Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Announcements => Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) => Topic started by: getter77 on May 01, 2012, 07:11:21 PM
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http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/games/avww-features
Eh, close enough and clearly packing some elements outright as well as inspirations. 8)
A 2D sidescroller without a linear path. An action game with tactical combat and strategic planning. An adventure game that lets you free-roam a vast, procedurally-generated world. A Valley Without Wind defies genre stereotypes. Unlike other procedurally-generated games, you also get a logical progression in difficulty, plus helpful tips and checklists to guide your travels (should you need them).
Choose for yourself how to prepare to face the vastly stronger Overlord. Complete a variety of missions to earn arcane rewards, or roam the wilds to uncover secret missions and stashes of magical loot. Customize your characters with unique combinations of enchants and spells that change how you move, jump, and fight. Or rescue people and bring them back to your settlement, recruiting them to help you in return.
You choose how to play, and the world adapts around you.
Features
Travel alone or with friends across an ever-expanding world of dangerous creatures, powerful magic, high technology, and mysteries.
You have choice. The world of Environ is procedurally generated, and lets you go anywhere you see -- including right into the overlord's keep at any time. (Good luck with that.)
Environ is endless. When you save one continent from an overlord, a larger and more complex continent appears.
The game adapts to how you play: as you demonstrate your proficiency, monsters upgrade accordingly. Killed 100 bats? Okay, time for... bats on fire!
Crazy amounts of character customization. Combine a multitude of spells, enchants, and equipment to create specialized character builds.
Play as a long line of brave adventurers. It's not a question of IF your character is going to die, but WHEN. Any character that dies is permanently lost, but you keep all your inventory, enchants, and general progress in the game.
Become a community leader. Rescue NPCs, have them join your settlement, and construct buildings for them -- they may return the favor and help you.
Be a clever problem-solver. Challenges have more than one solution, each with its own pros and cons. You get to figure things out rather than just jumping through a set of hoops.
Difficulty levels give exactly the challenge you want, from casual to hardcore on both platforming and combat independently.
New updates are arriving all the time packed with additional content, improvements, and more.
Don't Just Take Our Word For It!
You can get a demo of the latest version at any time by clicking either of the download images below. During the demo, if you're inclined you can even check out the latest post-release beta updates if you'd like to look ahead to the nightly builds rather than the latest official build!
Win/OSX
$14.99 via direct to dev, Steam, Gamersgate, etc. No DRM nonsense either.
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Looks nice and fun to play, thanks Getter.
Does it have some rpg elements?
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It has crafting and power-collecting, but not quite true RPG gameplay as the focus is more on platformer shooting. Interesting review of it on Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/01/wot-i-think-a-valley-without-wind/
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I'll agree with the above reviewer that it does look a bit odd, but the permadeath and procedural generation sounds awesome (the reviewer was not as enthused). Thanks Getter, I'm gonna check this out.
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A thing to note is that the developer, Arcen, has something of a "hot and fast" post-release style----in that you can pretty much count on rapid and meaty updates to be a very common thing based off bug reports and general feedback/requests over on the official forums.
In other words, expect Major Changes throughout the 1.x line, currently at 7 strong I believe, while also expecting MAJOR Changes come whatever kicks off 2.x and so on.
Thus far to catch people up:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AVWW_-_Post-Launch_Series_1_Release_Notes
And now the current 1.007
Loot Goals / Shopping Lists
These are the most obvious new feature, and something that players have been requesting pretty heavily. So you want to get spells A, B, and C -- those each have various component ingredients that you need to find. Each of those ingredients is found in various locales. That's a lot to remember!
Flipping back and forth into the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia in-game is really a pain if you're trying to hunt down a lot of stuff in that way. It's great for when you need to look something up occasionally, but not handy for constant in-and-out navigation tips.
What the Loot Goals let you do is basically say "I want spells A, B, and C." Then the ingredients that make up those spells show up in a new little "Loot Goals" sidebar whenever you hit the Escape key. You can then see all sorts of data about each ingredient, including how many you need to collect to meet your self-set crafting goals, where to find them, and exactly what spells these ingredients are contributing towards.
You can even do this with the various kinds of items in the Where To Find Stuff You Want supplies sections! See the release notes for details.
Texture Packs
Some players have expressed a desire to be able to create custom texture packs for the game, and given the nature of how this game loads files that's something that we were able to reasonably accommodate. So this version of the game now supports swapping out specific images, whole new image sets, new particle effect logic, and so on -- anything you like.
I'll be curious to see what results from this; just please don't post anything that infringes on another company's or individual's copyright!
Mission Seeding Improvements
On the second continent and beyond, players were often getting way too many "personality structures" as mission rewards, and not enough of the other kinds of guardian powers. Similarly, on any continent sometimes one mission type could still overwhelm the world map mission breakdown more than was healthy.
A lot of improvements have been made here to make all that "just work," and the details are on the release notes. I'm sure that even further tweaking could well be warranted, so let us know what you think as you get a chance to try it out!
As usual, there was a variety of random other tweaks and fixes in this one.
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v 1.008
...focused squarely on the things that most annoy players who like the game. There's more to come on that score hopefully tomorrow, but this release addresses a lot of the major complaints that we've gotten so far. That doesn't sound very exciting, but actually I think it is.
Boomsticks
First of all, there's a new enchant category called "Boomstick." It causes all of your spells to knock you backwards in shotgun-like fashion (hence the name), but also do more damage. This is something that is very much a taste-specific sort of enchant, so not everybody is going to love it. But we had a lot of players wanting this sort of playstyle, and so we did what we did with the "power sliding" ability: made it optional!
