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.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.534, "Settlements Ahoy," Released!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.531, "Glyph Transplants and Abandoned Settlements," Released!
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.
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.
Monday, October 24, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.530, "EXP Containers and Map Editor Extensions," Released!
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.
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.
Friday, October 21, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.529, "The Awful Truth About Fairies," Released!
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.
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.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.528, "The Overlord Experience," Released!
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.527, "Greater Teleport and Lightning Rocket," Released!
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.526, "Telegraphing Crates," Released!
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.
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
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
Saturday, October 15, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.525, "Rushing Minis," Released!
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.
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.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.524, "Lieutenant Battle Rock," Released!
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.523, "Miniatures and Health/MP Drops," Released!
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.522, "Shadow Pathing," Released!
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.
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.
Monday, October 10, 2011
New AI War Reviews and LP Videos
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
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
Friday, October 7, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.521, "Storm Dash," Released!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.519, "Mysterious Pylons," Released!
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.518, "Eagle Tiers," Released!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
AVWW Betas 0.515-0516, "It's All Relative," Released!
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.
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.
Monday, October 3, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.513-0514, "Previously Pernicious Particles," Released!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
AVWW Beta 0.512, "Watertight Settlements," Released!
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.
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
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
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
Saturday, October 1, 2011
AVWW Betas 0.510-0.511, "I Seem To Have Dropped My Loot," Released!
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:
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.
- 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!
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.
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