Arcen Games News

AVWW Beta 0.578 "Battlefield Glow" Released!

2012-02-16T13:22:00.000-05:00

This one is mostly just a maintenance release with a bunch of polish and bugfixes. However, as part of that we've also decreased initial load times, decreased RAM usage, and changed how the glows work when characters and enemies are casting spells.

Also, battlefield missions have gotten a substantial upgrade in that they are now wider, include enemy towers that you have to work through in order to be able to damage the enemy base, and have a more randomized component in the form of the elements of said towers.

More to come soon, more along the line of missions next time. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 5.026, "Pay Attention, Exos!" Released!

2012-02-15T22:29:00.000-05:00

This one is primarily for a single bugfix: to prevent the exo-galactic waves from getting all distracted with minutiae and wandering off after minor ships. While funny to see your ultimate enemy do this, it wasn't exactly conductive to their usual hardcore challenge.

There's also a couple of other handy fixes and tweaks in here. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.577 "Transplant Upgrade" Released!

2012-02-15T22:11:00.000-05:00

This one has a really large amount of random polish/bugfix items in it, and the overall effect on the game is pretty notable. Things are visually and game-flow-wise smoother, and a number of the minor annoyances that people have reported have been dealt with.

Several key interfaces are also now more self-explanatory, and are also now more visually-oriented for faster navigation. Oh, and the stats of characters have been rejiggered a ton, so that they actually have more of an impact on gameplay; having a lot or a little mana, for instance, now actually creates a difference in game feel.

Upgrade Stones
The really exciting new thing in this release isn't something that we'd really planned on doing, though: vitality stones have become upgrade stones. The general idea is that now each character has a limited number of upgrades (10), but they can be spread across three categories rather than all having to go into the health category.

This is obviously a big win for character customization, which is something that people have shown a lot of interest in. But it's also a big win for the meaningfulness of permadeath: because whatever upgrades you have applied to your character all get lost on death.

There are a couple of ways to avoid this loss on permadeath:

First of all, try not to die. The death of a maturely-upgraded character should be the culmination of a lot of mistakes, not a single missed jump or what have you. So if you have a character that you care a lot about (for gameplay reasons, not thematic/emotional reasons), then take extra care.

Secondly, if you have a character you love, and you're about to go somewhere that they are not suited for (or that is just too high-risk in general), then you can use the newly-patched-up Glyph Transplant scroll to leave them at your settlement and take another NPC along as your character instead.

Doing this, you can actually build up a small stable of buffed-up NPCs that are each suited for specific kinds of tasks -- or you can just play each character until they die, and then build a new one from the ground up. Either way is valid at the average difficulty, but the point is that now you have a lot more choices (and some new ways to deal with the higher difficulties, in particular).

More to come soon. There's more stuff along the lines of this sort of cleanup/polish/training/clarity that we're working on, but we're also working on new missions. Keith has majorly upgraded battlefield missions today, although they weren't quite ready for release yet, and we're both really looking forward to implementing a bunch of the player-suggested missions (plus some more ideas of our own) very soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

A Valley Without Wind, Vol. 1 soundtrack on sale!

2012-02-15T10:33:00.001-05:00

After a long year, the first soundtrack to our game "A Valley Without Wind, Vol. 1" is now on sale!

It's available through iTunes (search for "A Valley Without Wind" in the iTunes store).

It's also available for purchase at Band Camp: http://arcenmusic.bandcamp.com/
Or you can purchase it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Valley-Without-Wind-Vol/dp/B0079G0N1E/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1329318756&sr=8-4

These are remastered high quality versions of the in-game tracks. Thank you all for your continued support, it means so much to us!

AVWW Beta 0.576 "Bug Bomb" Released!

2012-02-13T12:55:00.000-05:00

This one is a collection of a few bugfixes, and one balance tweak. We just wanted to go ahead and get these out ASAP.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 5.025, "Balance Beam ," Released!

2012-02-13T10:38:00.000-05:00

As Keith put it, "finally got around to some long-needed rebalancing" with this one.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.575 "Escape Hatch" Released!

2012-02-11T10:09:00.000-05:00

This one is just a single bugfix to the prior version.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.574 "Ducking And Warping With Friends" Released!

2012-02-11T00:54:00.000-05:00

This one has more bugfixes and balance tweaks, but also three major new features. Oh, and the non-HUD parts of the GUI have been majorly upgraded once again, too.

The first is one that players have been clamoring for for a while, but which I've not been too enthused about: the ability for your character to duck, and even duck and slide with a bit of momentum. I've finally come around to the idea, though, and now that I see it in the game it is pretty cool. I'm still really more of a jump-to-avoid kind of guy, but it's nice to have options.

The next big feature is the new warp mechanics. Be sure and read the release notes about those, but the general idea is that warp potions (that you carry around) are gone, and warp stones (that you find in the wild and visit) are replacing them. In other words, this is becoming a little more traditional for the genre in terms of the warp mechanics. This has many various benefits, which are explained in depth in the release notes.

Multiplayer Graduates From Opt-In Alpha
The third major new feature is CO-OP! We've had the multiplayer in an opt-in alpha state for months now, and some servers have been getting quite a bit of use. Toll's server in particular has been the go-to destination for beta phase 2 public play, I have to say.

Please see the release notes for all the details on the co-op updates, too, but the short of it is that we finally have movement smoothing in, and so huge swathes of gameplay now perform just like you'd expect rather than jerking around. There are still some known bugs, but these are just little isolated glitches that we need to clean up, not anything to do with fundamental architecture anymore.

So that's why we're moving the co-op up to beta status, and no longer requiring people to opt in to it: now it's just a matter of squashing isolated small bugs with the multiplayer for it to be 1.0 ready. Oh, and of course some new features like a server listing and some anti-griefing admin controls are things we also want to add before 1.0. It's a real relief to have the core there and working so well, though.

It's also really refreshing to see our remaining to-do list for beta phase 2 dwindling like it is. Lots to do next week, but then we should be moving into beta phase 3. More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.573 "Vital Signs Improving" Released!

2012-02-09T13:31:00.000-05:00

This one is mostly a bugfix/balance release, but it includes a lot of helpful items. It also introduces three new "diluter" enchants that are helpful for getting the specific kinds of tier orbs you need. The biggest change in this version is a host of shifts to how vitality stones work: basically making them less annoying and death more meaningful.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.572 "Enchanted Gills" Released!

2012-02-08T19:38:00.000-05:00

This one is absolutely preposterously large in terms of its affect on the overall game experience. First of all, perhaps least interestingly from a gameplay perspective, the HUD graphics have been completely overhauled. Man does it look better now!

Enchants At Last!
Finally those little blue enchant containers have a purpose again. And if you've been collecting them during the last few releases, you've not been collecting them in vain -- expect a flood of enchants as you collect enchant containers in this new version. All the stored up enchant points will be put to use getting you new and cool stuff to catch up with what you would have gotten before.

Enchants are basically like magical equipment that you can put on your body. There are three kinds of enchants: arms (of which you can equip two at once -- one for left arm, one for right), torso (of which you can equip one at once), and legs (of which you can also equip one at once).

The enchants for your arms have a lot to do with your abilities, and things like modifiers for outgoing damage, or outgoing damage buffs by element.

Enchants for your torso have some damage reduction buffs, lighting capabilities (like emit light, which has now been retired, used to do), and other special effects such as stealth (so that enemies don't see you from as far away) or acid gills (so that you can breathe underwater and not take acid damage).

The enchants for your legs are more logistical in nature, and have to do with things like increasing jump height or run speed, letting you fall slower and avoid falling damage, or letting you fall faster but avoid getting pushed around by the wind in windstorms.

Enchants always have one core focus (like incoming damage reduction, for instance), but then they typically often have other secondary effects attached to them. So for your torso you can easily get an enchant that gives off a huge amount of light but does nothing else -- that's kind of a raw deal, though. Better is something like reduction of incoming damage, plus a smaller amount of light emission. And there are various other permutations you can also find and use, especially if you don't mind using something like Ball of Light.

There's a separate inventory for enchants, accessible with the Z key, so you don't have to worry about all those enchants cluttering up your main inventory ability bars. That's pretty handy on its own!

Acid Gills
As noted above in the enchants section, you can now find various enchants that let you breathe underwater and which protect you from acid damage from the water. This means that, with one of these equipped, you can go exploring in the oceans and ocean shallows at last! This is very important so that you can actually go and get things like coral and sea essence, and even so that you can complete some of the unlocks needed to get to certain materials.

Key Balance Work
Also really important in this release is that the rare commodity unlocks and general crafting cost requirements have all been re-analyzed and tons of mistakes and logical missteps in those have been corrected. So it's now actually feasible to craft all of the appropriate spell tiers at the appropriate time during the game again, which is certainly really important to being able to play much.

Hand in hand with the crafting-related balance, is actual enemy balance. Previously, the game got linearly harder as the continent's tier went up. Enemies hit you for more damage, and your allied minions did not go up in tier during battlefield missions. Now your allied minions go up in tier right with the enemies, and your resistance to damage also goes up with the continent tier.

Oh, and the stats on enemies and on player spells have been retooled again -- the mana cost versus the spell power of spells was really out of whack in prior versions. You can read about the details of why, and what the fix was, in the release notes. But suffice it to say here, it's way better balanced now.

Enemy Progress (EP) Becomes Civilization Progress (CP)
To really understand the nature of this change, I think it's important to just go read the section devoted to explaining it in the release notes. It's a substantial change, and hard to summarize effectively.

But at the most basic level, it's reaffirming what we've always maintained: that this game is, at core, an adventure game. The strategic elements are meant to layer on top of it and provide interesting choices, not to rule the game with an iron first.

Put another way, it's switching things around so that there's a lot more carrot and a lot less stick. Players were telling us that the EP mechanic was stressing them out and that it wasn't any fun, so we've taken that feedback and come up with something that should be a lot more fun while still getting at the same basic style of game progression for player power.

Secret Missions Coming Soon, But Not In Yet

We actually didn't work on secret missions at all since the last release, because some other features in this release turned out to seem a lot more pressing. But now that these are done, secret missions and then the new warp mechanics are the very next things on our list.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Arcen Games Quoted in Game Developer Magazine

2012-02-08T00:26:00.003-05:00

Chris is quoted in the opening of Soren Johnson's excellent game design article "Design success means knowing what to do with feedback." Johnson goes in depth on how taking in feedback properly from a development team, testers, and/or player community is critical toward reaching success in a game's design -- specifically touching on how important it is to develop the ability to pick out what feedback will and won't work for your design.

The piece was originally published in Game Developer Magazine and can be currently viewed online via Gamasutra.

AI War Beta 5.024, "Carrier Rules Of Engagement," Released!

2012-02-06T12:42:00.000-05:00

This one has another big batch of fixes and tweaks, on a variety of ships and parts of the interface. Some welcome changes to the Plasma Siege Starships as well as the Spirecraft Shield Bearers, for instance, as well as Spider Turrets.

The biggest bunch of changes, however, is to the AI Carriers: how you're options work for targeting them, what happens when too many of them get destroyed on one planet at one time, and so on. Lots of player feedback really helped to shape these changes, so hopefully these are ones that work out well in practice. As always, let us know what you think!

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.570/0.571 "The Guardian City" Released!

2012-02-04T00:21:00.000-05:00

This one has a huge, huge number of miscellaneous fixes and tweaks; far too many to even try summarizing. Well, normally I would try, but it's really late and I'm incredibly tired. So I'll just point you to the link above, for most of it.

Guardian Powers And Citybuilding Structures Are In!
But the big marquee feature in this new version are the guardian powers, I will say. Most of them (37 out of 41 of them) are focused on the new citybuilding portion of the game, which is about beefing up your NPCs so that they can perform yet more powerful guardian powers for you. However, the other four let you: a) extend the life of the continent before it gets destroyed by the overlord; b) create an overlord or rescue-NPC mission anywhere you want; or c) create new rare commodity missions wherever you want.

More will come with guardian powers with time, but already these change the playing field dramatically -- suddenly you're no longer quite so at the mercy of the random number generator in terms of how you go about civilizing your continent. We're super excited to finally have those in, as they've been planned and in the works for a very long time now.

Secret Missions Are Almost Done, But Not In This One
Secret missions are the other big thing that is still lacking in terms of that sort of strategic power balance, and you'll be happy to know that the actual mechanism for secret missions are 100% done. The reason they aren't included in this release is that we didn't have any actual missions done to use them with yet!

On Monday I hope to get three or four small new mission types in place, all of which would be for secret missions only, and which would let you go about finding your own guardian powers and rare commodities through freeform exploration rather than having to use what the world map RNG hands you.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Just Press Start Podcast And Gnome's Lair Interview

2012-02-03T16:01:00.000-05:00

With A Valley Without Wind emerging out of over a month of heavy construction and significant changes, we're entering a phase where the game is settling into a stable enough state for us to start chatting with the press about it once more. This week we've had a couple new interviews hit:

Chris and I had an excellent time getting together with the gents at Just Press Start for a chat. In their latest podcast we discuss our games (specifically AVWW) give a bit about our backgrounds, and touch on various other topics.

Additionally, our friend Konstantinos Dimopoulos of Gnome's Lair has posted an interview where I talk with him about the current state of Valley, how we've reached this point, and where we hope and expect it to go now that we can see a bit of light coming from the end of the tunnel in regards to 1.0.

We're working steadily on some major items as far as providing new/updated media and info for everyone to check out. Stay tuned for that in the next week or two.

AVWW Beta 0.569 "Water Cushion " Released!

2012-02-01T15:00:00.000-05:00

This one is a very small maintenance release that fixes two bugs -- the more serious of which that falling very far in water could be death. We didn't want people to have to work around that for very long!

It also includes a great new battlefield music track for the battlefield missions, though, as a bonus.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.568 "The Sky That Fell" Released!

2012-02-01T13:25:00.000-05:00

This one has a whole bunch of fixes and tweaks to a lot of random parts of the game, first of all. There's also quite a bit of minor polish that has been applied, which will hopefully make the experience smoother both for experienced and for new players alike.

The first big thing in this release is that falling damage is back -- but in a much tamer form than before. If you leap off a really tall building or down a giant hole, expect to take some damage. This seems in keeping with the general feel and tone of the game at this point, but it's a tame enough amount of damage that slight missteps aren't going to result in character deaths. Details can be found in the release notes, but I think that even folks who normally groan at falling damage (which I often do myself) should be pleased with how this worked out.

The really big change in this version is the skies. After much polling and discussion, we decided to get rid of the dynamic skies that were previously being provided by Unisky. It was a cool system, but tended to be too homogeneous and way too load-heavy. Such a small percentage of our players could use it, and it was holding us back from doing some things like having the amount of daylight hours vary by season, etc.

So now we're down to just one model for skies, based on what were previously called "static" skies. But I think you'll find that the new skies are anything but static -- we have animated suns and moons, we have all sorts of cloud motion, we have sunsets and sunrises with the stars coming out at night through the clouds (most of the time) and all sorts of things.

It's a vastly simpler system for generating these skies, and so you won't see the crazy roiling stuff you used to with dynamic skies, but if you look at the game as a whole -- between different time periods and regions -- the skies are actually a lot more varied and unique now than they were in the old dynamic skies system (which had a lot of unique effects, but the effects were very similar between all regions).

And best of all, this new system of animated skies should run on pretty much anything. If anyone has problems with the animation load causing their framerate to be too low, let me know and I can put in options to turn that down. But the load is low enough that that should be necessary for a very tiny minority of our players (if any) as opposed to 80% or more (based on my best estimate) being unable to run dynamic skies at a decent framerate before.

Keith has been hard at work on guardian powers and secret missions, by the way. But there are some parts that I was supposed to tend to that I didn't have time for yet, and so those aren't actually in this release. The next release should have both of those, and will hopefully be out tomorrow night at the latest.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 5.023, "Plasma Siege Starships," Released!

2012-01-30T18:48:00.000-05:00

This one has a bunch of tweaks and fixes that should be really welcome (almost all of them were player requests, after all). There's actually quite a bit that is significant in here, such as many golems getting tweaks and turrets getting energy costs rebalanced almost across the board.

But of course none of these compare to... the antimatter starship. I mean siege. I mean dreadnought. I mean, now it's actually called "plasma siege." Wow that's a lot of identity shifting to go through in its life. This is a ship that has been in the game since very shortly after 1.0, so basically since June 2009, and we've just never been able to get a design for this one that folks have been happy with long-term.

This new design I didn't see until reading about them in the release notes that Keith typed up, but I think this stands a good chance of being the final design at last. The plasma siege starships have a unique role, a useful role, but not one that is prone to either abuse or long periods of listlessness.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.566/0.567 "OSX Framerates Rejoice" Released!

2012-01-30T16:49:00.001-05:00

This one is another maintenance release of sorts, focusing on this same mantis issue from 0.565. On the bright side, not only does that issue seem truly dead now (knock on wood), but performance in general has seen yet another boost. On my OSX laptop I now routinely get 100+ fps, whereas at the start of beta I was more in the 45-55 fps range.

There are also a couple of other tweaks and fixes in this one, and a lot of code work was done that isn't yet visible in the game. Keith has been hard at work on guardian powers while I've been hunting this one bug, and we hope to have the guardian powers and the related citybuilding stuff out tomorrow (again, knock on wood). The citybuilding model is incredibly, vastly simpler than the old model we used to use, but I also think it's more fun and much better integrated into the main game itself.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.565 "Better Texture Sorting And Other Tricks " Released!

2012-01-28T14:47:00.000-05:00

This one is more or less a maintenance patch based on issues reported in this mantis issue. It should be a help to performance in general, though, even for folks not affected by the core reported issue.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.564 "Gravity Kicks In" Released!

2012-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

This one isn't really that large in what it changes, all told, but the thing that it changes is pretty fundamental: wooden platforms and player-placed crates no longer float in the sky. They wood platforms will still hang against any sort of background wall, but in the surface areas they are now useless.

This changes... quite a bit. Especially really early in the game, when you don't have ride the lightning yet. It also really makes the exterior areas feel more distinct from the undergrounds and interiors, which is something we always strive for.

Along with this, crates and wooden platforms now float when underwater. So you can deploy a crate and then stand on it to escape from a deep watery grave. But you can no longer effectively put a wooden platform under water at all, because you can't stand on it while it rises, and when it reaches the top it's probably too high to help you if you needed it in the first place. So beware!

There were also fixes for a couple of big bugs with the new population code in the prior version. One was apparently tanking performance on some machines/savegames, and another was causing bosses to not spawn sometimes, or things like icicle leapers in the desert even when it wasn't time to migrate yet, etc.

