Games By Design

One More Piece Of High-Res AVWW Concept Art

2012-01-16T18:47:00.001-05:00

Been working on a variety of things today, but among them was a third piece of concept art. I feel like this one emphasizes the sci-fi side of things more than the second one, but I'm not sure I actually like this one better than the second one; the composition and the colors aren't quite as good, in my opinion. But still a piece worth having around.

Most of the work today was design work for the actual game, so don't worry that all we're doing these days is concept art. Some pretty major stuff should be coming this week!

Two Pieces Of High-Res AVWW Concept Art

2012-01-13T19:25:00.002-05:00

I've been working on doing some new concept art today so that we'd have a better boxart image than the old one, which has been feeling embarrassingly lame lately. Here are the first two that I've created, and I plan to do at least one more in the next week.

The second one at the moment is the one that I currently plan to use as boxart unless I come up with something better; while I do like many aspects of the first one better, the second one looks better when reduced (which, selling online, is what people see most of the time).

UPDATE: It appears that these weren't quite as ultra-high-res as I'd originally intended. I uploaded 2200x3300 px images, and blogger sized them down substantially. Oh well, these are still really large.

The Power-Coding Sprint Is Over -- So What's The Agenda Now?

2011-12-16T09:35:00.001-05:00

For the last week, we've been working on power-coding. That took us through multiplayer sync models and enemy/character stats balance, to a whole new health subsystem, to the addition of continents and a whole new mana subsystem, to a new mission system, and finally ending up with the removal of tiers, the complete revamping of crafting, and the transition of the strategic map functions into the mission system. Whew! Busy week.

During that power coding period, we were essentially asking people to hold the bulk of their commentary until we got through with the power coding. We'd been in a huge design phase for a week or two prior, talking with players in the brainstorming subforum about a lot of different things. After all that talk, a lot of things had firmed up and it was time to actually implement! Which meant we had to take a step back from design for a while, and couldn't get sucked into long discussions if we had any hope of meeting our power-coding goals.

Now that the power-coding is done, we're pretty much back to our regularly-scheduled programming style. Essentially, where we mix together design, coding, bugfixes, new features, and enhancements to existing features. There area few specific issues I'd like to make a note about, however:

Enemy Balance/Difficulty, Mana System Stats Balance
This is something that we know isn't right at the moment. The power-coding phase got us a lot closer, and players are reporting that this is way more fun and interesting (and challenging) than before, but it's definitely not yet polished. This is definitely something we want feedback on!

Civ Level Relative To Region Level Balance
Right now, when you go up one region level relative to your civ level (so, you go to a level 5 region when you are level 4), the difficulty is increasing about 100%. This is something that we're doing because of how the missions are designed to play out, and it's something that I want to leave in the short term.

We need more meat on the mission system bones before we can really evaluate if this is working as intended or not. If we get to that point and it still isn't feeling right then we'll change it up, but for now this is working as intended.

EXP Balance
Right now, minibosses and microbosses are still granting EXP, and EXP containers are still scattered out in the wild. Once the mission system comes better into its own, those sources of EXP will be going away, and only missions, overlords, and lieutenants will be granting EXP.

New Warp System
There was a brainstorming thread on potential new warp systems even back before we started power-coding, but that was basically one change too many at the time. Now this is going to be a focus again, probably with some form of Warp Statues that you can freely warp between in a region (once you've visited them), but without the current style of freeform warp.

We already took a few steps down the path of making the world feel more sizable by making the missions not allow warping in them at all, but then having a form of warp stone that takes you directly to the mission exit upon successful completion of the mission. That's something that, at the moment, we plan to keep indefinitely.

But not needing to have warp potions out in the wild would be a great thing, I think, and players have been pointing out the merits of making some terrain traversal necessary rather than being "too convenient." It's an interesting thread above, if you are inclined to read and comment.

The "Feel" Of Exploration, Specifically On The World Map
As has been pointed out by a few players, some of the feel of freeform exploration has been lost with the addition of the new mission system. Because of this, we're getting all sorts of suggestions on various ways to put back the feel of exploration, such as making missions optional, adding implicit missions, adding a fog of war to the continents, redesigning the entire flow of region levels... etc.

Whoa, folks! This is an area that is basically right in my wheelhouse, so to speak. For the moment this isn't actually one I particularly want any feedback on, because while in the short term exploration has indeed taken a hit, we already have plans on how to put it back better than it was before. Once we have those things in place we'll welcome commentary, but right now this particular aspect of the game is in too much transition for anyone to make much commentary on it.

Things that need to happen before we'll be soliciting feedback on this:
1. We need to get a really solid core of missions in place.
2. We need to get some of the planned "secret missions" in place.
3. We need to get crests and other elite loot in place (traps, other outfitter-type stuff, etc).

There might be a few other things as well that we also need (possibly some seafaring exploration for small hidden islands, etc), but the above should give us a solid core that will once again really reward exploration in a way that currently it isn't. Suffice it to say, we have plans upon plans for all sorts of cool ways to make exploration feel awesome -- it's one of my favorite things about any adventure game -- but I'm in no way wanting to reevaluate region levels, missions, or fog of war at the moment.

Crests Are Coming. Soon.
These have been one of those mythical features that we've been talking about for what seems like forever. We actually had them working in the game at one point, and they sorta kinda work in some dev builds even now. As noted above, these will be some elite loot that you can find.

Enchants
The whole idea of enchants is something that we've revised a lot from our original plans. Emit Light is the first example of an enchant that is already in the game, actually, but at the moment it's all very freeform and nonstructured. You put on emit light and it lasts a certain amount of time, then you put it on again. Yawn.

What we'll actually be doing once we add some more enchants, is making it so that each enchant can only go into a certain Enchant Slot on your character. You'll have a finite number of enchant slots, and each one would have a certain type. So you might have a movement enchant type, which would let you run faster or jump higher, etc.

And you might have a couple of body enchant slots, which could hold a light source or some sort of defensive modifiers. Suddenly ball of light and the other light sources actually have some attractiveness, versus emit light beating them all out, right? Emit light would mean only one defensive enchant rather than two, potentially.

Anyway, some of the details are still not firmed up, but that's the generality of what we're planning on enchants now.

More Missions, New Mission Content!
This is a really huge one, and something we're going to be focused a lot on soon. Right now we only have three types of missions, and all of them use the exact same mechanics. We're going to have not only more kinds of missions, but new mechanics for existing ones and new ones.

This is the "putting the meat on the bones" that I was talking about above. Once a lot of this is done, then that's when we'll make the EXP changes.

Old Strategic Map Functions Carried Forward Into Missions In New Ways
Consciousness shard nodes and vortex pylons and all that. We're going to be revamping how those work, and pulling them into the missions framework. Keith and I have a design call today to talk about some of those specific things, actually.

Citybuilding Interface Revamp
This is something that Keith and I are also going to be talking more about today, but the core idea is that you won't be placing buildings directly or any of that sort of thing. You'll still be able to get to the citybuilding screen as sort of a status-of-your-settlement screen, as well as potentially a way to make some more indirect changes to your civilization. But a lot of what used to be directly handled via a point-and-click interface on this screen will instead be handled through missions.

Permadeath
This is something we're still brainstorming, although the recent changes to the game have made death more significant again in some ways. Permadeath has always been a part of the game, but the issue we're brainstorming is how to make it feel more significant and poignant.

More Monsters, New Environmental Hazards, More Spells
In order for there to be a proper reward structure, and in order for there to be a proper escalating threat that requires the reward structure, we need more content!

Other Miscellany
There are lots of other things on our list, too. Monster weakspots. Multiplayer position smoothing. Multi-part monsters. And so on and so forth.

So, That's The Agenda
The above list is going to be pretty much what we're focusing on between now and 1.0, which means that this is pretty much the overall agenda between now and sometime in February, when we'll hit more of a polish phase if we hope to release in March. We'll see what actually happens -- we all know how schedules tend to be -- but it's a good list, I think.

AVWW Multiplayer: The Shattering Of The Multiverse

2011-12-05T15:44:00.001-05:00

On Friday we announced the first public alpha of multiplayer, and feedback on that was very positive except for one major point, which was could not have been received more negatively. The point in question is the "multiverse thing," which is detailed here.

What Happens Next With "The Multiverse Thing"
Firstly to go ahead with the most important news, we're working on an update that will negate most of the stuff with the intentional-desync effects. We're instead going to be moving to a model where the enemy logic is run on the server and the state will be as consistent between clients as most other games.

To accomplish this, there will have to be some slight wiggle-room in terms of monsters allowed to be in slightly different spots, but it's the sort of thing that I don't think you'll be able to tell even if you had two clients running on computers sitting right next to one another. Keith came up with this idea over the weekend and was talking about it with players in the forum, and those who have played multiplayer so far seemed optimistic that this would address their complaints.

Timeline?
The good news about this particular fix is that it's really replacing only part of the networking model, since the networking model is already such a multi-headed hydra. So it's possible we might be able to have this out tomorrow.

Downsides?
The short-term downside for this particular fix is that it's going to really require a lot of rebalancing of enemies, and some complete scrapping of some enemies, to make the model work. But this is something I was planning to do anyway, just in the interest of making even the solo experience tighter and more fun. As was discussed prior to this multiplayer fiasco ever coming up. But we're quite confident that players will help us iron out those temporary bumps in the balance road, and both the single player and multiplayer experiences will be a lot stronger for it inside a week or two.

One more serious downside is that certain things that we would otherwise be able to do, like "offscreen spawning of enemies" for one example. Or stuff like having bats flee from the cursor. Or even things like having 300 eagles in a chunk like we currently do. This isn't exactly a new sort of restriction class for us, as most action games have restrictions along these lines, and even network strategy games like AI War wind up with certain kinds of restrictions on what can and can't be done for reasons of multiplayer.

That said, after much discussion today, Keith and I have explored a lot of the various issues that arise from this change, and things that players were hoping we would change about the existing game even prior to multiplayer (monster spawners, etc), and we both are now feeling really confident that we can simply find lateral solutions to all the various issues.

For the monster spawner example, for instance, we have plans for how we'll be able to remove monster spawners (a popular idea with players) without having to do "offscreen spawning of enemies," which is something infeasible in the new model. There are several bigger things that will be resulting from that particular change, which I won't get into here, but the general effects are that: "trash mobs" will be fading into obscurity; enemy projectiles will be vastly slower and yet more plentiful; what were formerly trash mobs will become more interesting, more powerful foes; interiors, surface areas, and undergrounds will get differentiated even more heavily; and environmental hazards of new sorts will be playing a much larger role in the game. Most all of which were things that players were asking for, anyway.

Benefits?
The largest benefit is that we'll still be able to make the sort of game we want to make, while having it work well in multiplayer. The performance characteristics that you're seeing now, including that extreme latency-tolerance for general gameplay, should largely remain. Enemies will now jitter around some if you have a really latent connection, but it shouldn't be horrible and that's basically in keeping with any other action game, if not a little better than many of them.

That's part of the benefit of the existing hugely-hybrid networking model that Keith has spent the last two months implementing. We're able to re-tool part of it without having to affect any other part of it, and the general performance characteristics still remain quite high even though we're treading into some territory now that we'd initially hoped to avoid. This should be what players are looking for in terms of multiplayer performance/sync, I'm pretty sure, and it represents a technical middleground that until a few hours ago I didn't think would be possible to do. But Keith's idea, plus some refinement that we came up with working through it together this morning, strikes me as really solid. Knock on wood!

What Alternatives Were Considered?
Prior to ever implementing the model that we released on Friday, we had implemented a more traditional action game model that just performed completely unacceptably compared to solo play. We also looked at pretty much every other major networking model that we could think of when it came to other genres that are similar to a lot of what AVWW does. Nothing really fit this game perfectly, which is why we went with the model we did.

Side Note: We actually went with that model knowing we might have to change something about it, but we weren't sure what player reaction would be to it since no game had ever tried anything quite like that before. So we made sure to have the general networking be as flexible as possible so that changes would be possible. And that's part of why we didn't want to talk about the specifics of the model in advance, because we knew folks might not like the idea on the surface of it, and we wanted their feedback on the actual playtesting of it rather than the concept.

Since the release on Friday, and what can only be described as a "polite outcry" from our core playerbase about this one specific design choice (after playtesting, which is precisely the sort of feedback we were looking for), we've been wracking our brains to figure out a better alternative, and players have been making suggestions as well. Not really any of the suggestions particularly fit with the technical constraints of this game, which are really unique and particularly challenging to work with and explain, but we did get a razor-sharp insight into exactly the sort of performance characteristics that players were expecting and where our current model let them down.

Anyway, so we've been all over the board since then, thinking of radical other models, major changes to solo play to make multiplayer fit, and even not having multiplayer at all (since if the execution of said multiplayer was going to be a detractor, better not to have it at all). In the end, after many hours of discussion and modeling and remodeling, we came up with the above changes which are actually pretty slight. Key to being able to settle on that model was talking through solo-affecting core gameplay changes that solo players were already asking for anyhow, and which would be more compatible with multiplayer than the current model.

Conclusion
We think you're really going to like what's coming up, and you won't have to wait long this time. There are lots of changes coming to the game in general, as anyone who's been following the brainstorming subforum already knows. The game is really undergoing a transformation from something more rough and alpha-like to something more polished and release-like, which is a great thing all around.

Most of those changes are unrelated to multiplayer specifically, but a lot of them actually do happen to make the new model of multiplayer easier. And given that we keep getting comments to the effect of "this is how I was imagining the game back when I was first hearing about it" when people read about the coming changes in the brainstorming forum, I take that as another really positive sign.

We really do appreciate all the feedback, and for people taking the time to run through the early alpha of multiplayer for us. It sounds like overall people were having a lot of fun despite being hugely frustrated with "the multiverse thing," so I think that once we get that shored up we're going to be in happy territory.

Work Continues On The New AI System, Among Other Things

2011-11-18T21:51:00.000-05:00

Well, I'd hoped to have the new AI system ready for a release today or even yesterday, but things don't always go to plan.

At first I was just going to make it so that enemies could do multiple types of magic attacks. Then I decided to wrap in some of their general logic so that they could do things like chase you some of the time and then kite you and then just wander around, etc. Then I decided to wrap in a really much broader behavior structure, where enemies can flexibly switch between whole movement styles if need be.

It's not done yet, but it would allow some enemies to walk some of the time and fly others, or do things like run really fast and jump really high while having a weak attack, and move slower while having a stronger attack, etc. And to even have the various abilities be level-gated so that you'd see them with different frequencies or even not at all depending on their level.

The general idea being that this is a really flexible AI framework that can be used to manage some moderately more complex stuff in the short term, and that can then be extended without the need for any more rewrites as more and more complex enemies get added. A lot of that complexity won't actually manifest in the current enemies because they are meant to be pretty simple, but a number of them are getting more abilities that they only show under certain circumstances such as higher levels.

Regular espers start outright pathfinding after you a bit once you get to a pretty high level, for instance, and the bosses have an even better chance of doing that. Icicle leapers of a certain level, rather than always chasing you, will now sometimes do that and sometimes not, which actually makes them more dangerous because then they're harder to predict and better at navigating the terrain under some circumstances.

Whew. It's really a whole re-imagining of the entire AI system based on what I've learned with working with the mechanics of this game and its enemies so far. We started simple with the AI here specifically so that we could see what would feel good and play well, but now that we want to do real overlords (not just stat-buffed minibosses), that's requiring a much more flexible and advanced AI system. It's becoming a lot more AI-War-like in its decision making per enemy, now.

Two new enemies, the Skelebot Centurion and the Skelebot Overlord, have also been integrated into the game, and the skelebot overlord is now the largest enemy in the game. Standing next to a skelebot giant, the giant only comes up the overlord's elbow. Right now the centurion and the overlord skelebots don't actually act much differently from their lesser counterparts, but they'll be the first two enemies to very visibly benefit from the new AI system once I get that finished up. Hopefully Monday -- I'm down to 73 conflicts to fix in visual studio, so that's really getting down there from the hundreds it started out as!

Keith has also been having some absolutely amazing strides with the multiplayer, too. He and Josh have had a number of successful playtest sessions now, and there are only a few blocking issues that he's now working out. I don't want to jinx it, but it looks pretty likely that we could have this ready for some first public alpha multiplayer testing next week (though the Thanksgiving holiday might get in the way and push it to the week after). Anyway, it's getting down there.

There's a number of other cool things in the works, too, for soon after the AI update. A "mission scripting" system has really been on my mind a lot lately, and the design for that has been taking shape well. There's also a lot of things that I want to do to improve the flow of the game, providing more structure for players who want it while still allowing as much freedom as you have now for those who want that.

There are several other streamlining-type ideas that Keith and I have been talking about for a while that we're going to implement in the next month or so. There will still be more enemies and spells and such coming along with this, and yes I've got plans to address the eagles although that's going to take a bit more time to fully resolve as there's several levels of things I want to look at with them.