Boomstick enchants are particularly interesting underwater, because they can help you "swim" in a pretty different sort of fashion than was previously possible.
Multi-Monitor Support Improvements
With both AI War and AVWW, there's been ongoing annoyances with Unity 3D's inability to capture the mouse to the game window. It only affects people with multiple monitors, but that describes a lot of our fanbase (hey, including us). Thanks to the hack we figured out last week, we've now been able to improve our multi-monitor support despite the underlying engine not really supporting it; these features will be coming soon to AI War as well.
Windstorms!
So, windstorms -- and particularly wind shelter missions -- have been the bane of a lot of players' existence. Hard barely begins to describe them, as they were near-impossible if you didn't use tricks like turning yourself into a bat.
We've listened to a lot of player feedback, and come up with something that wraps together a lot of the more interesting suggestions along with ideas of our own. The wind is now life-sapping from you rather than something that buffs monsters, and it gets worse the further into windstorm territory you go on the world map.
The life-sap won't outright kill you, though; so it's not a true timer. It won't take you below 1 health, and it also gets smaller and smaller in the effect it has on you the lower your health gets. So it's this constant drain on you that requires you to kill enemies to keep your health at reasonable levels, but it's not something that just ends you outright if you dawdle around or take your time.
Going along with this, ports now work differently in windstorms, the wind shelter missions themselves have been fixed up substantially to be better balanced, and turning yourself into a bat now comes with severe consequences in the storms. See the release notes for the details.
Anachronism Missions, Take Three
The reflected damage wasn't popular with these. It was an improvement over the older way of doing things, I think, but it was still too easy to kill yourself accidentally. The new system is more forgiving of stray shots, and instead penalizes you with two newly-spawned monsters if you kill the wrong kind of monster. We'll see what folks think!
Note that we know this wasn't the most-hated mission type -- that belonged to the supply depot missions by a longshot. I'd hoped to have my changes in for that mission type today, but the windstorm changes really were more involved than I expected because I kept finding new things to improve. So the supply depot mission improvements should be hitting tomorrow instead, knock on wood.
Multiplayer Stuff
New admin commands, bug fixes, and some new keybinds to make sharing your goodies with allies easier. Nice!
Consciousness Shards
Substantial changes here. Rather than there being six colors, there is now only one. They also aren't used for guardian power scrolls anymore -- in fact, for this release they are temporarily pointless. They also aren't stored in the settlement stockpile, but rather go inside your main inventory now. Curious, eh?
We have some cool stuff planned for these that I think everybody will really like, and our hope is to get that in place tomorrow... but we'll just see how the schedule goes because people are constantly asking us for stuff and that can kind of throw our anticipated schedule out of whack as we adjust on the fly. One way or another it's coming soon, anyway.
As usual, there was a variety of random other tweaks and fixes in this one; we didn't get to remotely everything we had hoped to pack into this release, but so it goes. There's always tomorrow! More to come soon. Enjoy!
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v1.009
...is focused on the remainder of the largest complaints we've had so far. Once again, the results are pretty darn exciting if I do say so.
Supply Depot / Meteor Storm Missions Overhaul
So, these were definitely the most-hated missions. They took too long, had too little strategy if you did certain things, or were impossibly hard if you did other things. Not a good balance. There were also a lot of glitches with the stacks of crates in multiplayer in particular.
Well -- that's all changed now! There are no longer crates at all in fact, but rather there are four larger "supply stash" objects that you have to protect. And the new catch is that you have to protect all of them rather than just one, which really brings this a lot closer to its original Missile Command roots.
Enemies are still in abundance to bother you personally, but they won't mess with the supply stashes anymore -- that means that the meteors are now the sole threat that can actually cause you to lose the mission. The monsters are just there to kill you and make life more difficult.
There's now a handy heads-up display showing the health of all the supply stashes, so that you can protect the ones that are in more danger. There's also way fewer meteors over a much shorter period of time, and fewer monsters also. It's still a very hectic sort of "defend the hill" vibe to this mission, and they are quite a challenge... but it's world's better and more interesting than it was before.
We'll of course be very interested in feedback on the new mechanics from folks, but at worst I think you'll find that these are a giant step in the right direction. Personally I think these are pretty cool now, albeit still one of the more difficult mission types.
Trash Mob Loot Drops
Okay, so folks really wanted trash mobs to drop something other than just health. This came up during beta, but died down after a lackluster implementation involving the six-colored consciousness shards. Then we switched to health-only drops, and players who had been through most of the beta with us seemed placated because the alternative was clearly worse.
Then we hit 1.0 and of course now there's thousands of new players, and the strong consensus has been that they want more of a reward for killing trash mobs. "Otherwise, what's the point?" has been the general sentiment. Of course, then there's a smaller contingent who prefers avoidance and has been arguing the other side... people can't ever agree on anything, not that I'm particularly complaining.
Keith has always been in the camp that he wanted to see loot drops from minor enemies anyhow. I've been the one who was so opposed to it, because of some of the experiences during beta. For instance, when the rewards were tied to the monsters themselves there was no way to decouple the reward and the challenge.
So if you had three bosses guarding some cool treasure, you'd inevitably get 3x the normal boss reward PLUS the treasure, which just made all sorts of trouble for a challenge/reward system. And it's more complex than that, too, but I won't bore you with the details -- I believe those are still somewhere in the forums from back in November or thereabouts.
Anyway, something occurred to me yesterday when Josh brought up the fact that "enemies should drop loot" was starting to reach a fever pitch of popular opinion: my concerns really had to do with bosses and vengeful ghosts and missions. So the compromise is easy: during freeform exploration, trash mobs now drop the consciousness shards as well as the health they were already dropping (not either/or like it was in the beta, as that was a big part of the problem then).
