May 11, 2018

Tower of Time - Event Horizon

Dear Players,

We hope your journey to the bottom of the Tower has thus far been an exciting and entertaining one!

And wish to thank you for your tremendous development feedback and continued support. Let us share with you what we are working on at the moment.

We are finishing localization to German and Polish at the moment. We expect to launch German language on Monday or Tuesday - it had been intense work and possible only with the help of the community. We are very grateful for your support. Polish language most likely will follow few days after.

Together with German we will launch Patch #3 with another round of changes and improvements, as requested by You. In addition to minor combat balance changes, there are also few bigger improvements:

Ability to craft rings and amulets
Ability to craft pistols from Blacksmith Tier 3
Scaling of the rewards depending on difficulty. That includes amount of gold and crystals -- as well as unique items received as a reward from combat or challenges. Now, when you kill Shade on Epic, the reward will be worthy of your sweat and blood.
Dusty Scrolls - complete change of the mechanics. They will now split into Lesser and Greater Scrolls. The effect of the scroll will be clearly noted. Lesser Scrolls will have always a small positive effect while Greater Scrolls will have a major positive but also a small negative effect.
Combat UI - re-work of the tooltip showing champion or enemy statistics, with new information added.

As for other languages - we are very close to finishing localization to Russian and have started community translation projects for Chinese Simplified, Japanese, French, Turkish and Brazilian-Portuguese. If you would like to support the efforts - please join Discord channel for more information.

https://discord.gg/8hpkCgD

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We also bring you another interesting news.

Our co-story developer and lead script writer Nick Macari, has contributed to another fantasy CRPG about to crush its $60,000 Kickstarter funding goal.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grapeocean/black-geyser-couriers-of-darkness

We haven't played it yet, but if the Vienna based publisher, Grape Ocean Technologies, delivers on everything it has planned–"Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness" could be one to watch!

Apr 27, 2018

Patch #2

Tower of Time - Event Horizon

Dear Players

This patch brings a lot of quality improvements requested by you as well as several balancing changes and bug fixes. The list is very long so apologies for a wall of text that follows.

We will appreciate your reviews on Steam and metacritic. It seems our game somehow is received as too hardcore and that scares a lot of people away. We have several difficulty settings, so it is accessible to anyone - if you come just for the story have no fear.

Please help us spread the word about the game.

New Features

New steam cards, backgrounds, emoticons and badges.
Minimap. You can turn it off and on with 'N' or by pressing compass icon.
Buff icons in combat that show the remaining time of the buff above skill tab.
Pre-battle movement - initial positioning is very important when it comes to threat. Now you can move the champions within limited area.
New enchanting icons. Not the most important update - but they look nicer now.
When your champions are immobilized, there is an icon on character portrait (similar to when they are trapped).
Hotkey "T" to change champion stances betwen Stand Ground and Move and Attack.
Two new high-end practise dummies that simulate end-game bosses.
Added achievements for epic - win 5 battles on epic for each floor.

Gameplay fixes and changes

Issue with low cinematic sound on some configurations should be fixed now.
100% Progress fixed - mostly floor 7 (chest and battles in Daeva area are not counted). The battles that count towards progress are show on the map.
Daeva are no longer so strict when it comes to trials. Less positive results are required to be able to stay in their realm.
(if it happens that you don't see all progress bars, please enter this level and exit it.)
Graphic improvements to both introduction levels.
Journals necessary for quests are now more visible.
Floor 9 Elemental Statues' quest is fixed.
Bestiary not showing up sometimes has been fixed.
Bestiary now opens on the current tower floor.
Magic Source quest on floor 1 - new graphic effect when destroyed.
Frogs jumps up and down in merriment. Consider this if you want to offer it to Cindros. The most critical update that will help us to get more attention.
Lots of typos and syntax errors corrected (we are getting there).
Lots of new SFX added in exploration and combat.
Aura skills - visual upgrade.
Item Forge - health regeneration upgrade - increased from 0.3 to 0.5/
Some Unique Items (especially from Challenges) are upgraded - so they can be a competitive option for Item Forged Green items.