Lots of good stuff coming up! Just figured I'd give one last update before the weekend here.

New A Valley Without Wind Video Trailer!

2011-11-17T14:24:00.000-05:00

Just in time for Minecon, here's the latest and greatest trailer for the game! Erik and his friend Kevin really pulled out all the stops with this one, and I think it's our best-put-together trailer yet.

It's also far superior to the prior trailer in that it shows off a lot of the new spells, enemies, and visual effects that simply didn't exist when the other one was made. Enjoy!

A Week Without Updates!? An AVWW Status Report.

2011-11-16T16:47:00.000-05:00

Ever since beta started, we've hardly gone a business day without updates, but here we've now gone a week since the last AVWW update. Fear not! This isn't the start of some new trend. It's just been a confluence of events.

First of all, I was out of the office last Thursday and Friday due to some personal stuff. Then we've also been preparing for Minecon, where we're going to be an exhibitor. This includes getting both a new trailer going (which is almost ready!) and that new Getting Started Guide that we posted earlier today. Then there's been a whole bunch of stuff to do with various distributors for AVWW and our other titles, and some general nearing-year-end business maintenance stuff. Oh, and a number of press interviews or Q&As on several subjects.

Goodness! All of this has culminated in my being unable to work on the game directly much until today, but now all that seems to be quieting down (knock on wood!). Meanwhile:

* Josh has been hard at work on a variety of things including the Getting Started Guide and helping to test multiplayer
* Keith has been powering through the last of the multiplayer stuff for pre-public-alpha of that feature. He's almost got it to the point where we can start having some people opting in to testing multiplayer outside of the confines of Arcen staff, which is very exciting.
* Pablo has composed two awesome new tracks that I'm very excited about, one of which is for a new region type that isn't ready to go quite yet, but which will be really fitting for when that region is integrated.
* Erik of course has been busy as usual with all the PR/marketing side of things, but particularly with Minecon preparations and the trailer work.

I've got a number of items on my shortlist of features that I want to work on for myself, but what I decided to work on today is some more advanced enemy AI. Basically allowing for single enemies to have more complex patterns of attacks, and even unique combinations of attacks for specific individual bosses, etc. The existing bosses won't get these features since they are inherently meant to be simpler, but one of the new bosses I'm working toward is the first true Overlord type of enemy (versus the game just using stat-inflated minibosses for the overlords, which was always a placeholder mechanic).

There are also some other cool things on my shortlist, such as multi-boss rooms, outdoor boss arenas, underground rare commodity caverns, and enchants. Not to mention just general new spells and scrolls and enemies. And I keep meaning to add more stuff to craft at the outfitter, too, but that keeps getting bumped for other stuff that is more exciting in the short-term.

There's a lot that's coming, anyhow, and the next beta update should be either tomorrow or Friday, but probably tomorrow. Just figured I'd give folks an update on what's going on internally here! Definitely a really busy and exciting time, and we'll be back to our usual pattern of frequent updates starting late this week and into early next week.

A Valley Without Wind Getting Started Guide - Take Two!

2011-11-16T10:18:00.003-05:00

It's been a month and a half since our first Getting Started Guide for the game, and so much has changed since then! The old version is now confusingly wrong, as it refers to tons of stuff that either is no longer in the game or which you don't encounter until after you complete the intro mission, etc.

The intro mission itself is meant to be self-explanatory, but it's also meant to be more of a linear early-game experience than a hand-holding tutorial. So what we thought we'd do is make a little strategy guide of sorts to give you a hand if some aspect of the intro mission requires extra explanation. Enjoy!

A Valley Without Wind Getting Started Guide - Take Two!

by Josh Knapp

This is Environ, a world that's been shattered by an unknown cataclysm. We've tried the make the game as self-explanatory as possible, but there's a lot here.

When the game loads, the first thing to do is update to the latest beta if there are any updates available. There almost always are! This is a pretty quick process, and it gets you the absolute latest and greatest version of the game.

Once you've got the game up to date, Click 'Play' to get started, choose a name for your world, then press OK. Now it's time to pick your character. Each character has a list of randomly chosen stats below them. The meaning of each isn't crucial at this point, but it's good to know that green stats are good, red ones are below average, and white are average.

Once you pick your character, you'll start the game in an ice age tundra. You will see your “Action Bar” in the bottom left corner of your screen (it's empty right now, but that will change soon). In the top left corner is the mini map of the current “chunk” that you are in. On the minimap are dots, the colors of which have specific meanings. A blinking red dot would be a boss enemy, an orange dot represents loot of some sort, etc. You will learn the other colors as you progress in the game.

Finally, in the bottom right is the Dungeon Map. At the moment, this is showing you all of the surface chunks in the region. When you are in a cave or a building, it will show you the relationships between the chunks (rooms or caverns) in those areas as well.

Move to the right to get started, and use the jump key to get over any small obstacles in the terrain. As you do, you will see a coffer with a Fire Touch spellgem in it. Grabbing this spellgem will allow you to cast the Fire Touch spell, which is a close-range attack that doesn't do a lot of damage, but costs no mana.

Keep walking off the right-hand side of the screen to continue to the next area. You may have noticed that there was more loot up high in the first area. You can't get this now, but when you later get wood platforms, feel free to come back and grab it if you wish (though doing so is not required, and you can get the same item further into the intro mission anyhow).

In the second chunk you will find a tombstone; there are several of them throughout the intro mission, and they will offer clues and hints to get you through this part of the game and beyond. It's a good idea to read them! If the first one isn't clear enough, use the Fire Touch spell on the crates to destroy them and thus proceed beyond.

The next coffer has the wood platforms, which you will need to get past the next area. But, before we go on, lets grab one other thing from this chunk. Look on your minimap: see the orange dot way up high? You'll want that.

This might be a good time to talk about your action bar. As you have probably figured out, the fist action in your action bar is triggered by the left mouse button. Additionally, the second slot in your bar is triggered by the right mouse button. The third slot by the middle mouse button. If you have additional mouse buttons, this pattern will continue.

You can also trigger any action in your bar by right-clicking on its slot or by pressing the corresponding number on your keyboard. All of your spells and items that are not in your action bar are stored in your inventory, which you can access by pressing “I”. At any time, you can click and drag the items and spells in your inventory around to wherever you want them.

Assuming you've been following this guide, your platforms should be in the second slot of your action bar. If so then, simply right click on the screen a few times above you, jump up (add a few more if you need to), then get the warp potions up in the rock crevice. These will save you time later, so you can immediately warp back to your last location if you die.

The next chunk features a pool of water. Be careful! The water may look harmless, but the cataclysm has actually made it highly acidic; staying in the water will eventually kill you. You will need to deploy your wood platforms over the water, and then jump on them, to get across.

Our First Building

The next area starts with a sheer cliff: again, deploying platforms is the way to get past. On the other side of this cliff rests a building. You aren't required to go into all buildings, but they can be a good source of supplies to help get you further in the game. This particular building does have a spellgem that you will need to advance, so lets go get it!

Press the action button 'E' while standing by the building's door to go inside (you will see a note telling you that as well). Once inside, you will see two ladders. Press down on the ladders to drop through them (yeah, it's dark -- we'll fix that shortly). At the bottom you will find a coffer with ten Emit Light scrolls. Grab these, and then activate one of them by right-clicking on the new icon in your action bar.

Now that you can see well, look for the vent right above the coffer, in between the two ladders. Jump up to that vent and press the action button again. You can place a wood platform under the vent if you have trouble pressing the action button while jumping. The new room on the other side of the vent is small and simple, but contains a powerful spellgem called Ball Lightning. Ball Lightning is your first ranged offensive spell, and it can do a lot of damage, which we'll see in action shortly.

Head back through the vent to the other room you were in, jump back up the ladders, and head through the second white door from the left. This will lead you to a room with a platform near the top with two doors. Take the left door. This is a “stash” room, as indicated on the dungeon map with the color yellow. Stash rooms have all kinds of stuff that will be helpful as you venture out. This particular one has three coffers.

The most important things you will need here are the potions. The green potions will restore your health, the blue ones will restore your mana. There is also a Storm Dash spellgem, which makes it much faster to traverse wide open areas. Once you have these, there's nothing more you absolutely need inside the building; but if you want to explore the rest of it, feel free, as there are other goodies lying around.

Once you're done in the building, it's time to use the warp potions you found a couple chunks back. Rather than backtracking all the way through the building on foot, let's just warp straight outside! Press the period key until you see the region map instead of the dungeon map. Click on the long green rectangle, which represents the surface dungeon.

You will then be looking at the dungeon map of the surface instead of the building. Click on the rightmost node in this map that doesn't have a black line through it. This will warp you back out to the grounds outside the building (or further, if you passed the building before doubling back to go inside it). You can use these warp potions to warp to places you've already been -- there's never a need to backtrack unless you run out of warp potions!

Back Outside; aka Our First Enemy!

Now that you are back outside of the building, move on to the next area. As you can tell from the tombstones, the red slime up ahead can be pretty dangerous. But don't worry, you have the tools to take him out.

As soon as you get on the same level as the slime, which looks like a big, red blob, fire your Ball Lightning at it a few times. Don't get too close, because if you do, it will attack you. Once it's dispatched, move through to the next area.

This next area is the beginning of a cave. There's quite a bit in these “surface tunnels,” but for now, head towards the bottom left and go in the door you see in the wall. This will take us deeper into the cave, towards some raw gems so we can learn how to craft more spellgems. You'll need to use something different to get past the next slime, which happens to be resistant to Ball Lightning and Fire Touch.

In the next cavern, simply head to the right and drop down to find the next door (you don't get damaged from falling... except in the lava flats where gravity is heavier...). Go through the door to the next cavern. Again head to the right, and you will see a bunch of skelebots (one of which even shoots back). Take them out with your Ball Lightning before you drop further down

You don't need to kill minor monsters in this game, but doing so means they won't be hitting you. Once you have gone down to that platform, head a bit more to the right and you will see another door -- behind which is the cavern containing the raw gems.

Mining Our First Gems..

For the cavern with the gem veins, head to the left, drop straight down, and head left across the water, using platforms to get across. On the far side you'll find two easy-to-harvest raw jade gem veins. You can use Fire Touch on this to break it down, and you will get one raw jade and two jade gem dusts from each one. There is a third gem vein on the far right side of the cavern, but that one is much more of a battle to collect.

Now that you've got the gem, head back two rooms (to the beginning of the cave), preferably by warping. There are convenient coffers of warp scrolls in the gem vein caverns in case you are running low. Once you're back at the surface tunnels, head to the top of the chunk and you will see the crafting benches as shown above. Press confirm while standing in front of the spellgem workbench. This will bring you to the spellgem crafting interface.

Click on the raw jade to bring up the info on a spell called “Launch Rock”, this spell will help us against that next slime. Click craft, and the spell will now be in your action bar or inventory. If you don't see it, press “I” to view your inventory and you will find it there. There is another color of gem in the caves you can get if you wish, but it's not necessary, and it does require you to kill your first set of minibosses in order to get them.

In the chunk where you crafted the spellgem, head to the bottom right there is a red and yellow slime blocking your way. Once again, don't get too close -- and this one has a twist, in that it's resistant to your Ball Lightning. You'll have to use Throw Rock to get past.

With the second slime dead, finally you enter the last portion of the intro mission. After that you will move on to the full game... only there's a giant skelebot miniboss standing in your way! You can choose to fight him or just slip quietly past.

Whether or not you take him out is up to you, but, if you do, you will gain valuable EXP for your civilization, advancing you towards more and more powerful spells. If you don't, you will still have numerous other opportunities to gain the EXP you need in the main game itself. Most EXP is gained by fighting bosses, though some is found by collecting EXP containers in large rooms in buildings.

If you want to kill the boss, use spells like Ball Lightning and Throw Rock and try to hit him without falling down where he can physically attack you. You will still have to dodge the fireballs he's throwing at you even if you stay up high, though. If you prefer to skip the boss for now, you can use platforms and get above him, and simply walk to the other side of the chunk to leave. Either way, this ends the intro to the game.

Going Out Into The Full World; or What Now?

After you leave the intro, you will be put into your first settlement. This settlement will likely be your “home base” for quite some time. In here are guardian stones that will fully heal you and restore your mana, and restore you up to four warp potions if you are running low. You can see other people living here as well, who you will optionally be able to play as once you get some“Transfer Glyph” spell scrolls.

From any settlement you will also be able to run a lot of the citybuilding and strategic-type features that will be unlocked as your civilization level increases. A lot of the "macrogame" features don't show up until civilization level 3, so you have some time to just explore in the side view and get used to that.

Leaving the right-hand side of the settlement chunk will take you to the world map, an overhead view. On the world map there is a numerical value to each tile -- this "region level" denotes the level of the enemies and bosses in each area, as well as the general quality of the rewards you'll find. Bosses and the EXP containers will grant more EXP the higher the region relative to your current level.

If you feel the game is too easy, you can go to regions that are above your current level. Otherwise feel free to play in areas that are at or even below your level. You can also tune the action or strategic difficulty of the game at any Difficulty Shrine. You started out the intro mission next to such a shrine, and there is also one located in each settlement. Any time you die, your new character will appear by one of those shrines.

Besides the level of each region, you should also note some of the icons on the map. Many of them represent Rare Commodity Towers, which have multiple bosses guarding a rare crafting resource at the top. From time to time there will also be groups of rampaging monsters on your map. They will demand resources from your settlement, but you can fight them (and gain EXP for doing so) if you don't want to pay. You can right-click on any region for more information about the various icons.

Checklist Of General Early Game Goals

Here are a few suggestions for early goals that you can pursue:

1. Explore various regions to gain new crafting materials to craft more powerful and exciting spellgems and spell scrolls. The Reference Info button on the in-game menu (press escape to see) has detailed info on things you can craft, what materials are required, and even where you can typically find those materials.

2. Try to gain as much EXP as possible by defeating bosses and exploring large buildings. Getting better spells and equipment will really help you in this endeavor, hence the importance of exploring for better crafting materials. Often you can accomplish both of these goals at once, as there tends to be minibosses guarding most of the more valuable crafting supplies.

3. As your civilization levels up from all the EXP you are bringing in, you'll unlock the "strategic overlay" and the "settlement management" interfaces. These let you build homes and other buildings for your NPCs, it lets you order around your NPCs to explore the world map, and it even lets you rescue other settlers that you find in the wilderness, adding to your population. Improve the morale of your settlers to have them produce resources at peak efficiency. There are a lot of in-game tips (and tooltips) explaining all of this once you gain access to it. Bear in mind all of this is optional.

4. Try to find the lieutenants that are oppressing the land, and then ultimately the overlord that they serve. You probably won't have an overlord move into your world until you reach civilization level 10 or so. And you'll likely need to be around level 20ish before you can take him out. The overlord keeps and evil outposts of the lieutenants provide special and interesting challenges.

5. Explore the world for its own sake! Every time your civilization level increases, the world gets larger. As your civilization level goes up you'll also start finding objects, enemies, crafting materials, and even whole region types that you've never seen before. There's a lot to discover, and as the game continues to be developed further there will be more and more to find in your existing worlds.

There's really a whole lot more in the game, but, you should go ahead and discover it for yourself. Have fun!

More Reflections After A Month Of A Valley Without Wind's Beta

2011-10-26T12:30:00.003-04:00

Has it really been a whole month since beta came out? How time flies. It's been a while since I wrote my two-week "thoughts on the beta" post, so I thought I'd do another such post

The game is still growing at a hefty rate, but we're no longer in that period where we're spending all our time polishing the core mechanics. Which is definitely good -- there's been vastly more content added since the last post of this sort that I made.

Let's look back at the same topics we talked about last time, and see how they've progressed:

Difficulty
Not a whole lot to report here, in the main -- we got this hashed out pretty well in the first couple of weeks, and players seem to be happy with where the difficulty is sitting, in the main. We did introduce some new bosses that are much harder in some circumstances, but we've also introduced a lot of new player abilities that make things easier.

At this stage, the difficulty of the game is into that "arms race" territory -- where the difficulty is generally fine, but we're constantly adding new enemies that make it harder and new abilities that make it easier again. This is familiar to anyone who has ever followed the development of an AI War expansion, and one of the main net effects of this is that it gives the game a lot more variety and depth over time.

Complexity
Despite my intentions, I really haven't been able to address much of this yet. I've instead been erring on the side of improving the experience for the players who already are able to get over the base difficulty curve. This keeps the existing players happy, and gives more of a reward to anyone who picks up the game fresh and gets past that initial complexity perception.

The "intro mission" has been something that I sit down to work on every day, and I get little bits and pieces done, but I have yet to really make significant progress on it. I expect that to change very soon, but I keep saying that. Usually when I have some reluctance to work on a specific feature, it's because I know there's some fatal flaw with my conception of that feature, but I just can't put my finger on it yet. That's been my sense for my plans for the intro mission.

