This one has more balance and bugfix changes, and more responses to the "worst unit" polls. This time, the Mobile Repair Station gets some overdue love. Most substantially with this release, however, are some bug/balance fixes relating to the AI and how it gets reinforcements.
Those were being held artificially low on certain difficulties, in certain circumstances, and when the AI had certain ships. So we fixed the glitch, and this will just work itself out naturally. Haha. In some recent versions, players were wondering why we were being so nice to the player team in terms of balance changes; well, now the other shoe drops, I guess!
It's not all that bad, really, but it's nice to sound ominous sometimes.
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.
Friday, March 30, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.922 "Come Out, Shy Little Monsters..." Released!
This one is a hotfix for some issues in the prior version. Sigh.
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.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.921 "World Of Darkness" Released!
This one is a lot cheerier than our last release, in that it's not fixing critical bugs. Minor ones, sure, but that's a much better way to end the day as far as I'm concerned. It also changes around the balance on the supply depot meteor defense missions, and makes the world map way more oppressive-looking in a way that players have been asking for. Plus the world map just seems to look better now, 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.
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 0.920 "Thog No Like Jurassic Bugs" Released!
This one has got to be about the least fun sort of release to be working on, for everyone involved (players and developers). There was still a memory leak in the prior version, and it was harming performance as well because of all the garbage collections it was causing.
So all day today for Keith, myself, and Josh has been spent on this one issue. That's the bad news. The good news is that we found all the issues (knock on wood) and the game is running more memory-efficiently than it ever has before.
Some of the "recent" bugs withe memory leaks were actually just us having cleaned up some code that then revealed an older and longer-standing bug. There were multiple bugs that we fixed today that dated back to when this game was from the top-down perspective.
What essentially happened was some more recent bugs (as well as some more recent fixes) combined with the older bugs to create major problems. But we've been through this thing backwards and forwards today, Keith added memory profiling capabilities into the game engine itself, and it's now incredibly lean. If you hit F3 and look at the managed memory usage, it's absolutely through the floor.
Unfortunately this means we didn't get anything else done today, but this evening hopefully I'll have time to get a little more done. As well as fix any new bugs that might crop up if you guys find something.
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.
So all day today for Keith, myself, and Josh has been spent on this one issue. That's the bad news. The good news is that we found all the issues (knock on wood) and the game is running more memory-efficiently than it ever has before.
Some of the "recent" bugs withe memory leaks were actually just us having cleaned up some code that then revealed an older and longer-standing bug. There were multiple bugs that we fixed today that dated back to when this game was from the top-down perspective.
What essentially happened was some more recent bugs (as well as some more recent fixes) combined with the older bugs to create major problems. But we've been through this thing backwards and forwards today, Keith added memory profiling capabilities into the game engine itself, and it's now incredibly lean. If you hit F3 and look at the managed memory usage, it's absolutely through the floor.
Unfortunately this means we didn't get anything else done today, but this evening hopefully I'll have time to get a little more done. As well as fix any new bugs that might crop up if you guys find something.
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 0.919 "But I LIKE Referencing Nulls" Released!
This one is our third release of the day, which is never a good sign.
Two releases can be good or bad: yay we had a batch of content and stuff leftover from prior days that we released mid-day, and then yay we did even more and released that at the end of the day; or yay we released a new version, and then oops we released a followup to fix something in the version we just released.
Three releases... there's no way there's not an oops in at least one of those three releases. Today has been a day with two oops-fixing releases out of three, although two out of the three releases also had new content of significance.
Sigh. It's been one of those days, I guess; hopefully tomorrow will go substantially more smoothly! But things seem to be in good enough shape for now, and so I'm heading for some sleep.
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.
Two releases can be good or bad: yay we had a batch of content and stuff leftover from prior days that we released mid-day, and then yay we did even more and released that at the end of the day; or yay we released a new version, and then oops we released a followup to fix something in the version we just released.
Three releases... there's no way there's not an oops in at least one of those three releases. Today has been a day with two oops-fixing releases out of three, although two out of the three releases also had new content of significance.
Sigh. It's been one of those days, I guess; hopefully tomorrow will go substantially more smoothly! But things seem to be in good enough shape for now, and so I'm heading for some sleep.
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.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.918 "The Music Of The Leaky Draconite" Released!
This one is the second release of today. There was a memory leak in chunk-gen in the prior version, and we wanted to get a fix out for that as soon as we could. Apologies that it took us a couple of hours to do so, actually -- we had the fix done about an hour and a half ago, but there were some other bits of code that were still in-progress and we couldn't push a new version until that stuff was checked in.
That said, there's some pretty cool new content in this version. A new kind of playable character (draconites), and a great new music track by Pablo that has now been added to the playlists for underground caverns in most areas.
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.
That said, there's some pretty cool new content in this version. A new kind of playable character (draconites), and a great new music track by Pablo that has now been added to the playlists for underground caverns in most areas.
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 0.917 "Toss Some Ice At That CPU" Released!
This one took us substantially longer than we thought it would, but that's mainly because I wound up going down a rabbit hole of performance improvements.
Which is great news! There's a whole host of mainly-CPU-related performance improvements all through here, with everything from chunk-gen (particularly key in multiplayer) to actually when you're running around. Some of the most GPU-heavy enemy shot types (such as those from amoebas) have also had their load requirements toned down (in the process also making them more visually distinct from player spells, which is a double plus.
There's a new spell in here, called ice toss. I'd wanted to add another couple of spells at least with this one, and we've got another enemy that is just about complete, but on the other hand I didn't want to keep delaying this release indefinitely.
There are also a lot of fixes and balance tweaks in here. Large monsters drop more health now than small ones do, for instance. The ocean shallows are a lot more unique and a lot more interesting to explore, and they also no longer have dead ends through them constantly. So getting sea essence and coral is no longer the exercise in frustration that it once was.
Oh, and you can now place both wood platforms and crates in spaces that are normally too small for either (and when they grow into existence, they'll just expand to fill the space that they can. This is hugely useful for when you fall down a narrow 1-tile-wide hole, for instance. Previously that was a death sentence if you didn't have something special like a bat scroll, double-or-triple jump, lightning rocket, or an elusion scroll.
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.
Which is great news! There's a whole host of mainly-CPU-related performance improvements all through here, with everything from chunk-gen (particularly key in multiplayer) to actually when you're running around. Some of the most GPU-heavy enemy shot types (such as those from amoebas) have also had their load requirements toned down (in the process also making them more visually distinct from player spells, which is a double plus.
There's a new spell in here, called ice toss. I'd wanted to add another couple of spells at least with this one, and we've got another enemy that is just about complete, but on the other hand I didn't want to keep delaying this release indefinitely.
There are also a lot of fixes and balance tweaks in here. Large monsters drop more health now than small ones do, for instance. The ocean shallows are a lot more unique and a lot more interesting to explore, and they also no longer have dead ends through them constantly. So getting sea essence and coral is no longer the exercise in frustration that it once was.
Oh, and you can now place both wood platforms and crates in spaces that are normally too small for either (and when they grow into existence, they'll just expand to fill the space that they can. This is hugely useful for when you fall down a narrow 1-tile-wide hole, for instance. Previously that was a death sentence if you didn't have something special like a bat scroll, double-or-triple jump, lightning rocket, or an elusion scroll.
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, March 26, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.916 "The Black Wind Shows" Released!
This one is the first of what we expect to be two releases for today. The main reason we're pushing this one early is that it has such major CPU usage enhancements in it that we really wanted to get that into the hands of folks as soon as possible.
But it also has a few other tweaks, the most notable of which is that the wind on the world map is now a visible thing that not only is shown blowing but also darkens the tiles it covers. This is something that players have wanted for a good while, so that they can have a better visual barometer of just how much they have pushed the winds back on their continent.
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.
But it also has a few other tweaks, the most notable of which is that the wind on the world map is now a visible thing that not only is shown blowing but also darkens the tiles it covers. This is something that players have wanted for a good while, so that they can have a better visual barometer of just how much they have pushed the winds back on their continent.
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.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.915 "Dire Servant... From The Meadow?" Released!
This one has yet another batch of bugfixes, but also four new/revised features:
1. Actual glass in windows, with periodic cracks and everything.
2. Healing Touch now not only works in multiplayer, it's a lot more useful in how it works in multiplayer and solo.
3. Skelebot Guards are now Skelebot Grunts, and way less annoying. Elite versions of the grunts will be added later with new abilities/behavior to make them more challenging, but for now the grunts are pretty simple cannon fodder for the start of the game.