We're also getting closer on the guardian powers and the various lightweight citybuilding components that go along with that. The last of the images for that mode (for 1.0, anyway) are now in place, and that's why this version takes a bit longer to download. The guardian powers aren't accessible in the game yet, but hopefully by Tuesday we'll have the first of them in there for you to play with.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 5.022, "Minor Tweaks And Fixes," Released!

2012-01-27T18:09:00.002-05:00

This one is really just a maintenance release. There are a couple of balance tweaks that players requested, and we fixed a bug from the prior version that had busted tutorials.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.563 "Migratory Battlefields" Released!

2012-01-26T20:16:00.000-05:00

This one is one that I think players will find very exciting. It's not as massive as the prior one, but it does include a number of key fixes and two major new features that have been asked-for.

The first is... a new mission type! At long last. This one is a "battlefield" sort of mission, and plays out with you and your army of spawned minions fighting a horde of enemy minions. The battles are pretty pitched, and as you unlock more enemy types they get quite a bit trickier. See the release notes for details.

The Removal Of Monster Spawners
The second major new thing in this release is actually two features: the removal of monster nests and the addition of migratory patterns for monsters. Monster nests have bugged a lot of people for a while, and the general consensus among players was that they were fun in boss rooms but not much of anywhere else.

So there's a completely new way of spawning enemies anywhere except for boss rooms, which matches more the experience that folks were looking for. There are a few things we still need to do there, mainly handle monsters drowning properly again (rather than trying to warp out to monster spawners that no longer exist), and also to make it so that monsters don't jump off of cliffs so readily.

Monster Migrations
In terms of the migratory patterns, the idea is that as the tier of enemy forces goes up, the monsters start spreading out of their regions that they normally would be in. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time, because the idea of (say) the dinosaurs escaping the lava flats over time and running amuck elsewhere in the world is really appealing to me (and no, there's no lysine contingency).

Until all the recent work with the per-continent tiers, I never had a way to handle this sort of thing, but now we have monsters migrating away. That adds a lot of considerations to the world map that weren't there before, because now monsters from a harder region type will eventually migrate into "easier" region types that are nearby.

Having one chunk hold monster types that normally wouldn't ever be seen together (robots and dinosaurs, hey) also really allows us to hit a high multiplicative complexity a lot sooner. That was something that I've always liked about AI War -- the combination of the various ship types leads to unexpected results. Having the segregation of not only 9 time periods in AVWW, but also indoor/outdoor/underground monsters, and region-type-specific monsters, really cuts down on how much we're able to have that happen.

We'd have to have something like 36x as much content as AI War in order to get the same amount of combinations of enemy types, and as more region types are added that would only get worse. We want to have a lot of content anyway, but we also want to make strong use of every bit that we add. The migratory patterns really pull that off in an interesting way, I think -- they avoid the other end of the spectrum, where everything is too homogeneous because there's always all the combinations everywhere.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 5.021, "Hybrid Helper Pie," Released!

2012-01-24T22:16:00.000-05:00

This one is filled with some really cool stuff that I had no hand in. Keith has been really adding in some neat new features with this one, as well as a lot of housekeeping stuff.

First off, there's a lot of balance stuff in here. AI superforts won't be so annoying to deal with anymore, and a lot of the neinzul ships in particular also got some balance shifts. Then there were a bunch of smaller changes to things like showing the munitions boost amounts in tooltips, things of that nature.

Now to the new features: there's basically now an observer mode to the game, but it actually goes even deeper than that. When players have the setting "allow team control of ships" enabled, then the observer can actually act as a "helper" instead, and share control of that player's ships, resource bars, and so on.

That "switch to UI of other player" function actually works in regular gameplay between full players with the "allow team control of ships" setting on, come to that. So it's a really pair of features in that it allows a) multiple full players to switch between each others' interfaces; b) one or more observer players to watch the game; c) one or more observers to act as "helpers" to one or more fully players.

There's actually a pretty substantial list of other tweaks and balance changes in this release, too, but that's definitely my favorite new feature in a while. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.562 "Continental Drift " Released!

2012-01-24T20:08:00.000-05:00

This one is... massive. Actually, that's a bit of an understatement. I'm not sure that this is our largest single beta release ever for any of our games, but it's certainly our largest one that was done in just a week.

Consequently, even trying to summarize what all has changed is really difficult -- so I'm not going to. To really understand all the many changes, you'll want to read the release notes themselves. It includes not only detailed information, but also multiple summaries about many of the things that are changing.

Closing In On Beta Phase 3
What I will talk about in this post, really broadly, is the overall direction shift that this release signifies. We're not yet done with beta phase 2, but we're getting close. My goal is to be done with this phase of beta by the end of next week, and to have:

1. The game in a fun, closed-loop state (meaning that there is a reward cycle and a challenge cycle that feed upon themselves and allow for unlimited play in the sense that early beta phase 1 versions of the game did -- we're almost to that point now, but not quite).

2. Multiplayer in a non-alpha state, meaning a few key bugfixes and most importantly the smoothing for player and monster positions. If we also had time for server lists that would also be a plus, but we'll see how that goes.

3. In general all the core subsystems working in a final-for-1.0 state (they won't be perfectly balanced, but their premise would be set). Missions are getting darn close, the crafting and materials are now pretty much there, and most of the other core mechanics are already there now. But we still are lacking side/secret missions, guardian powers, a finalized enchant system, and a finalized warp system (though the current one is seeming less crusty lately, it could still be better).

More on all this in a bit.

A Brief Timeline Of This Beta
Beta phase 1 was all about refining the core engine and mechanics of things like shooting and physics and all that sort of thing. We also found out a lot about what people did and didn't like about the game, and that determined the future course of the game to a huge degree.

Back in September, I couldn't have predicted that the game would ever be in the state it is in now, and yet the current state is a much purer version of the core concepts that we've been striving for since last January or even before.

Beta phase 2 was chiefly characterized by violent change to the game. The brainstorming subforum was an enormous help, as were players, in helping us to transform the game into what we really wanted it to be. A lot of things of the "sounds great on paper, is less fun in practice" variety were thrown out, and a lot of new concepts came into play.

Figuring out how to tie all the parts of the game together without over-extending our time budget or without making the game itself a confusing mess, was a chief challenge. But at the same time, figuring out how to introduce more strategy and tactics into the game was really on my mind.

Ultimately we've wound up with an interface that involves way fewer subscreens and menus, and which has stripped away a lot of the clutter from things like the world map and the settlements, and even the number of types of crafting has shrunk from six types down to one. Lots and lots of streamlining.

But at the same time, we've been trying to figure out ways to make the remaining mechanics a lot deeper, and to give the players a lot more choice. That's a big part of what this specific release is about -- the new Enemy Progress counter gives you way more choice than you had before, but it keeps a very stiff opportunity cost for each action. The new tiered crafting system does the same. And soon, when we add in guardian powers and secret missions, you'll have even more decision-making latitude.

Beta phase 3, when we reach that point, is going to be all about finishing what we have and making it a focused, awesome 1.0 experience. Post-1.0 we're going to want to explore new things and layer on more stuff, but prior to 1.0 we're going to want to make sure that we have a lot of content: plenty of enemies, spells, hazards, enchants, guardian powers, missions, unlockables, loot, and so on.

In order for your choices to feel meaningful and varied, there has to be enough content that you don't fall into a set routine. Even compared to a month ago, things are already much better on that front, but there's more we want to do before a 1.0 version is ready hopefully in March. And of course there's also polish -- we've been working on polish the whole way through, but there's still going to be more to do between now and 1.0.

So How Does This New Version Support The Game's Goals?
Once again, the release notes talk about all of this in depth. But a few specific points:

1. The new level-less progression system is more organic and vastly more flexible. There are more ways you can customize your character and your civilization (versus all the numbers just going up across the board every time you level up).

2. Not having region levels really lets us make better use of space. Rather than each continent being a fairly linear "you must play in this section now because it's the only part that matches your level," it's instead far more open-ended and you can choose the sections you want to spend time in.

Wherever you go, the challenge is appropriate, and this even helps to encourage revisiting old areas -- heck, after moving on to another continent we can even introduce reasons to come back to older continents, come to that. That wasn't very easy to do in the older style. Nor were things like vortex pylons, which were previously removed but which will be making a comeback.

3. In general, the game is mostly moving away from having an overall progression of power, instead having per-continent progressions of power. However, there are still some progression of enemy strength/complexity and of personal power that cross continents, so keeping going in a single world is still going to be more interesting in most cases compared to starting a new world after you win a continent. More on that here.

4. In general, the game is coming down to two main activities: missions and side exploration.

Prior to our power-coding phase a few months back, there was no central driving force (aside from the distant goal of killing overlords), and so the game was all about exploration in an infinite world. That really appealed to some people, and really didn't to others. And myself, I was on the fence. Having freedom is awesome, that's something that is really important to me in an adventure game. But having no central direction... well, that had never been the idea we wanted for this game.

So during the power-coding period we introduced missions, and made a lot of things centralized through this missions mechanic. That was met with some dismay from folks that wanted the free-roaming experience they had been accustomed to. And while I felt the missions system was an enormous improvement, I could also understand how the feel of the game had changed, and not for the better in the case of freedom. It was kind of missions or nothing for a while there, and that had never been what we wanted for the game, either.

Growing pains! With this release, the final balance is starting to become more clear. The average player will spend about half of their time on missions, and about half of their time out on self-directed exploration. There are a lot of things in this release that you can't accomplish any other way except to go out on some self-directed exploration. It's not just about gathering supplies, it's about unlockables and non-rare commodities and all that sort of fun stuff. But by the same token, the missions remain the only way to accomplish certain other tasks: putting up wind shelters, rescuing NPCs, getting rare commodities, etc.

Secret/Side Missions Are Still A Missing Link At The Moment
In the coming week or two, we'll be pushing this duality of the free-exploration and the missions even further, with the secret/side missions, which get found via exploration rather than showing up on the world map. These will let you do things like rescue NPCs that you find in a cavern, which is a fun thing to do, but it will still tie into the EP cost system without your having to undertake a formal mission from the world map.

The ultimate goal for us is to make it so that the game automatically responds to however much freedom or structure you seek, providing the experience that matches your personality or even just how you feel that day (example: you spend a lot of time exploring, and thus accomplish a lot of side missions with no need to do the ones on the world map; or you stick close to the world map because that's easier, and thus aren't forced to go off and explore the wilds much if you don't want to).

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.561 "Don't Follow Those Lights! " Released!

2012-01-17T20:18:00.000-05:00

This one contains two new enemies: Will O' The Wisps, and Crashed Land Speeder Robots. One very fantasy, one very sci-fi. The swamp, the junkyards, and the thawing ice age areas definitely feel a lot more rounded-out now, although of course there's still more enemies we want to add with time.

This version also completely finishes the GUI redo: there was only a tiny bit left after the past release anyhow, and now even that little bit is done. So everything with the GUI should be working well, and if you see something amiss please let us know.

Another welcome new feature in this version is the ability to skip the intro mission when starting a new world. We know that more experienced players who have already played the intro mission once aren't going to want to play it repeatedly.

There's also a lot of other internal work that we've been doing, leading up to something we'll be excited to fully reveal either tomorrow or the next day (hopefully tomorrow). Now that we have more enemies in the game, we're turning our short-term focus to improving the per-continent game flow and the missions. Those are currently the weakest elements of the game by far, as they have been in a very incomplete state since last month, and now we have enough content to actually realize the vision that we started with the power-coding period.

Currently our goal is to have those in a way more satisfying state by the end of the week, and then to kick into high gear with new content of all sorts. In other words not just enemies and spells, but also new mission types, mission rewards, and lots of things to explore outside of missions themselves.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.560 "The Green Clock-Cleaning Machine" Released!

2012-01-13T20:39:00.000-05:00

This one comes only two days after the last release, which suddenly seems fast. What happened to our daily release schedule!? Well, mainly it's that we're working on slightly larger features that take more than a day to implement each time. Or in the case of this specific release, a lot of medium features.

There are two new enemies: the Clockwork Probe and the Giant Green Amoeba. But in addition to that, the logic of the Giant Red and Giant Blue Amoebas has also been updated so that they are substantially more unique from one another. And the new Giant Green is really a whole new enemy unto itself; I'm finding it to quickly be my favorite boss to play against. It's difficult, but it's also just plain fun.

The most-reported longstanding physics bug is also fixed with this version: that of not being able to jump onto/off of platforms that were not fully expanded due to being too close to walls or other obstacles. And that bug with the deep being insanely too dark when not in a windstorm is also fixed.

There's also a variety of other fixes and tweaks in here; and two new ambient music tracks this time. More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.559 "The Changeling And The Hydra" Released!

2012-01-11T21:26:00.000-05:00

This one comes very near to finishing the GUI rework, which has been my main focus for about a week. There's essentially a little bit of cleanup left to do, and then one last control (the "grid view"), which is only used on a single screen (the commodities inventory).

I think that you'll find the interface in this one to be a night and day difference with prior versions. All the graphics are pretty much the same except for the text, and none of the functionality has been changed, but just having the text better colored and sized and bordered is an immense aid to readability. Spell descriptions no longer feel so spreadsheet-ish, for instance. And the chat box in multiplayer will no longer make you want to rip your hair out.

Monster Stuff
More exciting from a gameplay standpoint, however, is the work that Keith has been doing during this time. Multi-part monsters and multi-form monsters are two major additions to the game, and we've got a few salient examples already added.

The crippled dragon has been updated so that it can now start flying from time to time after a certain level is reached, which is an example of a multi-form monster.

The urban predator has been updated to have three missile bays that you can shoot (and which shoot at you independently of the main body), which is our first example of a multi-part monster. The missile bays actually make it harder to hit the main body, adding some degree of protection for it; but at the same time, shooting the missile bays jams them, so suddenly you have a lot more tactical choices at your disposal when attacking this enemy.

Next there's an all-new enemy called the urban crawler. If you want to experience it in-game without any spoilers, then skip reading that section of the release notes, as they give rather detailed descriptions of it. This is by far our most complex enemy ever in this game, and it's a great example of all sorts of new capabilities that we'll be able to extend to future enemies that we add, too.

Hazards
The first of the new hazards has also been added to the game. These come in the form of stinging nettles, which you'll start encountering in the swamps. There's going to be a lot more hazards coming up, but for now that's a good start down that road (mainly considering how distracted we've been with the monster logic and the GUI for the last week).

More to come soon -- and actually, there's a number of other things in the release notes that I didn't even touch on, like a new ambient music track for the desert. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.558 "Seizing Menus " Released!

2012-01-05T22:56:00.000-05:00

This one is continues the menu/HUD/text work from yesterday's release in a fairly visible fashion, and it continues the multi-part monster work in a less-so fashion.

Multi-part monsters are working quite well, but now we're doing all sorts of fun other things like making it so that you can shoot a gun on the machine to jam it, or you can shoot and destroy its wheel to make it unable to move. And we're having things like enemies with multiple weapons attached to them, and are even working on things like enemies that can change form mid-fight.

So... lots of extensions, and those are going to be benefiting the (as yet unreleased) urban crawler, the recently added urban predator, and the longstanding crippled dragon. A lot of these enemies (especially those which are bosses other otherwise "centerpieces") are taking longer than the smaller enemies tend to, but they are really a lot more interesting.

Ultimately I think that a satisfying experience comes from having a mix of enemy scales and complexities, though, so we'll be having a lot more smaller enemies in addition to these big beefy ones. Once I get finished with the GUI work that I'm currently doing, I'll be working on some smaller enemies, some player spells, some new spells for existing enemies (such as the skelebot overlord and centurion), and environmental hazards.

Speaking of the GUI work, that's made a lot more strides today. We now have word wrap on the sprite text, plus a lot of other new features. And a lot more sections of the interface now make use of the new functionality, which generally makes the game feel more polished and easier to read. And it solves probably a dozen cosmetic issues that I'm going to have to go back and hunt up on mantis. Not to mention the performance benefit.

At this point, I've pretty much converted the entire HUD of the game, and all that is left is all the menus and the tooltips. That comes with its own set of challenges, of course, but I'm hopeful that I can get that finished up in a matter of a couple of days and be back onto more interesting things. There were a lot of bugs that we just couldn't solve any other way than ditching the Unity GUI, though, so that's what we're doing.

This SpriteText stuff, and the general GUI revamp, is something I've wanted to do since at least this time last year, if not long before. It was one of those things I just never seemed to have time for, and I kind of built it up as this really overwhelming task in my head, so it was easy to keep putting it off. Coming back from the holiday I was really energized, though, and I decided to use that energy to finally tackle this thing. So far it's going really well, knock on wood!

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.557 "Of Bitmap Fonts And Pipelines" Released!

2012-01-04T23:11:00.000-05:00

This one is another really major release in a lot of ways, as it finally implements some major performance and render-capability improvements that I've been wanting to do since even before we started beta.

I'd been avoiding these things since they tend to be a time sink, but we're now hitting the point where there were a number of bugs that I just couldn't solve any other way than addressing the more fundamental issues -- pretty much all of which are with Unity's vanilla GUI capabilities. I've been adapting in the better third-party EZGUI code, with a lot of heavy customizations for even better performance and to fit into our render pipeline.

Anyway, I'm doing my best not to get sucked into a major time sink with these GUI changes, but the results that are already in place from what I've been doing rather speak for themselves -- the parts I've swapped out so far are really more attractive, and in some cases I'm seeing a 50% speed improvement, which is huge. Not that the game was slow before, but we want to make sure it is able to run as close to 60fps on as many computers as possible.

This release also includes a couple of new music tracks which are both awesome, a couple of general bugfixes, and quite a few multiplayer bugfixes. The multi-part enemy code is also working quite well now, and the Urban Predator enemy from the prior release is going to be seeing an update hopefully tomorrow to include some of that new functionality. Another new enemy, the Urban Crawler, is nearing completion and should hopefully also be ready tomorrow.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.556, "Urban Predatation" Released!

2012-01-03T11:55:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone! This one is our first update of 2012, and it lays the groundwork for a lot of new things to come.

Urban Predator
First of all, there's a cool new miniboss called the urban predator, and it's basically this big hovering spaceship-looking thing. Flaming exhaust shoots out of the bottom of it as it moves around, and it fires both homing missiles and non-homing plasma bolts at you. Working on this enemy also laid the groundwork for things like proper lava/water/ice falls, and other environmental hazards of that sort which will be coming soon.

