A Valley Without Wind (Now at v1.2)

[getter77]

http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/games/avww-features

Eh, close enough and clearly packing some elements outright as well as inspirations.  

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.

[Skeletor]

Looks nice and fun to play, thanks Getter.
Does it have some rpg elements?

[Darren Grey]

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/

[Chex Warrior]

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.

[getter77]

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.

[getter77]

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!

[getter77]

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!

[getter77]

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!

[getter77]

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.

[getter77]

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.

[getter77]

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!

[getter77]

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.

[getter77]

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.

[getter77]

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.

[getter77]

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.