4. A new summon spell has been added to the game; it's something you can get starting on the second continent. It's got a funny name and appearance, but it's actually pretty powerful -- depending on the circumstances, actually moreso than the rhino.
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.
1. Actual glass in windows, with periodic cracks and everything.
2. Healing Touch now not only works in multiplayer, it's a lot more useful in how it works in multiplayer and solo.
3. Skelebot Guards are now Skelebot Grunts, and way less annoying. Elite versions of the grunts will be added later with new abilities/behavior to make them more challenging, but for now the grunts are pretty simple cannon fodder for the start of the game.
4. A new summon spell has been added to the game; it's something you can get starting on the second continent. It's got a funny name and appearance, but it's actually pretty powerful -- depending on the circumstances, actually moreso than the rhino.
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.
Steam Deal: Tidalis $2.50 Today Only
Steam has our 'easy to learn, hard to master' puzzler Tidalis at 50% off today only as part of their Daily Deal promotion. With the game's recent price drop that brings the PC/Mac title down to just $2.50.
If you know much about our games, you know that's quite a bit of content for around the cost of a cup of coffee. Plus no calories (directly).
The sale ends tomorrow (Monday, March 26th) at 10:00 AM PT. Reluctant? Demo. Tidalis Lite (browser version).
If you know much about our games, you know that's quite a bit of content for around the cost of a cup of coffee. Plus no calories (directly).
The sale ends tomorrow (Monday, March 26th) at 10:00 AM PT. Reluctant? Demo. Tidalis Lite (browser version).
AVWW Interview On First Drop Show
Chris and I had a solid chat last week with Eddie Milanes on the First Drop Show podcast.We cover a variety of topics regarding the design, development, and upcoming official release of A Valley Without Wind, including scrapped concepts, future possibilities for the game, why we try to only develop features in that we'd want to play, etc.
If you're looking for some in-depth discussion about the game, or just have an hour to kill, definitely give it a listen.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.914 "Insecticide" Released!
This one is our second release of the day, and it's just a bugfix release that is focused on fixing mainly things that we broke in the prior version. With that many changes to get multiplayer working better (which we're told that it is, happily), there were bound to be some other things broken.
The unhappy truth of doing surgery on a codebase to fix a nest of issues is that you get some collateral damage. Fortunately the damage was mostly pretty mild so far (knock on wood), but definitely still annoying and something we wanted to fix as soon as we could. All of the worst ones seem to be resolved with this release, but let us know what else you find that seems off, as always!
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 unhappy truth of doing surgery on a codebase to fix a nest of issues is that you get some collateral damage. Fortunately the damage was mostly pretty mild so far (knock on wood), but definitely still annoying and something we wanted to fix as soon as we could. All of the worst ones seem to be resolved with this release, but let us know what else you find that seems off, as always!
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 0.913 "Unraveling Mysteries" Released!
This one has been a few days in the works, but has two major components to it.
Mysteries!
First of all, there are finally mysteries in the game, as well as puzzle rooms to solve to unlock clues from each mystery. Right now there are two mysteries with a combined 28 clues between them, but there will be more mysteries added both before and after 1.0. The mysteries are really fun because they allow you to learn some more about the world of Environ without it just being lots of exposition, and they also add a puzzle element that is lightweight, and optional, but fun-if-you're-into-that-sort-of-thing.
Mysteries themselves took a little over a solid day for me, but they represent the last major "type of game mechanic" that we needed to add before 1.0, so that's pretty exciting to have done. We still have lots of content to add, but mysteries were the last new kind of broad mechanic that was missing.
Multiplayer Work
The rest of my time, and all of Keith's and Josh's time, has been spent working on multiplayer. We'd thought that multiplayer was in a much cleaner state than it turned out to be, honestly. We'd done a goodly amount of multiplayer testing on our own, but only in short-ish sessions over good connections in geographic areas that only spanned a few hundred miles. And we were getting and fixing the occasional bug report from people playing on public servers like Toll's, but there wasn't much of that and so we presumed all was well.
Turns out that was not the case! For some folks who were more geographically distant, or who were otherwise having lag issues, there were a number of severe MP issues that only cropped up in those circumstances. We've now got a way of testing under situations of moderate or heavy lag internally for ourselves, so we were able to duplicate the issues (and then had to figure out how to fix them). We fixed an absolute horde of these sorts of MP-specific bugs, and the MP experience is thus incredibly smoother under most conditions.
What Remains For Multiplayer -- And A Communication Breakdown
There are a few mostly-cosmetic bugs that we're still aware of, as well as a handful of not-cosmetic-at-all bugs, but in the main MP is now feeling a lot closer to a product we'd actually want to release as 1.0 next month.
The most concerning thing through this process, however, was that we just didn't get the feedback and didn't even know there was a problem -- normally people tell us when they run into issues right away, and since there were a number of people we knew were playing MP, we assumed that an absence of reports meant an absence of issues.
But in this case, it apparently meant that MP was so badly broken for a few people that they just assumed that it was some sort of working test version and that we knew about it; and thus said nothing. And meanwhile other people were playing under situations that weren't high-lag, having almost no issues, and telling us things seemed great, which matched our own testing.
Far be it from me to chide anyone, because I know that everyone who takes the time to submit any bug report is doing us a huge favor, and it's not something they were required to do. Testing our games isn't your job, etc, etc.
But for those folks who do find a bug that they want to see fixed, definitely I'd advise erring on the side of assuming we don't know about it. We'd rather have to clean up duplicates than to have something important slip through the cracks -- in the last three years, this is the first time I can really remember where that almost happened, and frankly it was kind of scary. If we had gone ahead with our original go-live date of next week, there would have been some major fecal matter hitting the proverbial fan, and we would have had no idea that was coming.
Serves us right for not doing our own better testing under conditions of lag, of course. We just assumed that having two people in two different cities in North Carolina, plus a third person in Georgia, would give us real-world-enough results. Ah, well; in the end it looks like it is all working out well, knock on wood, but that's definitely had us in a bit of a tizzy for the last couple of days and delayed some content updates.
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.
Mysteries!
First of all, there are finally mysteries in the game, as well as puzzle rooms to solve to unlock clues from each mystery. Right now there are two mysteries with a combined 28 clues between them, but there will be more mysteries added both before and after 1.0. The mysteries are really fun because they allow you to learn some more about the world of Environ without it just being lots of exposition, and they also add a puzzle element that is lightweight, and optional, but fun-if-you're-into-that-sort-of-thing.
Mysteries themselves took a little over a solid day for me, but they represent the last major "type of game mechanic" that we needed to add before 1.0, so that's pretty exciting to have done. We still have lots of content to add, but mysteries were the last new kind of broad mechanic that was missing.
Multiplayer Work
The rest of my time, and all of Keith's and Josh's time, has been spent working on multiplayer. We'd thought that multiplayer was in a much cleaner state than it turned out to be, honestly. We'd done a goodly amount of multiplayer testing on our own, but only in short-ish sessions over good connections in geographic areas that only spanned a few hundred miles. And we were getting and fixing the occasional bug report from people playing on public servers like Toll's, but there wasn't much of that and so we presumed all was well.
Turns out that was not the case! For some folks who were more geographically distant, or who were otherwise having lag issues, there were a number of severe MP issues that only cropped up in those circumstances. We've now got a way of testing under situations of moderate or heavy lag internally for ourselves, so we were able to duplicate the issues (and then had to figure out how to fix them). We fixed an absolute horde of these sorts of MP-specific bugs, and the MP experience is thus incredibly smoother under most conditions.
What Remains For Multiplayer -- And A Communication Breakdown
There are a few mostly-cosmetic bugs that we're still aware of, as well as a handful of not-cosmetic-at-all bugs, but in the main MP is now feeling a lot closer to a product we'd actually want to release as 1.0 next month.
The most concerning thing through this process, however, was that we just didn't get the feedback and didn't even know there was a problem -- normally people tell us when they run into issues right away, and since there were a number of people we knew were playing MP, we assumed that an absence of reports meant an absence of issues.
But in this case, it apparently meant that MP was so badly broken for a few people that they just assumed that it was some sort of working test version and that we knew about it; and thus said nothing. And meanwhile other people were playing under situations that weren't high-lag, having almost no issues, and telling us things seemed great, which matched our own testing.
Far be it from me to chide anyone, because I know that everyone who takes the time to submit any bug report is doing us a huge favor, and it's not something they were required to do. Testing our games isn't your job, etc, etc.
