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.