Combat Improvements
The next big change here is in how the collisions work with melee attacks of enemies, and spells like launch rock, etc. Previously, spells that were piercing or exploding could only damage a given enemy once. That meant that if you did something clever like fire creeping death into an enemy, then splash back the enemy to knock them into the creeping death again, the cleverness accomplished nothing.

Now, piercing spells can hit each individual target once per second, so a single spell can hit a single enemy more than once. As another example, if an enemy is walking along inside a cloud of creeping death, the creeping death will keep damaging them once per second rather than them being immune to that cloud after the first hit. All of this really makes things feel more natural, and opens up new avenues for player cleverness in the combat model.

We've also improved the swarm logic for things like the tiny fairies, the dragon breath, and the new missiles. They'll actually look more like a swarm (and even take different paths quite a bit), rather than stacking up on one another so much. This isn't just a visual thing, because it really makes them behave in a way that feels quite different when you're trying to attack them (splash damage is harder to hit the group with, for instance).

Balance Improvements
One particularly welcome change is that the effect of playing up on a +1 higher region level is now only 50% harder, rather than 100% harder. And on up 50% per level, rather than 100%. This should make it a lot easier to play up a region level or two.

Also, the way that hanging traps has been redone entirely. You can't destroy them anymore at all, but they don't flood quite as much lava anymore and you can block lava with crates. Also, they now have a randomized timing to each trap, so that you can learn the timing of the bursts of lava in a room, and then run through the opening of them if you prefer.

More to come soon! Right now Keith is working on the first multi-part enemy, which will really open up what we can do with enemies. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

A Valley Without Wind Soundtrack Preview!

2012-01-02T13:55:00.001-05:00

If you've enjoyed the music you've heard in A Valley Without Wind so far, then check out Pablo's Sound Cloud page with a preview of some new tracks!

http://soundcloud.com/pablo-vega-music/sets/a-valley-without-wind

Happy Holidays From Arcen Games!

2011-12-26T08:03:00.000-05:00

I'm a bit late on posting this, but I just wanted to say thanks to all of our supporters who made this year our most successful yet as an indie developer. We're all hugely grateful, and hope that you have a happy, restful holiday season with your family. And that you have plenty of time to play some games, too, be they ours or otherwise. :)

To that end on our own side, every year between Christmas and New Years we're "closed." We still check the emails and forums, but we're slower to do so, and we're not doing any active development during that week-long period. This really helps us recharge to come into January with a bang.

Business will resume as normal for us on January 2nd. In the meantime, thanks again and happy holidays!

AI War: Children of Neinzul donations to Child's Play reach $30,741.89

2011-12-23T10:29:00.000-05:00

As of December 23rd, 2011, we have so far raised and donated $30,741.89 for Child's Play! That's $2,962.77 since our September update, all of which has already gone directly to the charity. That closes out the year with $20,212.18 having been raised and donated in 2011 -- smashing our 2010 numbers, and well more than doubling our original goal of $14,000.00, which we could not be more pleased about.

And sales of Children of Neinzul are still going strong, so there's a chance we might be able to hit triple our goal by the time 2012 is over. We'll keep everyone posted on how the donations are doing. Once again, we're ecstatic to continue our on-going contributions!

More About AI War: Children of Neinzul and Child's Play

When you purchase AI War: Children Of Neinzul, you're not only getting an exciting new expansion, you're also supporting an important cause. Arcen Games has partnered with the Child's Play charity, pledging 100% of the profits from sale of Children of Neinzul (excepting any taxes and distributor fees) to helping sick kids in need.

The staff at Arcen has long admired the work done by Child's Play, and we're very excited to finally be able to contribute in a substantial manner. Our goal for 2010 was to raise $14,000.00 USD for Child's Play, but even after 2010 all of the proceeds from this micro-expansion are continuing to be donated to the charity.

At the moment, this micro-expansion is available directly through the Arcen Online Store ($3.99 USD), as well as through Steam, Impulse, and GamersGate.

AVWW Beta 0.555, "Headshotting, Kneecapping, and Ice Pirate Patrols" Released!

2011-12-22T13:54:00.000-05:00

This one is a really substantial release, so it took us a couple of days.

Enemy Weakspots
First of all are the new enemy weakspots, which really add a lot to the game -- shooting spells into a skelebot's head now does 2x damage, while shooting it in the legs slows it down, for example. Not all enemies have weakspots, but most of the larger enemies do. This really gives you a lot more tactical options in some respects, and also rewards skillshots in a much more substantial way.

In the future we'll be expanding this system to include things like "strong spots" where the enemy counterattacks you when you hit it in a certain area, etc. With that sort of functionality, plus the coming multi-part enemies, we'll really have a lot of interesting things going.

New Enemies
In order to make compelling missions for players to complete, first we really need... more spells and enemies! So that's what we're working on at the moment. A lot of that has also involved expanding our engine's enemy-design capabilities themselves, which is pretty cool. Already the work from the last two days makes a lot of new kinds of enemies possible, such as for instance the new Ice Pirate Patrol Ships.

The Ice Pirates actually can't be damaged by you directly, as they have this massive flying airship in the background and they shell you with big blocks of ice from a distance. The only thing you can do at the moment is avoid the ice. However, there will be missions available that specifically allow you to destroy the ice pirates as a result of the mission, which will be one of those opportunity costs to consider when selecting missions in the future.

We've got another half dozen enemies in the works now, too, most of which already have their art in place but not yet their code. Keith and I are both working on this sort of thing for the time being, so we're able to really push into territory that is new for the game, enemy-wise.

New Spells
There are two new spells in this one.

Summon Tornado is our second summon spell (the other being summon rhino), and this one is really different. It doesn't do a whole lot of damage to enemies, but it does fling them into the air while damaging them moderately. It also follows you around, versus just running off into the distance, so that can be really useful and fun as well.

In order to make summon tornado really work very well, we also had to completely redo the whole knockback immunity system. Now enemies have varying degrees of knockback resistance, rather than a black and white "vulnerable or completely immune" system. This breathes new life into the existing splash back spell, and makes a lot of other interesting things possible as we move forward.

The second new spell in this version was a really complex one to add, but again it adds a lot of new functionality for us with spells for both players and enemies. This one is called Gold Boomerang, and it works much like you'd expect. The cool thing about it is that it can be used to hit multiple enemies in a line, or even the same enemy more than once. Thanks to Dizzard for suggesting this one all the way back in October!

Ow, Shrapnel!
This version also has barrels that explode, harming any players, enemies, or NPCs that are near to them. Expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing with various background objects, which will help to make the terrain a lot more of a tactically-dense environment.

More to come soon. Just as forewarning we'll be closed during the week between Christmas and New Years, but we should be able to squeeze in one more release before the holiday break. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW: Last Chance For IndieDB Top 100 Voting

2011-12-20T18:33:00.000-05:00

There's just a few hours left to vote for IndieDB's Indie of the Year Top 100 competition. A Valley Without Wind has been in the mix and making a push toward the final stage where the ten top vote getters will compete the last week of 2011 for the right to be called IOTY.

If you've yet to have your say in the competition, head over to the Top 100 page and take a look at all the great games. Or if you'd like to vote for AVWW specifically head over to our IndieDB page, scroll down to the "Top 100 Game of 2011" section, and click on the red button that states "vote for this game."

Just over six hours left at the time of writing, so make sure to get your vote submitted in time!

AI War Featured Today In Steam's Holiday Sale Gift Pile Objectives

2011-12-20T15:17:00.003-05:00

Our space strategy title AI War is featured today on Steam's Holiday Sale Gift Pile! For those participating in the mega giveaway contest, make sure to snag the holiday-themed achievement for a gift and/or another token to put into the drawing that will see one entrant walking away with the entire Steam catalog. Which is rather insane.

What's the objective you say? Glad you asked:

In The Midst Of A Cold, Dark Winter - Lose at least 30,000 ships in a single game.

Best of luck picking it up and adding the loot to your growing pile! Remember that both AI War (75% off) and our puzzler Tidalis (just $2) plus all DLC are on massive discount via Steam today through December 31st.

AVWW Beta 0.553 & 0.554, "Shield Dash" Released!

2011-12-20T13:14:00.000-05:00

This one is actually a series of two releases. The first was purely a bugfix version to avoid more people having issues with world corruption that could happen in 0.552. The second release has new tweaks and features, mainly centering around mana recharge and how mana can be expended.

This will have an effect on a variety of spells coming up, but most notably at the moment it completely redefines how both Storm Dash and Rush work, and how the four different elemental shields work. Players had found the shields really difficult to use in particular, and now they should be far more useful.

There are several other small-but-really-nice tweaks in here, too, such as a rebalance of the espers.

More to come soon. At the moment we're working on things like weakspots for enemies, new enemies and environmental objects, and new on-death effects for various existing objects. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Steam Holiday Sale: AI War Products 75% Off And Two Dollar Tidalis

2011-12-19T20:04:00.001-05:00

A quick note that our games Tidalis and AI War are on massive discount as part of Steam's Holiday Sale that runs now through December 31st. Keep an eye on the Holiday Sale Gift Pile challenges page during the duration of the event as well for a chance to win every single game in Steam's catalog and other prizes.

As far as our titles go, you'll be able to grab Tidalis for 80% off the $10 tag, and AI War plus all DLC for 75% off--or go for the Alien Bundle and get even more savings. If you or any of your loved ones are in for some two buck Tidalis and/or all of AI War for the cost of a fast food combo, best not to miss this great opportunity to pick up some copies on the cheap.

Interested in trying before you buy? Check out the demos on the Steam game pages, or download them here (AI War) and here (Tidalis).

AVWW Beta 0.552, "Parallax And The End Of The World" Released!

2011-12-16T23:40:00.000-05:00

This one includes a number of new things, including various balance and bugfix items that players noted from the prior version. The changes to fire touch and the way that the class-based spell cooldowns work should be particularly welcome. And the reference info and other in-game text is now up to date with all the recent changes from our powercoding period, too.

Parallax Backdrops
The most striking thing about this release visually is no doubt the new parallax backgrounds. This provides a welcome sense of depth, as well as really visually differentiating the outdoor areas to a degree not seen prior to now. Making some of the forest-y areas really feel heavily forested has been a struggle ever since the switch of the game to side view, but the parallax backgrounds really let us nail that and more.

End Of The World (Well, Continent)
Mechanically speaking, the biggest change in this version is the addition of the Overlord's threat against the continent. Every period that passes (ie, every mission that you do) brings the continent one step closer to destruction. In a few releases, when missions are the only source of EXP beyond the overlord and lieutenants themselves, this will really come together into some interesting choices.

Each continent is essentially a cage match between you and the overlord, and the average completion time that we're expecting per continent is around the 13 hour mark once we finish with getting the missions where we want them -- in other words, about the same average as a campaign in AI War. Some people will obviously be faster or slower, and there's no particular time limit.

The destruction of the continent comes after a certain number of periods, but you can take your time as much as you want, and think as long as you need, between each mission you choose to undertake. The impending continental destruction is very analogous to the AI progress in AI War, drawing a lot of parallels in terms of the sort of choices it presents to the player.

If you don't find that sort of thing fun, you can turn the strategic difficulty down to 1 or 2. If you want it to be harder than the default, you can crank it up to 4 or (god forbid) 5. Playing on strategic difficulty 5 means that you need to be prepared to take out the overlord while being barely the same level as him, or even being lower-level than him if you're doing any secret missions or dealing with any threat. That's... really rough.

We may have to add some more difficulty gradations in there for the strategic side, but we'll decide that later once we're getting testing feedback on a fully-implemented mission system. Right now this is still sort of the extended preview.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.551, "Power Coding Finale: New Crafting Model, More Missions," Released!

2011-12-15T17:13:00.000-05:00

This one is the last of our power-coding releases -- at least in this stretch. The framework of everything we wanted to accomplish in that stretch of power-coding is now done, and now it comes more to balance, polish, and putting some meat on the new bones.

New Crafting Model, No More Tiers
It was pointed out, and rightly so, that the older model of tiers in the game was something of a grind. Every 10 levels your stuff would start to degrade, and you'd have to get new stuff to replace it. Even the people who love the game felt like that was a very visible treadmill.

For us, the intent wasn't to build a treadmill, but it was to be able to have a sort of "many game progressions in one world" quality to the game. And there are only two ways to have an infinite progression: 1) infinitely rising stats, which are murder to balance and tend not to work very well even then; or 2) periodically causing players to lose their stuff in some fashion.

And the simple fact is, losing your stuff is not fun. Especially when it's on some arbitrary and predictable timetable as you play.

The solution we settled on, after much discussion with players, was to make it so that spells and crafting are all a per-continent thing. You unlock spells on a continent by crafting them once, and then you get to keep them forever on that continent. If you ever drop or lose them, you can equip a new copy of that spell for free at any spellgem workbench. So can any other player, when it's a multiplayer server.

But each continent has its own magic selection, and so when you go to a new continent only a core of your spells will actually work there. You can carry your inventory with you, so it's not getting lost or rearranged or anything, but you can't use anything beyond the basics on the new continent. Your process of getting more powerful so that you can face the overlord will involve unlocking the spells that you think will best help you achieve those goals.

This has all the advantages of being able to play "multiple game progressions in a single world," without making for arbitrary degradation of spellgems. There's a lot of other things related to this that changed for the better, such as making the crafting commodities inventory central per continent rather than being something that is per-player (so again this is great for multiplayer), and changing up the material costs for all the spells. Definitely check out those release notes if you want the whole scoop.

More Missions
For details on how the new mission system will work long-term, please see this link. There are several forum threads with older designs in them, so make sure you're not looking at something outdated if you look in the forums.

This new release makes it possible for players to rescue NPCs and raise wind shelters via the missions system. The contents of both of these missions is incredibly temporary and boring -- it's identical to the rare commodity tower missions.

One of the core next things that Keith and I are going to be working on is not only new missions in general (new things you get for completing a mission, in other words), but new ways for the missions to actually play out. It won't always be fighting a bunch of bosses, or even fighting at all. Lots of cool things planned there, but we just need time to actually get them in place! You'll start seeing more of that in the next few days and week, actually.

No More Strategic Map
The strategic map has now officially been disabled. There were a few things that you could do on the older strategic map that you can't do yet in the missions system, but that stuff is coming -- along with new things that had been planned for the strategic map but which had never been implemented.

The idea with the missions is that they completely replace the strategic map in terms of how they let you do your strategizing. The result is more like certain boardgames -- Settlers of Catan and Dominion come most to mind for me personally -- rather than like a traditional turn based strategy game on the PC.

Worried About Freeform Exploration? Definitely Don't Be!
We've had a few folks that expressed concerns that freeform exploration is going away. That definitely won't happen!

There's going to be all sorts of cool stuff to explore for and find even outside the main mission structure, and we'll be doing things like optional secret missions that you can only find via exploration, too. We'll probably even get into world map stuff like secret islands that you can uncover out on the sea, etc, but that's a bit further off.

For me personally, being able to go off the beaten track and explore is really key to having a fun adventure game, so the exploration-minded need not worry. During this transitional period most of the focus is going into the missions, so that does skew things temporarily -- but that's just a short-term factor of this being beta, not a new design direction for the game itself.

New GUI Graphics And Revised Logo
Phil did some awesome new GUI graphics for us months ago, and I just have finally had time to actually put them in the game. They really make a huge difference! Things are a lot cleaner and easier to read, and in general more attractive.

I also took this opportunity to improve the AVWW logo, while still keeping the identical shape of the text. Now it just looks fancier and more crystalline.

Done Powercoding, But Balance Still Might Be Wonky In The Short Term

As noted above, Keith and I have completed our power coding phase. So that's good news, we're now going to be working on content and other new stuff, rather than a bunch of tectonic shifts to the underlying game. But still, given the scope of the changes, the balance is likely still off at the moment. This is something we very much want to hear about, now!

The missions still are in an incomplete form, meaning that some aspects of balance still won't be possible to completely finish yet, but in general we're getting there, I think.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.550, "Power Coding Round 4: Mission System Basics," Released!

2011-12-13T12:56:00.000-05:00

This one is one that we decided to push out today because there are a few critical balance tweaks and bugfixes that players could really use.

Mission System Preview
In terms of the core feature of this new version, the missions: the general framework is complete and in place, but there is currently only one kind of mission rather than the four we had planned for our first missions release. And that's definitely shy of the eight that we have planned for the next few weeks, let alone however many mission types we wind up with by 1.0.

So take this as sort of a preview of missions, more than anything else. Longer-term, missions will be the sole source of EXP (aside from killing lieutenants and overlords), but since they are still in a preview state we've left in the EXP containers and the EXP from bosses for now.

In the brainstorming subforum, we'd originally talked about having side missions and core missions. We also talked about making it a binary system and removing EXP all together. In further design discussion, Keith and I came up with a simpler approach that meets all of the goals of the above in a more fun fashion.

How The Mission System Will Work
The mission system framework itself is actually completely done in the current version. There will almost always be 7 missions, but right at the start there will be only 5 or 6 (this happens only when you are civ level 1 and 2 respectively).

The release notes talk about the three general levels of missions: the "stretch" ones that are higher than your civ level, the middle of the road ones that match your civ level, and what Keith and I were calling the "cop out" missions that are lower than your civ level (but we won't really call them that in-game!).

Each mission that is shown only will last for a certain number more of missions. Each time you undertake a mission, all of the other missions become unavailable until you complete that mission or abandon it. If you abandon it, you can try that mission again, or any other mission. If you complete that mission, then the mission and all its mission-specific dungeons disappear, and the counter counts down on all the other missions. As missions disappear, new missions appear to take their place.

This means that there's an opportunity cost to any mission you do, because you can never do all the missions. Some missions will focus more on improving the players' adventure options directly, while others will focus more on improving the civilization and thus helping out the adventurers a bit more indirectly (but still meaningfully).

So there will be all sorts of interesting choices that this system provides players with as they try to bend each continent to their will... but so far it's just a replacement for a way to get rare commodities. The first eight or so missions we're planning are all actually replacements for other activities that you could undertake previously in the game outside the mission structure. Things like rescuing NPCs, or building wind shelters, or destroying vortex pylons, are all planned to be missions and thus part of that opportunity-cost decision-making structure.

By the way, when you have multiple continents, you can have one active mission per continent, and the "mission time" is local to each continent, too. So that's a way for multiple groups to do different missions in multiplayer, versus everyone having to either collaborate on the same mission or go off on side exploration.