However, during missions you don't get rewards from killing even the trash mobs. During a mission your sole focus is the completion of the mission, so that makes sense. Outside the mission you're fighting and exploring and doing whatever other activities interest you, and I can understand players wanting to get rewarded for more activities than just poking their heads into every corner of the world.
The Store
So what's the point of those consciousness shards, though? Yesterday I said they had no point but would soon. "Soon" meant this release, as it turned out.
In your settlements you'll now find a third guardian stone: this one being the Opal kind. Talking to this guy brings up a store where you can spend... you guessed it... consciousness shards.
The store itself serves several functions. First of all, it provides a combat-based way to get some basic supplies like upgrade stones, wood platforms, and crates. You can now kill enemies rather than exploring stash rooms if that's really your preference. I recommend still using the stash rooms for things like that and then spending your shards on cooler stuff at the store, but to each their own.
Secondly, the store acts as something of a safety valve for when the random number generator is unkind to you with enchant unlocks or some of the more central guardian powers as mission rewards (buoys, wind shelters, and seek survivors mainly). You can now spend a fairly substantial sum of shards if you wish in order to get those things outside of the normal course of missions.
Which is great for your average player who enjoys the exploration anyhow: now they have all these shards and probably not much need to spend them on basic supplies like wooden platforms or upgrade stones. So they instead get to invest those either into enchants that are hard to find, rarities like elusion scrolls, or getting more buoys without having to stalk secret missions for potentially a really long time.
In other words, the store is a way to remove some of the accidental grind that could happen simply by virtue of the world being so randomized. If you're unable to get something you absolutely need, you are no longer stuck with just having to explore ad infinitum looking for that thing: the store is your safety valve that lets you trade some combat or exploration loot (you find shards via both) for whatever you most need at the time.
There's actually a larger variety of random tweaks and fixes than usual with this one, too, so be sure to check out those release notes. There's a new music track, player bats work differently, the warp gates let you move around differently, and so on. More to come soon. Enjoy!
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v1.010
This is basically just a cleanup maintenance patch with some hotfixes for stuff from the last few versions, plus some extra polish we threw in there "just because." Hopefully this is the last release prior to Monday, when we get back down to serious business. Enjoy!
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v1.011
...is focused on everybody's biggest complaint with the game these days: enemy variety. Four new enemies have been added, and two new minibosses have been added. There were already something like 40-50 enemies in the game, but given that many of them were unlockables or limited to just specific region types, that made them feel thinner on the ground than they really were.
In particular espers were annoyingly ubiquitous. Well, espers are no longer native to the grasslands, since those now have enough other monsters to take their place now. Espers will also be withdrawing from various other time periods as more monsters are introduced.
In general, adding more monsters will be our major focus for most of this week unless something else comes up, and then after that the focus is probably going to be on more exploration rewards plus more mission types. That's the current plan, anyhow!
Check out the release notes if you want the goods on the new monsters, or just wait and experience them in-game if you want to avoid spoilers. There's also a number of notable bugfixes, including that "stuck in urban crawler" one and a fix to an exploit that made shields ridiculously overpowered in journey to perfection missions.
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v1.013
It includes one new enemy and one new miniboss, but there were five other enemies and one other miniboss that we worked on today that didn't quite make it into this release.
Instead of being focused solely on new monsters, this version packs in a number of other miscellaneous improvements -- see the release notes for the full rundown. The largest groups of improvements have to do with balance on a few of the enchant progressions (to prevent some exploits that players found), as well as a variety of general improvements to the terrain generation of ocean regions. We know that's something folks have been wanting for a while, so we took a chance to slip that in.
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v1.016
...On the one hand there are some fixes for multiplayer plus some new admin commands to help with yet another anti-griefing case as well as to be able to rename either your character or your profile. Very useful.
On the other hand we've got some changes to make the transition to the second continent easier and less grindy when you're going for those early NPCs and settlement structures. To some extent I think it was a communications issue with players missing things that were actually already there, but we've done a great deal to make it more robust in general so that that doesn't come up.
Next up are three more enemies and a new miniboss. One of those enemy types actually has four variants, and another of them has eighteen variants. So, yeah.
Also new this release is the concept of chunks having "infestations" of hostile background stuff. If you don't want spoilers I won't give them in this summary. But suffice it to say, some of the new enemies don't seed like other enemies -- they either show up like the crashed landspeeder or dread gazebo as part of region-specific seeding, or they show up during an infestation in addition to normal enemies.
Players have been asking for more environmental dangers and traps and such for a while, as well as more variance on a per-chunk basis as opposed to a per-region basis, and the infestations provide us for a pretty interesting vector for providing both in one. We'll be doing more with it over time, but right now there are three broad types of infestations that can happen, each with three differing severities and some region-specific tie-ins.
Sorry that was kind of vague, but given this is a game partly about exploration I thought you might prefer just finding it in the game yourself. If not, then have at the release notes themselves, because all the details are there!
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v1.018
...has fewer new enemies than prior versions, but the enemies that it does have are pretty darn cool -- the Deepwoods Gargans are one of the neatest enemies we've added in my opinion.
There's also a variety of balance improvements in this version, plus a new spell scroll that allows you to turn yourself into a Micro-Rex. Finally something you can transmogrify yourself into beyond just a bat! Speaking of Micro-Rexes, those are also now something that you'll be encounter en-masse via one of the Elder T-Rex's attacks.
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v1.020
definitely our largest post-release update so far in terms of how it affects the overall feel of the game. The loot drops from enemies plus the opal guardian's store was also pretty huge, but this is bigger.