Just this morning I actually did have a breakthrough on part of my plans for the intro mission, though, so maybe that means I'll be able to wrap this up sooner than later. The lack of the intro mission is probably one of the single biggest things holding the game back from wider appeal at the moment, so I certainly feel antsy to "just get it done," but at the same time that's tempered by my desire to get it right the first time and avoid too much rework. I've been plotting this out in word documents, and I think it's getting there.

"Signal To Noise"
This is something that we've been taking some pretty enormous leaps and bounds with since last time. As a few examples:

The storm dash and storm rush spells let you traverse wide exterior areas in a much faster and more fun method, making it so the tedium there is gone in favor of some sonic-like frantic movement if you like.

The game now has "stash rooms" in most buildings, with unusual and cool rewards that players have really responded positively to. This makes it so that any building is quite rewarding, and you don't have to spend remotely so much time or effort building up your potion reserves. The way that this has changed up the feel of exploration for the game is just immense.

The game also now has EXP Containers that you can find in large rooms, and in particular in maze rooms. This gives a point to long, dead-end hallways that previously were just a frustration. Now you actually get some EXP out of it. This also provides a new way for players to level up; if you are combat-averse, you can avoid boss fights and just level up by exploring around if you want.

Exploration-only leveling takes a lot longer, and the best path is really to mix and match your sources of EXP gain, but it really expands the options that players have in how they choose to interact with the world. You don't need to be a boss-slayer to progress at all in the game, now.

New Content
This is another of the areas in which the game has really taken some enormous leaps. We've not introduced very many new enemies just yet, but we've added tons of spells and spell scrolls and even a few outfitter items. All of these new goodies expand the options that players have in terms of how they fight enemies or simply get around.

I felt it was important to focus on player abilities first, so that players would be better-equipped to actually deal with new enemies as those get added in the coming weeks. Some other really major additions are still upcoming in the coming weeks as well, such as the long-awaited elemental damage, which will really change up how both offensive and defensive combat loadouts are chosen.

Speaking of defensive loadouts, that's another area that's seen a lot of new content in the last few weeks. The new shield spells, the ability to summon crates, and even somewhat the miniature spell and other new traversal spells (greater teleport, lightning rocket, etc) all expand your options during a fight beyond simple reflex-based dodging.

We've also added several new music tracks, tons and tons of furniture, and loads of new room templates. There's still lots more to do with furniture, but as of the last post the interiors of rooms were always completely barren, and where we are now is a huge bound forward thanks to Josh's efforts in this area. A lot of the cooler new room templates were actually player-created, so it's awesome to see the map editor getting use outside of Arcen staff.

A big part of any given boss fight in particular is the actual room structure itself. Fighting the same boss in different rooms can lead to wildly different experiences. There have been a lot of awesome boss room templates submitted in particular, and these really amp up the variety and excitement of the boss fights to a degree I hadn't quite expected.

Multiplayer
Yesterday on the main Arcen News Blog I posted about the current state of multiplayer. We're still not release-ready on that, nor is a public release of that too imminent, but we're figuring out lots of things internally with it.

We have it playable, but not performing with the combat precision that we want over the Internet, and so we're going through a lot of big changes there to make sure that the combat experience in multiplayer is equal to that of solo. I'm still hopeful that we'll have the first multiplayer public version sometime in the next month, but only time will tell -- I don't have anything remotely resembling a firm ETA as yet.

Conclusion
Things continue to go well. We're increasingly shifting into the content development phase of the dev cycle, and that's always exciting for us and players because each new bit of content really increases what you can do in the game.

Multiplayer has been draining about half of our programming hours for the last couple of weeks and likely will continue to do so for another few weeks or a month, but despite that the rest of the game is still growing and changing at an excellent clip.

I still think that the new player experience is a key thing that is holding the game back at the moment, but I think we are making at least incremental progress in getting that to where it needs to be. All good things in time! We're still hugely encouraged by everything that we're seeing during this beta period, and it remains our most successful public beta to date.

Some Reflections After Two Weeks Of A Valley Without Wind's Beta

2011-10-07T10:08:00.001-04:00

If you've been following the main Arcen News Blog, or the AVWW Forum, or any of our social media, then I'm sure you've seen that we've put out a few metric tons of releases for A Valley Without wind in the last two weeks. We're presently working on update #20, actually.

So, how have things been going? Sales-wise, we started out with a real bang, and then it's gotten a bit quieter as the initial wave of press passed and all the players who had been most anxiously awaiting the game already now have it. This is already our second-best-selling beta yet, though, and it's only been two weeks -- within the first month, this will have surpassed what Light of the Spire sold in three months of beta.

That's great, but of course sales aren't the core reason that we do these public betas in the first place -- what are we learning from all this exposure to players? Well, quite a lot actually. The difficulty curve was all out of whack, the lack of loot drops and the unkillable monster spawners really bugged people, and there were a number of mechanics that were found to be too complex even by our hardcore forum fans, and so on.

Difficulty
The difficulty curve is now consistent throughout the game, which is great, but in the process we've had to rebalance everything, and that's led to some wild oscillations in some parts of difficulty -- mostly toward the harder end. Still working on that! This 20th release, to be available later today, should address most if not all of the remaining large issues with difficulty being too high.

I was actually really pleased with the difficulty flow of the game right at the start of beta, but after about 10 levels of play that really started breaking down and the game got progressively easier. Having a growing pool of players in the level 30-40 range or even higher has been really invaluable for us -- testers invaluable to any game, especially at this stage in the life of a game.

Complexity
Ever since A Valley Without Wind was first conceived, it's been our goal to have it be so simple that we didn't even need a tutorial to get new players started with it. I loved how Minecraft or similar just plops you down and you're left to forage and expand, etc (though I understand a tutorial was added there more recently than I last played).

On the other hand, we wanted our usual incredible amount of depth to this game -- just gating most of that depth and complexity into a natural game-like progression. Games that are easy to pick up are awesome, but once players have their feet wet they shouldn't be asking "is this all?"

So that's been an interesting balancing challenge for us, and I think overall we've done a pretty good job of getting into the right ballpark. We were taken by surprise both in alpha and beta by how complex certain parts of the game were perceived to be, but again that's why we get the players involved early -- it's very hard to objectively judge the complexity of something you thought of. And if you let the game get too far along without getting that critical external feedback, there are some kinds of complexity that just get too interwoven into the game that you can't later take out.

We've made a lot of strides on the complexity front already: adding more tooltips, simplifying the crafting interface, level-gating the strategic and citybuilding aspects of the game so that you don't have to deal with them immediately, and most recently taking out the "profession books" for the main three kinds of crafting. Those added complexity without fun, which I wrote about in more length in the release notes.

So all of this helps a lot, but there is still more we need to do. We're going to be adding a little introductory "mission" that players have to go through in new worlds. It's not really a tutorial -- the linear mission will give you the basic tools you'd need to find for yourself anyhow, and make you use them as you would anyhow, while giving you onscreen tips just in case you feel stuck. This should take all of 5 minutes to play through, or even less for players who already know how to play, and that should serve as a much more fun and game-like introduction to the game rather than just reading lots of stuff from the adviser guardian.

"Signal To Noise"
One of the interesting things about making a really huge infinite world is that one of two things happen: on one end of the spectrum you're constantly tripping over awesome stuff all the time, and the world feels small because you don't really have to go anywhere to accomplish anything; on the other end of the spectrum the world is incredibly vast and sparsely populated, and you wind up having to really trawl immense tracts of land to get anything done.

Right now AVWW is somewhere in the middle, which is the overall best place to be, but "the middle" is a broad place. AVWW definitely leans toward the side of being too large and sparsely populated. There's a ton of awesome stuff in here, and players who bother to learn how to use the dungeon map and world map, and who read the tooltips, can find those things with ease.

Of course some of the traversal is still a bit too longwinded to be as fun as we'd like (maze rooms have come up a lot in particular as needing tuning). And even more core is the issue that players tend not to want to read. I'm as guilty of it as anyone -- just let me play. If the game looks familiar enough that I think I should know what I'm doing, I figure I'll figure all the stuff out as I go.

That's a challenging problem to combat, because one of the things that I like to do in my games -- as you see in AI War, for instance -- is to give the player a lot of choices and let them figure out what matters to them. In AI War, if you try to take every planet you will usually wind up losing because of the AI's rising aggression. In AVWW there is no penalty for trying to explore every room in every building, but it sure is boring to do; we intended for people to scout the buildings, find the rooms of interest, grab the loot, and get out.

And a number of players do just this; but still others don't. So that's still something we're trying to find the sweet spot on, and again the beta testers are being absolutely invaluable for this. I think we're not that far off at this point, but there's still some more condensing and such that needs to be done.

New Content
With all the flood of feedback about the existing content, and all the revisions to balance and so forth, there's been limited time to work on new content thus far. But we have managed to add in a couple of new enemies, and our update #20 includes the first batch of new spells. We've also added a lot of macro-game type additions all throughout -- the citybuilding bits have really grown, and we got things like consciousness nodes, pylons, vortexes, and resource deposits added on the world map. And there's been a large number of new boss room templates, too -- things like that.

Thankfully a lot of the revision-type work looks like it is overall winding down, so I expect to see the focus really shifting soon into blasting out tons of more content. I know that's something that a number of players have been really waiting for most eagerly, and so have we, but I think the last two weeks have been incredibly valuable to the game.

Multiplayer
Multiplayer is something we've decided to make a focus sooner than later. Still no ETA on that, but Keith is going to be sinking most of his time into that starting today. It's going to be rough and in need of a lot of beta testing right at the start once we first publicly release it, but hopefully within a couple of weeks of the first release into the hands of the core beta testers, we'll have it ready for wider dissemination.

Why Release This Early?
A comment that comes up occasionally from people who don't really "get" the game yet, or who just aren't that interested in it at all (hey, that happens) is "why release the game in such an early state?" Usually with added snark or nastiness.

That really gets under my skin a bit, I have to say. We've got loads of players who are clearly having a blast with the beta, and the feedback we're getting from the dozens who are choosing to give feedback has been nothing short of amazing. This is how we make games at Arcen -- we actually listen to players and value what they have to say.

But you can't listen to players if they can't play the game. And if the game is already finished, then there's not a lot that player feedback that the players can really give. Ergo: if you want player feedback, you have to get them involved once the core of the game is solid, but before the full shape of the game is even remotely finished.

I think that when a lot of people ask for feedback, they're really saying "tell me you like it and think it's perfect in every way." I actually want to know when there's something up with the game that makes it less fun, or more tedious, or too complex, or whatever. When we know about those things, we can do something about it.

To some extent, that means that the players who get in early get to see "how the hotdog is made" a bit. And if somebody really doesn't want to know that sort of information and gets turned off the game by it... well, that's a cost of being open, I guess. But I think we and the game gain a lot more in the long-run by getting players involved in a real, early, and meaningful way. Next time you complain about a released game having some fundamental flaws that you just can't understand, remember -- that's what can happen when games are developed in a vacuum.

The Bottom Line?
Things are going really well, I think. We have a growing contingent of players who seem really happy with the game, and the early press has been largely quite positive. There are still a few fundamental things we're trying to get tuned exactly right, and the new player experience still needs a lot of work in particular, but in another week it's going to be in a whole different place than it is even now.

In short: we're one of the few game developers, indie or otherwise, to experiment with a development process remotely this open. And I think that the process is working quite well. Only time will really tell, of course, but based on the first two weeks of beta I'm strongly encouraged.

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

2011-09-26T10:51:00.000-04:00

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

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

Here's the beta trailer:

A Valley Without Wind: Locales And Enemies

2011-09-23T21:39:00.003-04:00

As you journey through your own unique world of Environ, you'll primarily be splitting your time between exterior landscapes, building interiors, and underground caverns. Not only that, but you'll be traversing shards of nine different time periods, ranging from the prehistoric, to medieval, to modern, to far-future. Each has a very different feel, often different enemies, and often unique rewards.

While the game is in beta, of course, the all of the full content from all these areas of the game is not remotely yet in place. However, that said:

You can visit all nine of the time periods already.
There are at least four different character models for NPCs in each of the seven human-inhabited time periods.
There are already a number of unique bits specific to each time period's shards.

Enough enumeration -- a lot of the fun of a game like this comes from simply exploring it and seeing what cool things you can find. So we won't provide an exhaustive spoiler-laden list here, or attempt to show everything. Suffice it to say, we've had some alpha testers that put more than two dozen hours into the game, and they didn't even see everything that the game contained at that stage of alpha. Right from the start of beta, this is a respectably varied world, and it's only going to get more vast as beta continues.

Here's a few specific snapshots to give you an idea of what you might encounter on your journey. All of these are full-resolution (no downscaling, no JPEG or video compression, etc), just cropped down to make them fit in to 600px wide:

Fighting A Blue Amoeba In An Underground Cavern
As you gain civ levels, you'll actually start running into the even-more-deadly red amoebas, so watch out! This is also a relatively close-to-the-surface underground dungeon; as you delve further underground, the number of wooden platforms decreases, the monsters become tougher, and eventually you'll find yourself in a heated lava climate.

Charging A Rhino

The grasslands surface areas (and sometimes interiors!) commonly have rhinos running about them. Rhinos move pretty fast, and stop for nothing short of a brick wall. This character is casting the Forest Rage spell at the rhino, but unfortunately it looks like not only did she miss, but the rhino is closing in.

Creeping Death Inside Pyramid

This character is casting the creeping death spell on some desert burrowers inside a pyramid hallway. Creeping death is a particularly nasty entropy-based spell (there are six colors/elements in all), and is one of the few that presently can harm your allies or NPCs. The doors you see behind the spell lead further into the pyramid (she's about halfway up at the moment), into massive maze-rooms filled with enemies.

Decrepit Modern Building

This is a building from the modern time period, and the character is casting Ice Cross to the far side of the image, which is what is providing the paltry light here. The Emit Light spell would be a far more effective choice, but as it stands this old building looks more like something out of a horror movie. Buildings don't yet have furniture in them -- that's one of the things coming throughout beta -- but the walls, floorplans, and room designs are heavily varied already.

Desert Hut

Thus far, all of the images have depicted characters who were actually from the time period of the region shards they were journeying in. However, this is a character from the medieval time period (which you won't be finding until much later in the game), and he's traversing a bronze age desert exterior. This is perfectly normal -- you'll start out with only futuristic ice age characters to choose from, complete with sci-fi snowsuits, and as you journey you'll eventually unlock characters from all the time periods as playable options.

Destroyed Room

This is an example of a destroyed room in a modern building. There is never, ever, anything interesting in these; and they are marked with a bomb symbol on their doors so that you can see to ignore them. Why have bombed-out rooms? Because players -- including us -- hate doors that your all-powerful magical character mysteriously can't open. It's like the chain-link fence kryptonite joke. At any rate, in the wake of the cataclysm, buildings are in varying states of destruction -- some are all but impassible, others are pristine. You can go into any room in any of the buildings, but the bombed-out ones are items you can easily (and happily) mark off your exploration list. The spell shown is Douse Monster Nest, by the way.

Settlement Management (Citybuilding) Interface

This is one of two screenshots that we're actually not going to crop down, so you'll have to click through to see the entire screen resolution on this one. This is where you can create homes and jobs for your NPCs, assign them places to live and work, and provide them with amenities like wells, grave plots, upgraded homes, and so on.

Avoiding Death With Auto-Applied Potions
This character is exploring next to a pyramid in a region far above his civ level of 6. As such, the lightning esper bolt that you see piercing him has brought his health to zero -- but since he was carrying healing items with him, one of them was auto-applied to save him from death. The recharge time when a healing item is auto-applied is extra long, though, so he won't be able to heal himself again (automatically or otherwise) for another 20 seconds. If the esper (or another monster) lands another killing blow within that span of time, the character will be permanently dead and the player will have to choose another to continue with. Those spear-skulls the character is jumping over are monster spawners, incidentally.

Terrence Crow's Grave

What's the name of that character above? ...Oh. Looks like the espers did him in, after all. Each settlement starts out with 100 grave plots forming a graveyard. Every time your current character dies, or an NPC associated with that settlement dies, one of the grave plots will get filled with their actual grave. It also depresses the local NPCs for ten macro-game turns, making them less effective. If you play for long enough, you'll have to put down more grave plots to prevent your graves from spilling out into the rest of your settlement where you don't want them.

Forest Battle With Bats

This character is from the pre-industrial time period, and she's using the Circle of Fire spell to strike back at some bats that are following her through a daytime forest. Circle of Fire is great to use against bats because often they'll swarm around you, and one use of this spell can hit a lot of targets if you're careful about it. It's also hitting the background trees and stumps and such; ice cross and fire touch also do this, as does energy pulse, but most offensive spells don't impact the background.