Still Powercoding, Balance Still Might Be Wonky In The Short Term

As noted last week, Keith and I have both entered a power coding phase to follow the recent brainstorming/design phase, so there are a few metric tons of changes coming through last week and this week. Given the scope of the changes, this means that the game is going to be in a moderate state of disarray during that time, in terms of general balance and such. We're doing our best to keep things as clean as possible, but the difficulty in particular might swing up and down some substantially during this time. The end result is going to be pretty darn cool by this Wednesday or Thursday, though.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.549, "Power Coding Round 3: Continents, New Mana Subsystem," Released!

2011-12-12T12:06:00.000-05:00

This one is actually two huge changes to the game.

Continents
Previously, the world was just one big landmass, with smaller pieces of ocean stuck here and there. It was consistent with the story mythos about a 4D-scrambled world, but it was only so interesting. And worst of all, it made the dividing lines for where overlords were actively oppressing land, etc, really unclear. This was another thing discussed in the brainstorming subforum.

Pre-existing worlds are handled gracefully into the new system, basically taking whatever land they had and treating that as the first continent (and adding to it if it would be too small). With new worlds, you'll see the entire first continent as soon as you start up the world. Then when you reach civ level 20, a new continent will be discovered and you'll start being able to use the seaports to sail the seas!

There's actually still a fair bit more we'll need to do long-term with continents, such as names for continents and some other things of that nature, but for now the basics are really solid and are a definite improvement over the past way of doing things. It still fits with the mythos about a 4D-scrambled world, but each continent already feels so much more unique and interesting than the one big blob of landmass previously was.

New Mana Subsystem
This one was heavily discussed along with the health subsystem from the last release. There were a lot of varying opinions, but overall there were a lot of trends in player tastes that we managed to meet in most cases, I think.

The general idea of the new mana system is somewhat related to what we did with the health system: finding mana potions periodically was kind of a lame chore, and essentially your only limiter to mana was how much time you wanted to spend grinding these sorts of potions.

We considered some ammo-style subsystems, and while those were an improvement they were ultimately prey to the same sort of problems: they added some "running around and collecting stuff repeatedly" time without adding any actual fun. Even for really rare and powerful spells, having mana would be bad because players would tend to want to hoard that. Plus, making something tedious to get doesn't mean that players won't get it -- it means that they'll get it and complain about how tedious it was. We learned a lot about that from Knowledge Raiding in AI War.

So, the system we wound up going with treats mana as a tactical resource, while health is your "how far can I journey?" resource. Thus mana is now regenerating, and you never need to go out of your way to get more of it. Spell scrolls have mostly been removed (and the ability to craft them has been completely removed), and the spell scrolls we took away are now available as spellgems instead.

For most of the lower-power spells in the game, which is most of the spells in general that exist right now, this system plus cooldowns is all that is really needed. For the ultra-spells that we'll add later, they'd have additional tactical or strategic penalties for use, such as blighting the land or giving new buffs to the enemies they are used upon, etc. There's a lot of flexibility in what we can do, on a per-spell basis, to make them interesting and balanced.

THAT said, the spell balance as it is currently implemented is surely not perfect. This is something we will be wanting feedback on, particularly later in the week as we get through our power-coding phase. You'll notice that as part of this changeup, ride the lightning and storm dash have actually been nerfed a bit, now costing a lot more mana -- so you can use them perfectly well for navigating around many hazards, but using them during battle when you want your mana for offensive spells is going to be properly challenging to do.

Down To One Kind Of Crafting
So, as mentioned above, spellscroll crafting is gone -- though from time to time you'll still find spell scrolls like elusion or glpyh transfer, etc, in stash rooms.

The outfitter crafting is also now gone, and so when you need a snowsuit or heatsuit or wooden platforms, you'll actually need to go to the stash rooms and scavenge for them, as well. Similarly, the upcoming crests and spellshaping gems (that go with crests) will no longer be craftable either, but will instead be exploration rewards.

We basically realized that if we were going to have loot drops and exploration rewards that were notable, that we needed to make those things not just be craftable. Otherwise they're kind of lame as something to find! And at the same time, it was a great chance to simplify down to one kind of crafting instead of 5-7 kinds of crafting. Less overwhelming for new players, while not actually not removing any content -- just shifting around how and when you gain access to that content.

Still Powercoding, Balance Still Might Be Wonky In The Short Term

As noted last week, Keith and I have both entered a power coding phase to follow the recent brainstorming/design phase, so there are a few metric tons of changes coming through last week and this week. Given the scope of the changes, this means that the game is going to be in a moderate state of disarray during that time, in terms of general balance and such. We're doing our best to keep things as clean as possible, but the difficulty in particular might swing up and down some substantially during this time. The end result is going to be pretty darn cool by this Wednesday or Thursday, though.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

A Valley Without Wind Voted Into IndieDB's IOTY 2011 Top 100

2011-12-12T08:18:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we received the awesome news that A Valley Without Wind has been voted into the top 100 of IndieDB's Indie of the Year 2011, and is onto the second round. The game can be found in the "upcoming games" section under the "adventure" category.

We're both excited and humbled to still be in the running alongside some very fantastic/popular indie titles. The next step is the top ten. Competition may be stiff, but we plan on doing everything in our power to make a run and be there for the last leg of the event.

There's just over a week to garner as many votes as we can for AVWW. If you're interested in voting for the game, head over to our IndieDB page, scroll down to the "Top 100 Game of 2011" section, and click on the red button that states "vote for this game."

Thanks in advance to all who do cast their vote in our direction, and/or help get the word out for us. On top of that, perpetual thanks for the continued support received from our community. It's extremely appreciated, and never ceases to amaze us.

Time left to vote:

AVWW Beta 0.548, "Power Coding Round 2: New Health Subsystem," Released!

2011-12-09T13:45:00.000-05:00

This one is another major game-flow changer. First off, I should note that there are also some important bugfixes in here, mostly relating to multiplayer. That's why we went ahead and pushed this out in the middle of the day, rather than just waiting until later in the day when the rest of our new stuff would be ready for one larger release.

At any rate, looking past the bugfixes, the really big game-flow changer in this version is the new health subsystem.

The Old Health System And Its Problems
In the old model, you had a finite amount of health and that health could be replenished when you used a health potion or got minor floating health drops from enemies. You could carry infinite health potions around with you, and upon death one of those potions would automatically heal you to prevent death. This meant that the only way to have death even possible was to make a long cooldown on healing: if you died twice within a 15-20 second span, you were dead for good regardless of how much healing you had on hand.

That old model grew up organically from a lot of various design decisions that ultimately came together in a displeasing way. The old system had a lot of problems, such as an inability for players to really accurately tell how low on health they really were -- the health bar was just part of the "how long can I live" equation. And just the basic fact of juggling all those potions was annoying. Not to mention difficult to balance, although the balance wasn't horrible.

The New Health System
The new model we're using for health is something that we arrived at through much discussion with players and our staff in several threads in our brainstorming subforum. Our goal was to create a system that was simpler, less fiddly, and easier to balance... while still maintaining the general feel of what we'd been trying to do in the first place.

To that end, health potions and scrolls have both been removed from the game. At the most basic level, you have a health bar, and as you explore around and kill monsters, they will drop health restoration floaty-things a lot more commonly. You can also go back to town to get healed back to 100%. At the most basic level, that's all there is, and the game thus uses health firmly as the "how far can I travel in one expedition" limiter.

That's not really enough on its own, of course -- there has to be a better way to have more health stores with you on an expedition, so that you can make a more-arduous-than-average journey or prepare for a big boss fight. In Metroid games, that's usually done via the Health Tanks idea, whereas in most RPGs or adventure games it's done via healing items that you carry with you. For a lot of various reasons including HUD considerations and the extremely large inventory in this game, we went with something closer to the Metroid model -- so there still aren't any healing items that you can carry with you and use in the field.

Instead what we have now are Vitality Stones, which you can collect in the field as you explore, and use in town. Using 2 of these stones causes your maximum health to double -- kind of like adding an energy tank in Metroid. Then using 4 of the stones makes your max health 300% of the base max health. That pattern continues: 8 vitality stones make for 400%, 16 makes for 500%, 32 makes for 600%, 64 makes for 800%, and so on.

There is no limit to how buffed you can make your max health at the moment, but there is a catch: every time your health drops the equivalent of 100% of your base max, your current max shrinks by that same amount. So if your current max is 400%, and your health drops to 299%, then your current max drops to 300%. This was originally suggested by Hearteater in the forums, and then expanded upon somewhat, and the idea is quite clever because it makes for interesting decisions on how and in what quantities you use your vitality stones.

Still Powercoding, Balance Still Might Be Wonky In The Short Term

As noted yesterday, Keith and I have both entered a power coding phase to follow the recent brainstorming/design phase, so there are a few metric tons of changes coming in a week span or so. Given the scope of the changes, this means that the game is going to be in a moderate state of disarray during that time, in terms of general balance and such. We're doing our best to keep things as clean as possible, but the difficulty in particular might swing up and down some substantially during this time. The end result is going to be pretty darn cool by the 15th or 16th, though.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.547, "Power Coding Round 1," Released!

2011-12-08T17:11:00.000-05:00

There is nothing subtle or incremental about this one. All the stats for characters and monsters have been reworked internally, and as part of that we've redone the general balance and flow of combat. Enemy spells tend to be a lot slower now, but more plentiful and more frequent. Trash mobs have a lot of health and now do substantial damage, but there are fewer of them. And did we mention the eagles? Yeah, the most-hated enemy should be a lot more fun and palatable for folks now.

Similarly, the terrain itself has been tightened, so there is less wandering through uninteresting space, and so there are fewer same-y buildings, and so there is less empty sky for espers and amoebas and bats to wander off into. The result is really a different feel in the exterior areas, accentuating the existing differences in each region type through making them all more focused in general.

We also changed the multiplayer synchronization model around a ton, so now enemy positions and enemy shots will be synchronous between clients. Let us know if you run into any issues with this, but based on the reaction to our other model this should be way more popular with players. The one downside is that this does mean that sometimes enemy positions will need to correct themselves, and right now that means the enemy just jumps to the side and that might make you miss a shot against them. But we'll have smoothing for that later, and the really good news is that still your shots and enemy shots never will have jumps of that nature. Multiplayer details have been updated here.

There are also a variety of general bugfixes in this version aside from the above, and there's a new way that enemies flash when you hit them with a spell. There are also some new room maps by Josh, and he's created a new wiki article explaining the maps for new players.

Keith and I have both entered a power coding phase to follow the recent brainstorming/design phase, so there are a few metric tons of changes coming in the next week or so. This is the first batch of them, but there will be more batches as we can break it up. Given the scope of the changes, this means that the game is going to be in a moderate state of disarray for a week or so, in terms of general balance and such. We're doing our best to keep things as clean as possible, but the difficulty in particular might swing up and down some substantially during this time. The end result is going to be pretty darn cool by the end of next week, though.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW: Multiplayer Public Alpha, Brainstorming Subforum, And IOTY 2011

2011-12-08T03:06:00.002-05:00

Arcen Games is pleased to pass along new information regarding our procedurally-generated, post-apocalyptic 2D sidescrolling action/adventure title A Valley Without Wind.

The game has reached yet another major milestone as the multiplayer component has entered alpha and for the first time is publicly available for testing. For those interested in opting into co-operative play in the same server/world with up to a few dozen other players (perhaps even more), head over to the AVWW multiplayer wiki and check out the FAQ section along with other related notes, specs, and such. Arcen CEO and head programmer Chris Park chats about what's coming up for all the aforementioned as well in the latest post on his development blog.

We're also excited to have the game participating in IndieDB's Indie of the Year 2011 competition. To celebrate the constant support we and many other indies receive from the IndieDB community, we'll be holding game giveaways that people can enter into via the comments section of an upcoming/aptly-titled news post on the site. The news post will go live sometime Thursday evening, and drawings will take place from then on throughout the weekend. Supporters, well-wishers, curious parties, etc. are encouraged to stop by, enter the giveaway drawing, and vote for AVWW if so inclined.

The full version of A Valley Without Wind is available now on PC/Mac for pre-order at 50% off the launch price during early beta, with customers gaining instant access to the latest available build and all subsequent releases through 1.0 and beyond. The game can be purchased and downloaded directly through the developer as well as on GamersGate, Impulse, and MacGamesStore. A demo is available for taking a free look around, and grants full access to the game/multiplayer with the only restriction being a cap when civilization level six is reached.

AVWW is currently in beta and as such is still very much in development. It continues to evolve at a rapid pace, with new content and improvements added nearly every weekday as it progresses toward official launch in 2012. Follow the game and its updates/discussions on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. To get more involved with how AVWW evolves in any and/or all of its aspects, be sure to stop by our recently opened brainstorming subforum and join in on the various design discussions. Additionally, anyone looking for hosted servers to jump onto and play with others are advised to stay tuned to the player-created "post when you host" thread on our forums.

About Arcen Games

Arcen Games entered the PC indie scene in 2009 with their cult classic AI War: Fleet Command, which was named the 40th best-reviewed PC game of the year by MetaCritic. Their second year was a busy one, seeing the release of The Zenith Remnant, the first full expansion for AI War; Tidalis, an innovative block-based puzzle with casual appeal and hardcore depth; and Children of Neinzul, a micro-expansion for AI War with all profits benefiting the Child's Play charity, of which Arcen is a platinum sponsor.

AI War's third and largest expansion Light of the Spire marked Arcen's first release of 2011, and now the company has shifted its focus and excitement to the development of A Valley Without Wind. Originally a one-man shop, Arcen Games has grown to have half a dozen part-time or fulltime contributors to its various titles. For all the latest news, media coverage, and some of our other musings, follow us on our developer and individual game pages on Facebook or on Twitter: @ArcenGames.

AVWW Beta 0.546, "Multiplayer Fixes Round 1," Released!

2011-12-05T16:12:00.000-05:00

This one has a whole list of fixes for multiplayer AVWW, to get rid of most of the small annoyances that have been reported. In other news, we have plans for how to deal with the one major annoyance in the next few days, so stay tuned on that. But we did want to give an update on what our plans are.

If you've not yet played multiplayer AVWW, here's a wiki article to explain all the ins and outs of it. We really appreciate all the feedback we've gotten so far, and I think we're heading in a direction now that folks will be pleased with.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.545, "Multiplayer Public Alpha (Opt-In)," Released!

2011-12-02T16:54:00.000-05:00

This one has been a long time coming -- in the works since October 7th, in fact. Ever since that date, Keith has been working almost solely on getting multiplayer up and going, and so that's caused basically nothing to happen with the macro game parts of the game for that large swathe of beta. The last time we had any form of functioning multiplayer for this game was back in March, when the game was still top-down, and despite having been coding to a solid multiplayer spec all this time, it's been a gargantuan task for Keith to get things all up and going to a point where we could show this publicly at all.

But today's the day when you can opt in to testing out multiplayer if you are inclined to do so! Details on how exactly that works, plus known issues and all that sort of fun stuff, to follow below.

The Next Phase Of AVWW Development Drawing Near
Before I get to that stuff, though, one more note: the brainstorming subforum for AVWW has been abuzz all week, and there are absolutely tons and tons of changes coming to the game as a result of that. I decided to take most of this week as a design week for my own side of things, because the core parts of the game have matured to the point where I could now step back and look at how they all fit together and decide better how to achieve the immutable design goals for the game.

The result is going to be a very different sort of game than what is currently implemented, but the prevailing opinion on the forums seems to be "awesome, that's a lot more like what I was picturing when you were talking about the game in the first place!" Which seems to be a good sign. In a lot of respects, I view this like the shift from AI War 1.0 to 2.0, or AI War 3.x to 4.x. Same core game, same design philosophy, but some things cut and a lot of stuff added, and so much more refined.

It's pretty much all there on the brainstorming subforum if you're curious about what, specificially, is going to be changing. Feel free to weigh in!

This isn't going to be affecting the pricing of preorders, just to set your mind at ease. We're still considering this "early beta" for now. So it's still a really great time to get into the game early, if you like that sort of thing!

All About The Multiplayer Alpha
This one takes a whole wiki article to explain all the ins and outs of, although there's only a few key parts you'll really need to read to get started in the alpha. But we figured that since we're doing some unusual things, and since people were likely to have questions just in general, that we'd make a more inclusive document that has everything and which we could update over time.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.543, "The Black Wind Blows," Released!

2011-11-28T23:20:00.000-05:00

This one is our first one since coming back from the Thanksgiving holiday -- hope everyone else who celebrates it had a great holiday also.

There are a number of important bugfixes to this one, including the "leveling up takes off my suit" bug that was causing a number of people to die a fiery (or frigid) death.

Windstorms have also seen a major expansion of their power, such that the wind is actually a force that you (and your projectile spells) can feel in a tangible way. Thanks in particular to Armanant for his suggestions there!

On the forums, if you've missed it, there have lately been a number of threads where we're asking feedback on various things we're brainstorming about. The first one was redesigning health and mana, followed by one on inventory, another on possible food systems, another one on allowing players opportunities for cleverness, another based around expanding the concept of permadeath in the game, and lastly a fun one where you can submit epitaphs to be shown on in-game graves!

There's also been a lot of progress on multiplayer, which seems like a really repetitive and generic thing to be saying at this point. But lots more bugs were found and squashed, and Keith and Josh have been having increasingly successful tests. I think Keith's list of must-do-before-first-public-alpha-of-multiplayer items is currently about 9 items long, but it goes up and down pretty rapidly. Some of the recent bugs and regressions in single player have been results of the multiplayer heavy revamps, but that's settling down and really I think there's been remarkably little collateral damage there.

My hope is still to see a first public alpha of multiplayer sometime this week, or next at the latest, but that really depends on what further bugs are found as the testing cycle continues. Trust me, no one is more tired of that cycle than Keith, so we're really hoping that winds down shortly and he gets to do "something, anything else." But it's exciting to see multiplayer coming together, and we're both really looking forward to being able to play with our wives, speaking for ourselves.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Black Friday Steam Sale: AI War And DLC 75% Off, Tidalis 80% Off

2011-11-25T02:38:00.001-05:00

Looking to pick up some great gifts for yourself or loved ones on Black Friday, but boarded up in your home as you rightfully should be? Great news! Online digital distribution king Steam is having an Autumn Sale, and we're participating big time.

Right now you can get AI War and all of its expansions for 75% off. That means you can get the base game for $5, small DLC for $1, full expansions for $2.50, and the whole AI War kitten caboodle together with some extra savings in the Alien Bundle for just $7.50. If that wasn't enough, Tidalis is 80% off, and goes for just $2 instead of the standard $10 tag.