But for those folks who do find a bug that they want to see fixed, definitely I'd advise erring on the side of assuming we don't know about it. We'd rather have to clean up duplicates than to have something important slip through the cracks -- in the last three years, this is the first time I can really remember where that almost happened, and frankly it was kind of scary. If we had gone ahead with our original go-live date of next week, there would have been some major fecal matter hitting the proverbial fan, and we would have had no idea that was coming.
Serves us right for not doing our own better testing under conditions of lag, of course. We just assumed that having two people in two different cities in North Carolina, plus a third person in Georgia, would give us real-world-enough results. Ah, well; in the end it looks like it is all working out well, knock on wood, but that's definitely had us in a bit of a tizzy for the last couple of days and delayed some content updates.
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.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
AVWW 1.0 On April 16th, Confirmed On Steam -- Also Price Drop For Final Game
It was just two days ago that we gave you some general updates about A Valley Without Wind's launch coming the "week of April 16th," but there were a lot of specifics we couldn't give you at the time. Welp... now have the rest of the details for you!
Release Date -- And Steam!
The actual release date will be, specifically, Monday April 16th itself. The game will be going live on Steam on that day as 1.0, along with having its version updated to 1.0 with Impulse, GamersGate, MacGameStore, and our own site. All of the latter already carry the game at a preorder discount.
Steam Keys For Existing Preorders?
Any keys you buy from other sources should be able to have their CD keys imported into Steam for Steam keys. The final call on that is always up to Valve rather than us, so we can't make promises on their behalf. But all five of our existing games/expansions that are on Steam allow for CD key imports, so we don't have any reason to believe that this sixth title will suddenly be any different.
Final Pricing For 1.0
The preorder price has been $9.99, and will remain thus until April 16th. At launch, we'll be moving to a final price of $14.99 for the game instead of the previously-planned $19.99, however.
Insight Into The Pricing Thought Process, If You're Curious
This pricing change is something that we decided upon in consultation with our distributors, who strongly recommended it. Looking at the market for games vaguely similar to AVWW, we had to conclude that they were correct, and honestly we'd been getting antsy about the $20 price point for a game of this genre, anyhow.
Crazy, right? There's dozens of hours of content in here, hundreds if you really get into the game heavily, and that beats out a lot of AAA titles in terms of how much bang for your buck you get -- at $15, $20, or even $60. But that's not how the market works, and the market is always changing.
If you think about this as your game, and you're trying to figure out a fair price, that makes $20 seem like the right choice -- after all, AI War was $20 up until this past month, and it's done very well for us. So that's what we originally went with as our goal for the launch price. The thing is, if I step back and think about this as a consumer (which I am -- I still buy plenty of games myself), then $20 for most small-studio indie games seems a bit steep.
The exception are those that are in niche genres: strategy titles, visual novels, wargames, hardcore simulations, and so forth. I think that my friend Cliff has it right with his pricing for Gratuitous Tank Battles, for instance. And I think that $20 was the right price point for AI War for most of its life (though I always had people telling me it should be $30 like some other wargames, and others telling me it should be $10 like some other indie games).
For A Valley Without Wind, looking at anything that could be lumped into its general sort of genre, the pricing is more typically between $10-$15. Given the massive amount of playtime this game has, and the ongoing work we do post-release with titles like this, being at the higher end of that range -- but no higher -- seemed like the pragmatic move.
What's Left To Do?
Today we should have the first two mysteries released for you, which will mark the last of the overall "broad game mechanics" for the game. Then it's a focus on:
- Polish
- Bugfixes
- Player-requested tweaks and additions
- More enemies, including enemy elites and boss modifiers
- More spells
- More guardian power scrolls
- More mission activities
- Possibly a few more enchants, although there are already hundreds of thousands of permutations of these.
If you're curious how things are likely to go over the next month between now and 1.0, just take a look at what we've been up to lately. That's pretty representative.
And Now, Some Shameless Plugging Of Social Media
Be sure to like the game on facebook if you're into that sort of thing, follow the game on twitter if that's your bag, etc. This game is really important to us both personally and as a company, and word of mouth has been absolutely instrumental in the past success of AI War for us. If you like what we do and want to see more of it, be sure to tell your friends!
Thanks, as always, for your support! We really wouldn't be here without you all. Nor would AVWW be the same without all the extensive beta involvement it's seen. I mean, seriously.
Release Date -- And Steam!
The actual release date will be, specifically, Monday April 16th itself. The game will be going live on Steam on that day as 1.0, along with having its version updated to 1.0 with Impulse, GamersGate, MacGameStore, and our own site. All of the latter already carry the game at a preorder discount.
Steam Keys For Existing Preorders?
Any keys you buy from other sources should be able to have their CD keys imported into Steam for Steam keys. The final call on that is always up to Valve rather than us, so we can't make promises on their behalf. But all five of our existing games/expansions that are on Steam allow for CD key imports, so we don't have any reason to believe that this sixth title will suddenly be any different.
Final Pricing For 1.0
The preorder price has been $9.99, and will remain thus until April 16th. At launch, we'll be moving to a final price of $14.99 for the game instead of the previously-planned $19.99, however.
Insight Into The Pricing Thought Process, If You're Curious
This pricing change is something that we decided upon in consultation with our distributors, who strongly recommended it. Looking at the market for games vaguely similar to AVWW, we had to conclude that they were correct, and honestly we'd been getting antsy about the $20 price point for a game of this genre, anyhow.
Crazy, right? There's dozens of hours of content in here, hundreds if you really get into the game heavily, and that beats out a lot of AAA titles in terms of how much bang for your buck you get -- at $15, $20, or even $60. But that's not how the market works, and the market is always changing.
If you think about this as your game, and you're trying to figure out a fair price, that makes $20 seem like the right choice -- after all, AI War was $20 up until this past month, and it's done very well for us. So that's what we originally went with as our goal for the launch price. The thing is, if I step back and think about this as a consumer (which I am -- I still buy plenty of games myself), then $20 for most small-studio indie games seems a bit steep.
The exception are those that are in niche genres: strategy titles, visual novels, wargames, hardcore simulations, and so forth. I think that my friend Cliff has it right with his pricing for Gratuitous Tank Battles, for instance. And I think that $20 was the right price point for AI War for most of its life (though I always had people telling me it should be $30 like some other wargames, and others telling me it should be $10 like some other indie games).
For A Valley Without Wind, looking at anything that could be lumped into its general sort of genre, the pricing is more typically between $10-$15. Given the massive amount of playtime this game has, and the ongoing work we do post-release with titles like this, being at the higher end of that range -- but no higher -- seemed like the pragmatic move.
What's Left To Do?
Today we should have the first two mysteries released for you, which will mark the last of the overall "broad game mechanics" for the game. Then it's a focus on:
- Polish
- Bugfixes
- Player-requested tweaks and additions
- More enemies, including enemy elites and boss modifiers
- More spells
- More guardian power scrolls
- More mission activities
- Possibly a few more enchants, although there are already hundreds of thousands of permutations of these.
If you're curious how things are likely to go over the next month between now and 1.0, just take a look at what we've been up to lately. That's pretty representative.
And Now, Some Shameless Plugging Of Social Media
Be sure to like the game on facebook if you're into that sort of thing, follow the game on twitter if that's your bag, etc. This game is really important to us both personally and as a company, and word of mouth has been absolutely instrumental in the past success of AI War for us. If you like what we do and want to see more of it, be sure to tell your friends!
Thanks, as always, for your support! We really wouldn't be here without you all. Nor would AVWW be the same without all the extensive beta involvement it's seen. I mean, seriously.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
AI War Beta 5.031, "Harvest Of The Unloved," Released!
This one is just rebalancing, but some of it's pretty significant. The main thrust
is to bring some of the consistently-least-loved units back into the
"interesting choice" range. It also has a few bugfixes and some changes to both harvesters and harvester exo-shields, hence the macabre-sounding nickname for the release.
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 0.912 "Denizens Of The Tide Pool " Released!
This one has the usual bug and balance fixes, as well as three new monster types: two regular monsters, and one miniboss.
All three of these new monsters are primarily for the ocean shallows, replacing the underwater-only types of monsters that were previously used there (and which are now deeper-ocean-only). Although the oceans are also getting these new monsters seeded into them, too.
In general we're working on revamping the ocean shallows to have a better feel and to be focused on monsters that are equally at home in and out of water, based on a lot of player feedback we had on ocean shallows in the last few weeks.
This release also has a number of balance changes for some missions, including the meteor shower missions that were introduced last release. And there are a couple of new graphics settings options for helping to narrow down performance problems that one might have.