First off, the smaller stuff: a variety of bugfixes and tweaks, and some new graphics compression options that may or may not be of interest depending on how much RAM you have and if you tend to play for hours and hours at a go. And a few other neat things like "Small Rare Enchant Containers" that you can find out in the wild.
Streamlining?
The larger changes are all noted in detail here. Essentially, what we've done is removed "Civilization Progress (CP)," and instead made it so that you kill lieutenants in order to increase the continent tier. In short, we took out one mechanic that was a bit superfluous and complicating things needlessly, and are now making better use of a more interesting mechanic (lieutenants) to accomplish the same thing.
Another way to look at this is focused around missions themselves: you no longer have to worry about world map missions accidentally making the world arbitrarily harder (through CP) by completing too many of them. And the secret missions are no longer so grindy by giving you fewer rewards than the world map missions -- both kinds of missions now give you the same, higher, resource rewards.
Yet a third way of looking at this is in terms of overall game structure: previously you would bounce back and forth between missions and free exploration, then eventually kill all the lieutenants and the overlord pretty much in one long string. Now you bounce back and forth between missions and free exploration for as long as you like, then take on the lieutenant of your choice, then keep improving your stuff until you are ready to take down the overlord. Much better flow, that.
Strategic Difficulty Returns
Right now the strategic difficulty setting only affects one thing: how many tier orbs of each tier you can accumulate per continent. However, as we go further into post-release content there will be other things we do with this.
One of the cool things about CP and tier orbs being tied to one another in the prior system was that it forced an opportunity cost on you: you had to be efficient. The downside was, not everybody wants to play that way. And for those that do, it was not forcing that difficult of choices, really.
The strategic difficulty setting lets you choose how constrained you want to be: how much you want each unlocked spell to matter in terms of your overall strategy to defeat the overlord. Just like players have differing feelings on how hard the platforming and combat should be, so too has it become clear that players have different feelings on how hard those long-form decisions should be. This lets you set it to whatever is most fun for your particular tastes.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
UPDATE: 1.020 is now out with a fix to the anachronism missions spawning crazy numbers of enemies in the prior version. Part of why I did the 1.019 release in the middle of the day was in case there were some severe issues that people found; I didn't want them going overnight if I could help it.
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v1.021
reworks the least-popular mission type to be more palatable. In this case, I'm speaking of Journey To Perfection missions, which are meant to be tense and fun hardcore combat challenges -- but which had a lot of platforming thrown in there as well, which threw things off quite a bit. Now the focus is more squarely on combat with these, and they seem a lot more fun.
All of the non-jumping-related leg enchants now give you a boost to your max mana, so there's a greater incentive to pick up something other than double or triple jump for your legs slot. We'll be having some more changes in that area before long, but for now this is a step in the right direction.
A couple of other player frustrations have also been addressed with this release. First of all, the puzzle rooms for getting the the mystery clues were really far too rare. They are now quite a bit more common and not always behind maze rooms. Secondly, the four most-basic settlement buildings can now be purchased via the opal guardian stone's store; it's still generally better to get these through missions, but when the random number generator hates you, you now have alternatives.
Oh, and two new music tracks! Both really cool ones in very different ways.
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v1.022
has yet a few more changes to the Journey To Perfection missions, although I'm not quite done there yet. These now have a more natural progression in difficulty, ranging from "pretty easy" to "pretty insane," though, so that's fun.
One of our longest-requested features that we somehow never got around to adding (despite it being requested as far back as version 0.501) was some better scouting of the chunk in the minimap. Mainly better correlation between what you see on the screen and what gets revealed on the minimap; previously you could see something on the screen but still have it blanked out on the minimap, which was super frustrating and made exploring little corners of caves a chore. Not anymore!
Aside from a few general bugfixes and tweaks, the other big thing in this release are a variety of new infestation types. Two broad new categories of traps are now in place for interior and underground infestations: blade traps and spike traps. Each of which has at least three variants.
And then there are also four broad different categories of "dangerfalls," by which we mean waterfalls, lavafalls, icefalls, and miasmafalls. These each have their own respective sub-variants and also react to the platforming difficulty you've selected. Timing-based waterfalls/lavafalls have been something I've wanted to have in the game since mid-alpha almost a year ago, so it's really cool to finally see these in play.
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v1.026
has some various small tweaks and improvements, including to the balance of shields and infestations. Well, actually, depending on the player they might find those two balance things rather substantial (the former hopefully not too negatively, and the latter quite positively I'm sure).
More excitingly, however, are the two big features of this release:
Foot Enchants and Elven Boots
This stems from a lot of discussion about the jump-related leg enchants and how they basically made all other leg enchants obsolete by comparison. At one point there was talk of nerfing the jump-related enchants, but we realized that would really impact the fun-factor more than anything else.
So what we've done instead is split out the jump-related enchants to no longer be leg enchants; they are now foot enchants instead, and occupy their own slot. This makes it so that the various leg enchants now compete with one another on a much more even playing field, and the jump-related stuff just competes with itself on the foot slot.
But given that not all players are enamored of having double and triple jump (though those players are the minority for sure), we also added a new kind of enchant to the foot slot: elven boots. These are kind of "jack of all trade minor improvement" enchants that give you a variety of boosts in exchange for not taking the awesome jump enchants. We expect that most players will utterly avoid the boots, but some players have already stated their desire for them -- so everybody wins.
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That Other Big Feature I Mentioned: Two New Monsters
Yeah, sorry about the overlong side story there. Anyway, the other big new thing in this release is two new monsters both for the abandoned towns. And thus the withdrawal of espers from yet another region! Hooray! The ubiquitous espers just got less ubiquitous, as we've been working on for the last few weeks.