The sale only goes through this Sunday, November 27th. So be sure to take advantage of these huge discounts now!

AVWW Beta 0.542, "Centurion AI," Released!

2011-11-21T21:51:00.000-05:00

This one has been really quite a long time coming, hasn't it? Unusually so, for us. Well, it's packed to the gills with internal enhancements to both the enemy AI and multiplayer.

We're really getting close to being able to start our first opt-in multiplayer public alpha testing, which is very exciting for us. That's a major milestone for the game in general, and also it means that Keith will be able to do something else with his time other than toiling silently behind the scenes on the multiplayer code! Not that it hasn't been fun... but, no, actually I think Keith is too polite to say it but it hasn't been any fun. Fortunately, for players it should be quite a bit of fun!

The other big thing in this new version is a huge new AI behavior system, which is way more flexible and allows us to make enemies behave in much more interesting and complex ways. A number of enemies take advantage of this at higher levels, and there are two new enemies which make particular use of the new features. Many of the existing enemies are intentionally simplistic in their AI, since they are for the earlier parts of the game, but most new enemies will be using the more advanced AI options.

There's also new music in this release, a goodly number of new room map templates, some minor bugfixes, and a couple of minor balance tweaks. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW: MineCon Giveaways, New Starting Guide, And Beta Trailer #2

2011-11-18T04:08:00.001-05:00

Arcen Games is downright ecstatic to share the latest information regarding their procedurally-generated sidescrolling action adventure title of infinite proportions, A Valley Without Wind.

AVWW's beta will be on display at MineCon this weekend (Nov. 18-19), and to celebrate we'll be raffling off over 100 prizes Friday and Saturday during floor hours including copies of the game, along with our other titles. For those in attendance, all you have to do is stop by our booth in the indie kiosk area of the convention hall and sign-up to be included in every raffle drawing all weekend.

For those not in attendance, you have not been forgotten! Stop by A Valley Without Wind's Facebook, Reddit, and/or Twitter throughout the event for several chances to win a copy of one of our titles.*

To mark the special occasion further, we have an updated AVWW Getting Started Guide, along with a brand spanking new beta trailer for all to view (at its best in 1080p.)

The full version of A Valley Without Wind is available for pre-order at 50% off the launch price during early beta, with customers gaining instant access to the latest available build and all subsequent releases. The game can be purchased and downloaded directly through the developer as well as GamersGate, Impulse, and MacGamesStore.

The game is currently in beta and as such is still very much in development. It continues to evolve at a rapid pace, with new content and improvements added nearly every weekday as it progresses toward official launch in 2012.

About Arcen Games

Arcen Games entered the PC indie scene in 2009 with their cult classic AI War: Fleet Command, which was named the 40th best-reviewed PC game of the year by MetaCritic. Their second year was a busy one, seeing the release of The Zenith Remnant, the first full expansion for AI War; Tidalis, an innovative block-based puzzle with casual appeal and hardcore depth; and Children of Neinzul, a micro-expansion for AI War with all profits benefiting the Child's Play charity, of which Arcen is a platinum sponsor.

AI War's third and largest expansion Light of the Spire marked Arcen's first release of 2011, and now the company has shifted its focus and excitement to the development of A Valley Without Wind. Originally a one-man shop, Arcen Games has grown to have half a dozen part-time or fulltime contributors to its various titles. For all the latest news, media coverage, and some of our other musings, follow us on our developer and individual game pages on Facebook or on Twitter: @ArcenGames.

*Limit 1 prize per person during the event for both onsite and online contests. Name and valid email required to receive prize.

Show Me The Games Indie Sale

2011-11-14T06:17:00.001-05:00

Our friend Cliff Harris has launched an awesome sale over on Show Me The Games. Aptly titled Show Me The Sales, you'll find Tidalis, AI War, and over a dozen other excellent indie games for a fraction of their standard price tag.

The cool thing about the sale, other than the nice discounts, is that 100% of all sales go directly to the developers. SMTG doesn't take a dime.

The sale only last 14 days, so if you're interested in supporting indie developers to the fullest and picking up some awesome titles (Frozen Synapse, Gratuitous Space Battles, VVVVVV, and many more), best take advantage of the offers soon.

AVWW Beta 0.541, "Plasma Bolt," Released!

2011-11-09T20:24:00.000-05:00

This one has some pretty major internal changes in terms of how the AI functions for the monsters in the game. I'm not completely done with those upgrades yet, but already the AI has some cool new capabilities. For one thing, enemies can now change behaviors as their level gets higher. So, for instance, now icicle leapers start actually chasing you once they hit level 5, but not before.

The insect orb scroll was also ridiculously overpowered in the prior versions, and has been scaled back quite substantially. It's still a really solid spell, especially against masses of enemies or really large enemies (more of the bugs hit larger enemies, doing more damage than they would to a smaller enemy -- also true of circle of fire and ice cross, by the way).

There's also a cool new plasma bolt spell suggested by KDR_11k. Finally there's a cheaper light-element offensive spell, like fireball or forest rage or similar in some of the other elements. This one has its own slightly different flavor as well, but most importantly it gives you more options when you run into a boss that is weak against light but not much else.

There's some other bugfixes in here as well, yet more multiplayer internal progress, and... a new enemy in the lava flats. I won't say what it is, but I think it has to be my favorite enemy so far. I intend to do more enemies with... the general theme of this enemy. It also has some of the more interesting AI behaviors, at least to me; it took a while to get that tuned right, but now I can reuse that general code in other enemies to make even more complex behaviors.

The next release is likely going to be an unusual stretch from now -- probably we're looking at Monday the 14th, so half a week from now. I'm going to be out of the office until then with some personal stuff, but I'll be back and raring to go on Monday. When I get back, one of the things I really want to work on, aside from yet more spells and scrolls, is increasingly complex and interesting enemies. But for now I think there's a great amount of recent new stuff to experiment with, anyhow. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Steam Daily Deal: AI War, Alien Bundle, And All DLC 75% Off

2011-11-08T13:24:00.001-05:00

A quick note that our massive co-op space strategy title AI War is 75% off as Steam's Daily Deal. That means today only the base game runs just $5 instead of $20, expansions run just $2.50/$1.00 instead of $10/$4 each, and the Alien Bundle (which contains all of the aforementioned) goes for a paltry $7.50 instead of the standard $30 tag. A great deal, and as good a time as any to jump into the fight.

Offer ends tomorrow, November 9 at 10 AM PT.

AVWW: New Intro Mission, MineCon Exhibiting, And IGF

2011-11-08T01:26:00.000-05:00

Arcen Games is excited to pass along new information and details surrounding A Valley Without Wind, the game of infinite procedurally-generated 2D sidescrolling and so much more. The title has reached a sizable milestone, wrapping up series one of the beta patch releases. During the period the game saw 40 individual updates over 43 days, with 640 distinct changes made in all. Check out all the beta series one statistics for a full picture of what's been added since the game's public arrival six weeks back. Special thanks goes out to AVWW's community for all the feedback and help to get us to this point.

The conclusion of the beta's first phase is marked by the release of an all new Intro Mission for the game. The goal of the mission is to give new players a linear way to get acclimated with the game before they ever encounter the world map, take on broader decisions, etc. It offers a more traditional intro for any sort of platformer, with players starting out with no ability to do anything except run and jump, and rapidly gaining new abilities that have to be used immediately. The new addition should allow players to be more comfortable navigating around the world in the side view, become familiar with how buildings, surface areas, and undergrounds all work, and have the confidence to head out onto the world map on their own.

In other news, AVWW has been entered into IGF 2012, along with the upcoming Indie Games Challenge. We're very excited to be competing in both, and wish the best of luck to all those who entered. Also, we're heading to MineCon! We'll be in Las Vegas November 18th and 19th to exhibit at Mojang's event, and are extremely excited to have a chance to share our game with some 4,500 attendees. Those who are making the trek are encouraged to stop by for a hands-on session, enter our game giveaways, and participate in some other fun stuff we're still currently cooking up.

The full version of A Valley Without Wind is available for pre-order at 50% off the launch price during early beta, with customers gaining instant access to the latest available build and all subsequent releases. An updated demo--complete with the aforementioned intro mission--is out now for download, and a huge batch of screenshots showing off what's new have been released as well.

AVWW is currently in beta and as such is still very much in development. The game continues to evolve, with new content and improvements added nearly every weekday as it progresses toward official launch in 2012. Follow the game and its updates/discussions on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.

About Arcen Games

Arcen Games entered the PC indie scene in 2009 with their cult classic AI War: Fleet Command, which was named the 40th best-reviewed PC game of the year by MetaCritic. Their second year was a busy one, seeing the release of The Zenith Remnant, the first full expansion for AI War; Tidalis, an innovative block-based puzzle with casual appeal and hardcore depth; and Children of Neinzul, a micro-expansion for AI War with all profits benefiting the Child's Play charity, of which Arcen is a platinum sponsor.

AI War's third and largest expansion Light of the Spire marked Arcen's first release of 2011, and now the company has shifted its focus and excitement to the development of A Valley Without Wind. Originally a one-man shop, Arcen Games has grown to have half a dozen part-time or fulltime contributors to its various titles. For all the latest news, media coverage, and some of our other musings, follow us on our developer and individual game pages on Facebook or on Twitter: @ArcenGames.

AVWW Beta 0.540, "Whips, Bursts, And Insects," Released!

2011-11-07T12:26:00.001-05:00

This one has two new spell scrolls and one new spellgem. It also has a couple of tweaks and bugfixes.

The most interesting thing about these new spell scrolls is that these are the first two that are offensively-oriented in a direct fashion. Previously scrolls were all logistical, healing, or movement type effects, except for the summon rhino -- which, while offensive, is fairly indirect.

Insect Orb and Ice Burst are both as directly offensive as they come, but they are unique from any of the spellgems. That's something that we plan to do more of, as it's interesting to me to have limited-use offensive spell scrolls that are nonetheless having the advantage of costing no mana.

Right now there's still only about 9 spell scrolls in general in the game (compared to 34 spellgems at the moment), so there's really a lot more to do on scrolls to even get them caught up to the spellgems. I'm still expecting to have 100+ of each spell scrolls and spellgems by the time we hit 1.0.

The new Miasma Whip is a particularly fun one for me, as it's a refreshingly fast entropy-based attack that isn't quite so short-range as Death Touch. Given the elemental strengths and weaknesses that bosses now randomly have, it's kind of important to have a lot of offensive options in every element. We're still not quite there yet, but there's lots more to come soon!

More to come tomorrow! The rest of today is going to be spent on updated installers, some new distributor setups, and so on. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.539, "In-Game Reference Window," Released!

2011-11-06T20:12:00.000-05:00

This one isn't what I'd planned on doing today, but I'm really glad that I took this detour -- and I think that even experienced AVWW players will be, too.

The big new feature in this version is the "reference window," which lets you get at full stats for crafting, civ-level unlocks, and materials. No enemies yet, but that will be coming sometime down the road along with a related "scan" spell.

Also included in the reference window is an advice and tips section, which basically replaces the adviser guardian functionality with an available-anytime tips section broken out by category and subject line. That's SO much better than a bunch of paragraphs that were sequential and semi-ordered (since only so much ordering could be done).

The reference window, on the one hand, might be seen as being geared toward new players. And I certainly hope it will help new players quite a bit. But actually, I think that this will become something that even experienced players use on an ongoing basis as more spells and recipes and so on are added. The reference window essentially saves you from having to run back to town every time you want to look something up -- and it saves you from having to find some external wiki about the game, too, which was another goal of mine.

I had planned to spend today adding a bunch of new spells and enemies, but I really felt like the reference was something that was needed first. It's something that a lot of different players have asked for the various component parts of, and it's something that can be extended over time in terms of the tips it offers, and adding in things like icons and whatnot later rather than having it just be textual like it currently is.

There's also a couple of bugfixes in this one. The GC exception one should be particularly welcome.

More to come tomorrow, although some of my day is going to be spent putting together a new installer build since it's been a while and since we're going to be having the game come to some new distributors. But my goal is to also get some new spells in there tomorrow, too. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.538, "Intro Mission At Last," Released!

2011-11-05T22:51:00.000-04:00

This one is one that I've really been looking forward to ever since beta began: the intro mission for the game is now complete! Pending feedback and further testing, of course, but so far it seems pretty good to me.

Intro Mission Notes
The goal for the intro mission is to give new players a linear way to get acclimated with the game before they ever encounter the world map or have to make broader decisions, etc. This is a more traditional intro for any sort of platformer, really: you start out with no ability to do anything except run and jump, and rapidly gain new abilities that have to be used immediately. My inspirations for this ranged from the original Metroid, to Braid, to Limbo.

Other goals for the intro mission included to make it so that it has some goodies that you want, some side (fairly mild) secrets to find, and some optional challenges to face to get ahead in the game if you want to tackle them.

Oh, and another goal was to make it so that if you want to speedrun the intro mission, you can do so pretty quickly. I just clocked myself at three minutes and three seconds on a speedrun, and I: 1) detoured to get storm dash; 2) took two very minor wrong turns; 3) took the time to stop and kill the optional miniboss in the last surface chunk just to get the EXP. I imagine that if someone were so inclined, they could shave as much as 30 seconds off my time, if not more.

For an actual new player who is playing through the intro mission for the first time and who is stopping to read the tombstones, explore all the little caverns, and so forth... I'm not sure what the completion time would be. I imagine it would vary; anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes seems likely to me, but that's just speculation. There are 24 hand-crafted chunks to explore, but about half of them are completely optional.

But the important thing is that a new player isn't just sitting there reading a boring tutorial, or doing boring tutorial-style things. This is why I'm not labeling it a "tutorial," although it does serve that purpose. It's more like the first 10-30 minutes of Metroid, where your character has fewer powers and fewer options on where to go, but still full autonomy within those constraints. This is also where the inspirations from Braid and Limbo come in, is that they weave their tutorial into the main gameplay in this way, too.

Once you complete the intro mission, will you be an expert at AVWW? Of course not. But you should be comfortable navigating around the world in the side view, and familiar with how buildings, surface areas, and undergrounds all work. You should be able to feel comfortable striking out on your own to explore the world map -- which is kind of the point. People were getting to the world map too fast before, and feeling intimidated by it rather than excited.

Hopefully this changes that first encounter with the world map in a fundamental way, but I guess we'll see. Whatever the case, the new player experience is vastly better now than it ever was before, anyhow.

Oh Yeah, There's Other New Stuff In This Version, Too
Well, there's a laundry list of bugfixes and tweaks that I won't just repeat verbatim here -- check out the full release notes for those.

One big change is that enemies no longer die from environmental factors like walking off the side of the chunk or falling into water/lava, though. Instead, at the side of chunks they just turn around, and with the water/lava they now have a little meter that quickly fills up before they shrink away to nothing and respawn at some random monster spawner. This style of respawn, in practice, isn't much different from what the game was doing before, but it will have some major positive ramifications for multiplayer (and several smaller positives for solo). See the release notes for some details.

The next really big change is to how damage gets calculated for your equipment. The details are once again in the release notes, but the general message is that way-outdated stuff is now worse than it was before, while better-than-your-current-tier stuff is now more useful than it was before.

More to come tomorrow: I'm excited to finally be able to get back to some content development, so expect some new spells and possibly some new enemies. This week is going to be a quite odd schedule for me, as I have some personal stuff going on and I'll be out of the office from this coming Thursday through Sunday; so this weekend I'm getting in some extra time to get ahead of things. Anyway, I know folks will be pleased to see me working on stuff for existing players rather than new players again. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 5.020, "Nanoswarm Fortress," Released!

2011-11-03T22:43:00.000-04:00

This one has a couple of pretty significant balance tweaks that folks should really appreciate. Firstly, the Fallen Spire exogalactic strike forces are a bit better tuned. Secondly, the youngling nanoswarms now really are better at their job of hitting a lot of targets. And thirdly, the AI fortress health has been halved, making them not remotely such a grind as they were.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.537, "Elemental Resistance," Released!

2011-11-03T22:32:00.000-04:00

This one is a pretty sizable one in terms of what it changes about the "feel" of the game. The big new thing for existing players is the elemental damage system: spells each belong to one of six elements (fire, water, earth, air, light, and entropy), matching the colors of the gems used to create them.

Enemies then have weaknesses or resistances to specific elements, meaning that (as in many games) lightning attacks are more effective against robots, and you can't hurt a being made out of fire by attacking it with fire. Beyond that, bosses also now get randomized elemental resistances mixed in with their other unique-to-the-individual health/attack/casting-speed bonuses. And lastly, the various shield spells that were introduced a month or so ago now have proper elemental resistance bonuses tied to each of them.

There actually was a sort of elemental "combo system" that we'd implemented, too, but as the very savvy Jerebaldo1 pointed out from the release notes before the release even came out, it was possible to exploit. We have some other ideas about elemental combo systems, but coming up with something simple, fun, and non-exploitable is going to take some more thought and discussion. I overlooked one major class of exploit with my first pass at such a combo system, but that doesn't mean that a combo system of that general sort is impossible.

There are also two new enemy types in this new release. The first is Red Slime, which is a stationary enemy that you'll only encounter (for now) in the intro mission. I imagine that the slimes will make some appearances elsewhere in the game in the future. The second new enemy is the Water Esper, which is now mixed in with Lightning Espers to show a bit of what can be done by mixing "identical" enemies that have differing elements but little else.

Let's see, other stuff... There's an awesome new ocean music track in this release, and there's a goodly bit of new furniture/objects, particularly in the ice age areas. The intro mission has another two surface chunks and a new building with ten rooms in it. Coffers are now used in some stash rooms throughout the game now, rather than being exclusively limited to the intro mission. And there were a number of bugfixes.

Keith is still completely immersed in the multiplayer aspects of the game, but that's getting to a point where I expect we'll be able to do some internal testing with staff within a week or so. There's still a lot more to do before a public release even after that, but it's a promising step.

More to come tomorrow: my ardent hope is to wrap up the last segment of the intro mission (which takes place underground) tomorrow. Knock on wood, I think that all of the major game extensions that are needed for the intro mission have already been put in place, so I should be able to wrap things up. Then I'll be back to new content for the main game itself, which I'm really looking forward to. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.536, "Snake In The Window," Released!

2011-11-01T16:27:00.000-04:00

This one is another one that has been several days in the making because of the intense number of internal changes that have been a part of it. The recently-revised multiplayer model is continuing to get further along, and as a part of that we've done some refactors to help make for (longer-term) fewer bugs in both multiplayer and solo.

