is stuff that the players didn't notice!

One more day to catch Torment Hexus at the TooManyGames convention!

Day one of TooManyGames is done and dusted, but Torment Hexus will be back tomorrow! Stop by if you're in the area!

Torment Hexus will be on the exhibition floor at the TooManyGames convention, this Friday through Sunday! We're in Hall C in the indie games showcase, come say hi!

This is a graph of wishlists gained for Torment Hexus. The big bump is from the Access Ability showcase (thank you @laurakbuzz.bsky.social for running it!). The last seven days are the Steam Next Fest. Seems like the takeaway is that Next Fest, on its own, doesn't give much visibility these days!

We'll also be live on the convention floor, come say hi and check the game out!

Torment Hexus running on Android! Huge thanks to @sysl.bsky.social for the test.

Spending my critical Next Fest time on adding dumb jokes

I got player feedback that the customization screen was confusing, in particular that they expected to be able to refund their purchases. Hopefully this new UI clarifies how things work and also sets user expectations properly for this new and as-yet-unpolished feature.

I spent the last four days in a fugue state, rebuilding the start-of-run spell selection screen nearly from scratch. The new UI is much better, but holy cheese I hope I don't have to do this kind of effort again for this game. #indiedev #indiegame

Today's bug: the Archmage boss redirects all damage she receives to her horde of interns. Turns out this applies to healing as well. Will fix so she's always 100% a bad boss.

A selection of plushies that made it into Torment Hexus as items! #indiedev #indiegame

What am I doing with my life?!

Indeed, I had to disarm Iggy to kill them. Here's the end-of-run stats:

After a good 20 minutes spent processing the beginning of the fight, before anyone has taken any of their turns, we are left with this scene of utter devastation. Iggy survived!

As a followup: the game has built-in validation checks to make sure that event rewards are viable (e.g. refer to items that actually exist). If you have the entire item pool in your inventory already, then when you load in, the game thinks there's nothing it can reward you with! Will fix.

What happens if you give yourself every item in Torment Hexus? The game doesn't expect this, many items are only available if you have specific spell domains. So at the start of combat, a lot of mana gets generated that you have no use for, and it just drifts around. (CW flashing lights)