Oh, and of course I think the two new enemies are actually pretty cool -- both are small and flying, to basically fill the same broad niche that the espers previously did in this region. However, the feel of these and the way you fight them is really super different and I'm quite pleased with how that changes the feel. I'm a little worried that they might be too hard for the start of the game, so let me know if we need to tone those down and then make some elites of them or something.
More to come next week. Enjoy!
UPDATE: 1.024 has been released to fix an extreme slowdown problem with waterfall-heavy caverns.
UPDATE: 1.025 has been released to fix an issue where the player could not jump off top-solid platforms in the background in the prior version.
UPDATE: 1.026 has been released to fix one more performance bug, plus it also adds a couple of new abilities for neutral skelebots, neutral draconites, and the bronze age characters.
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v1.029
1. There's a new Freefall mission type. It's all kinds of awesome (player suggestion, by the way). However, the balance on that is preliminary at best -- by which I mean "it's way too hard at the moment." We did not get to finish our unit testing of balance on these missions, although we did finish the other forms of testing on it. There were simply too many other things in this release to delay it until tomorrow, though, so what you've got is an unbalanced new mission until that next release -- sorry about that.
2. One of the big killer changes in this one that meant we really needed to release tonight were a selection of balance improvements as well as a pretty major CPU usage improvement. I decided that having these things in your hands earlier rather than later was more important than waiting until the Freefall mission was pristine.
3. The Lieutenant Towers are way way cooler and more interesting now. And also have this new thing called Area Enchantments, along with a new kind of guardian power scroll you can use to bypass them. Much less grindy this way.
4. In general, the balance on the traps has been particularly improved, which we know some folks were really looking forward to.
And with that, I have to run for the night. More to come soon. Enjoy!
UPDATE: 1.028 fixes an unhandled exception that would get thrown when trying to view the enchants inventory.
UPDATE: 1.029 fixes two other unhandled exceptions, or at least should -- I didn't have world files, so I was working off error files without line numbers only. I saw a few places where errors could arise if the game state was in some edge cases, though, so the preventative measures I put in there will hopefully be the solutions that were needed to fix the two bugs in question. And with that, I'm really going to go sleep now, so hopefully things are clean until morning. Apologies for the trouble!
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v1.030 and v1.031
another really cool and major one -- but I've learned my lesson. We're releasing this earlier in the day, and then planning another release later tonight with smaller changes and fixes, so that if there are any issues with this one they don't go untended overnight (or keep me up when I'm trying to get sleep instead).
Anyway, this release has a ton of changes and improvements, many of them small but notable. The list on the release notes is pretty long and varied, so I won't even try to summarize that here. But I will highlight four specific major features:
Enchants View Filtering
Now whenever you click an enchant or an enchant slot, it darkens all the other slots/enchants that are not related to it. Click an empty inventory slot to restore the normal brightness. This makes managing large inventories full of enchants vastly easier!
Character Select Screen Improvements, And Re-Rolling Characters
There's a whole host of changes here, so be sure and see the release notes (or just check it out in-game). But the basic idea is that there is no longer a scrolling list of 6-18 characters to choose from. Instead it just always gives you a non-scrolling selection of 4 that you can more quickly compare, and there is a re-roll button that lets you get a different set of 4 if you don't like any of the ones you were first given.
Added to this, it also now has a filter for time period -- you can leave it on Show All, or just get 4 characters from a time period of your choosing. If you know you want a character of a certain time period, this plus the re-roll option makes it incredibly, vastly, enormously, gargantuanly easier to get a character you are happy with without a lot of faffing about or suicides.
Three New Enchant Slots Take The Place Of Upgrade Stones
Upgrade stones are now gone, as they simply weren't working out as well as we'd hoped for a long litany of reasons. See the release notes for all the gory details.
Taking their place are three new enchant slots: Health, Mana, and Attack. Sound familiar? It's basically the upgrade stone system you already know, just streamlined and moved into the enchants interface. So now there are 9 overall enchant slots in the inventory, and these three new ones work a bit differently (having a budget that is shared between them, a few rules on when you can swap them out, etc).
The net effect of these changes is to give you more flexibility with your characters, and not penalize mistakes. Also letting a single character switch roles more easily, although their base stats still play into what their ultimate role is likely to be.
Health And Mana Rebalancement
When it comes to mana, you can upgrade that more easily now -- base characters don't have any more of it, but it's easier to make a high-mana character via upgrades rather than being forced to use a time of magic character.
For characters in general, they all now have more health, making death hopefully less frequent and the upgrades to the first tier or two of the health stat (formerly via stones, now via the enchants) less vital. The upgrades variance is now lowered somewhat in response to this, to make it so that there aren't thousands of percentage points difference between one character's health and another's.
Death is supposed to happen from time to time, but not be something that's constant. It's also supposed to be something that is the culmination of a series of mistakes rather than one slip into the lava. These changes help bring the balance back into line with those design goals, but I'm sure that more tweaks and refinements will be needed with time.
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our second release of the day, but it's not just minor fixes this time. Sure, there are a variety of fixes both major and minor. But there are also some substantial improvements to how enemy-dropped consciousness shards work AND a new mission type.
The new Boss Delve mission is nothing that complicated, but it's welcome variety for the early game in particular, which was something we wanted to be sensitive to. Also, it lets you kill two birds with one stone when it comes to gathering gems and arcane ingredients, whatever your current tier/continent/skill is. The new style of vertical cave structure of these missions makes them particularly fun to spelunk down into, as well, I think.