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.
All three of these new monsters are primarily for the ocean shallows, replacing the underwater-only types of monsters that were previously used there (and which are now deeper-ocean-only). Although the oceans are also getting these new monsters seeded into them, too.
In general we're working on revamping the ocean shallows to have a better feel and to be focused on monsters that are equally at home in and out of water, based on a lot of player feedback we had on ocean shallows in the last few weeks.
This release also has a number of balance changes for some missions, including the meteor shower missions that were introduced last release. And there are a couple of new graphics settings options for helping to narrow down performance problems that one might have.
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, March 20, 2012
A Valley Without Wind 1.0 Version To Launch The Week Of April 16th
I know, I know, we've been saying it was going to be next week. And we could hit that target, if we wanted to launch just on our own site and not give reviewers any advance time with the very-near-final game before it releases.
But the game is now definitely coming to a large digital distributor that we all know and love (and who carries all of Arcen's other titles), and we have to coordinate our schedules not only with them but also with all the other vendors that already carry A Valley Without Wind.
I don't have a specific release day yet, but I will update you with that as soon as I do.
In the meantime, this gives us more time to pack in the polish, the bugfixes, and even more content prior to 1.0. We had a list of things that we had planned to do "just after 1.0," but now that list of things is instead going to be a list of things for "just before 1.0" instead.
We still have a huge commitment to getting the game into a final-except-for-content state in the next week or so, by the way, for two reasons: 1) being able to give this to reviewers so they have time to do their thing before the big 1.0 release; and 2) having an ultra-solid build to take with us to PAX East.
I'll share further news on this as I have it, but I literally just got the confirmation on some of this stuff in the last 30 minutes and so you're hearing it almost as soon as I am figuring it out myself.
Cheers!
But the game is now definitely coming to a large digital distributor that we all know and love (and who carries all of Arcen's other titles), and we have to coordinate our schedules not only with them but also with all the other vendors that already carry A Valley Without Wind.
I don't have a specific release day yet, but I will update you with that as soon as I do.
In the meantime, this gives us more time to pack in the polish, the bugfixes, and even more content prior to 1.0. We had a list of things that we had planned to do "just after 1.0," but now that list of things is instead going to be a list of things for "just before 1.0" instead.
We still have a huge commitment to getting the game into a final-except-for-content state in the next week or so, by the way, for two reasons: 1) being able to give this to reviewers so they have time to do their thing before the big 1.0 release; and 2) having an ultra-solid build to take with us to PAX East.
I'll share further news on this as I have it, but I literally just got the confirmation on some of this stuff in the last 30 minutes and so you're hearing it almost as soon as I am figuring it out myself.
Cheers!
AVWW Beta 0.911 "Fifty Craters " Released!
This one is our second release of the day, and its main feature is a new "Defend Supply Depot From Meteor Storm" mission type, which is a pretty cool new mission vaguely reminiscent of missile command (but with tons of twists making this a lot more interesting).
This also fixes a few bugs, one of which was a rather critical regression in the prior version (the inability to use fire touch to damage stuff).
More to come soon -- 1.0 is coming up next week (though we still don't have an exact day yet). 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.
This also fixes a few bugs, one of which was a rather critical regression in the prior version (the inability to use fire touch to damage stuff).
More to come soon -- 1.0 is coming up next week (though we still don't have an exact day yet). 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 0.910 "Grains Of Sand" Released!
This one is just a small bugfix version, although it also does improve the look of desert sand edges so that deserts feel more desert-y. We're in progress on a number of things internally that weren't quite ready for this one, but which will be released later today, though.
More to come soon -- 1.0 is coming up next week (though we still don't have an exact day yet). 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 -- 1.0 is coming up next week (though we still don't have an exact day yet). 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.
GDC 2012 Wrap-Up
Earlier this month I attended GDC in San Francisco, it was my first time doing so and it ended up being quite an experience.
I was pulling double duty, covering the event itself and its happenings as a journalist for DIYGamer and MCV during the day, and talking Arcen and indie game development in general in the evening as well as other downtime periods.
The conference itself was fun, informative, and (as expected) utterly exhausting. Over 22,000 industry folk were in attendance, though it never felt overcrowded thanks to the layout. Despite seeing a few great talks, it felt like there were dozens of good panels I completely missed. Regardless, interesting developments tended to spread like wildfire, with plenty of new reveals to muse upon and advice to debate over seemingly everyday.
I spent a ton of time with Retro City Rampage developer Brian Provinciano, and went out quite a bit with Lorenzo Scagnolari and Marco Pivato of 93 Steps. I also caught up with my pals Terry Cavanagh, John Polson of Dejobaan, Paul Taylor of Mode 7 Games (huge congrats to them for winning the IGF audience award for Frozen Synapse), and Adam Rippon of Muteki Corp. Additionally I had the pleasure of meeting Rami Ismail of Vlambeer (way taller than you'd expect), Dan Griliopoulos (one of my favorite games writers), my new work affiliates at Indie Game Magazine, MCV, and Develop, and spend bits and pieces of the week with many other industry friends both new and old. Food, drink, and/or discussion nicely sums up the majority of these meetings.
A quick aside: Super Duper Burger is as advertised — amazingly good food. I ate lunch there a couple times and regret not going more throughout the week. San Francisco really has great food and drink in general.
As for A Valley Without Wind, I was able to set-up impromptu demo sessions with a few press that weren't entirely swamped by their schedules, and talked casually about it to more people than I can count. On top of that, I had a few dozen people demo it at the very awesome POW party put on by Morgan Tucker (aka Crash Faster) at the DNA Lounge.
The venue was really impressive, especially when it was packed full of GDC attendees and San Francisco locals all beered up and ready for some excellent chip tune performances. Here's a video I took with my phone right before the doors opened:
I took a few pictures that night as well. Next up: PAX East! (Which Arcen will be attending in much more of an official capacity, what with a booth and everything.)
I was pulling double duty, covering the event itself and its happenings as a journalist for DIYGamer and MCV during the day, and talking Arcen and indie game development in general in the evening as well as other downtime periods.
The conference itself was fun, informative, and (as expected) utterly exhausting. Over 22,000 industry folk were in attendance, though it never felt overcrowded thanks to the layout. Despite seeing a few great talks, it felt like there were dozens of good panels I completely missed. Regardless, interesting developments tended to spread like wildfire, with plenty of new reveals to muse upon and advice to debate over seemingly everyday.
I spent a ton of time with Retro City Rampage developer Brian Provinciano, and went out quite a bit with Lorenzo Scagnolari and Marco Pivato of 93 Steps. I also caught up with my pals Terry Cavanagh, John Polson of Dejobaan, Paul Taylor of Mode 7 Games (huge congrats to them for winning the IGF audience award for Frozen Synapse), and Adam Rippon of Muteki Corp. Additionally I had the pleasure of meeting Rami Ismail of Vlambeer (way taller than you'd expect), Dan Griliopoulos (one of my favorite games writers), my new work affiliates at Indie Game Magazine, MCV, and Develop, and spend bits and pieces of the week with many other industry friends both new and old. Food, drink, and/or discussion nicely sums up the majority of these meetings.
A quick aside: Super Duper Burger is as advertised — amazingly good food. I ate lunch there a couple times and regret not going more throughout the week. San Francisco really has great food and drink in general.
As for A Valley Without Wind, I was able to set-up impromptu demo sessions with a few press that weren't entirely swamped by their schedules, and talked casually about it to more people than I can count. On top of that, I had a few dozen people demo it at the very awesome POW party put on by Morgan Tucker (aka Crash Faster) at the DNA Lounge.
The venue was really impressive, especially when it was packed full of GDC attendees and San Francisco locals all beered up and ready for some excellent chip tune performances. Here's a video I took with my phone right before the doors opened:
I took a few pictures that night as well. Next up: PAX East! (Which Arcen will be attending in much more of an official capacity, what with a booth and everything.)
Monday, March 19, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.909 "A Perfectly Anachronistic Escape" Released!
This one is another biggie. This time literally in terms of filesize, as well as in terms of what it changes.
Visuals
Visually this is a giant release because it really improves the character art (making it look painterly) and does the same for the monsters that aren't particle-effect-based. There are also a few minor other changes here and there, such as really improving the quality of the effect of warp gates, and there's a goodly number of new monsters in here, too -- some actually implemented in code already, others awaiting implementation over the next few days.
