Vaporum New Rig Design, Difficulty Survey, Patch #1

The folks over at Fatbot Games have recently released a pretty important patch for their steampunk dungeon crawler Vaporum. The patch addresses two of the game’s bigest issues if you’re prone to motion sickness – the limited Field of View and the idle camera-swaying animation, while also tweaking some things balance-wise and fixing some bugs. Here are the patch notes:

• Difficulty changes:
  • Final boss health: -15%
  • Acid Roach:
    • Health: -18%
    • Acid pool damage: -16%
  • All roaches can now drop Repair Kits. This was disabled, for some obscure reason. ?
  • Decreased the difficulty of some of the hardest encounters in the Haunted (L03) and Librarian (L04) levels.
    • Note: For this to take effect, you have to load an autosave or quicksave in the previous level (so end of L02) and then continue to L03, or to just start a new game.
• Added new options:
  • Invert mouselook: You can now invert the up-down mouselook.
  • Mouselook sensitivity.
  • Toggle idle camera animation: When you remain still for a while, the camera starts looking around. You can toggle this now.
  • Field of view slider.
  • Phonodiary auto-play: You can toggle whether you want phonodiaries to automatically play or not.
  • Aspect ratio filter added for 21:9 (2.33:1). Set the filter to “All” if you don’t see your resolution listed in the list.
• Fixed a dead-end in the Office level (thanks TurnSpender!). See this.
• Fixed: Hardware cursor flickers while mouselooking.
• Fixed: Restoring HP and EP is not 100% correct in rare cases.
• Squashed a few other nasty bugs. (No roaches were harmed! That’s up to you guys!)

Additionally, the game will soom get a brand new Rig (this game’s take on classes), and Circuit (read – skill tree). And you, the player, can help the developers come up with ideas as to what those two can be. Here are some details:

Hey guys and gals!

We’re thinking of expanding the game’s RPG features by adding a new rig (4th) and a new circuit (10th).

We have some ideas, but because you’ve shown interest and provided us with great feedback on many issues so far, we’d like you to take part in designing these features! We will choose & mix & match the best design(s) and add them to the game in one of the following patches, along with adding the authors’ names to the credits.

The new rig should provide something unique to allow for a new playstyle, something interesting. Re-using some of the mechanics already in the game might work well, but perhaps a new, refreshing mechanic would be more interesting. I’m pretty sure you can come up with crazy & compelling ideas, unlike us for whom it’s hard to think outside the box after 2 years of development. 🙂

The new circuit (skill tree) should add depth and allow the player to improve their build in a unique way. There should be little to no overlapping bonuses with other circuits already in the game. Each circuit has 3 passive skills: one unlocked automatically at rank 3, and then you choose one out of two at rank 5. These can be anything, on-hit effects, triggerable effects, large stat boosters… imagination is the limit!

Also, share this among your friends! You never know who comes up with a genius idea, no matter if they play Vaporum or not! 🙂

Looking forward to your ideas!

And finally, you can participate in a survey in order to help the developers determine whether their game is too easy or too hard. Here’s how you do it:

Hey guys!

We’re doing a game difficulty balance pass and we’re interested in YOUR experience with the game. Here’s a quick survey so we have a better picture of what you like / dislike about the game.

We appreciate any feedback you give us. Thank you!

Show me the survey!