Oh, and as part of this version the state of equipped enchants are now synced between players in multiplayer. That sounds boring, but the key thing it means is this: the longstanding issue where you couldn't see light sources being emitted from another player's enchant is now resolved.
That means that one player can now light the way while others follow with enchants that aren't bound to light. Or it means that with a group of players the light is pushed back even further as they all spread out, giving a distinct visual advantage to a large group of players.
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v1.034
is all kinds of awesome, if I do say so. First of all, there's a new music track that is just really wicked cool. Live electric guitar, and great composition both -- nice.
Then there's a bunch of improvements to various things like enemy seeding and things like T-Rexes getting stuck in tiny stairwells and such. And multiplayer fixes like falling straight through mines without touching them, or your NPCs getting stuck during rescue missions. Also the new upgrade enchants now cost 30x less than before, making them not a grind to collect at the start.
It's kind of a greatest-hits of a lot of the things that have been annoying people, I think, when it comes to the miscellaneous small fixes here. Monday is Memorial Day and so we won't be working that day, but on Tuesday and Wednesday that sort of focus on polish and balance is going to be most of what remains prior to 1.1 official being released.
The Deep's Overhaul
The mechanics of the deep were always temporary and kind of placeholdery. I made a note of that at the time we put in the +2 tiers thing and the darkness thing, as we'd basically run out of time. Anyway, now there are basically fiveish new types of enemies that are used in The Deep, and they are all really strong and scary.
So strong, in fact, it's like they had +2 tiers even though that mechanic has now been removed from the deep (along with the darkness effect on spells and enemies). Why the shift? Well, migration of course! Nothing is allowed to migrate into the deep anymore, but if monsters from the deep start migrating out into the surrounding lands that's quite a fearsome thing to see!
I have to say, the miasma bats are a new favorite enemy of mine, mainly just because I love their visual. Although the entropy hoppers that the dark dragons spawn are also really interesting, too.
Lots Of Changes To Freefall Missions
These missions have gotten a big facelift based on feedback from you folks. The missions themselves have proved to be really popular with lots of people -- but also brutally hard. This release updates the difficulty to not be so extreme anymore, although further tiering will still be needed come Tuesday.
I just ran out of time to keep working on this specific mission today, but it's getting close. What you're looking at now is pretty close to what I would consider the "hardest version" of the freefall missions, and then we just need some step-downs from that so that you get eased up to that level. If folks still feel like this is too hard for the hardest level of them, though, then let me know.
All Time Periods Now Have Unique Bonuses
Previously it was just limited to some of the time periods having some special bonuses like darkvision for the Draconites or the Fast Runner buff for the bronze age characters.
Well, now all the different time periods have their unique bonuses in place and they seem reasonably well balanced -- I'm sure this will evolve over time, but for a first pass I'm really pleased with how this turned out.
The ice age characters and medieval characters are now my personal favorites since they have some melee reduction and also some serious knockback reduction. But then again the extra two upgrade enchant points on the contemporary characters is pretty crazy powerful. As is the mana regen and extra mana of the time of magic characters, which are even more extreme now than they used to be.
Of course, if you find scouting buildings to be slow or tedious, an industrial revolution character will now make that go much faster. And the pre-industrial characters are now something of a cross between Luigi and Princess from Mario 2 in how they handle -- I think that's pretty fitting for their style of dress, haha.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
UPDATE: 1.033 is now out with some key bugfixes mainly relating to bosses not spawning properly.
UPDATE: 1.034 is now out with one fix to some inventory management stuff throwing exceptions in MP. Apparently. Never could duplicate it, but the error log was clear enough for now.
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v1.037
UPDATE: 1.035 is now out with some more bugfixes, including a lockup, sudden-death on characters at inappropriate times, and a missing lieutenant. Also 10 new overlord boss rooms, which I'm sure is welcome news.
UPDATE: 1.036 is now out with a couple of more bugfixes.
our first one since the Memorial Day holiday yesterday in the US. It includes some interesting new changes for bosses, as well as three new spells, along with two new elite minibosses, plus some key fixes.
We're pretty much out of time to put in new features for 1.1, so we're going to be focusing more on polish (meaning fixes and balance) for the next few days. The official 1.1 release will be late this week, and then we'll get cracking on 1.2 -- we have tons of stuff planned for that that simply wouldn't fit into 1.1.
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v1.047 and friends
UPDATE: 1.038 is out with a fix to two unhandled exceptions that could appear in a wide variety of situations in the prior version.
Lots and lots of balance tweaks and bugfixes in here. 1.039
Lots and lots of balance tweaks and bugfixes in here, and a bit more to come later tonight. 1.040
This one has a few standout changes, in particular:
- A fix to something that was making some worlds unreadable in recent versions (though it looks like we have one more of these to do).
- Many improvements to make the Crafting Grimoire more informative and helpful.
- 42 really cool new rooms by Benmiff
- Drastically lowered crafting costs for high-tier spells (see release notes for details)
ots more balance tweaks in particular in this one, and it's probably our last for the night unless Keith gets in a few last things.
This one has two standout changes:
- Much improved seeding logic for the continents and missions in several ways.
- Much improved Things You Should Do advice in the planning menu for new players.
UPDATE: 1.042-1.043 are now out, fixing another world deserialization bug and removing a debug message that accidentally got left on in 1.041.
Lots and lots of balance tweaks and bugfixes in here, and more is planned for 2-3 more releases throughout today. 1.044
This one has a few standout changes, in particular:
- Freefall mission balance progression is now what we consider "final, pending feedback from you." So please, if it seems off then let us know.