The intro mission is also progressing nicely, and you'll notice some changes to the first three sections of the mission that were previously released (these changes will only be in new worlds, not existing ones, FYI). Actually a fourth screen has now been added, and the first four (of ten) rooms inside a new building type for the intro mission, but since there were six missing rooms that lead more or less into black holes, all those new screens are disabled in this build.

More to the point for this release in terms of existing players, there's a number of bugfixes and tweaks. The light snakes are now a lot more exciting and useful as they move faster, go further, and reveal the minimap as they go. A lot of buildings now include some interior windows looking out at the sky when they are aboveground, making structures feel less enclosed unless you're actually underground.

More to come in the next couple of days, including an easy new enemy type that will be used in the intro mission. Thanks for bearing with us during this period of work on the intro mission and multiplayer -- we'll be back to the features that are likely to be more exciting to our existing players soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.535, "Audio Epitaph," Released!

2011-10-28T23:30:00.000-04:00

This one has been a couple of days in the making, and the release notes are still pretty short even so, but it's been a busy few days for sure! Keith has been hard at work on the multiplayer stuff, and that's coming along well although it's still an uphill thing.

For my part I've mostly been working on the intro mission, both in terms of the framework for it, and the actual implementation of the mission itself. A very foreshortened version of the intro mission is now in place for when you start a new world; it gives you three screens that you have to get past before getting to the settlement.

Those three screens themselves are pretty much what I'd consider "final pending feedback," but there's intended to be a lot more to the intro mission than just that. And the actual first-settlement logic still needs some updates, too. But it's getting there!

My favorite things about the intro mission thus far are: 1) the epitaphs, which I think is a really fun and thematically-appropriate way to give hints to new players about how to get through the mission; and 2) the fact that the very very start of the mission reminds me a little bit of the starting area of the original Metroid game. You have to really look to see it, and maybe it's just me, but I get that same general vibe from the start of this game now, which I'm really pleased about.

There's also a lot of new back-up related features in this one. Now backing up your worlds doesn't have to be a manual-in-the-OS process. The game asks you if you want to do a backup before you load any world (and you can turn that prompt off if it bugs you). And there's an option for manually backing up a world folder any time you please.

In the last few versions there's been a few crashes, mainly out of memory crashes, experienced by a few players. I strongly suspect that has to do with the way that the audio playback was altered in 0.531. Well, as of this version, the audio playback has been altered completely, and now uses a method of playback that will use vastly less disk I/O, that will use a bit less memory, and which should solve the crashes if that's really what they were caused by.

Oh, and I finally got rid of those ice age vent pipes that everyone hated, and replaced them with some more-attractive icicles. More to come most likely on Monday. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.534, "Settlements Ahoy," Released!

2011-10-26T23:38:00.000-04:00

This one is our third and final release of the day.

The thing I'm most excited about it is the work that's been done on the intro mission framework. The mission-as-implemented-so-far is just a tiny cave that you walk out of (yay), but what that tiny cave represents is pretty substantial for my ability to now move this mission design out of the word processor and into the game.

The thing that I expect many existing players will be the most excited about in this one is the changes to settlement seeding logic -- there are now hard minimums on how infrequently settlements can seed on the world map. That wasn't previously the case, so we had some players who were level 60-70 before seeing their second settlement, while other players were finding their second settlement easily by level 20. That was definitely too much variance!

There are a number of other fixes and defensive coding bits added in this version, too. If you have one of the few kinds of graphics cards that supports shader model 3.0 or higher, but which doesn't support vertex fragment programs, it will now auto-disable the dynamic skies so that you see the nice static skies instead of a hot pink sky backdrop. Destroyed rooms are also now the thing that are the most likely to be missing if there's a missing door in a building room, which is another big plus.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.533, "Rockslide and Meteor Shower," Released!

2011-10-26T15:43:00.000-04:00

This one is our second of what looks to be three releases for today. There were a couple of bugfixes in it that we wanted to get out to players ASAP, so here we are.

Also included in this release, aside from the bugfixes, are a whopping 24 new stairwell-type room templates and 2 new spell gems. Rockslide and Meteor Shower are like launch rock and launch meteor, except that they fire four projectiles up in a fixed arc rather than firing one projectile at a player-set angle. These are much more friendly to keyboard play, and are extremely handy for things like masses of enemies, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.532, "Bugfix Collection," Released!

2011-10-26T11:03:00.002-04:00

This one simply has some bugfixes that we wanted to go ahead and get released before tonight's later release.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.531, "Glyph Transplants and Abandoned Settlements," Released!

2011-10-25T23:40:00.000-04:00

This one doesn't have hugely long feature list, but it includes several things that have been on my to-do list for what seems like forever.

First up is the new Glyph Transplant spell scroll, which basically lets you do a body swap with any NPC you like. You become them, and they become you, and you continue on with their stats, name, and appearance.

Thematically, this is actually passing your blue, floating "glyph" (and all the associated inventory that goes with it) to another character. This is actually what happens when you die, too, but when you die you always pass the glyph to a "wandering" NPC that hasn't yet shown up in any of your settlements or other locations. This lets you actually become someone you've already met, which has been a goal for the game from the start.

Next thing is that there is finally a solution for the abandoned settlements. Previously if you found yourself with literally no NPCs in a settlement, well, that settlement was just dead because you normally need at least one NPC to use to recruit other NPCs.

Now if there are literally no NPCs in a settlement (and all the monsters have been cleared out), go and talk to one of the guardian stones of the settlement and they'll call a wanderer to the settlement. You can then use that new resident to recruit more residents, and you're back off to the races.

There are a few other things in this release as well, including a fix to that lighting issue in the prior version. But the above were the high points.

Notes On The AVWW Multiverse
Today was a hardcore design day for Keith and I; it's been over a month since we last did this, I think, and it was definitely overdue. We got a number of important middle-term things planned based on what we've each been thinking about lately and what we've learned from the beta.

One consistent theme from what we were talking about today is that the concept of a multiverse is really getting increasingly central to this game. The idea of a string-theory-type multiverse has always been one of the founding ideas of the AVWW mythos, but it's been a much more subtle thing up until now.

It's why all the instance of the world are called Environ, for instance, but each one is completely different in the details. Each one exists in a separate universe. It's also key to why all the time periods are able to co-exist in the newly re-formed universe that now exists after the cataclysm.

A lot of that gets into backstory and explanations that are really something that we want players to be able to solve and figure out through piecing together clues in the game, but most of those clues haven't actually been added to the game yet. That's another thing on the list prior to 1.0, and is also heavily related to the future return of the memory crystals.

Anyway, I don't want to spoil much, but we've come up with some new gameplay ideas that tie several existing gameplay elements together better, and which weave in more of the story, too, and even which tie into multiplayer in a wholly unique way. You'll start seeing the results of all that coming up in the next weeks and months.

The one that I'm most excited about are the new "personas," which are an idea of Keith's that I won't spoil. But I will say that these will provide yet another way of customizing and improving your characters, among other benefits, so that's some welcome news I'm sure.

Notes On The AVWW Multiplayer
Keith has gotten the multiplayer functioning to the point where the main barrier we were running up against is the simple speed of even LAN networks versus the amount of precision demanded by pixel-perfect, shmup-style projectiles and dodging ability.

The networking model was getting really refined, but still was a definitively inferior gameplay experience to solo play, which obviously isn't an acceptable state of affairs. There's a reason why there are very few networked multiplayer shmups, particularly those of the 2D pixel-perfect variety.

Traditional action-game networking just isn't sufficient for the precision that they demand in order to avoid frustrating players with wrong collision hits. Minor client/server disagreements where there is as little as 200ms worth of difference in entity positions can mean the difference between a hit and a miss at this sort of scale and this sort of projectile speed.

So what do we do when we meet a seemingly-intractable problem like this? We redefine the problem. I don't want to get into the details yet because there's a lot we still have to actually implement and test out how it works, but the bulk of Keith's and my time today was spent redesigning the networking model based on some ideas we'd batted around way back in early alpha in the event that the traditional approach couldn't be smoothed and predicted into as precise an experience as we wanted.

Our core goal with this redesign was to make the multiplayer combat experience absolutely just as precise and as much fun to the solo combat experience regardless of network conditions or lag, but still while maintaining the ability to have co-op and PVP styles of play. That said, the design for PVP play has really changed for the game, and even the way that the co-op aspects will work is now really unique from any other game I can think of.

This is a big shift for the multiplayer modes, so I felt I should give a heads up about that before we actually fully unveil it later. It's kind of like the shift from being a 2D top-down game to being a 2D sidescroller in terms of the scale of the change, but this change only affects multiplayer play; solo play isn't changing one iota in response to this.

Still no ETA on multiplayer actually becoming publicly available. A majority of what has already been done for multiplayer actually will be retained, but now we have a bunch more logical complexity to set up and add in on top of that stuff. But shifting this to being a logical design problem rather than something primarily bound by the speed of the Internet is something we're really happy about, to put it mildly.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.530, "EXP Containers and Map Editor Extensions," Released!

2011-10-24T23:01:00.000-04:00

This one is back to having a more regular sort of file size, but it's a real biggie in terms of the new things added in it.

First of all, if you're someone who is getting into the map editor, there's a number of key additions in the map editor that make designing things like boss rooms a lot more functional and powerful. I needed to make some additions there in order to get closer on the intro mission work, and while I was at it I also added the various recent fan requests for it.

As a part of that, I also created another four boss room templates using some of the new features, and went back retroactively and upgraded most of the boss rooms to have make sure that bosses now will always tend to seed in a better fashion, etc. Also while I was at it, I really improved how the procedural rooms are being created, so that they will tend to have more varied, interesting shapes than before.

Storm Dash has been altered to be easier to use and to be more distinct from Storm Rush, which is pretty cool. And a number of bugs were fixed in general, along with some momentum tweaks turning around, and things of that nature.

EXP Containers
My favorite new feature from this one, though, would have to be the new EXP Containers. These can now be found in over-large rooms and at the end of long, formerly-pointless hallways. They are found in special abundance in attics, basements, and maze rooms. They are also pretty common in switch rooms and some boss rooms.

Why are EXP containers such a big deal? Well, this is the first major other source of EXP beyond fighting bosses, so that really opens up the field for people to improve their characters and world without always going head to head against boss monsters.

That's huge for certain playstyles, and for many newer players who might have poor equipment, and so on. It's something that some players have really been waiting on for a while, and something we've had on our to-do list since prior to even our internal alpha.

It takes about 100 containers on average to gain a new level, which we may need to tweak further. But given the current seeding rates of the containers, this seems like a good first stab at the balance for it -- feedback definitely welcome from playtesting, of course!

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.529, "The Awful Truth About Fairies," Released!

2011-10-21T22:37:00.000-04:00

In terms of file size, this one is by far the largest update we've done to any of our games, ever. In terms of release notes length, not so much. Why the huge file size? Well, there's some new art, but that's really only a few megs.

Further-Processed Character (And Some Monster) Graphics
The thing that makes this update a whopping twenty-seven megs to download is that I've post-processed all of the characters and most of the monsters in the game. It's the same graphics, but they've been spruced up and made more painterly and with a stronger, cleaner border, etc.

They look a lot more in keeping with the rest of the game now, although I'm not going to be surprised if some players don't notice the difference at all. Side by side it is a notable improvement, but if you've been playing for a while and not really been bothered by the characters before now, I expect the difference won't be something you'll see at first glance.

Glyphs and Just-Entered-Chunk Lightning
There are other visual improvements in this one, too -- for instance, there's now a visual representation of your "glyph," which is a core story element for the game that we haven't really done much with in the game itself until now. It's a core part of the game, and as the story gets more integrated into the game you'll be hearing a lot more about these.

The glyph follows you around and makes it easier to see your character versus other characters (only you have a glyph that you can see), and it also turns red when you take damage. There's also much cooler just-entered-chunk invincibility visuals, too.

Fun With Physics
The physics and controls for ride the lightning, lightning rocket, storm dash, and storm rush, have all been pretty substantially updated based on player feedback from the last few days. A lot of good ideas there, and these spells are now a lot more useful and fun feeling.

Don't Trust That Fairy!
Still have fond memories of Navi the fairy? Wait, scratch that -- "fond" wouldn't be the word to use. But still, as annoying as she could be, she was (overly) helpful. And hey, there's always those nameless fairies in so many games that give you health or other goodies.

A Valley Without Wind is... a much harsher place. When you see a fairy, your first thought should be to run like heck if you're not prepared to face it. These fairies are mean, travel in packs, and live in deep dark caves. The red fairies in particular are tough enough that I have yet to beat them without over-leveling them, and I'm quite good.

Part of it was that the cave I was in was particularly un-favorable for my battle with them (that sort of thing can happen, it's procedural generation), but the other part is that I simply didn't have any weapons on par with them.

For a good while I've been putting new weapons in the hands of the players without adding more enemies, and that's all very well and empowering. But there's a growth curve for both player weapons and enemies, and most of the enemies thus far are clustered pretty low on that curve. Actually, most of the player weapons are, too, although a few creep up the curve slightly.

Well, the red fairies are a slightly larger jump up the curve, and so you'll really want to lean on your highest damage-dealing spells: launch meteor, creeping death, and so on. Those spells don't tend to be favored by most players in most situations because of cheaper, faster spells like energy pulse, launch rock, or even fireball.

Future Plans For Specialization of Spells Vs Specialized Enemies
The new fairies -- red in particular -- require the use of specific tools to have much of a chance against them unless you over-level them. This is actually going to be an ongoing trend with the game, where there will be increasingly specialized tools for specific kinds of enemies.

To go on a longer expedition you'll want to craft and carry along a varied loadout, and then during your initial-chunk-invincibility period when you run into a boss you'll be wanting to adjust your loadout to best deal with them.

You'll always be able to pick and choose your favorite spells in a "genre" to beat an enemy (there would never be only one solution to an enemy, as that's boring). And for most "trash mobs" and similar, you'll really have even more flexibility in spell choice, as now.

But where a lot of the tactics of this game is going to come in is in choosing your tools to match both your skills and preferences and to fit your enemy, and then taking out the enemy with the tools you chose. You get a bit of that now, and the fairies push things a little more in that direction in particular, but a lot of the really cool ideas along these lines are really things we're just getting started with.

Intro Mission
I just wasn't "feeling it" on the intro mission today, so I decided to work on other stuff. We've had a single boss type underground for far too long, so that was one of the first things I wanted to address.

The fairies idea was something that just occurred to me today, it wasn't something long-planned, but I have a few other underground-specific bosses that I've been planning for quite some time. Next one up is probably "murderous darkness," which should actually be tamer than the fairies. Go figure!

More to come soon, probably on Monday. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.528, "The Overlord Experience," Released!

2011-10-20T22:05:00.000-04:00

This one is really a pretty small release in terms of what is publicly ready in it, but there were enough player-requested tweaks in there that I felt like it was worth getting out tonight rather than waiting for a larger batch of stuff tomorrow.

The minimap has a few more options and works a little smoother now, and overlords and lieutenants now give a consistent satisfying EXP gain rather than varying so much based on your relative civ level. That second one is where the name of the version comes from, given there wasn't a whole lot in this one.

Oh, another cool one, though: actual music in the settlements! It's ambient enough and long enough that it shouldn't get annoying if you're in the settlement screens for a really extended time. And I expect we'll do some more settlement tracks to mix in with that one over time, too, since you can choose to spend so much time there.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.527, "Greater Teleport and Lightning Rocket," Released!

2011-10-19T23:07:00.001-04:00

This one is a quite a lengthy set of release notes, because I decided to make today a "mantis day" and just plow through a ton of the higher-priority bug reports, feature suggestions, and so on. I also added a couple of random smaller spells and scrolls that I've been meaning to add for a while.

One of the most notable changes for many people will I'm sure be the changes to the minimap and the message log. Both can now be cycled through more effective sizes, and when it comes to minimaps in particular, those now have a better method for scaling so that they won't intrude into so much of your screen real estate so often.

A few enemy spell-telegraphing improvements were made, a goodly number of world-gen bugs were fixed, and more multiplayer work was done. Ride The Lightning has been refined, and a new Lightning Rocket spell scroll variant of it has also been created -- this one requiring a new umbra ember rare commodity to craft, though, making it not available until level 40. There are now Greater and Lesser versions of teleport, too; the greater also uses umbra embers.

A number of other spells also got tweaks, tab-targeting got a number of tweaks and fixes, and so did warp scrolls and their related functions. Lieutenants and dragon breath will no longer get higher-level than they should be, and there's now a quick-load button on the main menu for taking you back into your last world with one click upon application start (talk about a highly requested feature).

Definitely been a productive day -- the "mantis days" are always fun, even though I usually do at least a half dozen or so mantis issues each day, anyway. But sometimes it's fun and relaxing to just really focus on the refinement and polish for a solid day or two. Tomorrow my plan is to get back to the intro mission stuff, and hopefully get at least part of that release-ready.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.526, "Telegraphing Crates," Released!

2011-10-18T22:17:00.000-04:00

This one is a longer set of release notes again, but it's been a couple of days since the last beta update. What gives? Well, at the moment we're simply sinking a lot of time into some larger features rather than focusing on vast amounts of smaller stuff.

Multiplayer Status
Multiplayer is one gargantuan feature, for example, but it continues to progress well. Keith has a lot of it functioning now, but we don't just want it functioning, we want it running as efficiently as we reasonably can right from the start. So there's been a lot of work on client-side prediction lately in particular, and what happens in high-lag situations, and just general work to optimize the network load under all the various scenarios we can think of.

These things will be important day one because people will use it under all manner of circumstances day one. We're still at least a week away from doing even more serious internal multiplayer playtesting, I suspect, and then sometime after that we'll move to limited public testing to hopefully iron it out further. I hate not being able to give an ETA on something like this, but a lot of really good work is getting done on it by Keith, and I'm really happy with how this is taking shape.

"Intro Mission" Status
Another big feature that I've been working on with part of my time for a while is the new "intro mission" for the game. This will basically be a completely new way to start the game, giving you a linear set of challenges to overcome. It's mildly tutorial-y in the same sense that the first levels of any platformer are, but my goal is to make it actually like playing the start of any Metroidvania game where it's quite linear and you get presented tools one at a time, and have to use those tools to overcome obstacles that come up immediately.

Of course, this is further complicated by the fact that this needs to work in multiplayer, and really I want this starting mission to be something that each player must go through solo to start the game. If you already know what you're doing it should be a real breeze to complete in a matter of a minute or two, during which you'll do some basic starting preparation tasks that you'd do anyhow even now. But anyway, all that requires some new kinds of plumbing to be added (I'd never planned on linear, player-specific content in this game), and that's one thing that I've been working on.