Fixes And Balance Galore
Lots of bugfixes that people have been really wanting, and balance improvements to the upper difficulties, and a wide array of physics improvements. Seafaring with lots of continents is now a lot more straightforward thanks to guide markers, and so on.
Three Updated Missions
The battlefield missions are night and day different. People wanted more control, so now there are command flares that you can use. They wanted more balance and more interesting choices, and so now there are two new kinds of minion robots that work in a much more interesting fashion (and are a lot less weak). You also don't get the usual healing orbs anymore here, but you can retreat to your base for healing at 10 health per second. Lots of cool changes there, to really give them a more tactical feel.
Lava Escape and Journey To Perfection, on the other hand, have been tweaked in more subtle ways: their difficulty was about right, and was part of what made them fun. However, the penalty for failure with these was absolutely insane and not in keeping with the rest of the game. So after much discussion on the forums, we finally figured out a way to make these not have such unusually stiff penalties while at the same time retaining their hardcore challenge. This actually makes it possible to practice these missions and get better at them, rather than just assuming you're good with them to start with (which is always a bad assumption with anything a player has never seen before, eh?).
New Mission: Fix The Anachronisms
There are two variants of these, and the core idea here was thought up by player Penumbra. It's a really cool idea that basically combines some puzzle elements with combat elements: there's an anachronism with monsters from the wrong time period inside a building or a cave, and you've got to kill them and only them. Killing any of the monsters from the time period you are in loses the mission.
There are elements of memory-match here, to a small degree, but there are also elements of deduction because you can see how many monsters are remaining that are anachronistic, and use that to figure out which ones don't belong (okay, everybody sing the Sesame Street song with me now). The twist is that even if you know the monsters by heart and which ones belong where, you still can't kill the wrong kind and so that means they're harassing you constantly while you search for the monsters you can kill. That's really different from the rest of the game, and has a really cool feel in practice.
Other Cool Stuff
There's now a second type of overlord, so all the overlords aren't Skelebot Overlords now. Now you've got the Draconite Overlord. You'll be seeing the smaller draconites very soon, as in the next couple of days, for they feature in yet another player-suggested mission type that we've got half-implemented internally.
There's also a new kind of interior procedural room generation logic used by the new mission type, and a new kind of underground procedural cavern generation logic used by the new mission type and now the journey to perfection underground variant as well. I've really been trying to make sure that all these missions don't just feel like different activities in the same old places, but rather feel like different activities in different places, which is a lot more time consuming to do but pays off in much more unique-feeling missions, I think.
More to come soon -- 1.0 is coming up next week (though we still don't have an exact day yet). 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.
Visuals
Visually this is a giant release because it really improves the character art (making it look painterly) and does the same for the monsters that aren't particle-effect-based. There are also a few minor other changes here and there, such as really improving the quality of the effect of warp gates, and there's a goodly number of new monsters in here, too -- some actually implemented in code already, others awaiting implementation over the next few days.
Fixes And Balance Galore
Lots of bugfixes that people have been really wanting, and balance improvements to the upper difficulties, and a wide array of physics improvements. Seafaring with lots of continents is now a lot more straightforward thanks to guide markers, and so on.
Three Updated Missions
The battlefield missions are night and day different. People wanted more control, so now there are command flares that you can use. They wanted more balance and more interesting choices, and so now there are two new kinds of minion robots that work in a much more interesting fashion (and are a lot less weak). You also don't get the usual healing orbs anymore here, but you can retreat to your base for healing at 10 health per second. Lots of cool changes there, to really give them a more tactical feel.
Lava Escape and Journey To Perfection, on the other hand, have been tweaked in more subtle ways: their difficulty was about right, and was part of what made them fun. However, the penalty for failure with these was absolutely insane and not in keeping with the rest of the game. So after much discussion on the forums, we finally figured out a way to make these not have such unusually stiff penalties while at the same time retaining their hardcore challenge. This actually makes it possible to practice these missions and get better at them, rather than just assuming you're good with them to start with (which is always a bad assumption with anything a player has never seen before, eh?).
New Mission: Fix The Anachronisms
There are two variants of these, and the core idea here was thought up by player Penumbra. It's a really cool idea that basically combines some puzzle elements with combat elements: there's an anachronism with monsters from the wrong time period inside a building or a cave, and you've got to kill them and only them. Killing any of the monsters from the time period you are in loses the mission.
There are elements of memory-match here, to a small degree, but there are also elements of deduction because you can see how many monsters are remaining that are anachronistic, and use that to figure out which ones don't belong (okay, everybody sing the Sesame Street song with me now). The twist is that even if you know the monsters by heart and which ones belong where, you still can't kill the wrong kind and so that means they're harassing you constantly while you search for the monsters you can kill. That's really different from the rest of the game, and has a really cool feel in practice.
Other Cool Stuff
There's now a second type of overlord, so all the overlords aren't Skelebot Overlords now. Now you've got the Draconite Overlord. You'll be seeing the smaller draconites very soon, as in the next couple of days, for they feature in yet another player-suggested mission type that we've got half-implemented internally.
There's also a new kind of interior procedural room generation logic used by the new mission type, and a new kind of underground procedural cavern generation logic used by the new mission type and now the journey to perfection underground variant as well. I've really been trying to make sure that all these missions don't just feel like different activities in the same old places, but rather feel like different activities in different places, which is a lot more time consuming to do but pays off in much more unique-feeling missions, I think.
More to come soon -- 1.0 is coming up next week (though we still don't have an exact day yet). 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.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.907/0.908 "Defeating The Regressive Guard" Released!
This one is mostly just a bugfix patch, fixing a number of issues from the prior version as well as longstanding issues that the prior version made apparent. It also adds a couple of little tweaks and features, and makes Skelebot Guards less of a pain to deal with inside.
EDIT: Then there was one blocker bug in the new one, so we released 0.908 quickly to resolve that.
More to come soon; probably another release later today. 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.
EDIT: Then there was one blocker bug in the new one, so we released 0.908 quickly to resolve that.
More to come soon; probably another release later today. 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 0.906 "Of Terrain Upheavals And Server Browsers" Released!
This one took us a lot longer than we expected, but when you see what's in it, you'll see why. First of all, there's a bunch of fixes in there, as per usual. Secondly, there's a big efficiency gain with the size of the save files, which has a number of benefits (faster saves, faster transmission in multiplayer, etc).
More excitingly, we finally have a server browser on which you can advertise your servers at will, and players can see and connect to your servers. We've also got the first batch of admin commands in place for the server, too. See the release notes for details.
Next up there's a new spell and a handful of new seeker enchants, plus a new obstacle (sort of like an enemy), plus a new mission with three pretty hefty variants. Next we did an absolute ton of rework on some of the internal math for the stats balance and enemy health and all that sort of thing, to make things simpler and resolve a number of bugs that folks had reported, and make it much easier for us to balance over the coming week.
Lastly, and perhaps most excitingly next to the server browser, is the changes to terrain generation. Frankly you have to see them to really get how different it is. A lot of the outdoor areas suddenly just feel like a whole new, and much more interesting to explore, game.
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 excitingly, we finally have a server browser on which you can advertise your servers at will, and players can see and connect to your servers. We've also got the first batch of admin commands in place for the server, too. See the release notes for details.
Next up there's a new spell and a handful of new seeker enchants, plus a new obstacle (sort of like an enemy), plus a new mission with three pretty hefty variants. Next we did an absolute ton of rework on some of the internal math for the stats balance and enemy health and all that sort of thing, to make things simpler and resolve a number of bugs that folks had reported, and make it much easier for us to balance over the coming week.
Lastly, and perhaps most excitingly next to the server browser, is the changes to terrain generation. Frankly you have to see them to really get how different it is. A lot of the outdoor areas suddenly just feel like a whole new, and much more interesting to explore, game.
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.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
AI War Beta 5.030, "Refined Hacking," Released!
This one is basically "just" a laundry list of fixes, tweaks, and balance adjustments that you folks asked for. Not really any new features, and no single item jumps out above all the rest, but there's a lot of solid refinement here that I know people have been waiting for.
Sorry for the delay on that -- with AVWW's 1.0 coming up, and the need to both finish it and document it, plus it being tax season here, plus the general cyclical business stuff like payroll and so on, it's been kind of a hectic week. Keith had all this stuff ready to go on Sunday, but I've just not had a spare moment until today.
But now it's out -- 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.
Sorry for the delay on that -- with AVWW's 1.0 coming up, and the need to both finish it and document it, plus it being tax season here, plus the general cyclical business stuff like payroll and so on, it's been kind of a hectic week. Keith had all this stuff ready to go on Sunday, but I've just not had a spare moment until today.