Launch Meteor

Personally, this is one of my favorite spells at the moment. Launch Rock is a spell that you can craft right from the start of the game, and it's pretty neat -- it does pretty much what it says on the tin. Launch Meteor is a spellgem recipe that you have to unlock through profession books, and it uses magma -- one of those rare commodities that you have to climb a boss-ridden tower to find a single unit of. Magma will ultimately be useful for more than just the launch meteor spell, but it will have to be something pretty cool to keep me from using it over launch meteor, which crashes through multiple enemies in a wicked, flaming arc.

Moon Rising

Even Environ's moon didn't escape the carnage of the cataclysm, as you can see. Every 10 minutes of game time is a day/night cycle, although you can accelerate to morning or evening using the Sunrise and Nightfall spells (if you can get your hands on some of the rare sunstone or moonstone, that is). At present the day/night cycle doesn't have an impact on gameplay, but during beta we'll be introducing spells and enemies that are affected by the time of day. Also please note that the global passage of time is counted in macro-game turns, which are considered more equivalent to weeks and which you can advance via the strategy or settlement-management screens.

The World Map

Here's a small slice of the world map. This is how you get between the various regions. As you can see, the cataclysm has thrown the time-shards together in a somewhat haphazard fashion. You can tell roughly how difficult a given region is going to be based on the region level it has -- if the region level is higher than your current civilization level, then be careful there! Of course, some region types -- the ocean, the lava flats, and the deep spring to mind -- are always exceptionally dangerous.

Strategic Map

And now we've come to the second of the two full screenshots that I'm not going to crop down -- you'll want to click this to see it at full resolution, for sure. This is the strategic map, which lets you order your NPCs around to do things outside of the settlement in which they live. At the moment it's pretty much three things that they can do: they can scout regions for you (removing that crosshatch fog that you see below on many of the regions); they can build wind shelters (and the attendant roads) for you; and they can invite new NPCs to join their settlement (you have to have located the target NPCs first on your own). This is a part of the game that is still in relatively early stages, like the citybuilding sections, but it's a part of the game that we're very excited about. These :macro-game: bits are turn-based, like a very light 4X strategy game.

Wind Shelter

Here's a wind shelter -- this is one that I constructed directly, by hand. You don't have to use NPCs to do this, but it is often faster to do so. Until this wind shelter went up, this region and all the regions near it were covered by a terrible snowstorm. Any regions too far away from a wind shelter, settlement, or road are covered in fierce windstorms that buff all the monsters and reduce your visibility. This wind is part of where the name of the game comes from ("a valley without wind" would represent a safe place to the people faced with these winds), and it also has a mysterious connection to the cataclysm. You'll be able to learn more about these and other mysteries through talking to NPCs and collecting memory crystals on your journey.

Rainstorm

The type of weather the windstorms manifest as, as you might guess, is based on the climate of the region in question. In temperate climates it tends to be rain more often than not. In the desert it's sandstorms. In the lava flats it's a firestorm (lots of blowing ash, etc). And so on.

Ocean Cavern

If you have enough healing potions, you can actually go exploring in the acid oceans that dot the planet. It's a slow and dangerous road, but there are even completely submerged caverns such as this one. In future beta updates there will be fish and whales (instead of just amoebas), and you'll be able to transmogrify yourself into a fish as well for faster, safer travel. Did we mention that you can already transmogrify yourself into a bat? Yeah, that's another favorite of mine.

Sapphire Gem Vein In Ice Cavern

The undergrounds vary by the region they are in, of course. Here in the ice age, even the underground caverns are so cold that you'll freeze to death in under a minute if you don't bring along a heavy snowsuit. Here you can see a couple of Icicle Leaper enemies guarding a sapphire vein -- split that open, and you'll get not only a sapphire raw gem, but also two units of sapphire dust. Gems and dust are the backbone of almost all crafting (everything except the Outfitter goods use them).

Robo Brawl Here you can see my neutral skelebot character (left) fighting some other skelebots in a futuristic junkyard's surface tunnel. That's a quartz outcrop I'm after, behind them. You might notice that my character here is also named Terrence Crow (as was a woman from the medieval period in the underwater cavern). This isn't normally something you'd see in a game, it's just a function of how I was transforming my character to move quickly around the world and take these screenshots. There are tens of thousands of first and last names included in the game, and millions of possible character names -- the likelihood of your ever seeing two characters with the same name for as long as you play is pretty low. And unlike with AI War, these are all real names that you can pronounce (well, except some of the monster names, but those are still way more prounounce-able despite not being real names).

Giant Skelebot

While we're on the subject of skelebots, here's one of the minibosses from the game: the giant skelebot. He hits you with his spear if you get too close, and he shoots fireballs at you when you're further away. The giant skelebots, believe it or not, are actually by far the tamest of the minibosses in the game. When you hit level 12 and start seeing the crippled dragons, whose fire breath actively chases you around the room... yeah, the giant skelebot is nothing compared to that.

But he's still killed me quite a plenty times; and depending on the boss room layout and what regular enemies are spawning to help out, even a weaker miniboss type can give you quite a fight. This is a case where we're starting to see some combinatorial emergence in the same fashion that we see with AI War battlefields, and that's something that was really a surprise to me personally to find. The AI itself isn't emergent here, not like AI War's swarm intelligence, but the way that the environment and various enemy types combine to make emergent challenges is very much in the same style as AI War.

Windmill

The very last locale I'll leave you with is the my favorite grasslands windmill, with rolling clouds behind it. In-game, all those clouds are dynamically animated in realtime on your GPU thanks to Unisky (on modern GPUs -- older or underpowered GPUs can use a much-lighter static skies option that still has the day/night transitions, etc). That's a lightning esper waiting down below, peacefully gliding along until you come within range -- and then zap. Bring a weapon.

A Valley Without Wind: Getting Started Guide

2011-09-23T12:06:00.006-04:00

Note: This guide is now hugely out of date, and we've written a replacement that you can view here.

A Valley Without Wind

Getting Started Guide
By Josh Knapp

The year was 888.

Wind blasted snowfields have covered the world of Environ for centuries...

Hey! Never mind all that, let's just get to the game!

If this is your first time playing A Valley Without Wind, getting started is easy. First, install then open the game. Click 'Play' on the menu, and a new menu will open up. This time, click 'Create World'. Now the game will ask you to name the world. Personally, I'd suggest naming it “Wayne's World," but really, you can name it anything you want. Now, for the character selection -- every character you have the possibility to select has a name, and a list of personal stats. Don't be overwhelmed with the stats, the most important thing you need to know about them right now is that green is good, red is less than good, and white is average. So, you want to try to avoid a character with a lot of red stats.

Once you've chosen your character, he or she will be dropped into your first settlement. This is your first base of operations, and you will likely come back here often. To start, use the 'A' and 'D' keys to explore the settlement, and collect all the various gifts (like books) on the ground that the Ilari have given you.

The next steps you should take are mentioned in the top right part of the screen, but we'll briefly cover them here, too. First go and talk to the Adviser Guardian Stone, the big teal colored crystal dude with an inflated sense of self-importance. To talk to him, simply stand in front of him and press the 'E' (also called 'confirm') key. He'll give you tips about the game. You are only required to read the first 5, but if you want to keep reading more, he's got a lot of good information -- and you can always come back later.

Ok, now it's time to talk to the green crystal dude -- another vessel of the Ilari. This is the Hearth Guardian Stone. Any time you are low on health just stand in front of him to have your health and mana be completely restored. Also, he'll give you free warp scrolls if you have fewer than two.

We'll get to what those do later, but for now, find the spellgem crafting books that you should have already picked up in your inventory (if you haven't picked them up keep searching your settlement till you find them). They look like a small rectangle with a diamond in the middle (if you don't see them in the bar on the bottom left of your screen, try opening up your inventory by pressing 'I', and see if they are there).

Once you've found them and you are standing in front of the Hearth Guardian Stone, right click on the spellbook. This will open up a display on which you can choose what new spell you want to learn the recipe for. Keep in mind you aren't making the spell at this point -- we'll do that next.

The list of available spells you can take here depends on which hearth guardian stone you talk to (there's more than one in the world, but only one in your starting settlement), so they won't always be the same. To start, you should take some sort of ranged spell. Examples include: Fireball (my personal favorite), Forest Rage, and Energy Pulse. After this, since you have four books, go ahead and learn three more spells. Don't worry, you'll find more books later, but having more spells makes it easier to do... anything.

You may have noticed that as you were doing this, you gained EXP. There are many things you can do in this world to gain EXP for your civilization. Learning new spells is one. Killing one of the many bosses you will encounter in your travels is another. As you continue to gain EXP, your civilization will level up, making you more powerful and able to face the monsters in higher-level regions. There you will in turn find better gems, which will allow you to craft better/stronger spells.

Now we actually get to make some spells! And isn't that what we're all here for? Well, ok, maybe not all of us... To make a spell, stand in front of the Spellgem Crafting Workbench, as shown above. Pressing confirm will open up a new window. Each new spell consists of a spellgem and possibly 1-2 commodities.

As you hover over a gem, the window will show you what spell that gem alone will make. Click on the sapphire. You will see that this can make the Ice Cross spell. If you add a walnut, it will make the Tidal Pulse spell instead; or adding granite will make the Douse Monster Nest spell. For starters, don't add any commodities, and just click “Done” to make the Ice Cross spell. This is a good spell to have for damaging enemies close up.

Now go ahead and make as many spells as you can at this point. While you do have a limited number of gems, you will be collecting many more as the game progresses. One other spell that is crucial is called Ride the Lightning: this one allows you to double jump to reach higher locations, get away from enemies, or escape from caves.

Ok, once you have your spells made, you're almost ready to go out and start making the world a better place. Literally. The last thing you need to do is to make a few Spell Scrolls. The Scrollmaker's Workbench is usually right next to the Spellgem Crafting one, and works the same way. The main difference being that this time, instead of raw gems, you're using raw gem dust. I'd recommend making at least a few Heal scrolls, using jade dust. Make any other scrolls you feel you might need or want, as gem dust is usually plentiful enough. Consider the Emit Light scrolls, as these help you see in otherwise dark caves and buildings.

The last workbench (that's right, the last one, we're almost done here) you should know about is the Outfitter's workbench. This one works the same as the other two, but is useful for making physical objects, like platforms (which you can use to get out of holes) and protective suits. It's not required to visit this bench before leaving, but you should at least check out what's there. More workbenches will appear as you level your civilization.

One last thing to do before we leave: see the circles in the lower left of the screen? That is called your ability bar. Whatever spell or item is equipped in the first circle can be activated by pressing either the left mouse button or by pressing the number 1. The second circle is activated by the right mouse button or by pressing the number 2, and so on.

You will want to put your spells and scrolls in the slots that you'll find easy to use. You can do this by dragging them where you want them.

Wait, what's that? You don't see all the spells you created? Hmmm, well, if you press 'I', you will see your full inventory open up and the rest of the stuff you took time creating will be there. I'd recommend putting a ranged spell like fireball in the first slot, and a melee spell like Ice Cross in the second, but, you can do whatever you want.

Got your bar set? Ok, then let's ditch this settlement!

Your first time out of the settlement

Now comes the real fun! But how do we get out of this settlement? Your minimap is on the upper-left hand part of the screen -- you can press 'M' to maximize it if you want. Your character is represented by a blinking blue dot. On your mini-map, there is a white bar that goes all the way to the top on one side of the map or the other. Head in this direction, and keep going until you leave the settlement.

Once you are out, you will see an overhead map of your world. This is where you pick which region you want to explore. Your character starts in the region of your settlement. Press confirm to enter whatever region you're standing on, and use the WASD keys to move around your map to choose the next area to explore. I'd recommend picking one that has the number 1 on it (the numbers represent the level of the region, and the level of the enemies that are in it). This will probably be an ice-age region. As you progress further away from your initial settlement, more region types will come available.

Once you enter a region, you are back to the side view again. You can use A and D again to move left and right, and spacebar to jump. Left clicking the mouse will fire your first action in the direction of the mouse pointer if it is an aimed spell, or simply around you if it is a melee spell.

Ok, so now what do you do? I'd recommend exploring any buildings you see. Inside the buildings, you will find things like consciousness shards (which allow you to do things in the strategic part of the game later), health and mana potions, and even gem dust. In regions such as abandoned towns, you should search houses for studies and libraries as well. These are the best places to find more books.

After you've collected a bunch of health and mana potions, you may want to consider taking on your first boss. On the map above, you can see a number of rare commodity towers (all the triangular memory crystals, in this case).

These towers that have several bosses in them, and at the top of the tower is the rare commodity that you saw on the world map. You will get EXP for killing each boss, and further EXP for bringing the crystal back to the Memory Archive in your settlement. At higher levels, the towers also can contain elusive crafting materials like sunstone or moonstone.

Eventually, after your civilization gains a few levels. you will have to scout new regions to see what is in them (any regions above level 3 won't show you their icons automatically). To scout regions you must first expose them on the world map by moving around it. After that, go into a settlement and speak to the Hearth Guardian Stone, and you will then be able to assign the NPCs living in your settlement to go explore for you.

Once a region is scouted, you will be able to see if there are any resource stashes in it that will aid your settlements, or things like evil outposts and overlord lairs, which contain the big bosses for this part of the world.

One final thing: remember those warp scrolls we talked about? Well, any time you are in the side view of the game, simply open your dungeon/chunk maps by pressing either comma or period. Once these are open, you can click on any part of the map you have already been to and you will automatically warp to that area. So, for example, if you are deep into a large building, using these will allow you to leave the building without having to back track through every room.

That should be enough to get you going. I don't want to give you everything, since this is a game about exploration, after all. Happy adventuring!

AVWW Update: Windstorms, Fast-Travel, Vengeful Ghosts, Strategic Overlay, Citybuilding, Character Selection/Stats, Caving, Boss Types

2011-09-12T15:06:00.003-04:00

It's been a couple of weeks since our last update, but we've been hard at work! No video this time, but I wanted to tell you about a few things that are new or altered in the game, since we're getting close to public beta. We're hoping to hit that stage in about another week and a half if the final preparations continue to go well (as they have been so far).

New Windstorm And World Map Exploration Mechanics
In past videos and blog posts, we've shown and talked about the windstorm mechanics of the game, which I won't re-explain here -- because those have been completely tossed out and replaced with something more fun. The old mechanics, which basically had kind of a "musical chairs" general design to them, were one of those things that sounded good on paper but felt awkward in practice.

The new windstorm mechanics are simpler: there is no windstorm counter, and you never get "lost in a windstorm." You can wander freely on the world map, except into the ocean, the lava flats, or the deep, without fear of getting sucked into a region against your will.

THAT said, you also can't wander infinitely in the world anymore, either; the only world map tiles that will appear are those that are no higher than five levels above your civilization level. This gives a more focused feel to the early game in particular, and every time you level up your civilization the world expands! This has been a really popular change with our internal alpha testers.

So what happened to the windstorms? Regions that are too far from a wind shelter (which are now more sparsely seeded) show up with a little asterisk behind their region number. If you go into one of these regions, then you'll see that you're in a windstorm/snowstorm/sandstorm/firestorm/etc, and all the monsters are buffed up to 150% of their normal magical and physical attack powers. This makes wind shelters still important, because it makes for easier adventuring in regions that are under their protection.

I should also add that now there are roads on the world map, which get automatically formed between wind shelters that you construct, and settlements that you've been to. All the tiles that are crossed by these roads also are protected from windstorms; later there will also be other NPC-related macro-game benefits to having these road networks, but that's not in place yet.

Fast Travel: Warp Scrolls
This is not something we ever showed before, but on the forums and in one vide we did talk about our plans: essentially, we were going to have a sort of portal system that would get new nodes each time you killed a boss. There were a lot of minor problems with this approach, though, mostly in that there were still plenty of inconveniences for the player, and that it felt like an immersion-damaging case of "the game developer is helping me out through arbitrary tunnels leading exactly where I want to go."

In other words, it felt like being handed something, rather than like winning something for yourself, and it still made for some annoying backtracking through areas you had already been; just less of it. I wanted to get the annoying backtracking down to as close to zero as I could possibly manage, and to have the players feel like they weren't being handed something through the fourth wall (narratively speaking).

The solution turned out to be remarkably simple, thanks to the dungeon and region maps that we already had in the game (which you can see in the last video we did, although the graphics are a lot more polished on it now and there's added information in the nodes and their tooltips, such as rooms that are destroyed, areas that have "side links," or areas that you've not visited yet). The solution was just to give players "warp scrolls" that they can craft and use to get back to any dungeon node anywhere in the region they are currently located -- if they've already been to that dungeon node.

This is something that a lot of games wouldn't do, I suspect because they want you to actually spend more time traveling since the world is ultimately only so big. AVWW's world is literally infinite, so in our case there's actually a big incentive for you never to visit the same place twice unless that place is a settlement or a challenge that you're completing a small bit at a time (or failing at multiple times, as the case may be).