Combat

We spent a lot of time on improving combat and balancing the game based on tons of feedback and lots of end-game parties. Some of the "crazy" builds took us by surprise :)

Most important is a set of changes to animations, pathing and enemy behavior that should make everything much more responsive and smooth.

Also, we did some rebalancing - especially to champion's skills and mid-game floors (5-7) that were too easy.

Magic Penetration decreased slightly on higher end items.
Armor Penetration - increased across all weapons / tiers.
Physical-based party should be again viable on Hard and Epic.

Fights on the first floor have an easier learning curve now. You don’t have too many options yet to customize your party and you made a valid point. If you find some of them too easy now - please adjust your difficulty as needed. Level 2 is unchanged.

There are close to 300 individual changes made, so I will list only the most important ones below.

Mech companion has been buffed somewhat. He has a speed aura and can temporarily stun enemies around him. He remains the team mascot, but at least he does some confusion on the battlefield now. That is a small compensation that he just charges at closest portal without asking anyone.

Skills

Kane:

Stone wall - mana cost reduced to flat 20 for each level, duration set at flat 16 seconds at each level [with max cd reduction the uptime on the wall is now 80%]

Maeve:

Arrow Barrage - damage per arrow increased, at max level from 50 to 70
Bear Traps - bleeding damage increased, at max level from 10 to 15 dmg per second.
Rain of Arrows - damage per arrow increased, at max level from 40 to 48

Aeric:

Earth Fury - damage per stone increased, at max level from 100 to 140. B2 poison damage increased, at max level from 9 to 12.

Rakhem:

The new theme at Event Horizon is "Love Thy Dwarf"

Rakhem - Base Health increased from 160 to 180. Health per level increased from 18 to 20.
Inner Fire - an upgrade for both B1 (tanking path) and significant upgrade for B2 (damage path) - so there is a more clear risk/reward for different playstyles.
Path of Flames - increased length at all levels, B2 extended burning duration
Blinding Flash - B2 now deals Air damage too.

Boron:

Health per level increased from 20 to 22.
Cleave - reduced cleave% by 10% for each level
Axe Throw - increased damage per axe. For B2 - reduced weakness to 30% at each level

Whisper:

Thunder Injection - reduced elemental weakness slightly at each level, at max level from 18% to 12% (dual wielding was too strong at higher levels / it still applies 2x debuff for dual wield)
Elemental Barrage - no of base projectiles 5 to 4, Damage per projectile base - slight reduction. For B2 - increased Void dmg component - so B1 and B2 are now competitive. Overall - at max level the effective damage of this skill is reduced by approximately 20%. It is still very overpowered.
Magic Tower -- B1 now deals splash damage of Base damage at the same speed

Kaela:

We made few interesing changes to Kaela as she was too difficult to master yet too overpowered when did so.

Electric Cage - B1 - damage per second increase at all levels, at max from 20 to 24 Air dmg per second. B2 - Weakness reduced across all levels - at max level from 60% to 40% (it is a very long duration skill and it was too easy to stack with other skills for 100% weakness).
Summon Mech - variable duration increased from 20-40 to 20-60 seconds. Number of mechs increased. At max level she can now create up to 12 mechs. (insane, yes - but it is so fun skill)
Elemental Grenade name changed to Void Grenade. Explosion radius reduced from 5m to 4m. At B1 - resistance reduction decreased, at max level from 100% to 80%
Tesla Cannon - as it is high risk / reward skill (requiring positioning), its damage output has been increased significantly. With B2 boost, at max level damage increased from 400 to 600
Titan - a massive boost to everything. Now this is truly an ultimate ability.