But now it's out -- 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.
Gratuitous Tank Battles Pre-Order And Beta
Wanted to drop a quick note that our good friend and excellent indie game designer/developer Cliff Harris has announced the beta launch for his new game Gratuitous Tank Battles.
As RPS notes, the game is a mix of RTS, simulation, and tower defense. It's set as if World War I never came to an end — with trench warfare evolving through means of mechs, lasers, and more.
Those who pre-order through the official site will gain instant access to the current beta release and all subsequent builds. Have a look at the game's shiny new trailer:
As RPS notes, the game is a mix of RTS, simulation, and tower defense. It's set as if World War I never came to an end — with trench warfare evolving through means of mechs, lasers, and more.
Those who pre-order through the official site will gain instant access to the current beta release and all subsequent builds. Have a look at the game's shiny new trailer:
Monday, March 12, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.905 "Refined Gargantua" Released!
This one has been almost a week in the making, so it stands to reason that it's massive. And as releases go, even for us this one is particularly massive. It wasn't until today that I realized it had almost been a week since our last release... or that it has literally been a month to the day since I took a day off.
Yikes! But the end is in sight. This release is primarily focused on polish of all sorts: making the terrain more interesting and better, removing bugs all over the place, making the monster AI more enjoyable, making the monsters more tactile, and a host of other things. There are also multiplayer-specific bugfixes out the wazoo.
But it's not just polish, terrain, and enemy behaviors -- though that would have been enough, methinks, given how much better the game feels with those things done. We also have a number of new features, listed here in no particular order:
- A new difficulty level for those who find Adept too easy but Hero too hard (which was a lot of people, apparently).
- Added in a damage log so you can see what's killing you!
- No more "global" cooldowns, which adds all sorts of advanced simulcasting possibilities.
- A more even mix of male and female characters whenever you're asked to choose a new character (it seems like every girl or woman who's played the game has requested this)
- Rather than just giving lame shards as a reward, lieutenants and overlords now give you rare enchants when you kill them.
- A whole new "Risktaker" enchant type has been added.
- The "Regular Skelebot" is now the "Skelebot Guard" and is a lot more interesting.
- Skelebots in general can deflect your incoming piercing shots, which is pretty wicked cool.
- Utahraptors leaping out of magma to kill your character and give you, personally, a heart attack in the process. You've been warned.
- Monsters can drown or burn up in lava, and try to avoid that fate unless you... nudge them along.
- Did we mention that we redid the entire monster AI from the ground up to make it better and less buggy?
- Oh yeah, and now monsters are tangible for the most part -- they collide with each other, and with you. Which solves a lot of "stacking" issues that looked bad and made monsters too vulnerable to piercing/AOE spells. This one simple change makes for a really different feel to close combat -- be careful of crowds of monsters -- those are fatal to leap into now, rather than just something you'll take a small amount of damage from!
- The grasslands and the lava flats terrains have been updated so heavily they're practically unrecognizable from their former states. They're pretty awesomely better and more varied.
- Oh, and the Battlefield missions have gotten an overhaul, too -- both in terms of allowed enemies to spawn, how they spawn their towers, what their terrain is like, etc. It's like a whole new mission.
...Speaking of whole new missions, we actually have three that are almost done, but I just didn't have the stamina tonight to get the last bits of those polished off. That will be my focus for tomorrow, when we should be able to resume our usual near-daily release schedule. All this polish work in one big batch was quite an undertaking, to put it lightly, but it was one of those necessary steps for 1.0.
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.
Yikes! But the end is in sight. This release is primarily focused on polish of all sorts: making the terrain more interesting and better, removing bugs all over the place, making the monster AI more enjoyable, making the monsters more tactile, and a host of other things. There are also multiplayer-specific bugfixes out the wazoo.
But it's not just polish, terrain, and enemy behaviors -- though that would have been enough, methinks, given how much better the game feels with those things done. We also have a number of new features, listed here in no particular order:
- A new difficulty level for those who find Adept too easy but Hero too hard (which was a lot of people, apparently).
- Added in a damage log so you can see what's killing you!
- No more "global" cooldowns, which adds all sorts of advanced simulcasting possibilities.
- A more even mix of male and female characters whenever you're asked to choose a new character (it seems like every girl or woman who's played the game has requested this)
- Rather than just giving lame shards as a reward, lieutenants and overlords now give you rare enchants when you kill them.
- A whole new "Risktaker" enchant type has been added.
- The "Regular Skelebot" is now the "Skelebot Guard" and is a lot more interesting.
- Skelebots in general can deflect your incoming piercing shots, which is pretty wicked cool.
- Utahraptors leaping out of magma to kill your character and give you, personally, a heart attack in the process. You've been warned.
- Monsters can drown or burn up in lava, and try to avoid that fate unless you... nudge them along.
- Did we mention that we redid the entire monster AI from the ground up to make it better and less buggy?
- Oh yeah, and now monsters are tangible for the most part -- they collide with each other, and with you. Which solves a lot of "stacking" issues that looked bad and made monsters too vulnerable to piercing/AOE spells. This one simple change makes for a really different feel to close combat -- be careful of crowds of monsters -- those are fatal to leap into now, rather than just something you'll take a small amount of damage from!
- The grasslands and the lava flats terrains have been updated so heavily they're practically unrecognizable from their former states. They're pretty awesomely better and more varied.
- Oh, and the Battlefield missions have gotten an overhaul, too -- both in terms of allowed enemies to spawn, how they spawn their towers, what their terrain is like, etc. It's like a whole new mission.
...Speaking of whole new missions, we actually have three that are almost done, but I just didn't have the stamina tonight to get the last bits of those polished off. That will be my focus for tomorrow, when we should be able to resume our usual near-daily release schedule. All this polish work in one big batch was quite an undertaking, to put it lightly, but it was one of those necessary steps for 1.0.
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, March 6, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.904 "Umbra Vortex Missions" Released!
This one is another big one. For one, there's a bunch of new art: lots of new furniture and other small objects, lots of new cavern backgrounds that look really cool, and so on.
These sorts of things really help to breathe some extra life into the exploration itself, so I'm always happy to have time to do some of that; and when it comes to furniture and other environmental objects, Josh is handling that almost single-handedly these days, which is a double bonus.
Even cooler is a new mission type that player Terraziel suggested: Umbra Vortexes. The basic idea is that you get infinite jumps in a sort of evil-corrupted cave. At first that's just fine and easy, you're fighting some micro-bosses and they either fly after you or wander around helplessly below. Wheee! What a power trip.
But after you win three of these missions, the enemies get the infinite-jump ability as well, and things get a lot more challenging. If you keep playing a lot more of this kind of mission, it gets progressively harder until you're fighting up to 10 crazy-leaping micro-bosses at once in some rather insanely-designed caverns. It's really different than anything else in the game, and it's only available as a secret mission until you get to the second continent.
Oh yeah, we also made NPC Rescue Missions a lot easier to find by giving them their own special kinds of one-use mission nodes that you can find in caves and buildings. Better chance in caves than buildings. So when you're just starting out on a new continent beyond your first, and you need that key stonebinder or whatever, now you'll have a much easier time of doing so.
All that, along with a variety of bugfixes and balance tweaks. We also have one other new mission type half-implemented, and should have that complete and in place tomorrow. This one is one that we thought up, rather than a player suggestion. In all, at the moment we have six more kinds of missions that have passed the fully-designed-out stage and are awaiting implementation hopefully this week (time permitting). Perhaps half of those were player suggestions, 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.
These sorts of things really help to breathe some extra life into the exploration itself, so I'm always happy to have time to do some of that; and when it comes to furniture and other environmental objects, Josh is handling that almost single-handedly these days, which is a double bonus.
Even cooler is a new mission type that player Terraziel suggested: Umbra Vortexes. The basic idea is that you get infinite jumps in a sort of evil-corrupted cave. At first that's just fine and easy, you're fighting some micro-bosses and they either fly after you or wander around helplessly below. Wheee! What a power trip.
But after you win three of these missions, the enemies get the infinite-jump ability as well, and things get a lot more challenging. If you keep playing a lot more of this kind of mission, it gets progressively harder until you're fighting up to 10 crazy-leaping micro-bosses at once in some rather insanely-designed caverns. It's really different than anything else in the game, and it's only available as a secret mission until you get to the second continent.