My big fear was that this warp scroll mechanic would make the world feel artificially smaller, since every time you want to get back to anywhere in the world you've already been, you just walk to that region on the world map, enter the region, pull up your region map, click the dungeon you were in, and then click the specific area of the dungeon you want to go to. And presto -- you're there.

I worried that would make things seem smaller, but in practice I don't think it does, because to get to some place in the first place, you have to put in the time to travel there on foot. It's only once you've been there at least once that you can warp back there anytime you have need to.

Next, of course, was the challenge that we didn't want players to go harvesting purple dispersia dust all the time just so that they could fast-travel around. Purple dispersia is our entropy-themed gem for the game, and one unit of dispersia dust can be used to craft a number of warp scrolls (I think four). Having to spend your dispersia dust would be a major ongoing chore that I wasn't keen to inflict on players.

What we decided to do was to make it so that the any of the guardian stones in the game (of which there is one green "hearth guardian stone" in every settlement, for instance) will automatically refresh your inventory back to two warp scroll if you presently have fewer than two. This makes it so that you can't spam the warp scrolls, and if you want to do a multi-jump expedition (for some reason I can't fathom) you need to use some purple dust to craft more than the two base warp scrolls.

So the flexibility is still there, but most expeditions consist of visiting a settlement, crafting some stuff, taking some other macrogame-related actions (that I'll talk about below), letting the hearth guardian heal your mp and hp back to full for free, letting it refresh you to two warp scrolls, and heading back out again. Quickly walk to the world map tile of the region you wan to visit, use a warp scroll to go where you want in the region, and then use the second warp scroll to get back to the area of the region right by the world map when you're ready.

All in all this is really different as a mechanic than anything we've encountered in other games, but it fits really well with the infinite nature of our world, so that's nice.

Permadeath
Permadeath is something we've been talking about for a long time, since the game has been talked about at all in fact, and it's still very much in force. However, the way in which we're going about it has recently changed.

Previously, when you died that meant that you dropped all your inventory where your character fell, and to get that stuff back you'd have to do a corpse run. In the meantime, of course, you'd have to craft your own lesser things in order to get back there. And, just as annoying as having to craft a bunch of stuff that I've already crafted before and which in fact is worse than what I was just using in the field, was the fact that I'd have to rearrange my inventory constantly to get it back in my preferred arrangement.

For me, that tends to be a long-ranged spell on my left mouse button, a melee-range spell on my right mouse button, wood platforms on my middle mouse button, some other special function (varying by context) on my fourth mouse button, and then ride the lighting (double jump) on my fifth mouse button (I use a Razer DeathAdder). Then elsewhere on my main ability bar I'd have health/magic restoration potions or scrolls, which I can easily activate by right-clicking them in the main interface, or pressing the corresponding number key to use them.

Anyway, in practice what this was meaning was that every time I would die -- which can happen as often as every few minutes, in this game, if you play up in region levels compared to your civilization level -- I would be stuck spending 2-3 minutes crafting some repetitive scrolls and spells, and rearranging my inventory.

And with the addition of the warp-scrolls fast-travel mechanic, suddenly corpse runs fell into only two camps: trivial or impossible. Either you would die, every time, trying to get your stuff back; or it would be simple to pop in, grab the stuff, and jet out. There was rarely a middle ground.

Our goal with the permadeath mechanic, unlike in roguelike games, has never been to punish the player or end the game. Rather, what we're trying to do is craft a large and meaningful world where actions matter -- and what action is more narratively meaningful than someone dying? That person is then gone forever, and people may have emotional reactions to this, etc. It's one of the few truly one-way doors of the human experience.

Nowhere in that goal is there something that says we want to inconvenience the player as part of it; and generally we find any inconvenience to the player is counter to the game design we want to have. Therefore: when you die, you now get to keep your inventory, and it stays ordered exactly as it was, etc. Thanks to warp scrolls being given out free from the hearth guardian stones (which you respawn right next to in the last settlement you visited), there's not even a "time tax" when the player dies.

This, of course, would make death feel as meaningless as in a Mario game, except for...

Vengeful Ghosts
What we really wanted to do was make it feel like death actually matters. And this is a game about a broken, magical world. So we took a bit of inspiration from my old "Alden Ridge" game design, which featured zombies heavily, and decided to make death matter in a very literal way: any human character (player character or NPC) who dies now immediately turns into a vengeful ghost version of themselves. Neutral skelebots, since they are robots, do not do turn into ghosts.

The ghosts themselves are freaky, purple-glowing, floating apparitions which slowly move towards you, and kill equal-level characters in a single hit. They remain behind in the area you died in, so this actually adds back some measure of that "do I continue onward or do I head back for safety for now" tension that I so admired in Demon's Souls.

Particularly with bosses. If you are fighting a boss and die, then not only do you have to once again face the boss that killed you, you also now have to face an evil ghost version of the character the boss killed. Die three times with the boss, without killing any of those ghosts, and suddenly it's three ghosts and the boss you have to face. Yikes!

Of course, given that this is an infinite world, there are always other bosses and other goals you can pursue. But this is now a choice that you face. Do you go somewhere else in the world for a while, accomplish some other goals, level up in the process, and then come back to tackle the thing that killed you the last time? Or do you go directly back and try your hand again against the boss AND the ghost, knowing that you might just succeed in making it a boss and TWO ghosts when you ultimately do come back.

These sorts of tough choices are something that's interesting to me as a player and as a game developer, and I like that vengeful ghosts add this. However, that's not all they add, as I'll talk about further down.

Oh, and one last note: if you or another character dies in an area under the influence of an Illari (read: settlements, wind shelter sites, etc), that dead character will go peacefully away instead of turning into a vengeful ghost. Thus the prevalence of "sweeps" whenever one character dies in a settlement is negated.

Strategic Overlay
This is something that Keith and I have been talking about internally since the start of the game, and which Keith has been working on now for several months, but we've never talked about it publicly. Basically, while the core of this game is definitely always going to be a Metroidvania-style action-adventure game, we also wanted to pull in some of our existing experience with strategy games.

Specifically, in this case, turn-based 4X games. Right now, as a standalone strategy game, the strategic overlay of AVWW would be trivially simple and not that satisfying. However, as a subsystem of a larger adventure game, this adds some elements that have never been seen before elsewhere.

The strategic overlay is basically a special view of the world map that you can get via talking to the green hearth guardian stone in any settlement. This view shows the status of all the NPCs in that settlement, and lets you give them orders that they will carry out for you on the world map. You can pan around the world map like in any strategy game, and it even has a resource bar at the top showing your available quantities of resources such as wood, stone, and "consciousness shards."

Consciousness shards are found all throughout the adventure mode of the game, and every player gets a small windfall of 100 such shards every time your civilization level increases. Consciousness shards are of mysterious value to the Illari, and basically are pieces of people that didn't survive the shattering and reforming of the world. These shards are your main currency in the macro-game of AVWW, which consists of the strategic overlay and the citybuilding segments at the moment.

I mentioned that the strategic overlay is a turn-based game. This fits particularly well with the Metroidvania-style action-adventure mode, because you can go out adventuring for as long as you want without fear of the strategic aspects getting away from you. The top-down strategic map is exactly where you left it when you come back, with the exception of anything that you explicitly changed while you were out adventuring in the side-view. It's all one world, after all, even though you're able to interact with it in the manner of several genres at once.

The Passage Of Time, Day/Night Cycle
In the past I said there would never be a day/night cycle, but we actually decided to implement one after all. Part of that was due to our inclusion of Unisky and its amazing procedural clouds, but we also implemented a down-level "static skies" option for graphics cards that are too old to run Unisky (which requires shader model 3.0, unlike the rest of the game). And of course, the day/night cycle then had to be functional in both sky models.

Anyway, the day/night cycle doesn't actually affect the literal passage of time in the broader sense. Much like in The Ocarina of Time, the day/night cycle affects various aspects of minute-to-minute adventuring, but it doesn't affect the overall larger story (unlike, say, Majora's Mask).

"Ending a turn" in the macro-game of AVWW is more like actually progressing the story in a typical adventure game. Enemy units move around on the world map, new ones may appear, all your NPCs get refreshed and can take more strategic-level actions again, etc. And, nominally, a week passes in actual gametime. The actual turns in the macrogame are the only real concept of the passage of time that are held in this game, and the day/night cycle is completely unrelated to this. Like in a lot of games.

Another Way That Death Matters
Now that I've explained how the concept of time works in the game, this means I can explain another effect that death has: it wears on the minds of NPCs. If you go around murdering NPCs, or you yourself play character after character who dies, NPC morale/happiness becomes temporarily depressed with each death, and thus productivity and available options for that NPC also go down.

That said, as in real life, the effect isn't permanent: each death only depresses the NPCs for ten turns. It's a fairly simple mechanic, but effective, and the entire NPC model is something we look forward to experimenting with and expanding upon through beta and beyond. There's a lot of interesting directions we could take this, and right now we're just taking the first steps along those paths.

NPC Strategic Actions: Exploration, Construction, and Invitations
I'm sure that it has not escaped your notice that I never said exactly what sort of actions the NPCs could take in the strategic map part of the game. Right now it's limited to three things, but throughout beta and beyond we're going to be building this up more.

First of all is exploration: you can click on a tile on the map in the strategic overlay to reveal extra info about it and the surrounding types. Some NPCs are better at exploring thanks to their innate qualities, and explore further with each click. When a region tile is explored, any sort of special locations or resources become revealed.

You can totally ignore the strategic map and find this stuff manually on foot if you prefer, but that's really wasteful of your time. As with AI War's galaxies, the worlds in AVWW are filled with both interesting and uninteresting places to go. NPCs in AVWW, like the scouts in AI War, let you find out about places without actually going there, decide what you find is interesting, and then go there. That way you get both the massive world and imperative to explore, but without the boring task of wandering around aimlessly through endless areas that don't match what you're looking for.

Things you can find via NPC exploration at the moment: resource deposits that your NPCs can mine in citybuilding mode; evil overlord lairs housing the evil overlord oppressing the area; evil outposts housing lieutenant bosses that support the evil overlord; and rare commodity towers that are special vertical dungeons filled with minibosses with a special crafting component at the end. This is also how you now find the memory crystals mentioned in past blogs and videos -- through the rare commodity towers. Once again, we expect to build in more things to find via NPC exploration over time, but this is off to a pretty cool start if I do say so.

Secondly is exploration: when you are visiting a region that has a potential wind shelter site in it, you can travel across that region to the site and manually build the wind shelter yourself. If that's what you want to do, then more power to you. However, if you've discovered the potential wind shelter site on the world map, you can actually order your NPCs in the strategic overlay to build the wind shelter for you (and the attendant road network extensions are automatic).

Thirdly, and finally for the time being, is invitations: normally in a settlement, there are only so many NPCs present. Three to five on average, I'd say. You can only do so much with that number of NPCs. However, as you play through adventure mode, you will locate individuals or small groups of NPCs living under the sheltering influence of various Illari. You can find them underground, at potential wind shelter sites, and elsewhere. When you encounter these NPCs in adventure mode, you can't directly invite them anywhere. But it does mark their location in the strategic map. Next time you are in a settlement, you can use the strategic overlay to invite those found NPCs to your settlement.

Citybuilding
I mentioned earlier that character deaths cause NPCs to lose productivity for ten turns. But if you look at the list of things NPCs can do in the strategic overlay, none of those are affected, or make sense to be affected. There's another top-down mode, also accessed via settlements, which takes the form of a simple citybuilder.

In this mode, you can plan the layout of a top-down section of the settlement which you cannot directly walk to in adventure mode. You can place things like warehouses, farms of different sorts, houses, mining and refining buildings, wells, and so on. Most of those have functions that are fairly obvious in a broad sense, I expect. Note that the interface shown to the right is still very WIP.

A lot of the details of the citybuilding part of the game I don't want to get into yet because Keith is still working on implementing it and we're still working on playtesting and refining it in general. He'd kill me if I said anything that could be construed as a promise of a specific implementation of such a feature being implemented, as then that would severely hamper his ability to change said features if it later turned out to be a good idea to do so (as has happened numerous times as we pursue our immutable design goals, as you can see above with permadeath, windstorms, etc).

But the general idea here is that it works like a fairly simple citybuilder, with settlement residents needing a place to live and work, and with them able to produce raw materials or finished goods that you can then use for other purposes. You can also do things like upgrade the NPC houses, but to do so requires access to various goods, etc, etc. This is also where the graves of your past characters who have died show up. And as you want to expand your buildable area you have to get your NPCs to chop down trees, etc. All of this is also turn-based, using of course the exact same turns and NPCs from the strategic map. It's all one thing, it just depends on where you decide to use your NPCs.

Strategic Units (Including the last bit about Vengeful Ghosts)
Whew. Now that I've explained all the above about broadly what the strategic overlay and the citybuilder aspects even are, I can tell you about strategic units. Right now these are always enemy units of either of two sorts: bandits or vengeful ghosts.

Bandits appear every so often and threaten a settlement of yours; you can opt to either pay them off (they are demanding resources of specific kinds), or you can send out the lone adventurer hero-person to do them in directly (that would be you, going out to where you see the bandits on the world map and then fighting them in adventure mode). Later we expect to have a third option that is more in keeping with the strategy/4X aspects of the game, but since those are still heavily in development I don't want to talk specifics yet. We expect to start playtesting those mechanics sometime during beta.

So that's the bandits: they appear every so often, ask for resources, and advance on your settlements every turn if you don't kill them or pay them off. And then next time you visit the settlement in question in adventure mode, the bandits will be there and will do their best to kill off your NPCs, who fight back, but weakly. Expect a massacre; so unless you want to see a massacre (which is kind of fun, actually), don't let the bandits actually reach your settlements. At the moment you have about three turns of warning before they would get there, but we're thinking of extending that pending some more playtesting.

But what about vengeful ghosts? Normally those just haunt the area you died in, right? Well, this is true... until you have four ghosts haunting the world. Once there are four ghosts, they form a strategic unit of their own wherever the last ghost was located. And then, every turn, they advance on your settlements, too. And boy is it really a massacre if they get to your NPCs. The good news is, when they are advancing on you they are generally in a less dangerous locale than wherever you died in the first place. So you can fight the four ghosts without having to worry about, say, a boss or lava or whatever.

Did I mention that these ghosts retain the name and appearance of the characters that died? It's pretty neat. We're also in the process of experimenting with some other ideas for them, such as having them leave trails of temporary miasma as they move, etc. We're still experimenting with what feels best.

Procedural AND Hand-Crafted Interior Rooms
Moving in a completely other direction from all the macro-game stuff we've been talking about: let's talk about interiors.

The rooms that we've been showing off so far were all hand-crafted using a map editor (which will be publicly available), and then are procedurally filled with things like doors, monsters, objects, etc. This is still in place, and I think it works out really well.

However, we now ALSO have some purely procedurally-based room types, mainly for evil outposts and overlord towers and pyramids and things of that nature. These rooms are actually whole series' of little interconnected rooms with maze-like corridors. They show up as a single node on the dungeon map, but they are much larger than normal interior rooms, and much more twisty.

They add a fun bit of variety, I think, and I look forward to pushing the pure-procedural rooms even further in the future. These basically incorporate a lot of what I had originally done, then discarded, then publicly released for the top-down view, but it's much more straightforward working with the side view.

Interior Locked Doors ... But No Furniture Yet
We've been working heavily on polish, the first bits of content development, the macro-game stuff, and so on. That's been quite a process in and of itself, and so something that is mostly aesthetic, like interior furnure, hasn't made it in yet. This makes a kitchen and a bedroom and a bathroom look disappointingly same-y at the moment, but it won't always be that way.

We just didn't feel it was worth pushing beta back any for, when it's mostly an aesthetic thing and can be slotted in later. The interiors do look quite cool anyway, as you've seen in the past videos, but they all look more like barren dungeons rather than like houses or office buildings just yet. All good things in time!

On the other hand, since locked doors add such an interesting actual gameplay twist to the game, those are already in place. Keys are problematic in such a massive procedural world, especially in multiplayer. So we did it with switches, instead. You go into a special switch room, fight past the obstacles there, and... um... pull the lever. Then the door in another part of the dungeon opens. And sometimes something else happens. Watch out for that.

Locked doors and switch rooms are right now confined to evil outposts and evil overlord keeps, so it will be a little while before you are likely to encounter those on your first playthrough.

Character Stats
One of the chief challenges of making any game is managing complexity. Where do you want the game to be complex -- where is complexity fun -- versus where does complexity need to be culled.

In the case of our core character stats -- health, magic points, magic attack, magic defense, physical defense, and magic casting speed -- we decided that was too many stats to be fun to manage in an action game. Therefore, magic defense and physical defense are now gone, and the only relevant defensive variable is health.