Balancing

Added new type of skill - magic reflect (similar to physical reflect) - some enemies on floors 5-7 received this upgrade, tired of being shredded by Whisper's Elemental Barrage.
Shade - was too easy, Voidspawns now should be more than a nuisance (new skills added)
Titan Boss - major overhaul - he is no longer just a target dummy
Floors 5-7 - enemies and combat encounters rebalanced as they were too easy. That includes their statistics, damage output and skills. Now there should no longer be such a difficulty spike between 7 and 8 - as you will need to take care of your party always.
Both Exo-ME 10 and Exo-RA560 bosses - rebalanced to offer better challenge.
Warleader - throws 2 axes and now and the skill description is clear for axes and his leap. He should be much easier to deal with now.
Tower Avatar - health increased
Francisco Pizzaro - his skills are more dangerous now
Ferdinan Magellan - combat overhauled to make it more challenging
Irradiated Elemental Lord - he wasn't enough irradiating - now he should be. (he is an optional boss, so yes, he should be very fun now)
Void Horror - he wasn't enough horrifying - now he should be.

We will continue to work on further improvements.

Please share your feedback via Report Issue or join our Discord to talk with us directly.

Thanks for playing Tower of Time

Cheers,
Event Horizon Team

Apr 18, 2018

Patch #1 & Hotfix 19/4

Tower of Time - Event Horizon

Hello,

We hope most of you are enjoying the game. When we decided to break the copy/paste tradition on present gaming market and try something new, we were expecting that not everyone will like it. Judging by the reactions so far, most of you do like it. We are very happy about that.

When you play and finish the game, please leave us a review - your feedback is very important for us. This is our first project and we need your input to make sure that Tower of TIme is the game You want to play, and not only the pet project of “know-it-all developers”.

We received a lot of Report Issue logs or emails in the last week. Only thanks to them we were able to identify the problems that we could not otherwise reproduce. Big thanks for that !!

The patch notes are as follows:

Technical

Crashes at start some experienced
We couldn’t reproduce them but there seems to be a pattern between our compression codecs and players’ codecs. We did two things here - we added a timeout if video doesn’t play at all (that should not cause game to crash) and we rendered all cinematics again. We do hope it will solve the problem - if not - please let us know and we will try another solution with next week patch
Performance should improve in several areas pointed out as problematic
High GPU/CPU usage - if you are experiencing those, please try vsync option on and off. If that doesn’t help - please be so kind and Report Issue so we can nail this problem.
Fixed Tutorial Tips scaling on 21:9 and higher ratios.
(we also are looking into increasing text size for those of you that play on large screens - that would take a little longer)
Fixed issue with black screen appearing sometimes when movie is skipped

Gameplay

Selected unit will not move at all even if in aggressive stance mode. You can keep them all in healing totem range. Just deselect champion(s) again (or press “A”) to let him run towards enemies.
Fixed issues with item upgrades that had values clamp to integer value
Fixed teleporter problem ( teleports no longer block themselves after returning to city while teleportation was in progress )
Floor 1 -- Fixed rare issue with Magic Barrier and Devron
Floor 5 - Fixed issue with closed door / pinpad and Mech that was preventing access

Combat

We didn’t touch the champions yet, even if some builds are obviously steamrolling things on hard and even epic. Great creativity!

The only change was to the cost of Elemental Barrage - it was capped at 60 mana for level 3, 4, 5 of the skill. Now it is 60 mana for L3, 70 mana for L4 and 80 mana for L5.

Reaper Guard, Floor 1 - can be blinded again (stops drain life channel)
Two fights, Floor 2 - in Library and end level portals - decreased difficulty
Sewer fight, Floor 3 - decreased difficulty
Air Elemental Boss - changed fight mechanics, increased difficulty
Screamers - blind grenade duration reduced from 4 to 3 seconds

Item Forge

(edit)

There is a change to mana and health regeneration change per upgrade.
We had rounding error before.

Mana - 1 upgrade granted 1 mana regen point - now it grants 0.1
(as was always intended).
Health - 1 upgrade granted 1 health point - now it grants 0.5
(as was always intended).

It is a significant change in case you had invested into those statistics - and we apologize for this. If you have problem with your builds now - please let us know.

Next Patch

For the next week patch we plan to focus on the further performance improvement and few other quality of life features.

If you want to chat with us or other players - please join our Discord and share your thoughts.
https://discord.gg/8hpkCgD

Small Hotfix - 19 April

When in Save Game screen, sometimes the buttons where grayed out - implying they couldn't be used. They could - but now the color is back as well.
(did not do separate announcement for that since its minor change)

Thank you for playing Tower of Time!