Oh yeah, we also made NPC Rescue Missions a lot easier to find by giving them their own special kinds of one-use mission nodes that you can find in caves and buildings. Better chance in caves than buildings. So when you're just starting out on a new continent beyond your first, and you need that key stonebinder or whatever, now you'll have a much easier time of doing so.
All that, along with a variety of bugfixes and balance tweaks. We also have one other new mission type half-implemented, and should have that complete and in place tomorrow. This one is one that we thought up, rather than a player suggestion. In all, at the moment we have six more kinds of missions that have passed the fully-designed-out stage and are awaiting implementation hopefully this week (time permitting). Perhaps half of those were player suggestions, 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.
Monday, March 5, 2012
AI War Beta 5.028/5.029, "Hacker Revolution," Released!
This one is an enormously, enormously cool release. First off, lots more balance tweaks, and that annoying group-move bug was fixed, among other things. All thanks to Keith, of course.
Next, two existing mechanics have been united under the generalized new banner of "hacking the AI:" knowledge raiding and superterminals. As such their mechanics have been shifted around a bit with the help of player feedback, and the result is a lot more interesting and exciting than what was there before. But it gets better...
A brand-new activity is now in place as the third kind of hacking, and this is one that players have wanted since 2009: the ability to get some choices out of an Advanced Research Station, rather than just being handed a completely random ship type. We never could figure out how to do this in a balanced and interesting way before, and so we never did it.
Well, now you can create a little hacker ship, send him on a mission, and if you're successful then you've just bought yourself the ability to choose between three random ship types from an ARS, rather than just getting one handed to you.
Here's the thing: all of these kinds of hacking get noticed by the AI. Not in an AI-progress-increasing sort of way, but in the sense that every time you hack the AI, they respond to the hack with increasing vigor. So if you're hacking to reduce AIP via the Superterminal, or you're hacking for extra knowledge (what was formerly called knowledge raiding), or you're hacking to get more flexibility in your ship types with ARSes... each time you do so, it gets harder.
Having all three of these mechanics interrelated gives you a lot of interesting new choices, and personally I think it's a brilliant solution to a problem I've been unable to solve for a couple of years now. I had no hand in this one. Hats off to Keith, and also the player community, who made this leap forward possible.
UPDATE: 5.029 pushed to fix a critical data loss bug in 5.028.
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.
Next, two existing mechanics have been united under the generalized new banner of "hacking the AI:" knowledge raiding and superterminals. As such their mechanics have been shifted around a bit with the help of player feedback, and the result is a lot more interesting and exciting than what was there before. But it gets better...
A brand-new activity is now in place as the third kind of hacking, and this is one that players have wanted since 2009: the ability to get some choices out of an Advanced Research Station, rather than just being handed a completely random ship type. We never could figure out how to do this in a balanced and interesting way before, and so we never did it.
Well, now you can create a little hacker ship, send him on a mission, and if you're successful then you've just bought yourself the ability to choose between three random ship types from an ARS, rather than just getting one handed to you.
Here's the thing: all of these kinds of hacking get noticed by the AI. Not in an AI-progress-increasing sort of way, but in the sense that every time you hack the AI, they respond to the hack with increasing vigor. So if you're hacking to reduce AIP via the Superterminal, or you're hacking for extra knowledge (what was formerly called knowledge raiding), or you're hacking to get more flexibility in your ship types with ARSes... each time you do so, it gets harder.
Having all three of these mechanics interrelated gives you a lot of interesting new choices, and personally I think it's a brilliant solution to a problem I've been unable to solve for a couple of years now. I had no hand in this one. Hats off to Keith, and also the player community, who made this leap forward possible.
UPDATE: 5.029 pushed to fix a critical data loss bug in 5.028.
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 0.903 "There Was A Hole Here" Released!
A better title for this one would actually have been "There was a ladder here. It's gone now." But I couldn't resist using one of my favorite Silent Hill 2 quotes a little more overtly. This release comes quickly on the heels of the prior one, and does a few things.
First of all, it fixes some critical bugs resulting from all that ongoing-condition rework we did in the prior version (and I'd warned that might happen). Things seem to be good now on that front. We also took the opportunity to fix a few other random bugs.
Secondly, it takes a good hard look at monster balance and really stratifies the monsters better. Bats are small and weak and powerful, and will hurt you if you don't get them first -- but they die in a hurry when you do hit them. Skelebots are lumbering and each shot of theirs packs less of a punch, but they take a lot of hits to bring down in return. Etc.
Thirdly, the platforming difficulty now affects a whole lot more. Though come to think of it, I need to update the tooltips to tell players this. But anyhow, the frequency of "ladders" in undergrounds, surface tunnels, and interiors is now massively affected by the platforming difficulty level of the game -- as the difficulty increases, the number of platforms goes down, and you're left to make your own platforms or use other means to get up cliffs and around in caverns more. Special thanks to a number of players for suggesting this.
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, it fixes some critical bugs resulting from all that ongoing-condition rework we did in the prior version (and I'd warned that might happen). Things seem to be good now on that front. We also took the opportunity to fix a few other random bugs.
Secondly, it takes a good hard look at monster balance and really stratifies the monsters better. Bats are small and weak and powerful, and will hurt you if you don't get them first -- but they die in a hurry when you do hit them. Skelebots are lumbering and each shot of theirs packs less of a punch, but they take a lot of hits to bring down in return. Etc.
Thirdly, the platforming difficulty now affects a whole lot more. Though come to think of it, I need to update the tooltips to tell players this. But anyhow, the frequency of "ladders" in undergrounds, surface tunnels, and interiors is now massively affected by the platforming difficulty level of the game -- as the difficulty increases, the number of platforms goes down, and you're left to make your own platforms or use other means to get up cliffs and around in caverns more. Special thanks to a number of players for suggesting this.
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.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.902 "The Kid Gloves Are Officially Off" Released!
This one, once again, is primarily focused on difficulty. To be more specific, the lack of spread of combat difficulties in the recent versions. This game has always been designed to cater to a diverse crowd in terms of skill level, but in recent version we had a lot of combat difficulties suited for low-skill players, and too few ones suited for high-skill players.
As such, the difficulties have been shifted around rather substantially, and so you might find that you are now playing on a difficulty level that is murderously too hard all of a sudden. Sorry about that, if you get caught in the crossfire in that way, but remember that you can always return to your settlement at any time and tweak the difficulty to be just what you want.
Really the only thing that has changed in regards to difficulty has been monster health -- on higher difficulties, monsters simply had too little of it. It's fine to one-shot monsters on a low difficulty, but on a higher difficulty there needs to be time for you and the monster to get some good shots off at each other. You need time to be forced to dodge or block, and to think about the various attacks as the monster launches them, and that doesn't happen if you zap the monster in one burst as soon as he's on the screen.
We've also made a large number of other tweaks and bugfixes in this version, and there's a fairly rare new kind of item that you can find in lava stash rooms: advanced heatsuits. Some of the mechanics of fighting in windstorms have also been changed up a bit, so that spells no longer get slowed when fired upwind, but get sped up even more when fired downwind. The effect can be pretty dramatic in terms of spiking the difficulty, but at the same time not making it impossible for certain spells to damage the other side when they are firing against the wind.
Lastly, if you found yourself getting insta-killed by monsters in the last few weeks while using storm dash, that was due to some calculation errors that have now been fixed. Along with some other fixes to stats modifiers in general, actually, and some buffs to using upgrade stones on stats other than health.
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.
As such, the difficulties have been shifted around rather substantially, and so you might find that you are now playing on a difficulty level that is murderously too hard all of a sudden. Sorry about that, if you get caught in the crossfire in that way, but remember that you can always return to your settlement at any time and tweak the difficulty to be just what you want.
Really the only thing that has changed in regards to difficulty has been monster health -- on higher difficulties, monsters simply had too little of it. It's fine to one-shot monsters on a low difficulty, but on a higher difficulty there needs to be time for you and the monster to get some good shots off at each other. You need time to be forced to dodge or block, and to think about the various attacks as the monster launches them, and that doesn't happen if you zap the monster in one burst as soon as he's on the screen.
We've also made a large number of other tweaks and bugfixes in this version, and there's a fairly rare new kind of item that you can find in lava stash rooms: advanced heatsuits. Some of the mechanics of fighting in windstorms have also been changed up a bit, so that spells no longer get slowed when fired upwind, but get sped up even more when fired downwind. The effect can be pretty dramatic in terms of spiking the difficulty, but at the same time not making it impossible for certain spells to damage the other side when they are firing against the wind.