That is not to say that there won't be ways to augment your defensive characteristics throughout the game -- far from it. But those augmentations will be largely in the form of spells or equipment that you use on yourself to temporarily or permanently buff yourself. In other words, those are player choices that get made, further into the game when it is more interesting, versus it being an extra pile of stats that players have to wade through every time they choose a new character (at the start of the game or otherwise).

Character Selection
In the past, we talked about how when you died, you'd be able to take on any NPC you'd met, or choose a "random wanderer." In practice, we never got around to implementing the former because we couldn't think of a way to do it that would present as clean an interface as just choosing a wanderer, AND which wouldn't lead to massive depopulation of your settlements. If every time a player dies, some settlement loses an NPC, that's a big penalty!

So we're just sticking with random wanderers -- when you die, you get to choose a new character that previously did not exist in any settlement or any survivor camp. This character is new to the world, and if they die then you pick another character that is new to the world. This keeps things simpler and freer-feeling -- the vengeful ghosts are disincentive enough not to die!

What if you want to take over an existing NPC in your settlements? After all, the ability to do that is pretty neat. Well, we plan to implement that in a different way. It's not in yet, and probably won't be in for the very first beta, but we're going to implement essentially a "body swap" spell scroll. That spell scroll will require a semi-rare commodity to craft, so you won't be using it all the time, but you'll be able to swap your "wandering" character for another NPC if that's what you want to do. Thus your net population of your settlements still isn't negatively affected, but you can take over NPCs if you want.

Cave Depth And Appearance
Another something that is new is how the caves work. You know those little wooden platforms that are so plentiful, almost like ladders, throughout the surface tunnels and the higher-level caves?

Well, every time you go down a dungeon (each cave system is a dungeon, and you can often go 8ish dungeons down in most regions, or infinite dungeons down in a few regions), the prevalence of those wooden platforms goes down. How much varies by the region, but it's usually about 10% per dungeon.

Thus, in most cases, after about 10 dungeons down there are no longer any platforms at all. And when that happens, the visual look of the dungeons turns very molten and lava-like. You won't need to wear a heatsuit like in the lava flats -- probably -- at least you don't at the moment -- but it's a lot more hostile of an environment, and there's lava instead of water, etc.

Also as you go into the undergrounds, the "chunk level" (kind of like region level) goes up by one each time. So if the region level is 5, and you go into the first cave system, you're fighting level 6 monsters. Go another dungeon down, and it's level 7 monsters. Etc. Thus even older regions that you've been exploring for a long time can still have interesting and level-appropriate underground dungeons that you can get to.

Lastly for now, cave appearance actually varies by region type now. So if you're exploring in the ice age, the underground is icy until you get to the molten parts, which are further below the surface. If you're exploring underground in the lava flats, it's molten all the way down. If you're in the ocean or ocean shallows, and somehow are surviving the toxic water there, then the underground caverns you can find there are all also submerged in toxic water.

Explicit Difficulty Levels

Having dynamic difficulty levels is something that has always been a goal of mine for this project, and to some extent we have achieved that. You can play up or down in region levels, and that affects how hard the action-adventure parts of the game are. However, some alpha testers were finding even the same-level regions to be too challenging right from the start, which is harder to overcome.

To make matters worse, there's really more to the game than just the action-adventure difficulties, anyhow. What happens if the vengeful ghosts form a party and attack your base settlement? This happened to Keith's wife, and they wiped her whole town and made her think she was going to have to start a whole new world. This was an understandable response, though she really could have just walked to another settlement and started over there, but new players aren't going to have any way of knowing that if they haven't read much about the game and haven't explored far enough to find more settlements yet (there usually tend to be three withing walking distance right at the start of the game, but it varies randomly).

These are problems that are somewhat impossible for us to solve if we don't have any indication from players what sort of experience they are looking for. Are you looking for a hardcore strategic element, or something casual that you can just flit through to get your exploring done? Do you want to have enemies kill you in two blows, since they barely ever land a hit on you, or does that sound insanely masochistic? Even just among our in-house alpha testers, the answer varies wildly: I fall into the I-want-two-hits-to-kill-me camp, for the most part, but I would never intentionally inflict that on the wider player population.

So what's the solution? Using both dynamic and explicit difficulty levels. All the work that has already gone into dynamic difficulty-setting based on relative region level is still valid, and in fact will be particularly so for multiplayer, when players really do need to be able to tune their own experiences compared to their compatriots. But, on its own, it just isn't enough.

Therefore, when you start a new world it will now first ask you for a Strategic Difficulty and an Action-Adventure Difficulty. If you aren't sure what you want, you can take your best guess and then change it at any time while you're playing. You'll never have to start a new world just because your feelings on the desired difficulty level have changed. But splitting out this difficulty lets people have a difficult strategic experience and an easy action-adventure experience, or vice-versa, or anything in between.

You Will Actually Be Able To Pause This Game
Originally we were not going to have a pause function because of the multiplayer mechanics. However, this is something that we've known was non-ideal, and we just didn't have a better solution... until now.

Because of the way in which multiplayer games are segmented, if you are in one part of the world and I am in another, then the server is keeping track of both of us but our computers don't have info on each other. If we're playing in the same area, then we both have the info on that area and each other, as does the server.

Why does that matter for pausing? Well, it means that we actually can pause based on the "chunk" (local area -- specific node on the dungeon maps). Rather than having pause be a global state, the action of a specific chunk can be paused when one the players in that chunk wants to, and then it only impacts the players in that chunk. Thus if the phone rings, or the kids come in, or whatever, you don't wind up getting killed and at the same time you don't wind up halting an entire server full of people from doing anything.

Presumably anyone you are adventuring with that closely is someone you want to keep up with anyway, so if you pause they want to wait for you. If you're someplace commonly used by everyone, like a settlement, there's no need to pause anyhow, since there's nothing dangerous there.

This might seem like one of those "duh" features, and in fact looking at the solution it seems patently obvious. But trying to balance something as simple as pausing the game for solo play as well as various multiplayer scenarios is surprisingly challenging. Ideally we wanted all the various modes to work identically, so that people who play both solo and multiplayer don't have to mentally adjust or learn new mechanics each time they switch. And this does it!

Boss Types: Micro, Mini, Lieutenant, Overlord
There really is a ton of new stuff in the game since the last blog post I made, and there's no way I can cover it all, so this is the last thing I'll talk about. There are basically now four kinds of bosses in the game:

Microbosses are the smallest, and are really just elite regular monsters. They have a name as well as unique and buffed stats, and basically this is what the strategic bandits are: a collection of these. In the past I've referred to these as "named monsters," but microboss is a lot clearer as to their function.

Minibosses are the most common kind of boss in the game, for sure. They are different in appearance and function from any of the regular monsters in the game, although often they are thematically related. For instance, there are regular amoebas that you fight in the game, and then a Giant Amoeba miniboss. Others won't have a regular-monster counterpart.

Lieutenants are special bosses that aid the overlord. Each lieutenant has their own evil outpost, which you can invade and destroy if you wish. If you don't choose to do this, then when you attack the evil overlord in their lair, all the nearby lieutenants will come to join them. Yikes!

A lieutenant is basically an elite miniboss, in function: they are exactly like other minibosses, but with better stats and the added behavior noted above. NPCs complain about nearby lieutenants that are bothering the settlement if the overlord isn't bothering them more (or if there is no overlord at the moment).

Overlords obviously have the toughest stats of all of bosses of an equal level. These bosses will ultimately be larger and more complex than the minibosses (which are themselves quite large many times), and nothing other than overlords will use the overlord entity types.

At present, since we've only had so much time for content development yet, overlords actually are just lieutenants with even more stat buffs. That won't last more than another couple of weeks, before we get at least the first overlord entity type in place. It just hasn't been an early priority since it's so long before the players actually even meet their first overlord.

Public Beta's Getting Near!
Coming up in the next week(ish) we will also have our beta trailer, as well as a completely revamped set of AVWW web pages, screenshots, etc. It's been a long road for this game already, but we're finally hitting the point where it's just about ready for early public consumption.

There's still a lot we have to do, though, to hit our 1.0 goal. Most likely we won't hit the point of 1.0 until early 2012, because we want to pack a ton of content into the game and so far the main focus has been on worldbuilding, engine development, and all the various game systems.

There's plenty to do already, where you could easily get a dozen or more hours out of this game, but the true variety is something we're going to be adding through our daily-or-nearly-so beta patches once we hit public beta. We're really excited to hit that point, but we really want to be clear to players that will be considering early beta that we have a little bit of everything at this stage, but not a lot of any one part yet. Our work between first beta and 1.0 is to make it so that there's a lot of everything!

One thing that I do want to mention, though, is that initially the beta won't include any multiplayer component. We got a rough version of that working early in the project, but it's been semi-neglected as the game has grown up since we've been trying to focus on the game itself. It's definitely not ready for showtime, and we don't feel like we can hit both an awesome single-player and multiplayer experience right from day 1 beta without delaying beta for a few months. Therefore, multiplayer is just what's being delayed a few months, and we're going ahead with the beta in the meantime. This doesn't mean our commitment to the multiplayer component is slipping at all, but this is the way in which we feel we'll be able to deliver the strongest experience to everyone -- single and multi player -- in the most reasonable amount of time.

If the responses of our internal alpha testers are any indication, though, things are definitely looking up already for the game. Stay tuned!

A Valley Without Wind #14 - Beta Gameplay Footage Part Two (Crafting!)

2011-08-19T19:41:00.002-04:00

This time the video is all narration, and covers just about everything I would have said in a blog post after this past week. So very short post this time, and here's the video:

Video Notes
Gameplay footage after about 30 weeks of development. No music this time, sorry, as the voiceover runs throughout and is already condensing a lot of info into these twelve minutes. The volume on the voiceover is better this time; thanks for mentioning it last time!

The first half of this video runs through some tech unlocks, three crafting interfaces, and the inventory. We know this is stuff people have been wanting to see in action for ages, so we're really excited to finally be able to share it.

The second half of this video shows a bit of the new worldbuilding stuff from the last week. Specifically, it shows indoor lighting, a very few of the new interior room shapes, as well as showing what happens when you die. I venture foolishly into a region 6 levels higher than myself, and get killed in one hit when a boss reaches me.

Side note: the very platformy nature of the wind shelter area where I find the lone NPC and put up the wind shelter is somewhat temporary. The general structure is right, as it makes for efficient organization for settlements compared to what was shown in the first video, but the visuals need some work to make them more cohesive.

Also shown in this video are a number of new or revised spells. The energy lance visual effeect I could never get looking the way that I wanted because something that moves that fast doesn't do well with a purely particle-based system. So now we have the energy pulse instead; replacing the visuals but keeping the function.

The new circle of fire and ice cross are the first of new directional kinds of spells, and then the launch rock spell is the first of a new trajectory-based spell system. Also shown is the heat suit, briefly; although since it was used in an ice age region it was a liability rather than a help.

Until Next Time!
More details and another video coming sometime in the next few weeks. But definitely not weekly in general, because it cuts into actual development time too much. But this was definitely a video that has been a long time coming, so we're really excited to share this one in particular. Enjoy!

A Valley Without Wind #13 - Beta Gameplay Footage Part One (Video)

2011-08-13T10:42:00.000-04:00

It's been just about two months since we last did a video of AVWW, and we've been very busy! This is the first true "gameplay video" that we've ever done, where it's all one long un-cut stretch of in-game footage rather than a trailer with chopped-up clips.

This is also the first time we've ever included actual game sound effects in one of the videos, so you can hear all the work Pablo's been doing on that front. There's still dozens more sound effects he's working on prior to beta, but it's really sounding great already.

This video really speaks for itself a lot more than any that we've done before, so this accompanying blog post is going to be comparably brief. Or rather, a lot of my commentary is embedded in the video as voice-over, this time. And a lot of the rest of it has been on video-less blog posts stretched over the last few weeks (with more to come). Keith does have an accompanying blog post that he's going to make related to this video, I believe, but I don't think that will be until next week.

So, here's the video in question, anyhow:

There are a couple of things I'd like to note in particular that the video itself doesn't yet note:

Bosses
We do have bosses in the game, and you can actually see me kill a couple of them. Look for the skelebots that I have to fire lots of fireballs into, and which have little names above themselves (or really, a serial number in the case of skelebots) instead of just saying "Skelebot" above their health bar popup.

That said, I don't want to give the impression that the bosses in this game will just be regular monsters with buffed stats. We will be doing that for what I guess I would call "micro bosses," so in that sense the video is a good representation of how those will work.

Micro Bosses
These micro bosses have buffed stats and are actually more unique in their stats in general compared to their non-boss kin. They may have custom behaviors at some point, but probably not before beta if at all. So in terms of bosses, these are really kind of underwhelming, right? They're what I'd been referring to as "named monsters," and they are minor and common.

Why have micro bosses? Well, bosses of some flavor need to be a fairly common occurrence in A Valley Without Wind for two reasons:

1. When you defeat a boss, micro or otherwise, a teleport portal spawns in their chunk that lets you fast-travel to and from any other portals in that region, including one that then appears at the region entrance. As you will see later in the video, this is hugely important to general game flow.

2. Normal smaller monsters (aka, anything that isn't a boss) don't give you experience points when you fight them. The only way to get EXP, therefore, is by either helping NPCs out (the whole hopes/needs thing), doing other civilization-improving tasks (wind shelters, etc), following other side quests (like the memory crystals), or by killing bosses of whatever stripe.

Anyhow, micro-bosses use the same general underlying framework that the traditional mini-bosses and full bosses will also use. The larger flavors of boss will actually be larger, of course, and will also not be something you can mistake for a regular monster that is unusually tough. We're really excited about what we have planned for them, and Phil is working on art for the first full boss at the moment.

The wind shelter you see in the video (as well as all the new icons on the world map) are Phil's handiwork as well, by the way. As are the crafting workbenches, which we showed in past screenshots.

Why No EXP From Small Monsters?
I think I wrote about this in a past blog post months ago, but this bears repeating.

Exploration and killing small monsters used to grant EXP, but we found that encouraged OCD-like behavior in terms of exploring every little nook and cranny and killing every enemy in sight. This is the exact opposite of what we want to encourage: as with AI War, what we want players to do is look at a massive world, filter out what isn't important, and then go for what is valuable.

Some of the individual buildings have upwards of 1000 rooms in them, and we don't expect anyone to go through all of that (though, technically, you can). Instead, it's all about using your maps and scouting intel (the details of which are still being worked out) to plot an efficient course through buildings that gets you what you want and then gets you back out in one piece. A little bit of that is shown in the video, and that actually applies to underground caverns, too.

The other reason that EXP isn't granted from small monsters is that it's incredibly easy to farm small monsters. So that's why monsters don't give drops, either. The things that you find in the world are a non-renewable resource. Bosses, loot pickups, all that stuff: once you find it and claim it, you can't come back later and find it there again. The world overall is infinite, of course, so it's not like you ever run out of things to find -- but you can't just stay in one region, or in low-level regions, forever.

About That Self-Chosen Difficulty
In the video, you'll notice that I start out playing in a level 1 region, while I am also level 1. When I fight those skelebots there, it's pretty much one-hit kills and pretty straightforward. They hit me as well, and I believe I had to heal once or twice, but I'm generally quite good at the game and so it was no big thing; fun, but not really a challenge.

So the first thing I did when I went to the world map, after requisitioning some health and magic potions, was to go a little further afield and go into a level 2 region. You'll notice how much more challenging that was: even the bats took multiple shots to kill. I had to heal several times, though I had an abundance of healing potions so that wasn't too bad a thing.

Why did I get so many potions before heading out, though? Well, to be honest, this was actually my "second take" of the video. The first take that I did went... poorly. I was being gutsy and went all the way up to a level 4 region in that one, while still being civ level 1 myself. I was actually able to get in and get crystals and things, but I wasn't able to get out alive; after about my fourth character had died in 15 minutes of video, I decided to scrap that and try again with a more reasonable difficulty (meaning, just shifting to playing in a lower-level region for a while).

You'll also notice that I was mostly heading east on the world map, which is sort of the wimpy direction to go in. If I was feeling masochistic, I'd have gone east, where the difficulty ramps up sharply after just a short ways.

Final Note: The Early Game Balance Is Not Yet Fully There
Just so you know. We were rushing to get it so that we could show you this video, and we haven't done as much playtesting yet with the starting experience as we'd like. Keith and I tend to start with a testing loadout of spells and abilities, and play from there when we're testing. It's very quick for us for testing, and in that sense is really useful, but it means that the start of the game has not yet been brought up to the same level of balance as later parts of the game are.

What do I mean by that, specifically? Well, I only have a couple of abilities --fireball and fire touch -- and some wooden platforms. That part is fine for just starting out, but what isn't fine is how long it was taking me to get the crafting materials and research unlocks (profession books) to get anything more. What you were seeing was more the later-game pacing, when you already have a lot of interesting abilities and tools and the focus is on using them rather than getting new ones ever two minutes. The early game in a new world needs to get you more interesting stuff, faster, and by the time we hit beta that will be balanced properly.