Anyhow, I figure that once these updates are all in and the intro mission is fully working and such, there might actually be some other general uses for it later in the game's development. We'll see, but it's got a lot of interesting ideas percolating for me; not sure what might come of those yet beyond the intro mission.

Our Ongoing Quest For Furniture
If you've been playing the last few beta versions much, I'm sure by now you've seen some of the new furniture. It's still been somewhat sparse, but more and more rooms are getting more and more kinds of furniture.

Josh is doing an awesome job of rendering these out so that I can just do the post-processing on them, and then he's wiring them up with collision boxes and actually setting up the logic for how what furniture goes into what rooms. That's been extremely helpful for me, and really lets us put a lot of work into the furniture (and other general objects, as furniture continues to fill up), while keeping that work from impacting my main gameplay/coding work much at all. So that's exciting!

About This Actual Release
Longest intro ever before actually talking about the post topic? I think it might be. Well, this release is partly a longer list than the last few because we pruned down the bug list again. It's a real laundry list, but some of my favorites to have fixed are the ones where something was supposed to seed but didn't. Most if not all of those should hopefully be fixed now.

There's also a bunch of new sound effects for some spells and enemies that were previously using placeholders, there's some new player-made room templates that are particularly cool, and of course a bunch more furniture work.

Also in this one are some changes to where enemies will now "telegraph" their ranged spells. When an enemy is going to shoot a spell at you, they now pause in their magic pose for just a bit, giving you a warning that something is about to happen.

This is a lot better than just getting instantly shot, and is something that most of your favorite action games do. It lets you react to the patterns of enemies at least somewhat the first time you see them, rather than having to take the damage and learn to blindly anticipate them. It's also, incidentally, something that will help keep things in sync on high-lag multiplayer situations when enemies are firing at you, which is a double bonus.

The other new feature in this one is that you can now craft crates at the outfitter. Finally another use for all that wood and quartz you've been collecting! Crates are a really useful things to be able to create, because they let you adjust the battlefield, creating temporary walls. The seize spell already lets you fling background objects into the path of your enemy, but the crate-creation has the benefit of being able to be placed anywhere (though the disadvantage of typically being smaller). They can also be climbed upon if you really want, although wooden platforms already did that.

More to come either tomorrow or the next day, depending on how our larger-feature work progresses. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

New Interviews, Previews, and LP Videos

2011-10-18T02:54:00.002-04:00

So much has happened since we launched public beta for A Valley Without Wind back in late September. In some respects it feels like it's been out forever, when really we've just reached three weeks. It's been fantastic to have anyone interested finally able to play the game. We've received both a wonderful response as well as excellent feedback from players and press alike in such a short amount of time.

A couple of Arcen Games/AVWW items we'd like to direct you to, including a couple of new interviews. Chris chats comprehensively with UsedGameReviews in a just released piece, and Arcen is featured in Play Tribune's Developer Chat audiocast (where Chris and I babble on for over an hour about indie gaming plus all the aforementioned.)

Plenty of Valley-specific stuff below as well. Thanks to all who took the time to talk with us and/or take a look at our game.

Previews/Impressions

[Violent Gamer] A Valley Without Wind Beta Impressions
[Nightmare Mode] Beta Impressions: A Valley Without Wind
[Dealspwn] A Valley Without Wind Beta Impressions | Procedurally Generated Genre Smasher
[Quick Save Podcast] A Valley Without Wind Beta/Demo (8:00-12:00)

Videos

Hold [RESET] Gaming: A Valley Without Wind - Beta - First Look
Hyfrydle32: Let's Play A Valley Without Wind
Onemegatongamer: I will beat a valley without wind
A Valley Without Wind: Beta Gameplay

AVWW Beta 0.525, "Rushing Minis," Released!

2011-10-15T19:48:00.000-04:00

This one is again a shorter release notes, and again there's some... extra something in this release not noted. But this time, pretty well everyone should find that extra stuff because it's so darn pervasive in most any building now.

The two big things in this release, aside from the various tweaks and the "extra something," are a change to make the Miniature spell a toggle-based spell (go small, go back at your leisure), and a new Storm Rush spell.

The Storm Rush is basically just Storm Dash except sustained and draining your mana over time. This again is something you can toggle on and off, and it's really ideal for being able to run over great distances very fast. It's more Sonic than Mega Man if you want to make comparisons. We implemented this as a second spell because both spells are useful and this way players can customize how they play. That's going to be the general philosophy with this game.

More to come Monday. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.524, "Lieutenant Battle Rock," Released!

2011-10-13T23:03:00.001-04:00

This one is a much shorter-than-average set of release notes, so for the most part I'm just going to point you to them. But it's been a busy day indeed! Yesterday and today a lot of my and Josh's time has been spent on... something. Sometimes it's just more fun if you find it for yourself rather than me telling you in advance.

Anyway, in terms of the core set of documented new stuff in the release notes, there's a lot of tweaks to make the gameplay smoother, particularly with the Miniature spell and the Transmogrify Into Bat spell scroll. There's also now auto-potions for Magic Points, and an awesome new music track by Pablo for the Lieutenant boss battles.

More to come tomorrow. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.523, "Miniatures and Health/MP Drops," Released!

2011-10-12T22:37:00.001-04:00

This one is really all over the place in terms of what it adds -- a lot of things people have wanted for a while, plus yet more internal progress on the multiplayer front.

The first really huge change is to how the balance is handled for your equipment as your civ level increases. The short explanation is that there's now a grace period so your equipment doesn't start to get worse until you actually are able to start crafting new equipment of the next tier.

Kind of going along with that, there's also now a bit of randomization of when you will find gems of the next tier. The 100% changeover point from one tier to the next is still the same, but there is now a chance of finding higher-tier stuff a little early.

The namesake new feature of this release is actually the new Miniature spell, which is another Movement type spell (like storm dash, teleport, and ride the lightning). Miniature lets you shrink your character down to 25% of their normal size for about ten seconds, but you take twice as much damage while small.

This is great for a lot of purposes in exploring through small holes that previously only were traversible if you transmogrified yourself into a bat. However, it's also good in general for making it so that neutral skelebot characters can fit through underground areas that otherwise might have posed permanent blockages to them.

The Miniature spell can be activated by a double-tap of the down key, so that makes it convenient enough to actually use for purposes of dodging enemy attacks, too. This should fulfill some of the goals of the "crouch ability" discussion that's been going on for the last week or so.

There are another dozen or so smaller tweaks and features that I won't enumerate here -- see the release notes for details -- but the last new feature I want to highlight is healing and MP drops from non-boss enemies. Previously non-boss enemies only dropped shards or nothing. Now they also have a 10% chance each of dropping either a minor healing or minor MP-restoration item that flies to you automatically like the shards do.

This is another one of those things people have been asking for since the start of beta, so it's great to finally have that one in place. More to come tomorrow. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.522, "Shadow Pathing," Released!

2011-10-11T22:31:00.000-04:00

This one is our first release in a couple of days, which is certainly atypical for us! There's a couple of things that have been going on. Firstly, I was out yesterday for some personal reasons; nothing bad, so don't worry, but it was something that I needed to do and which took more time than I expected.

Secondly, Keith has been hard at work ripping parts of the game's innards apart and fitting them back together in a way that will work for multiplayer. That's led to a some new bugs internally (affecting single player as well since it's all one codebase), and we wanted to really hammer on it ourselves to get those ironed out before releasing even a new beta version to folks.

Josh has been testing all sorts of things, and Keith and I have also been playtesting as we work on all the various new things, and at this point it seems clean so far as we can tell -- but we do advise you to perhaps take extra care and back up your world files just in case.

The game might look the same in solo, but it's really come an incredible distance since last Friday in terms of its multiplayer-readiness. A surprising amount of the game is actually now playable in multiplayer in our internal builds -- go Keith! -- but there's still a lot of MP-specific issues that have to be ironed out before we'd want to do a release of that functionality outside the company. Still, it's coming along a lot faster than I thought it would, so that's really good to see. Still no ETA, but all the signs we're seeing are positive at the moment.

Content-wise, there are a number of new boss room templates, bringing the total up to 46. The way that the shadow bats and dragon fire pathfind has also been extensively redone, adding some pretty major new capabilities into the AI for the game. That feature was another big chunk of time for me, but it's something we'll be able to reuse for lots of flying or swimming enemies, and already fighting the shadow bats feels like a completely new boss compared to what it was.

Keith has another big batch of MP-related changes ready that are going to need some substantial internal regression-testing tomorrow, but assuming that we get that cleaned up well enough for tomorrow night, there should be another release then. There's a lot of other stuff that will be coming from my end tomorrow, as well, so hopefully all of that will hit together. This MP overhaul is affecting our normal release schedule a bit, but once we get through the worst of it (hopefully this week, it looks like, for the really major stuff), we'll be back to our regular schedule.

Enjoy!

Also in this release are a number of important fixes and tweaks that players asked for. There's really a very diverse list, so I won't try to re-list them all here; see the release notes for details.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

New AI War Reviews and LP Videos

2011-10-10T23:00:00.001-04:00

Several reviews and Let's Play videos have hit the net for AI War: Fleet Command 5.0 over this past year that we've been meaning to pass along. They all have some very nice words on the game, which is always rewarding for us to hear.

They're also a great reference point to have as a developer, especially with a unique title like AI War that has undergone as much change as it has over these first couple of years. So we're very appreciative of these journalists and reviewers to take the time to review a game originally released in 2009.

Reviews

"I was intimidated, even frustrated at first, but once I took it upon myself to learn the ropes, I discovered a deep strategy game that will keep me entertained for a good, long time."- GameRanx

"An elaborate back-and-forth game of action vs. reaction, patient wit vs. volatile force -- that’s what AI War is, for those who can play it well. It’s a game of manipulation, as you balance the AI’s sensitivity, tricking it into allowing you to cut a line straight to its heart, making it think of you as a trivial pest, while in reality you’re more like a hive of termites: an annoyance, as easily crushed as you are forgotten... until you bring their house crumbling down when they least expect it." - digital hippos

"Intimidating: Check. Difficult to learn: Check. Worth your money: You bet. AI War is many things (and game types) in one, and fortunately they are all good. You may have to dig a little (lot) to find it, but no one can accuse this game of being light on content. The dynamic AI makes for a different game each and every time you play, and the fact that you’re under the constant pressure of expanding without raising the alarm adds a level of complexity (and tension) to the genre that will make it hard for me to go back to traditional RTS games." - Platform Nation

ExtremeMMOGamer: A.I. War Fleet Commander Review
Gaming Shogun: AI War Alien Bundle Review
Three Point Games: AI War Review

Videos

JaviLQ Let's Play Video
10MMulti Let's Play Video

AVWW Beta 0.521, "Storm Dash," Released!

2011-10-07T23:26:00.000-04:00

This one is surprisingly large for being our second release of the day.

First up is a new spellgem, called "Storm Dash." You can use this to increase your movement speed by 500% briefly, but you'll also take twice as much damage while you do so. This is particularly great for the overland segments if you have a lot of overland travel to do in one go -- especially if the monsters are lower-level than you. It's really a big convenience, I find, and the visual effect is also pretty cool; traveling along the sloped ground reminds me somewhat of the old Sonic games, which is kind of neat (though unintentional).

The next big thing in this one is "stashes." Especially with the removal of the profession books, most of the buildings in the game -- keeps, outposts, and towers aside -- have been rather low-value exploration targets. Sure, you could get some dust, and some healing and MP-restoration potions, but you can get those things other ways. And those are only so exciting.

The stashes are basically rooms that are left over from during the cataclysm, when people who are... ahem... no longer with us, were trying to stock up and save themselves. The people are gone (providing some clue as to where all the consciousness shards came from), but the supply caches remain for you to plunder. You can find potions in large quantities (x10, usually), making it so that a visit one or two stashes replaces a much longer trek through many rooms. You can find wooden platforms and other objects, and even spell scrolls. Eventually there will even be some treasures you can only find through rooms like this.

Next up is a new pair of keybindings: Use Best Available Healing (default bound to Y) and Use Best Available Magic Restoration (default bound to U). They do what you'd expect, and that's a function some players have been asking for since last week.

There are a goodly array of other smaller changes and tweaks in there, too, now. You can now use Ride The Lighting via double-jump even if it's not directly on your ability bar. Heatsuits and snowsuits provide some new protections. Balls of light are cheaper in MP costs now. There are vastly fewer of the really large maze rooms in overlord/lieutenant strongholds. Real (and animated) vortex icons on the world map. Among other fixes.

This is likely our last release until Monday, unless something comes up and we have a bit of extra time. It's been a productive week, and I think next week will be even better -- I've been somewhat ill all this week and a bit of last week, but finally that seemed to come to an end today. Anyway -- enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.520, "Shields Up!" Released!

2011-10-07T13:53:00.000-04:00

This one is packed to the gills with good stuff. First off, the boring: boss stats have really been rejiggered again so that the difficulty isn't overblown like it has been the last couple of releases. That's super important, but not that exciting. There's also some changes to the amount of health you get depending on the Action Difficulty you choose, which aids in making the difficulties feel more different than before.

The first of the exciting new things in this release is four new shield spells that you can cast. Right now they are identical except in visual effect, but each is tied to the elements of fire, air, water, and earth -- four of the six elements used by the game (light and entropy being the other two). Later releases will include the last two elements of shields, and will also be including elemental damage and elemental resistance in general -- suddenly these "same thing except different element" spells will start making a lot more sense.

The shield spells in general fill a much-needed niche, in that they allow you to have a button that you can "block" with, compared to always having to jump out of the way of incoming projectiles. I'll be curious what folks think of the MP cost on these -- it might be on the high side at the moment, but I wanted to strike a middle ground between having shields you can block with and not having it be something to spam the usage of.

Also coming soon will be some element-less shield scrolls that will let you put a longer-term shield on yourself that simply has a certain amount of damage it can absorb before disappearing (the "certain amount of damage blocked only" is also true of these shield spells, but they still disappear after 1.5 seconds).

Next thing is a new "Warp To Origin Settlement" button in the escape menu while you are on the world map. This button lets you move back to the 0,0 position regardless of your position on the world map. It's possible to get trapped on the other side of vortexes that pop up, so this provides a means for you to get back on the correct side of things without having to suicide your character.

Lastly, but definitely not least, the way in which the world map is created and and explored is now 100% redone. It's now faster, gives more interesting results, gives a more consistent difficulty curve especially at the start, and doesn't require you to "walk the perimeter" every time your civ level goes up. There are dozens and dozens of individual changes with this one alone, so really I suggest giving the release notes a look if you want all the details.

There should be another release later tonight, I expect. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.519, "Mysterious Pylons," Released!

2011-10-06T17:06:00.000-04:00

This one is packed with more cool stuff. Probably the biggest new thing is the new "pylons" on the world map. These are basically magical barriers that prevent you from crossing certain region tiles. These barriers have a fairly temporary graphic for now, but it's clear where the barriers are, anyhow.

To bring down a barrier, you have to go to one of the pylons that actually generates it. Destroy the pylon, and the whole line of vortexes goes down, allowing you passage. Right now if you go out in adventure mode, it's just a cache of bosses to fight to bring down the pylon, but over time we'll be making the pylon a physical object that you have to destroy. You can also use a strategic order to destroy the pylon magically from afar, presuming you have enough red consciousness shards!

Also of note is that the boss balance was tweaked some more, and each boss also has substantially randomized stats now. Previously the randomization was so slight that I don't think anyone even noticed it. But now bosses, unlike base enemies, are each unique in stats. That will grow even further over time as we get into elemental damage and immunities/weaknesses on specific bosses, etc.

The next big thing is that profession books for spellgem crafting, spell scroll crafting, and outfitter crafting have all been removed. Just getting the resources needed to craft a recipe of those sorts is enough of a challenge, and those resources are (and always have been) gated by chunk level like a lot of other content in the game. So this isn't making it so that you just get access to all spells at the start of the game. It's just making it so that spell availability is based on the resources you have, rather than the resources and the profession books you've collected.

Profession books were easy to collect, but tedious; and they were monumentally unclear to most new players. I see this as being a really key simplification to making the game increasingly easy for new players to pick up. That said, there's a whole new "intro mission" that we'll be building into the game before too long, and that will be directly aimed at new players and getting them up to speed in a matter of minutes but in a way that is more fun and game-oriented than the current adviser guardian stone method.

There's also another music track, which Pablo described as "probably hardest piece I've worked on for any of our games." I can certainly see why -- he'd already created awesome boss music for the game, but I asked him to come up with something even more awesome to be used just for the overlord battles. So that's what he did!

The list of stuff in this release just goes on and on, so mostly I'll refer you to the release notes rather than just repeating all of it verbatim here. But microboss balance is better, the fire damage over time thing is fixed, slowing frost is a lot more interesting now, attractive drops work better, bosses should never seed in walls anymore, enemies should no longer be absent from stairwells anymore, rhinos and eagles are now outdoors-only, and so on.

The next release is likely to be tomorrow, because the current stuff on Keith's and my list are larger blobs of stuff than are likely to be ready by tonight. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.518, "Eagle Tiers," Released!

2011-10-05T20:19:00.000-04:00

This one is another really big release in terms of balance. And also: first new enemies since beta! The new Eagle, and the upgraded Eagle Diver, are two variants off the same enemy which you can now encounter in the forests. There's even a new bird's nest monster spawner for them.

The next big balance news is mostly to do with spells and other player equipment. Previously the crafting tiers were defined as 1 tier = 5 crafting levels. That was really turning out to be problematic, because it meant having to gather gems and craft an entire new arsenal every 5 civ levels. Which really was much too fast to be fun, instead feeling more like a treadmill.

In prior versions of the game that wasn't an issue because the bad difficulty scaling meant that players could continue using lower-tier equipment and thus not run into the issue. But fixing the difficulty scaling brought this issue into sharper relief; previously they had sort of cancelled each other out, as can definitely happen in game design.

Anyway, there were a host of other changes around this, too: lower-tier spells don't get so much cheaper in terms of MP quite so fast; and higher-tier spells get more expensive in terms of MP, faster. All the spells have had their MP costs doubled in general, because the new higher player MP stores meant that these were now out of balance. The range of time it takes for your equipment to get completely obsolete has changed from 10 levels to 20.

All in all this should lead to a smoother, more fun progression; but as always, we want to hear from you about it! There's some other cool stuff in this one, too, such as another 7 boss room templates, and various tweaks and bugfixes.