Lastly, if you found yourself getting insta-killed by monsters in the last few weeks while using storm dash, that was due to some calculation errors that have now been fixed. Along with some other fixes to stats modifiers in general, actually, and some buffs to using upgrade stones on stats other than health.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
A Valley Without Wind (Unofficially) At GDC
If you're going to be at or around the conference during the week and would like to get together to chat, play AVWW, or just drink together in silence (weird, but hey I'm not here to judge), give me a shout. You can reach me on twitter @GameConnoisseur.
Also if you're around and looking for something amazingly fun to do on Tuesday evening, come by the DNA Lounge and join myself and a bunch of other indie devs and musicians for POW. It's going to be a crazy party with chip music performances and many indie games to play. Valley will be on display, and I'll be moving back and forth between there and wherever the food stuffs are located.
So come by and say hi! Tickets are cheap, and even cheaper if you're attending GDC ($8 in advance/$12 at the door/$5 with a badge).
Hope to see you there!
Friday, March 2, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.901 "I May Or May Not Want To Be That Guy" Released!
Two days into beta phase 3, and now we have this one. It's a fairly good-sized one, though I would have liked to have been able to pack in more spells and such. But we did manage to get one new spell in here, along with a raft of other improvements.
Missions Changes
Rescue NPC missions, for instance, are like night and day from what they were before. You guys complained about various aspects of them, and we've answered with vigor. I think you'll like what you see, but if there are some things that still feel off, feel free to let us know. I, for one, am having way even fun with them now.
Another big shift in missions is to the battlefield missions. In the prior version those weren't working properly in co-op, which was one problem, but there were also a number of smaller glitches with them that made your ally minions just not quite perform as well as one would hope. Battlefield missions have obviously already gone through a good amount of public beta testing, so hopefully this cleans up most of the rest of what was off about them.
Enchants Changes
Our core concept of enchant-items and enchant-effects is unchanged -- it was working really well, and players really liked how it was working from what we could tell. However, the method of aquiring said enchant-items, and the general progression of how you'd find more powerful items of those sorts, left an enormous amount to be desired. Once again, the results from last version to this one are a night and day difference.
The bottom line with enchants is that they should just "feel right" as you get them. And the percentage indicator of when you will get the next one now never lies. You'll get new enchants at a slightly faster rate than before, but there will also be a lot more of them that are only subtly different -- as in most games with procedural loot. You'll thus have the fun task of sorting out those that best match your playstyle, and discarding the rest.
One note: the enchants in your inventory used to affect the likelihood of what new enchants you would find. That was just plain weird (my idea, sorry), and is gone now. So if you don't like an enchant you've been given, feel free to drop it down a long hole in a dark cave without worrying you'll just be handed that same thing right back. Now that you're getting more options when it comes to enchants, you can really customize yourself to an even better degree -- which is, at core, the whole point.
Also now included is a rarity system. You'll find uncommons and rares for enchants, like in a lot of other games of this nature, and that adds some extra flair. The details of all this are in the release notes, since there was a lot of discussion of these mechanics, but frankly those are details that the average player never needs to know; it won't affect your decision making in how you play the game. It simply is a more specific way of explaining how we made the progression of enchants-gathering "feel better" than in the prior release, and it's an opportunity for the critics of the old system to have some commentary on the new system if they so desire.
Combat And Platforming Difficulty Split
The lava escape missions were a really divisive mission that we added lately. And actually, so were some of the falling damage bits. Is this game a platformer, or not? How much skill at platforming is supposed to be required?
In the past, we've always said that this is first and foremost an adventure game, but that hardcore platforming bits would be added in as optional things because to some of us (myself most of all) they are just plain fun. But the falling damage mechanics as of two versions ago, as well as the lava escape missions in general, seemed to violate a few of those rules.
There were players who staunchly defended the mechanics as implemented, or even wanted yet more hardcore versions than what we'd put on offer; but then there were others that were decrying that they hated these mechanics with the fury of a thousand suns.
To me, this sort of divide can only mean one thing: more options are needed. This is a game engine that clearly supports both modes of play, and a lot of gradations in between, and so we might as well let everyone have the experience that they really want, right?
So now instead of having a single "action difficulty" that describes everything, we now have "combat difficulty" and "platforming difficulty." The former controls the strength of enemies and a lot of other things like that. The latter controls things like falling damage and rates of lava rise. So you can now tune your experience to be as brutal or as easy in either of those two spectrums as you like, independently of one another, and thus the factional divide in the playerbase is repaired.
It was an easy repair, see, because our playerbase was so polite and well-reasoned in their discussion of the whole issue in the first place. That's what I love about our forums -- the lack of vindictiveness, name-calling, and over-the-top rhetoric. Long-term forumites know what I'm talking about. This let us get right to the heart of the issue, put in something that will hopefully please everyone who was part of the original argument, and move on with more interesting things. This is why I sincerely love working with our community.
And lastly, of course, there were a few other tweaks and bugfixes, as always. 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.
Missions Changes
Rescue NPC missions, for instance, are like night and day from what they were before. You guys complained about various aspects of them, and we've answered with vigor. I think you'll like what you see, but if there are some things that still feel off, feel free to let us know. I, for one, am having way even fun with them now.
Another big shift in missions is to the battlefield missions. In the prior version those weren't working properly in co-op, which was one problem, but there were also a number of smaller glitches with them that made your ally minions just not quite perform as well as one would hope. Battlefield missions have obviously already gone through a good amount of public beta testing, so hopefully this cleans up most of the rest of what was off about them.
Enchants Changes
Our core concept of enchant-items and enchant-effects is unchanged -- it was working really well, and players really liked how it was working from what we could tell. However, the method of aquiring said enchant-items, and the general progression of how you'd find more powerful items of those sorts, left an enormous amount to be desired. Once again, the results from last version to this one are a night and day difference.
The bottom line with enchants is that they should just "feel right" as you get them. And the percentage indicator of when you will get the next one now never lies. You'll get new enchants at a slightly faster rate than before, but there will also be a lot more of them that are only subtly different -- as in most games with procedural loot. You'll thus have the fun task of sorting out those that best match your playstyle, and discarding the rest.
One note: the enchants in your inventory used to affect the likelihood of what new enchants you would find. That was just plain weird (my idea, sorry), and is gone now. So if you don't like an enchant you've been given, feel free to drop it down a long hole in a dark cave without worrying you'll just be handed that same thing right back. Now that you're getting more options when it comes to enchants, you can really customize yourself to an even better degree -- which is, at core, the whole point.
Also now included is a rarity system. You'll find uncommons and rares for enchants, like in a lot of other games of this nature, and that adds some extra flair. The details of all this are in the release notes, since there was a lot of discussion of these mechanics, but frankly those are details that the average player never needs to know; it won't affect your decision making in how you play the game. It simply is a more specific way of explaining how we made the progression of enchants-gathering "feel better" than in the prior release, and it's an opportunity for the critics of the old system to have some commentary on the new system if they so desire.
Combat And Platforming Difficulty Split
The lava escape missions were a really divisive mission that we added lately. And actually, so were some of the falling damage bits. Is this game a platformer, or not? How much skill at platforming is supposed to be required?
In the past, we've always said that this is first and foremost an adventure game, but that hardcore platforming bits would be added in as optional things because to some of us (myself most of all) they are just plain fun. But the falling damage mechanics as of two versions ago, as well as the lava escape missions in general, seemed to violate a few of those rules.
There were players who staunchly defended the mechanics as implemented, or even wanted yet more hardcore versions than what we'd put on offer; but then there were others that were decrying that they hated these mechanics with the fury of a thousand suns.
To me, this sort of divide can only mean one thing: more options are needed. This is a game engine that clearly supports both modes of play, and a lot of gradations in between, and so we might as well let everyone have the experience that they really want, right?
So now instead of having a single "action difficulty" that describes everything, we now have "combat difficulty" and "platforming difficulty." The former controls the strength of enemies and a lot of other things like that. The latter controls things like falling damage and rates of lava rise. So you can now tune your experience to be as brutal or as easy in either of those two spectrums as you like, independently of one another, and thus the factional divide in the playerbase is repaired.
It was an easy repair, see, because our playerbase was so polite and well-reasoned in their discussion of the whole issue in the first place. That's what I love about our forums -- the lack of vindictiveness, name-calling, and over-the-top rhetoric. Long-term forumites know what I'm talking about. This let us get right to the heart of the issue, put in something that will hopefully please everyone who was part of the original argument, and move on with more interesting things. This is why I sincerely love working with our community.
And lastly, of course, there were a few other tweaks and bugfixes, as always. 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.