- Fixed several things related to small entities not being able to fire certain spells properly, or certain spells sometimes passing through some objects, etc.
- Lava Escape missions now scale up as you complete more of them, but start much easier than they did before, so you can ease into them now.
- Fixed several seeding logic things which also improved performance. Fingers crossed this didn't break anything else.
This one is smaller in terms of the volume of fixes, but it has some really important ones including several core changes that fix multiple bugs that various people were experiencing. 1.045
Along with some fixes and tweaks, this version also includes a new music track, 99 new room templates, and a new semi-secret miniboss. 1.046
adds yet more polish tweaks, and also adds a new way to give orders to NPCs during rescue missions -- something folks have wanted for quite some time! 1.047
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Downloaded the demo for this after seeing this thread.
I'd advise everyone to avoid this game.
So far I've lost 15 dollars and two days of my life. ;D
(That is to say that it's good stuff. If you're the type of person who caught Terraria fever, this might be even more dangerous to you.)
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v1.057 and friends:
UPDATE: 1.048 fixes a fairly rare null reference exception that could happen on multiplayer clients in some circumstances.
1.049 has a ton more polish, including addressing the anachronism missions bug as well as a variety of seeding bugs.
has another batch of changes and fixes..
UPDATE: RC3 is now out, with a bit more polish.
UPDATE: RC4 is now out, with another new music track and some buffing to melee spells in general.
UPDATE: 1.054 has a couple of key bugfixes.
UPDATE: 1.055 has one bugfix that we had to rush out.
oes yet some more polish/fixes, as well as adding some new content.
The largest bit of new content is an entire new region type/biome (for the first time since beta started). The visuals and feel of this new region type (craggy highlands) are already really different from the other region types, but they'll get even more unique with time in terms of specific buildings and such.
Additionally, continents in general now have more water breaking them up, making for interesting barriers you have to cross more often. And with the two of these changes combined, continents are now all-around large even starting with the first one.
Beyond that, there's been a pretty hefty rebalance of all the spells to get them to a better place. Feel free to look at the AttackInfo.csv in the RuntimeData folder after you run the game once and let us know if there are tweaks you think we should make to our formula for determining the relative power of spells. Balance can never be reduced to an exact science, but we're much closer now than we were prior to this week, which is great.
And that's not remotely all!
Now settlement structures all give minor continent-wide buffs to your civilization as soon as you construct them. All the settlement structures have always had a purpose, but it's a long-game sort of purpose and presupposes that you plan on using guardian power scrolls and improving the skills of NPCs in the related professions. Now you get an incremental immediate bonus just from building the structure itself, which should help to erase the sense that some people had that buildings were "pointless" if they weren't playing a scroll-focused style.
Another biggie is the addition of randomized enchant-style stats that are hardwired into individual characters, making them more unique. This is something that players on the forums were really excited about a few weeks back, and we only now have had time to implement it. But it means that now aside from the name/portrait/time period specific stats/base stats variance, there's now a completely random extra-bonuses variance with each character. The idea is that if characters are more unique (in the sense of hard to replace in an exact sense), that helps players to care more about them in a mechanical (as opposed to an emotional) sense.
Oh, and we added a new monster and a new miniboss. The new monster is specific to the craggy highlands (except when migrating or as part of battlefield missions or anachronism missions, of course), but the new miniboss shows up in about half of the region types.
UPDATE: 1.057 is now out with some bugfixes.
Otherwise, well, v1.1 is coming and should be rather substantial...as is scheming already underway to have the eventual v1.2 also be rather substantial...and so it goes~
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v1.1 in general sum
* Over 160 new room maps.
* 15 new regular enemies
* 8 new minibosses
* 16 new "elite" enemies (plus the idea of elites at all)
* 5 classes of infestations (plus the idea of infestations at all)
* A new "craggy highlands" region/biome type.
* 8 new music tracks
* 5 new classes of player enchants
* 3 new player spells
* Substantial rebalancement of most player spells.
* The ability to give "wait here" orders to NPCs in rescue missions.
* Larger and more intricate continent designs.
* Rebalanced and streamlined strategic flow.
* No more Civilization Progress (CP) in favor of better mechanics.
* One central in-game currency rather than six.
* A new "Opal Guardian Store" in settlements.
* Loot drops from trash mobs, for use at the opal store.
* A better enchant-based system of upgrades in place of upgrade stones.
* New Feet enchant slot, splitting out items from the Legs slot.
* Streamlined character selection/creation process.
* Unique attributes for characters by time period.
* More enchant-like unique attributes for every individual character.
* Heavily revised and rebalanced existing missions to player feedback.
* New Freefall and Boss Delve mission types.
* More rewards from doing secret missions.
* No penalties/drawbacks from doin world map missions.
* More gradual ramp-up in difficulty of the harder mission types.
* New spell scroll that you can find and use to turn yourself into tiny t-rex.
* A "shopping list" system helping you to keep track of your self-set goals.
* Many improvements to the existing planning menu in general.
* Smaller, more fun lieutenant towers filled with infestations.
* Texture pack support.
* Smoother minimap exploration.
* More fun and threatening windstorm mechanics.
* Many new multiplayer admin commands (largely anti-griefing-related).
* Vastly more fun ocean exploration.
* Minor continent-wide bonuses from building settlement structures.
* Longer durations on continent-wide guardian power scroll uses.
* Filtering to the enchants inventory for vastly easier management of many enchants.
* Improved elemental strengths/weaknesses for enemies in general.
* Much better (completely randomized) elemental strengths/weaknesses for bosses).