Cheers,
Event Horizon Team

On the side note - you can download all our music tracks for free - there should be a DLC area. Since there is no price box, it is not so visible.

Mar 20, 2018

Itemization

Tower of Time - Event Horizon

(this is Kane trying his new equipment on a training dummy)

We received a lot of questions recently about itemization. So let me explain few things - as champions' equipment is what really matters the most in any cRPG game. You can revive your champion if he dies, but one you accidentally sell your epic sword to a vendor, it is usually lost forever.

We created quite complex equipment system that evolves as you progress in the game. Items are randomly generated, but they follow very specific and quite simple rules. On top of that, if you are fond of a particular item and you have resources, you can further upgrade as you want.

Item types

Lets take melee classes for example. Their "hands" equipment can be as follows:

1H weapon + shield
Two 1H weapon (dualwield)
2H weapon

Furthermore, each weapon type has three or four different sub-types, that differ in primary usage. For 1-handed swords, those are:

Regular Sword - high base damage and some Critical Chance
Stun Edge - that has inherent Stun Chance %
Fire Blade - that deals Fire Damage as main damage type

Sub-types for tier1 1H Crossbows, for example, are Hand Crossbow, Bolt Spitter, Repeater

Also, depending on the quality of the item (Green, Blue, Purple) they can roll different additional stats - called Prefix or Suffix.

Green roll only 1, either Prefix or Suffix
Blue roll 2, both Prefix and Suffix
Purple roll 2 + additional enchant slot

In the examples above we have the following:

Jagged Steel Sword of Poison
Jagged ... adds Armor Penetration
... of Poison adds 1-3 Earth Damage

Mighty Stun Edge of Sparks
Mighty ... adds +1 Might attribute
... of Sparks adds 1-3 Air Damage

Chaotic Fire Blade of Water
Chaotic ... rare prefix, it adds few nasty effects as Daze, Stun, Blind
... of Water adds 1-3 Water Damage

As you progress with the game, existing prefixes and suffixes will increase in strength and new ones will also start to appear, some with both positive and negative effects.

Each weapon class, e.g. 1H Swords, 1H Axes, 1H Hammers are different somewhat. Also 2H Weapons have special stat - Cleave Damage - x% of main damage is also applied to other enemies in cone area in front of your warrior.

Range Weapons - both Physical (Bows, Crossbows, Pistols) and Magic (Wands, Staves and Focus Stones) - have inherently different stats, e.g. Focus Stones have Skill Damage while Bows have Slow Chance or Daze Chance.

Legendary Items

We also have over 60 unique items that are something entirely different. Early on you get just strong items with powerful statistics.

Overall a very good weapon, that comes with a different price. This sword has Life Drain Enchant, that heals your champion for the % of damage dealt.

This Bow is quite strong compared to other weapons of this tier and has a very good enchant - increasing damage and pushing enemies back. But it has one negative trait - each attack with this weapon cost mana. If you want to use it, you probably should invest in mana regeneration, mana leech or +mana items.

This Armor (you can collect more pieces) changes the way how you play your tank. It has a very high armor (comparing to other pieces at this point of the game) but negative elemental resistance. It also lowers movement speed significantly. However, it has a damage mitigation enchant, very good for certain enemies. With this armor, you do not move your tank to the fight, you try to bring the fight to him.

One of the "extreme" examples. This item is very powerful but it is also very expensive - it drains life and mana continuously and also additional mana per each attack. It requires rebuilding your character or even the whole party, so other champions can support the user of this weapon.

This is just a very small sample of itemization. Different weapons, different armor and jewelry pieces can have different combinations of stats.

On top of that there are almost 50 unique enchants, some of them with different level of power.

All in all - it creates almost uncountable number of possible combinations and gives you incredible flexibility in champion and party building.

So we might not have an option to change the hair style or eye color of your champions, but apart from that -- if you include the skill system - you can build them as you want and when you want.

If you have any more questions, we would be happy to chat about that or any other aspect of the game on our discord.

https://discord.gg/8hpkCgD

Cheers,
Event Horizon Team