so - towermode. an idea ive had shelved ever since i decided i wanted to make a horror game, and tacked onto this one, something I figured would be a nice way to thank the insane amount of supporters this game managed to rack up. originally i wanted a 50 floor tower as a standalone game, then I wanted it to be a roguelike mode added to the post-game of a personal project im working on, and now its in CTI and its very hard to approach if we're talking its balance.

watching youtubers take on towermode has been a confusing affair. on one hand, i have people stuck and exhausted with it and its tedium, and on the other hand i have people asking i make it *harder*. where do i go from here? here's an attempt to analyze the state of towermode:

right now towermode is difficult due to bad rolls on late floors. die on floor 7 to soldier, that's on you, but if you're on floor 48 and you get cornered in a bottleneck by 2 heavies without a dead ringer? no way out. you could argue thats on the player for walking into such a spot while being pursued, but i don't want the game to have moments like that where a small amount of misdirection could lead to restarting another 20 minute game - for the record the dead ringer was added BECAUSE in early builds of tower, there could be a maximum of FOUR ENEMIES, which could be something as unbeatable as *four chaser enemies*. its bad game design, just adding a safety net, but it alleviates the stress.

that being said the tedium is definitely part of towermodes intentional design. i learned thru 100%ing a horror game - it had an achievement for beating levels without dying. suddenly a game i wasn't scared of became terrifying - the prospect of it made it that much more stressful, and insanely exhilarating when I finally beat it. towermode is an attempt at this, but its definitely not in a good state

floors pick the enemies from 3 pools, a pool for each enemy slot (you see the slots on the floor screen) and each one is different. these pools don't change, you just enable the slots as you progress. because the scaling difficulty relies on the late game slot 3 having difficult enemies like engie and ratman, that means you're GUARANTEED to be double teamed by two chasers only because you got unlucky for a floor. adding onto this since most enemies in the game are chasers, there's no real way to add more challenge without overwhelming the player. ironically the MINGE was my attempt at an enemy that exists only to compliment the main enemy, and he became probably the biggest threat in the entire game, poor guy.

my current plan for fixing towermode is a rework of the enemy slots - instead of difficulty scaling by adding more slots, the first slot will scale by the floor you're on, adding harder enemies in later floors and eventually removing easier ones from the pool, with the other slots adding less dangerous foes (argman, scout, pyro ect). ontop of that, the 1.2 content update will be adding more enemies - 3 of which only existing to compliment a main enemy. more variety without overwhelming the player, yeah

formal apology to the poor people still stuck on tower. idk if this fix will make the game harder or not, but what I DO know is it should hopefully make it more FAIR and less dependant on rng. the rng is intended to keep it fresh, not introduce unfair rolls - heres hoping it pays off? idk, im tired, here's a stupid drawing of the MINGE i did a bit ago ig