* 7 new achievements
* And much more:
Also: an illuminating and lengthy dev diary/post-mortem sort of writeup on the entire lot of it since v1.0's launch----good food for thought here folks.
http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2012/06/reflections-on-valley-without-winds.html
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v1.104 a big one
is as ginormous as they come, even for us here at Arcen. Where to even begin?
Out With Per-Continent Tiers, In With Global Levels
At the broadest level, the idea here is that it's more of a traditional RPG flow now. None of that "New Game+" stuff when you get to a new continent and are kind of starting over except for your enchants. People found that annoying, and we finally figured out a better way to handle that than the alternative we'd been using prior to November in the beta.
Procedural Spells As Loot!
World map missions now give spells instead of anything else. And each spell has some procedural bits to it now, giving it extra bonuses or whatnot. This means that even two different copies of "Fireball 2" might not be equal to one another.
This isn't exactly a new idea, as both Diablo and Borderlands and many other games do this sort of thing. And we already do procedural loot with the enchant system, too. But now we have more procedural loot. In this case that's particularly important because it encourages players to sample more widely from the selection of spells in the game rather than trying to find "optimal loadouts" that are global for every continent on every world.
If the stats vary, then the optimal loadouts are by extension also going to vary. So far we only have 6 different modifiers for spells, so that's actually kind of underwhelming compared to where we're headed with this. We'll be working on more of those this week and next, along with some... other unrelated exciting stuff yet to be disclosed.
Keith wanted me to make sure you wouldn't be disappointed with just 6 modifiers on this first release, though. Just getting all this framework stuff converted over and all the new systems balanced as best we can tell has been quite a job in itself, and I kept distracting him from adding more modifiers like he had been wanting to do.
Bunches Of Changes To Spells
Spells are still crafted, but that's now only one of two ways to get them. For most spells -- some spells can only be found via crafting, actually. And the most elite versions of spells still need to be crafted using the new Rarity Orbs that the release notes explain in greater detail.
But anyway, we wound up having to redo all the crafting costs for all the spells. And the unlock conditions for a lot of the arcane ingredients, and the unlock conditions for spells themselves (which can now have direct unlock conditions, at long last). So... yeah. There's a lot of shifts here, designed to get you up to speed and playing and having fun with a unique world of your own as quickly as possible.
Multiplayer Changes
First of all, the way that the resources are captured and stored has been changed around. There may be some things we need to do regarding resource trading or similar (some players already have concerns about that), but we'll see what people think when they have their hands on it. The old system was actively (though unintentionally) rewarding players for playing co-op in a "everybody goes their own way in the same world and we therefore get max resources from this" fashion.
The new system allows for people to go off and fend for themselves if they wish, but also makes it just as fruitful for them to stay together (which would seemingly be the point of co-op play, eh?). Also the much-discussed enemy health multiplier has been reduced in multiplayer, despite our logical arguments and objections, because the perception was that you were losing out if everyone was in the same chunk fighting enemies together. Now even the most casual of math and logic will show that it's in everyone's favor to be together, but you aren't punished for going off on your own either.
Ghost Copies Of Items In Your Inventory
Something people have wanted for a long time is the ability to take one item in your inventory (say, as stack of wood platforms) and make a copy of that so that you can have it on multiple ability bars at once. Well, today is the lucky day that this now has been implemented!
Other Stuff!
There's a really awesome new desert music track that now plays sometimes when you're indoors or in caverns there. A couple of new unlockables and a number of reassigned ones. 100 new rooms courtesy of BenMiff once again (if he keeps this up, half the rooms in the game are going to be his before too long!). Also along for the ride are some miscellaneous bugfixes, intro mission improvements, and encyclopedia improvements.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
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v1.2
A citybuilding model designed for citybuilding fans has been newly integrated from top to bottom into the game. Everything now takes place on the world map and NPC importance has been upgraded significantly with dispatch missions, gifts, and unique attributes based on time period. A new citybuilding strategy guide is available now for your perusal of this major addition.
While there are technically no new spells this time around, the feel of the game is that it has erupted with new ones. That's thanks to spells now carrying various, randomly-assigned modifiers to make every spell crafted or discovered unique from the next -- even if it's the same type. On top of that, the crafting system has been heavily reworked in general to reward exploration and take the pressure off of having to play missions to advance the game.
The main progression system for the game has been shifted as well. Out with tiers, and in with a reworked levels system. By doing so, AVWW trades in the "New Game+" feel for a more natural progression as players advance from one continent to the next. No more two steps back to take three steps forward, as it now feels like a more a more traditional RPG progression.
Of course it just wouldn't be a true update from us without a bunch of other good stuff too. A brand new mystery, more music, a hundred new rooms, new unlockables, the addition of an incinerator, peaceful retirement for player characters, ghost copies of items, and more highlight what's packed in A Valley Without Wind 1.2. As always, practically all of these features were brought about in collaboration with the game's amazing player community (who've contributed in countless ways since the game was mere weeks into development). In short:
We realized we didn't like the citybuilding system, so we made a new one.
We realized we didn't like the crafting system, so we made a new one.
We realized we didn't like the level progression, so we made a new one.
The reaction among the player base has thus far been enormously positive; the focus and flow of the game is a lot more fun now.
The complete breakdown for the aforementioned trio, along with everything else we weren't able to mention here that makes up 1.2, can be fully devoured on the post-launch series 2 release notes section of AVWW's wiki.
A new guide on upgrading to A Valley Without Wind 1.2 from 1.0 or 1.1 has been created as well for those returning players or press looking to quickly translate their prior knowledge into the latest official version of the game.
Full devlog on the thinking on it all: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2012/07/analyzing-valley-without-winds-further.html