A Valley Without Wind (Now at v1.2)

[getter77]

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.

...

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.

[getter77]

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!

[getter77]

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.

/////

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.

[getter77]

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.

[getter77]

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.

[getter77]

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

[Holsety]

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. 
(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.)

[getter77]

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~

[getter77]

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

[getter77]

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!

[getter77]

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