The next release is likely to be tomorrow. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 5.019 (Minor Bugfix) Released!

2011-10-05T12:01:00.002-04:00

This one is too small to warrant a name for the release. However, it does fix on divide by zero error that is well worth getting a fix into your hands for post-haste.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.517, "Primary Inversion," Released!

2011-10-05T11:49:00.000-04:00

This one is a smaller bugfix/balance release, but it's got a lot of really important stuff in there. For one thing, there was a gaffe in the prior version that had monster health scaling the opposite of what it should have been. For another, the MP costs of spells were still scaling in the old style, making many of them un-castable past a certain civ level.

Those, plus other tweaks and fixes, are now ready for your downloading pleasure. More coming tonight. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Betas 0.515-0516, "It's All Relative," Released!

2011-10-04T23:41:00.000-04:00

This one is yet another really huge release, and yet again it was sparked by player commentary. The work on new spells and enemies and such got pushed back a day, but this release basically marks a complete rebalancing of all the enemies and spells and player stats, and most importantly how they progress over time.

There was a big discussion about this on the forums, and I decided to make that my priority for the bulk of today. The game was starting out at its hardest at civ level 1, and then getting progressively easier as you played more, thanks to the linear algorithms we were using. Now I'm using a relative algorithm that makes things a bit easier at the start, then keeps the difficulty consistent or rising. The change in difficulty from playing up region levels is also now a lot more severe a lot faster.

Also in this release are fifteen new boss room templates, which really adds a lot to the variance of the boss battles in things like rare commodity towers. Going along with that, a number of enemy jumping logic tweaks have been made, as have a number of water-in-hole seeding algorithm changes. The result is skelebots, rhinos, and so on that can get out of shallow holes, and which will more frequently meet a proper watery grave in holes that are not so shallow.

The other really big thing in this release is the new Consciousness Nodes in the macro-game side of things. These are strategic assets that you can capture and "link" to, to get an income of consciousness shards per turn in the strategic mode. However, this stirs up the overlords and rampaging monsters more, so there's definitely a give and take with this.

Oh yes, I almost forgot -- you can now hover over entities while you have paused the game (P or Pause keys on your keyboard) to see their name and some stats about them. So if you're wondering how much an enemy will damage you if they hit you, you don't have to wait until they land a blow to find out.

I can't stress enough how much the balance has changed in this version, honestly. If you're accustomed to playing up a ton of region levels, or if you're accustomed to just having it be a cakewalk now that you're level 30 or whatever, there's going to be a ton of whiplash all of a sudden. On the other hand, if you're just starting out, things just got easier -- hooray!

In general this release brings the balance of the game incredibly closer to a final state, but it's had only me to test it so far, so I'm sure there are some oversights. The one current known balance issue is that the fire from the fire bats is still incredibly too damaging, but that was also the case prior to this release, so that's not really new. That's on my shortlist for tomorrow.

In addition to all of the above, there was also a pretty solid array of other fixes and tweaks; see the release notes for details. More coming tomorrow, including finally some new spells and enemies unless something else critical comes up in the morning -- fingers crossed that that doesn't happen, unlike the last two days! Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.513-0514, "Previously Pernicious Particles," Released!

2011-10-03T23:32:00.000-04:00

This one is a really big release, in a lot of respects. It changes a huge amount of stuff about the visuals of the various particle effects, without actually doing any new graphics. But to the average player it's really going to look like a bunch of new graphics, especially with something like the fireball, because the particle behaviors and compound effects have been updated so much that they look all-new.

We did this not just for every spell in the game, but actually every particle effect in general. Some of them saw pretty small changes only, but for most spells and enemy attacks, the following three things have changed: 1) the spells/attacks look better; 2) they cause between 20% and 50% of the GPU load they previously did; and 3) it's much easier to tell what is going on with them -- which parts of them your character will collide with and be damaged by.

This really changes the feel of the boss battles in particular, for the better. Thanks to all the players who have been suggesting this off and on for a while, but in particular stblr and eRe4s3r for their comments.

There have also been a number of substantial settlement management improvements and changes, among them the introduction of various activities now having shard-costs for colors other than blue shards.

The last major new feature is a new "Mouse Cursor Dynamically Moves Camera" settings option that basically adds a way for the camera to be controlled partly with the mouse. It's pretty cool, but I don't think I'm going to be using it because at 1080p resolution it seems superfluous. At smaller resolutions, though, this is something that can really improve your field of view and it's something that a number of players were asking for as an alternative way to control the camera. So here it is!

And of course there were the usual array of smaller fixes and tweaks; see the release notes for details. More coming tomorrow, including finally some new spells and enemies if at all possible. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta: Week One At A Glance

2011-10-03T02:26:00.000-04:00

We're not even a week into beta for A Valley Without Wind, and already a whopping 12 patches have been released for the game thanks in great part to all the community feedback. It's been an amazing start!

Beta Updates 5.001-5.012 Released (What A Week!)

We've compiled some interesting stats and notes across those dozen updates. Here's what's been added to the game over the past seven days:

Total Words in Change Logs: 9,121
Total Changes: 176

Our programmers have summed up a few favorites:

* Fixed a bug where the large floating rocks were eating the stockpiled wheat while the other npcs weren't looking.

* Fixed a bug where the settlement npcs were being forced to keep working their assigned buildings even after they were _dead_.

* Responded to complaints that normal monsters dropped no shinys. They now drop shinys. In unrelated news, 90% of monster species are now on the endangered list.

* Discovered a player item duplication racket where they were repeatedly dropping their warp scrolls on the ground to trick the naive guardians into giving them more. Fixed by making guardians give non-droppable warp potions instead. We've been very concerned about subsequent reports of players reverting to college behavior. Apparently it doesn't matter what the stuff's made of, as long as when you drink it you wind up somewhere without knowing how.

* Decreased the cooldown on the double-jump spell because it was too long to use on every jump. Then increased it again when we realized players had taken a novel interpretation of "double": they were simply flying by repeated midair jumps.

* Taught the Giant Skelebot boss how to kick field goals. They always miss, but how the players fly.

* Put in some memory workarounds after psychological analysis confirmed that the garbage collector is prone to look at a lack of heap space and decide "why not just let it happen?".

Early Coverage

The game has received a good amount of attention during this past week from the press. Special thanks to all those who have tried out and written/talked about the game! Here's what some of them are saying:

"I can imagine this game opening up under continued exploration to be one of those all-encompassing experiences that you can’t help sinking an unhealthy tract of time into." - Rock, Paper, Shotgun

"But really, at the heart of what A Valley Without Wind is about, at least for me, is exploration and it does it phenomenally." - DIYGamer

"The thing that struck me first about A Valley Without Wind is that it is absolutely vast. This is a game that you can sink hours and hours into, and still feel as though you’ve only started." - Brutal Gamer

Videos

Make sure to check out Quill18's and WelshPixie's excellent introductory LP videos for AVWW. They both do a fantastic job of showing off the game while teaching you the basics as well.

AVWW Beta 0.512, "Watertight Settlements," Released!

2011-10-02T22:25:00.000-04:00

This one is a relatively small release, but it contains a number of important fixes and tweaks. Several of them are aimed at making the settlement management interface clearer, and one of them prevents the farming of trash mobs that fall into water and die.

We're back to our regularly scheduled weekday programming tomorrow. In the meantime -- enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

More Early A Valley Without Wind Coverage

2011-10-02T01:01:00.000-04:00

Nearly a week into beta and A Valley Without Wind has cropped up more solid press previews and coverage, including some new videos as well. Thanks goes to these folks for talking time to play the game, have a look at what they're saying!

Games Blog Coverage

DIYGamer: An Isolating Yet Unique Platformer… A Valley Without Wind [Preview Part 1]
Brutal Gamer: A Valley Without Wind (PC) Preview
IncGamers: A Valley Without Wind in beta, available to purchase
Robocade: A Valley Without Wind 50% Off

Video Coverage

GamingFTL: Alpha Watch Part 1 -- Part 2 -- Part 3
Pewpewchewchew's Let's Play: Session 1 -- Session 2

AVWW Betas 0.510-0.511, "I Seem To Have Dropped My Loot," Released!

2011-10-01T00:46:00.000-04:00

These two releases are absolutely massive, so make sure and check out the release notes for all the details. There's a lot of little features and tweaks in here. But here's the big cool stuff:

Monster loot drops! Monsters of all sorts are now dropping consciousness shards, which have been split into six colors instead of just one. Right now only the blue color are used in the macro-game, but that's going to change soon. And minor insta-heal/insta-mana-restore drops will also be entering the mix from non-boss monsters.
A number of new improvements for keyboard-only control setups have been added.
Several enemy and spell visibility improvements have been made.
Fixed several issues with bosses not seeding -- in particular giant shadow bats but really any bosses in densely populated rooms.
Updated the doors into destroyed rooms so that they now look visibly destroyed in a much more convincing and obvious way rather than simply relying on the little bomb icon. Much cooler this way, and clearer to boot!

Again, those are just the highlights, so be sure to check the full release notes if you want all the gory details. Enjoy!

This is the first weekend since the public beta started, so one thing to be aware of is that while we do get some spots of work done here and there on the weekend, for most of the time for us, the weekends are family time rather than work time. It's been a really productive week, though, and next week we'll be right back at it with even more updates. Thanks to everyone for making this by far our best beta-first-released week ever!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 5.018, "Ions And Attritioners," Released!

2011-09-30T10:24:00.001-04:00

This one has a number of balance tweaks most specifically centered around the various ion-based units and the spirecraft attritioner. These should now be a lot more fearsome in AI hands, but even more notably a lot more attractive for players to actually build and use themselves. There are a couple of other minor tweaks and fixes in there, too.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Betas 0.508-0.509, "Walls? What Walls?," Released!

2011-09-30T10:04:00.000-04:00

These two releases are a couple of the coolest ones we've done yet, in terms of improving the overall feel of the game. There were a few ongoing gripes that a lot of players had, and we've addressed all the most persistent ones here:

Guardian stones now give you warp potions instead of warp scrolls, and refresh you back up to 4 instead of 2. The reason the change to potions is significant is that means you can still get refreshed to 4 potions if you've crafted some "extra" warp scrolls of your own.
Hit detection on melee combat is vastly better.
Bats can no longer go through walls, nor can spells like ice cross or circle of fire. This makes it so that you can actually take cover behind walls in all cases, and it makes terrain more tactical for all enemies. It also prevents players from being able to exploit ice cross or similar against bosses.
The power of healing potions/scrolls has been quadrupled, and the power of magic restoration potions/scrolls has been doubled. Magic potions also have their own cooldown, rather than causing a cooldown on all logistical spells. The difficulty had been creeping up in recent versions, but this gets it back into a better-balanced level.
Monster nests no longer respawn except in boss rooms. So if you take the time to clear out a room of monster nests, you can go back in without fear. Handy for exploration in buildings in particular!
The speed of enemy projectiles gets slowed down substantially (or sped up a little) depending on what action difficulty setting you choose.
In the strategic/citybuilding parts of the game, we've done a massive overhaul of how NPC actions are taken. Now actions cost time units, and NPCs each have a certain amount of time units they can spend per turn. Before it was a flat one action per turn, which really was not very kind when it came to lower-value actions that were needed but which would consume an entire action for that NPC.
The Ilari now provide protection from the ambient heat/cold in settlements and similar, so you don't have to worry about your new character dying from exposure while you rush to craft a snowsuit.
A variety of smaller physics improvements and fixes make playing as a bat smoother, flying enemies work better around walls, things like amoeba shots and tidal pulse slide along the floor, and so on.

And those are just the highlights, there was a lot of other smaller stuff, too. More coming later tonight -- and now that we're getting out of the territory of so many of these more core refinements based on the increased player feedback, we'll be able to do more in terms of new spells and enemies and such coming up, too. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Betas 0.505-0.507, "Skelebot Goal Kick," Released!

2011-09-29T12:35:00.001-04:00

These three releases have all come out in the last day or so. Aside from a lot of general bugfixes and balance tweaks, there's a number of cool changes here:

The Skelebot Giants now have a massive knockback to their melee attacks, letting them basically punt your character a few screens away.
Put in a number of improvements to the visual display and functionality of the direct keyboard targeting.
The ranged bosses can now hit you from further away, making it harder to kite them.
Gem veins and other mine-able stuff underground is now easier to find and see, and the dungeon map now updates its colors to indicate ones you've already mined.
Support for single-button mice has been improved; actually, so has support for mice with more than three buttons, too.

More coming later tonight. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Beta 0.504, "Multicolored Offense," Released!

2011-09-28T13:45:00.001-04:00

After a small maintenance release last night, this one is our latest full update. This one is full of tweaks and adjustments, including monster speed, how you transition between chunks, how the auto-potions work, how potions work in general, and how offensive spell cooldowns work. Check out the release notes for full details.

More coming later tonight. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

A Valley Without Wind Early Beta Coverage

2011-09-28T07:05:00.000-04:00

A Valley Without Wind has been out in beta for less than 48 hours, and already there are some great previews and other coverage coming in!

We definitely suggest you check out Quill18's super informative and captivating two-part LP preview of the game, which in lieu of our getting started guide is a great way to discover the basics of the game.

On the games blogs, IndieGames.com has posted the start of their preview with just an hour under their belt. DIYGamer has some extremely nice words on the game as well. More previews to come from these sources as well as many others!

Here's some of the other awesome coverage on the beta release:

Rock, Paper, Shotgun: A Valley Without Wind Demo And Beta Launch
VG247: A Valley Without Wind offers first public beta client – go get ‘em!

Gnome's Lair: Time to enter A Valley Without Wind

Co-Optimus: A Valley Without Wind Enters Public Beta

UnitLost.com: A Valley Without Wind (Blind Video Preview)

Games.on.net: A Valley Without Wind Goes Into Beta

BNBGaming: The Indie Fix: A Valley Without Wind Now Available

Anjel Syndicate: A Valley Without Wind Public Beta and Demo Now Available
Space Game Junkie: Off-Topic – A Valley Without Wind Released

WorthPlaying.com: 'A Valley Without Wind' Demo Available NOW

IndieGameMagazine: A VALLEY WITHOUT WINDS PUBLIC BETA BEGINS

AVWW Beta 0.502, "Smashed Spawners," Released!

2011-09-27T23:38:00.000-04:00

This one is actually our second beta update since 0.500 came out yesterday, but the first update was so puny it wasn't worth a news post for. Yesterday was a busy, busy day -- and a really incredible day. The amount of support and excitement for A Valley Without Wind is pretty incredible!

Today was a lot more productive, in terms of actually updating the game and getting to the things folks were wanting to see changed. The changelog, which is linked above, is pretty long and inclusive, so for a lot of the details you'll just want to go there.

However, some highlights:

Fixed a number of mostly-obscure crash bugs and other errors of that nature. Nothing like having a suddenly wildly-larger playerbase for flushing those out of the bushes!
Made it so that you can now kill monster spawners, but they respawn when you leave the area for too long. This was our most-requested feature. As a side note, minor loot drops from the small mobs is coming, but I didn't have time to get to that one today.
Added a new spell, Death Touch, which is like Fire Touch on steroids. This one actually costs mana, but it's great for quickly mining things and it's also great for taking out monster spawners more quickly.
With their help, fixed a couple of exploits that some clever players had figured out in terms of gaming the invincibility mechanics to slay higher-level bosses than they should be able to.
Fixed the gap where there often were few or no regions leveled 11-19 in most worlds. There will definitely now be at least one non-ocean region of every level 1-1000 in the world, and generally there should be at least one region of every possible level above that, too, although there might be gaps here or there where 1097 happens to only have ocean tiles and 1098 has somewhere you can really visit on land, etc.
Added several keyboard-centric control options for players that prefer not to use a mouse while they play.
Added a number of fixes, tweaks, and additions that are OSX-centric. In particular there is a nasty bug in just the compiled executables that Unity 3D generates, where the mouse cursor on trackpads leaps upwards above the top of the screen whenever you press a keyboard key. We can't directly fix that bug since it's in the underlying engine, but we did put in a workaround tha seems to solve all the problems. Folks on OSX who were having trouble aiming spells while doing something like, say, running, should now be trouble-free.
Also added in a little mouse cursor underlay to make sure the mouse cursor is easier to see against all kinds of backgrounds; in interiors on OSX it was easy to lose the cursor, and in snowstorms on windows it was easy to lose the cursor. Now you can see it everywhere for sure.
And lastly, put in a number of fixes related to dead NPCs and what happens to them in the strategic/citybuilding interfaces.
Along with a lot of other more minor things noted in the release log.

More coming tomorrow. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

AVWW Comes To GamersGate!

2011-09-27T10:34:00.000-04:00

Joining Arcen's other titles on GamersGate is A Valley Without Wind, which can be purchased there for the same 50% early-beta discount that Arcen is directly offering. Be sure to check them out!

A Valley Without Wind: Public Beta Begins Now! (Plus New Trailer)

2011-09-26T10:52:00.002-04:00

Today is the day that the public beta finally begins! We've fixed up the website with new information, screenshots, and all the recent videos, including the one below.

Most importantly you can now download the demo, and give the first six civilization levels a full crack if you think the game sounds interesting. The only restriction is that your civ level can't go past level 6. If you're loving it, here's the preorder page in our online store where you can get the game for 50% off during early beta -- only $10 USD!

Here's the beta trailer:

AI War: Alien Bundle (Physical/Digital) Arrives On Matrix Online Store

2011-09-23T15:56:00.000-04:00

Arcen Games is pleased to announce a partnership with Matrix Games and Slitherine that offers the AI War Alien Bundle up for purchase both in physical and digital forms at the Matrix Games Online Store effective immediately.

The AI War's Alien Bundle contains the base game along with all three currently released expansions: The Zenith Remnant, Children of Neinzul, and Light of the Spire. An absolutely mind-blowing amount of content!

In celebration of the event, Matrix is running a two week sale on the bundle so gamers can pick up the digital copy for just $19.99, or $10 (33%) off of the standard price! For more information, check out the product page on the store. As always, anyone who'd like can try the sizable demo as well.

RPS Exclusive Hands-On With A Valley Without Wind

2011-09-20T10:05:00.001-04:00

Over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun Jim Rossignol has published first impressions of A Valley Without Wind, which marks the first official media hands-on with the beta ahead of its imminent release. Lots of good stuff, but we'll let Jim do the talking. Head over to one of our favorite gaming sites period and check it out.

Also, at the end of the article Jim mentions he'll be posting more on the game soon. So stay tuned for a possible part two of his session!