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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

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

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

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

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

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

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

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

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

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

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

AVWW Beta 0.564 "Gravity Kicks In" Released!

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

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

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

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

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

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

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

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

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

Enjoy!

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

AVWW Beta 0.563 "Migratory Battlefields" Released!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AVWW Beta 0.562 "Continental Drift " Released!

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on all this in a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AVWW Beta 0.558 "Seizing Menus " Released!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

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

AVWW Beta 0.556, "Urban Predatation" Released!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

A Valley Without Wind Soundtrack Preview!

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

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