Worlds Are "Lazy Loaded," Which Is Awesome For You
The game balance stuff is actually going to be a huge focus for myself and Keith this next week, and when we do the next video you'll see the fruits of that work reflected in the very same world that we've started showing you in this video. As with AI War savegames, worlds in AVWW can be loaded in newer versions of the game, which makes upgrading (but not downgrading) a snap.

With AI War, of course, the entire galaxy has to be created as soon as you enter it, though -- so that means that there's only so much of newer seeding logic that can be seen in older savegames brought forward, etc. With AVWW, the world is literally infinite and so that means that there's no way to pre-generate everything.

In fact, we do precisely the opposite, and wait until the absolute last possible moment to create chunks and dungeons and regions and such. This is just good sense in general, but it also means that this game is incredibly upgrade-friendly.

The parts of the world that I specifically ventured into in this video have already been created, and they are what they are -- when we add furniture and new room shapes, etc, those rooms I already went into won't get upgraded.

However, for any unexplored room that is in a building I was already in, those will suddenly have furniture in newer versions of the gane. And for any outdoor chunks that I haven't yet been into, when I go there they will have any other new features that show up there. Any new bosses I find will start leaving fast-travel portals for me as soon as that feature exists in the game. The new minibosses and full bosses will start appearing as appropriate even in old worlds once those are coded in, as will any other new regular enemies.

And so on. This is part of the power of the world-creation engine that we've made here. This game is designed from the ground up to be continuously upgraded, while still maintaining your worlds. Making it so that you can create one world and play it forever if you want, getting any and all additions we make to the game seeded right into that world as you continue to explore. We're pretty proud of how that's working out!

Until Next Time!
More details and another video coming before too long. Stay tuned!

New Character Concept Art For AVWW, And Time Period Details

2011-08-12T22:22:00.001-04:00

The below images are not screenshots, but rather are un-processed original renders that then get scaled down to smaller size for actually being used in-game. So, hence the label "concept art."

That said, this is basically how they look except smaller when it comes to the in-game running around graphics, while the in-game portraits are heavily stylized and more painterly. It makes sense when you see it, and we'll show video and screens of that just as soon as we can get the video fully edited and then uploaded to youtube. The footage is taken, but that's only half the battle!

Let me lastly note that all of the prior character art that you've seen for the game -- Dawn, Darrell, and the Skelebots -- has been removed. Darrell and the Skelebots have all-new art as you can see below, but Dawn hasn't made it back into the game, yet. There are numerous other female characters added, though. And more to come before beta!

The Seven Time Periods With Humans
Overall in the game, there are actually 9 different time periods that we are featuring in the game. Two of those are from time periods where humanity does not exist. The other seven are where all the various NPCs are divided into, although I've done a lot more art in the ice age style since that's where you begin the game.

Through beta and after 1.0, it's highly likely that we'll also include some other minor time periods that do and don't include humans in them, but those will mostly be rarer and won't have nearly as much character art as the seven primary ones will.

All 9 Time Periods In Chronological Order
To avoid giving spoilers, mostly what I'm going to talk about here is how people are dressed in each period, and then share that period's name.

Unknown Ancient Century - The "Wild Garden" Age
This is the time period that the lava flats and ocean sections come from. This is one of the two time periods that doesn't include any humans in it, and it's so far back in Environ's planetary history that it's an unknown date. That's about all I'm willing to say about this, so far -- you'll find out the rest in-game!

4th Ancient Century - Bronze Age
This is the oldest time period with humans in it. They are dressed more plainly, often in tunics or togas or similar. Very cheap clothing by modern standards, and no armor at all.

3rd Ancient Century - Time of Magic
The clothing is a lot more mystical, very fantasy-themed, with still no armor at all. Magic, magic, magic, here.

1st Ancient Century - Medieval
The clothing is best described as "oversized fantastical armor." This is a time period where women and men alike are dressed in really bulky suits of armor. But you can still see their faces and heads.

Full armor/snowsuits/etc that includes headgear is something that you can equip separately on any character, so characters from this time period never have headgear to make the difference clear.

4th Modern Century - Pre-Industrial

The clothing from here is the most cultured out of all the various periods. Women don't wear dresses, but trend to pantsuits in a retro sort of style, and men wear suits and things like top hats, etc. It's a very... soft... society in a lot of respects. But still just as magically adept as all the other centuries.

5th Modern Century - Industrial Revolution

This makes a big stylistic jump, including the first (chronologically speaking) elements that are at all sci-fi. This is a very adventure-movie-genre sort of time period, mixed with some bits of steam punk. I really like this time period, personally.

6th Modern Century - Contemporary

This time period on Environ is the most equivalent to our modern times on Earth. However, given the hugely different society of Environ, you no longer have characters that are just dressed in our ordinary sort of fashion that you'd see on the street (as Darrell and Dawn previously were).

The new style for "modern" in Environ is basically a sort of funky sci-fi blend. With the very barest accents of sci-fi style armor in some parts, but that's mostly for fashion and not function in terms of this society. This is the last and in many respects greatest of the human ages, before the ice age that sends everyone into hiding.

9th Modern Century - Ice Age

This is where you start the game, and consequently it's where I've focused the most effort on in terms of art. For me, this time period -- character-design-wise -- is the least visually flexible, because everybody has to wear some sort of futuristic snowsuit to protect themselves from the cold. It's still possible to see a lot of personality in the various suits, but this is by far the most one-note of all the time periods when it comes to that sort of thing, simply by necessity.

30th Modern Century - After People

Robots have inherited the earth. This is the time the Neutral Skelebot character comes from, as well as all the unfriendly skelebots.

Incidentally, the Neutral skelebot is now about half a head taller than the regular skelebots, which are themselves about 9-10 feet tall. This makes it rather difficult for the skelebot to get into tight spaces inside some buildings, etc -- and forget about trying to put on armor, snowsuits, etc. Fortunately the skelebots are one of the few characters impervious to ambient heat and cold.

Last Note On Character Designs - About "Variants"
Previously, I was doing hue-shifts on the shirts or other clothing of the characters. This caused a notable quality drop in the character graphics, especially when they were rotated. And it didn't really look that different.

Therefore, I decided to take a different approach: drop the colorization, but instead do two versions of each character: their standard version and a variant. Both can be encountered in the game, and so far as you can tell in most cases they are really different characters. This tends to be color of clothing, sometimes style of clothing or accessories, often includes hairstyle details and facial features.

But in terms of the actual character assets being used to make them, it's the same base assets just with as-different-as-possible-while-still-looking-good variants applied to them. The approach is working out really well in practice, as you'll see when we do the video.

On With The Art!

Valeria - Bronze Age

Valeria 2 - Bronze Age

Lin - Medieval

Lin 2 - Medieval

Jack - Contemporary

Jack 2- Contemporary

Darrell - Ice Age

Darrell 2 - Ice Age

Dave - Ice Age

Dave 2 - Ice Age

Marie - Ice Age

Marie 2 - Ice Age

Richard - Ice Age

Richard 2 - Ice Age

Heat And Cold Matter Now
Not dressed for the ice age? Well, depending on just how badly your character is dressed, they might be dead in anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds. Or, don a snowsuit that covers your entire character head-to-toe. Specifically, this:

It comes in male and female variants, but that's the female version.

Alternatively, not prepared for the intense, searing heat of the lava flats? Unless you have robotic skin, you're going to fry just as fast as you'd freeze in the ice age. So better bring along a heatsuit, like the following:

That's the male version there, but there's also a female version. When you craft a snowsuit or a heatsuit, it's just a generic "snowsuit." But when a character puts it on, it takes on a male or female appearance depending on the gender of that character.

Incidentally, if you've transmogrified yourself into some other lifeform, such as a bat, you can't wear armor of any sort. So that's one way in which the lava flats remains the platforming paradise, because you can't just fly around in there since you need a heat suit in order to stay alive at all!

Art Credits
As with all of the "commodity art" that we use in AVWW, we've got a huge credits list of which artists did what items, etc. Since so much of the sprites you see above were pieced together (or wholesale) the work of others, in this case in particular I wanted to go ahead and share the credits even before the release of the game:

Character Elements: “Mark Hair”
Used by Character(s): Richard
Created By: SWAM, goldtassel

Character Elements: “Epsilon”
Used by Character(s): Richard
Created By: Lourdes

Character Elements: “Michael 4.2, Michael Morphs++, Michael Ethnic Morphs”
Used by Character(s): Jack, Richard, Darrell
Created By: DAZ3D

Character Elements: “Victoria 4.2, Victoria Morphs++, Victoria Ethnic Morphs”
Used by Character(s): Valeria, Lin, Marie
Created By: DAZ3D

Character Elements: “Beach Hair”
Used by Character(s): Jack
Created By: Valea

Character Elements: “Hardcore M4 (Uzilite Plus)”
Used by Character(s): Jack
Created By: Bobbie25

Character Elements: “Strike Ponytail”
Used by Character(s): Valeria
Created By: Val3Dart, Lesthat

Character Elements: “V4 Tunic”
Used by Character(s): Valeria
Created By: DAZ3D

Character Elements: “V4 Tunic”
Used by Character(s): Valeria
Created By: DAZ3D

Character Elements: “Moroccan Dreams”
Used by Character(s): Valeria
Created By: Ravenhair

Character Elements: “Lux Lucis”
Used by Character(s): Lin
Created By: ToxicAngel, Ravnheart

Character Elements: “MyLin V4”
Used by Character(s): Lin
Created By: Rebelmommy

Character Elements: “Digital Curlz Hairstyle”
Used by Character(s): Lin
Created By: Neftis3D

Character Elements: “Centurion A.D.”
Used by Character(s): Skelebots
Created By: The Antfarm

Character Elements: “Major Cache”
Used by Character(s): Darrell
Created By: Uzilite

Character Elements: “Major Upgrade 4.0”
Used by Character(s): Darrell
Created By: DzFire

Character Elements: “M4 Elite Texture: Rob”
Used by Character(s): Darrell
Created By: -Yannek-

Character Elements: “V4 Elite Texture: Marie”
Used by Character(s): Marie
Created By: Sarsa, BTLProductions, -Yannek-

Character Elements: “Sedition Soldier for V4”
Used by Character(s): Marie, Snowsuit Female
Created By: midnight_stories, mighty_mestophales

Character Elements: “Diamond Hair”
Used by Character(s): Marie
Created By: Valea

Character Elements: “Sedition Soldier for M4”
Used by Character(s): Dave, Snowsuit Male
Created By: midnight_stories, mighty_mestophales

Character Elements: “WildMane Hair”
Used by Character(s): Dave
Created By: Neftis3D

WIP Screenshots of AVWW Crafting Workbenches

2011-08-03T08:41:00.001-04:00

New WIP screenshots to share! These ones including some new art by the awesome Phil, who you might recall as the artist behind Tidalis, AI War 2.0, and The Zenith Remnant.

Phil has mostly been working on freelance work with other indies since Arcen hit financial difficulties last year when Tidalis got off to a rocky start financially (despite rave reviews). We've long since clawed our way back out of the hole we'd found ourselves in a year ago, but a renewed sense of caution (as well as experience doing all the new art for AI War 4.0 and Light of the Spire) has meant that I'm doing the art for AVWW using my talents as well as various commodity art (a way outdated post on my pipeline here).

At any rate, when it comes to some really specialized things in AVWW -- like the workbenches and wind shelters -- I was really having trouble coming up with anything that would look special enough. These are really tricky concepts to get across, since it's not like just showing a black smith's shop or a wizard's tent or whatever. We have no less than 9 different kinds of crafting benches, and making them look distinct, interesting, clear, and in keeping with the theme of the game was really sending me in circles.

So I called on Phil -- and I think the results are pretty awesome. Here's a peek at them, with screenshots I took out of the Unity 3D editor (so there's an extra bar at the top of the screens, and the bottom are cut off -- that's just because they're straight out of the editor, don't worry).

Left To Right: Disenchant, Socketing, Memory Archive

Left To Right: Spellgem, Architect, Crestsmith

Left To Right: Scrollmaker, Spellshaping, Enchant

About The 9 Kinds Of Workbenches
Not all of these are actually crafting benches, I should clarify.

For instance, the memory archive is a place where you can deposit memory crystals to try to piece together various mysteries in the world. Sometimes this could be the background of the local evil overlord, sometimes it's a piece of the world's backstory (which varies from game to game), etc.

And when it comes to the enchant/disenchant benches, those are for applying permanent affects to yourself, or taking them off if you want to replace them with new enchantments. We'll explain more on that later, but it's something that's a bit more advanced and that you probably won't be doing until slightly later in the game (as with crests).

Then we have the socketing workbench, which is all about configuring what spellgems and spellshaping gems go in your crests. It's not so much about crafting something new as it is about configuring something new with stuff you already crafted.

That leaves us with the five actual categories of crafting that we talked about in the previous diary.

A Few New AVWW WIP Screenshots: Rhinos, Crafting, And Early Dungeon Maps

2011-07-21T12:05:00.001-04:00

So, last week we briefly showed screenshots of the new world map and character select screens. We're still a few weeks away from being able to do our next large gameplay videos and huge diary entries (we really want to show off a ton of things in those all at once), but here's a few new things that we're ready to share:

Screenshot 1: More World Map Refinements

The screenshot above shows yet more refinement on the world map. The numbers aren't shown all over the place on it (unless you hold the Shift key, as with planet names in AI War), and the color for a previously-visited region is now green instead of white, making it much easier to see. The positioning of the numbers and icons is also now better, and hostile regions now show up with red numbers (not pictured).

Screenshot 1: Macro-Game Icons
Phil has also done some great new "macro-game icons" for regions for us. The one you can see above is the settlement icon, denoting that region contains a settlement. Most of these macro-game locations aren't visible until either you've found them yourself or an NPC explorer has found them. But things like possible wind shelter sites, evil out posts, and overlord keeps all now have icons.

Screenshot 2: In-Game HUD

This next screenshot is the first time we've actually shown the in-game screens in over a month. As you can see, visually a lot has changed with the HUD. There's a few new indicators relating to the new mouse-based controls, but I'll talk about those another time. The game now has full mouse+keyboard, keyboard-only, and gamepad support -- all with re-mappable keys -- if I haven't mentioned that before.

The biggest change to the HUD, of course, is the minimap. It's now shown in a different style, and at the top of the screen instead of the bottom. Via your settings screen, you can actually scale it up and down now; since I'm playing at 1080p, I've got it scaled to about 2x normal, but for smaller screens it can be equivalently smaller. There's tons more information in the minimap now, and you can also smoothly scale it up to fill most of your screen for detailed looking-at by hitting the M key. Simply tap M again to scale the chunk map back down into minimap size.

Note that there are still some color tweaks I need to make to the unexplored color and so on on the minimap. The brown is not quite the best color now that the background map-styling has been removed, but I just haven't gotten around to changing that color yet.

Screenshot 2: Rhinos!
Two other things you might notice in that screenshot are... the rhinos! These are a new form of enemy that run really fast along surface areas, goring you if you get in the way. There are also green spell scrolls that you can craft that let you summon your own friendly rhinos, which is pretty cool -- they go bashing through all the enemies they encounter.

Screenshot 2:Wooden Platforms
You'll also notice that my character is standing on a floating wooden platform. That is a "medium" sized platform, and there are also small and large versions. These can be crafted out of any form of gem dust plus some cedar logs, with the help of an architect workbench. I believe that you get 50 platforms per each log plus dust. The default is the medium platforms, but you can get the large or small versions by adding easy-to-find secondary ingredients if you like.

The purpose of wooden platforms is mainly to help you get around underground -- you can place these with ease with the mouse in particular, and then use them for jumping-on. They are only solid to land on, so you can jump straight up through the bottom of them, which is handy; and enemies don't hit them at all. Neither do spells, same as with trees and other background objects. But, as with trees and background objects, if you want to destroy them, you can use something like the Fire Touch spell to do so.

As you progress through the game you'll get access to spells like Ride The Lightning, which was shown in the last video. But early on in, you need to rely on platforms and the like when you go spelunking. In this case I've actually placed the platform above ground, and it's keeping me safe from the rhinos while I use a Restore Magic scroll (that's the blue lines showing on top of the platform, as I took the screenshot right as that started).

Each new character also starts with a healthy dose of wooden platforms, as they are something you don't want to get caught without. But even if you run out while exploring underground, if you can find a boss area and then use the "teleport tunnels" (temporary name for that fast-travel feature), you can get back to the first surface chunk of the region and go visit an architect bench. More on all that later, but that's a bit of info anyway.

Screenshot 3: Crest Crafting Interface

I can only partially show this particular interface at the moment because it's early in that particular world and I don't have the needed research done to actually build crests. But this is a general view of the crafting interface, which uses large descriptive "cards" to show you what you're building, and which has either a row of gems, dust, or commodities at the top of the screen.

Down at the very bottom you can see what you've combined thus far. At the moment, the combinations are always either gem or dust, and then other stuff. For crests it's one, two, or three gems. That is, a Base Gem, plus optionally a Mix Gem, and then optionally a Catalyst Gem (but only if you have a Mix already).

There are three kinds of crafting that use the Base+Mix+Catalyst pattern (crest, spellshaper, enchant) and three that use the Gem/Dust+Commodity+Commodity pattern (spellgem, spellscroll, architect). For those other kinds of crafting, you use one gem OR one dust, plus 0-2 commodities. It's really straightforward and quick to use, and doesn't require memorization or an external wiki.

You can easily check your inventory of commodities/gems/dust at any time, by the way, and there will also be some other in-game shortcuts to make looking at the various dimensions of this data as simple as possible.

Screenshot 3: Research
So, in the paragraphs above I did mention research -- so I'll expand on that a little bit. Basically, when you start out in a new world there is very little that crafters actually know how to make. They also don't have access to very many or very good raw materials. As you explore around, of course you'll find more and better raw materials, but you'll also find "books of magic" that you can use to research new spells, crests, scrolls, traps, mechanical devices, buildings, and so on.

We'll get into the mechanics of how you turn in books of magic, and what the research works like, in the next video.

Screenshot 4: Crafting Moon Lamps

The card graphics here are showing the crest image, which is a temporary thing, so please ignore that. However, what you can see here is that I've used some white opal dust that I have (see at the bottom where my base is selected), and now the provisional thing that I will craft is 20 moon lamps (see the card on the right).

Up at the top of the screen, I can either add in some cedar logs to my white opal dust to get wood platforms, or I can choose "none" to just finish and get my 20 moon lamps in exchange for one unit of white opal dust.

We'll show crafting in greater detail the next full diary that we do, including video of it in action, but I figured it was a good time to at least show you some of the interface. It is a rather central part of the game, after all!

Screenshot 5: Underground Dungeon Map

So I'll warn you right up front with this last screenshot that there's a lot of partially-complete stuff you're looking at there. First of all, there's a bug that is causing the darkness to be too dark in the compiled versions of the game, but which isn't causing that when I run the game in the unity editor. That is... bizarre, to say the least, and it's something I need to look into more. But that's why the darkness was so incredibly thick in the last video Erik did, and why I haven't shown more screenshots since.

At any rate, though, you can see an example of a partly-explored chunk map of an underground section in the top left. But ALSO, you can see a very early working example of a dungeon map in the bottom right. The graphics and styling on the dungeon map are very placeholder, but the green node is where I'm currently located, and all the white nodes are the other chunks in that same dungeon.

The cross-connections aren't shown yet, and that's one of many things we're still working on with the dungeon and region maps. But what's really exciting is that you can easily pop open the dungeon or region map with period or comma respectively, and you can close them just as quickly. But if you're running at a large screen and for some reason want to have their overlay up while you play, then you can turn them on, and even scroll them around so they are wherever you want on the screen. That's pretty handy!

Until Next Time!
We're working toward the point where we have enough things completed on all the various fronts to show you some longer gameplay videos that will really capture how the early game goes. And we'll have more to show on interiors, dungeons, bosses, scouting/exploration, settlements, crafting... a whole long list of stuff.

But since that's really requiring completion of so many different parts of the game, that's what the delay is in our showing the next video. Similarly, if we're going to be hitting beta in August it's going to be very late August at this stage. It might be September. The project is still roughly on schedule for a October/November launch from the look of things, but we keep realizing that "oh, we can't leave that out of our first beta release or people will be disappointed," and so that's made it so that the first published will be a lot closer to the 1.0 "finished" version than we'd been originally planning.

Of course, I put finished in quotes, because as with AI War this game is intended to grow and evolve immensely during the beta period and post-1.0. We've just got to have a nearly-complete foundation for all of the basic components of the game before we start letting people play it; first impressions being rather important and all that. Anyway, stay tuned! We'll have more for you in 2-3 weeks, hopefully with a video that time!

Old AVWW Top-Down Interior Generator Source Code Now Released

2011-07-12T16:45:00.000-04:00

As promised, the source code (and runtime) for the old Interior Generator for the top-down version of AVWW has now been released. If you want to read about what it is and what it does, please see the link above -- it's described in great detail.

And here is where you can download the source and runtime.

What's new in this version, since the blog post linked above? Well, the cleanup processes have grown and grown, so there's something like 60 unique cleanup steps now. It also builds even more varied interiors between the various interior styles, too. I also started using chasms for the "remainders" where a wall wouldn't fit but I wanted to have something blocked off -- that worked out really well.

I'm sure there are still some little glitches here and there where something gets placed in a way that violates perspective, etc. I had fixed most of those, but when we made the switch to a side-view this particular style of interior generation got tabled and so that was basically the end of this program for Arcen.

However, if you're making procedural interiors for a game that is top down, especially if it's tile-based with a faux perspective -- like so many pixelart games are -- then I welcome you to use this! We'd appreciate credit if you feel like it, or at least a heads up that you're using it just for our own curiosity, but you're not legally obligated and it's not a huge deal to us either way. Consider this released under the MIT license, and if you find it useful I'm glad. Enjoy!

New AVWW World Map And Character Select Previews

2011-07-12T12:49:00.000-04:00

Not a full developer diary today -- but I did want to share a couple of things since it's been a while. We've got a few full diaries with videos and lots of details coming up before too long, but in the meantime there are a few things that I can show well with screenshots.

New Character Select Screen

The new version uses a fancier way of letting you scroll through your options, plus it also uses the new character portraits. In general this is one of several examples of how Keith and I have been retooling the various interfaces to be less spreadsheet-like and more visually pleasing.

New World Map Visuals
Yet again, the world map visuals have been redone. This time it's to make it less boardgame-like and more like a 4X game. This also shows off the new ocean tiles, as well as some of the generally better seeding logic. The world map is getting pretty close to being final for beta, now:

If you're curious about the ocean tiles: yes, you can move onto them. However, like some other "hostile tiles" you get sucked right into them. If you're on a "shallows" section of the ocean (you can pick them out, though they are subtle differences), this isn't a crisis. There's a lot of dangerous water in the shallows, but also land for you to walk.

If you're not in the shallows... well, your character can't swim. You pop out in the middle of the ocean and start sinking fast. There are ways to cross the ocean in this manner, but I'll leave you to discover those in-game when it hits beta!

Until Next Time!
This is just a brief little bit of info, but we'll have a lot more to share next time, including some longer gameplay videos that let you see more how an actual gameplay session might feel.

More Musings On Iterative Game Design

2011-06-25T09:18:00.002-04:00

I've written before, in depth, on my process for iterative game design and why I use it. That blog post was a year and a half ago, however, when it was just Pablo, Phil, and myself and we hadn't even started working on the first expansion to AI War yet. I was the only game designer on the staff at that point, and the only programmer, and none of us did this fulltime. Then our game came out on Steam and Direct2Drive and changed all that.

So! Seems like it's time for an update about iterative design, especially in light of our major design shift for AVWW last week. After all, now I've had the pleasure of working with a Lars as lead designer on the Tidalis project (while taking the role of producer), and with Keith as my co-designer on the AVWW project. And we've put out three expansions for AI War, the second two of which were co-designed with Keith as well.

What's Changed Since The Last Blog Post?
Despite all the changes to the company, to my life, and to what projects we're working on, the process actually hasn't changed one iota. This is surprising even to me, honestly. But it's the nature of why we were able to make the shift to side view in AVWW, and why it wasn't as ballsy a move as some people seemed to think it was (though we appreciate the kind words on that score).

Our Process, In Brief
If you want the hugely detailed post, check out Iterative Game Design The Right Way, my original post that I linked to above. But the short of it is that we decide, at the start of the project, what our "immutable design goals" are, and then start chipping away at the 'ol block of marble.

As the joke goes, you just have to "chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant" to carve an elephant out of a block of marble. That's really an apt description of what we do. We start with a collection of ideas, things that the project absolutely must accomplish in some manner, and then we start brainstorming designs until we have something that seems likely.

Once we have a strong-enough-seeming design, and the time and manpower lined up, we start on the project. That's when the iteration begins. The first designs are always flawed and rarely fun, but they are illuminating. They teach us why other game designers probably did this or that, and what mechanic X or why means to the player. They help us build a technical prototype, and form both an art style and a musical/sound style.

Nothing is sacred except those immutable design goals, so we wind up having a very free discussion of ideas that actually works best with multiple designers. Keith and I both freely suggest things that are outlandish and half-thought-out, and just get the others' first reaction to it. If it seems like something worth pursuing, we do, but it's also perfectly natural to let such trains of thought just fade once they've shown they aren't worth it.

I always like to say that if a design was so obvious that we could have thought of it right from the start of the project, then everybody would be doing it. You can set a direction for a project at the start, and you can and should set immutable design goals, but if you try to create a massive design document that is set in stone, you're not going to make a very original game. All the best stuff comes out of the iterative process, and that takes time and iterations. To me, this is what it means to be an indie: this freedom to experiment.

An Experienced-Focus Way Of Looking At Immutable Design Goals
Another way of looking at immutable design goals is based on the player experience. In my other post, I said that my immutable design goals for AI War: Fleet Command were:

1. AI War must support co-op play in a way that is fun and painless.
2. AI War games must be long -- 8-12 hours perhaps -- and must continuously evolve as they progress.
3. There must be a huge number of viable options available to the player at any given time, or every game will start to feel the same.
4. The game must be designed in such a way that it does not reward fast-clicking over real thought, or my dad (and players like him) will not really enjoy it.
5. There must never be a "best path" for players to learn, or the game has just died. There must be enough variability and randomness in each game that players must somehow have to make different decisions based on the current situation.

And those are all true. Those were the parameters of how I wanted to play the game. But that's also like describing how an elephant is posed, not what an elephant actually looks like (awkwardly returning to the carving-an-elephant analogy from above). These sort of immutable design goals are important, but there's an even higher order of goal that I pay even more attention to: how does this game make me feel.

Imitative Feel
I think that any indie developer, when setting out to make a game, has an idea of what they want it to feel like to play that game. Often it's imitative: "I want to recapture that feeling I first got when I played Ocarina of Time." That's a specific goal, and so long as the actual mechanics of how your game works are sufficiently different, it's not to say that the final game will have much in common with OoT. We're talking about the impact of OoT, not its literal design.

Of course, that can result in games where designers simply try to imitate the form of the original game in hopes that the feel will follow; it never does, so that's a waste of time. But that's a whole other discussion that I won't get into here.

Art Imitating Life
Another way to establish the primary-immutable-goal for a game is to think about things outside of gaming. For instance, people that design golf video games are presumably trying to make something that feels increasingly like the real game of golf , not something that gives them the feel of the Tiger Woods games. These people presumably like playing golf, and want to capture what that means in the form of a digital game.

In the case of AI War, once the decision was made to set the game in space, I knew exactly what I wanted the game to feel like: I wanted to feel like Ender Wiggin. I wanted to feel clever and outnumbered and to win against all odds. It's surprising, perhaps, that the idea of an asymmetrical AI didn't occur to me until halfway through the project, but there you go -- it wasn't something any other multiplayer RTS game had ever done.

Setting Yourself Up For Epiphanies
At some point as I was chipping away at the game of AI War, I realized that a lot of my smaller goals were being met, but that I still didn't feel like Ender for some reason. And that's when the epiphany hits. That's the big benefit of iterative design, is that you set yourself a goal that nobody else has ever accomplished, and then you keep working closer and closer to it until you have all the epiphanies you need in order to make it happen.

Another analogy I like to use is that of walking down a long and twisty corridor. You know where you are, and where you want to end up, but you don't know all the intermediate steps. You can see around a corner or two as you go, and can make decisions that should take you closer to your goal, but you can't know absolutely for sure. Since you can only see around so many corners at once, that means you have to put in the time and do the walking to really find the right path; and sometimes that leads to backtracking.

Backtracking, in this sense, isn't a tragedy or even a surprise, it's just part of the process. I'm not one of those people who thinks that the first idea I have on a subject is the best I'll ever have. I rather think that the more I know about a subject, and the longer I think about it, the better my ideas about it will become. That's what the iterative design process takes advantage of.

Conclusion
You might be wondering what the overarching immutable design goal was for AVWW -- after all, it started out as a post-apocalyptic top-down game and is now a purely-fantasy side-view game. The core idea of that game is and always has been "I want to go adventuring in an exciting, dangerous-feeling, infinite world."

This is an elephant that we're still very much chipping away at, but I think you can probably see via our regular videos and developer journals how this sort of process evolves: we mention most of what we're working on, so you see some features appear and then later disappear. That's the process of walking down these corridors and finding out which ones really lead us to the end destination we're striving for.

Anyway, it's a process that I very much believe in and that I think others should use. So far it's worked every time for us!

A Valley Without Wind Alpha #12 -- Side View, Undergrounds, and Other New Mechanics

2011-06-20T17:20:00.000-04:00

This is the detailed diary that was promised in our big side view reveal post. It's assumed that you've already read the post on the other end of that link; if not, a lot of this post isn't going to make much sense, so make sure you do!

Obviously the biggest news this week is the switch to side view, and that's what the other post focused on, but that's not remotely close to being all that's changed. Here's a rundown of new stuff since last time:

Revised Control Options
Since the first previews, we've been saying that this game would be just a keyboard-only game or a gamepad-only game. You could choose which you want, but there would be no mouse involvement at all. This is something we've reconsidered based on playtesting and on feedback on our diaries and videos: now there will be three control options: keyboard, keyboard+mouse, and gamepad.

The new mouse-related control scheme is only partly in place now, but it will allow for precision aiming. The keyboard will also include options for angle-based aiming as well as the lock-on methods that we've been showing so far. Both of these control schemes will be interchangeable, so that you can mix and match these controls as makes sense to you. And of course all the keys are remappable.

The same thing goes for the gamepad, but actually that's becoming less the preferred way to play, now. We decided to increase the number of ability slots from 6 to 9, to make full use of the keyboard, and that means that most gamepads now don't have enough buttons to really handle the maximum number of abilities that can be used in the game. That's not crippling, and gamepads can be used in conjunction with the keyboard or on their own, but it's no longer the ideal control mechanism.

The control mechanism that we're going to be most emphasizing as the default will be the keyboard + mouse option, which is what we feel like will feel most natural to computer gamers, and which gives the most precise control over your character. But we're having options for everyone. And gamepad support is actually coded in now, for the first time in one of Arcen's released titles, so you don't have to worry about that going anywhere!

"What's My Motivation Here?"
Before I continue on with the list of what's new, I want to take a quick break and answer a question that a lot of players have been asking. We've addressed this in various interviews, but never very concisely or (apparently) clearly. If the goal in Zelda is to rescue the princess, and in Castlevania it is to defeat Dracula, then what's the overarching goal in A Valley Without Wind?

The most basic answer is: to heal the broken world as best you can. The world is torn, troubled, and overrun by evil. People are scattered, disorganized, and civilization has fallen. You play as a series of individuals (permadeath, remember -- every time you die it's a new character), and collectively all your characters are trying to help improve the world in whatever ways you see fit.

Usually this means helping out NPCs, improving settlements, and defeating evil overlords that threaten huge tracts of the world. If this were Zelda, each of these overlords would be Gannon. If it were Castlevania, they'd each be Dracula. However, since this is AVWW, they are all Big Bad Guys with procedurally-generated names and backstories and lieutenants and strongholds, and there are an infinite number of them.

Beating one of them is a big accomplishment, like winning the game in another game. And once an overlord has been beaten, you've saved a substantial part of the world -- it won't have to be periodically re-saved. NPCs will rejoice, and then life goes on in those areas. You can still improve the settlements and such there, and there are other NPC-focused things to do even in an overlord-less area, but the threat of that overlord is forever gone.

Part of the whole "you can play in one world for as long as you like" means that there always needs to be more to do. So, to that end, if you go just over the mountains, there's another overlord, even worse than the last, and leveling up and gearing up to beat him is like going through an entire game's progression again. It's like starting a new campaign in AI War, against a fresh pair of AIs, but keeping all the history and backstory and planets from the galaxy you played right before it. You've killed Dracula, now go get Gannon. Okay, now Sauron needs a good whooping. And so on.

To get a hair more specific: you're going to have to play for 10-20+ hours to bring down one of those overlords. Doing so requires not only the fight with the overlord themselves, but also traversing their entire fortress of bad guys that they have on hand to protect themselves. Prior to defeating that bad guy, you'll have 10-20 hours of NPCs in a wide range of regions who are lamenting the crushing yoke of this overlord in various ways. And if you try to attack the overlord too early, after even finding their keep to begin with, expect to die. Once you finally do defeat the overlord, the game remembers that forever (that's part of the "deeds" system the game has). To NPCs that were affected by the overlord, this is a really big deal and they remember both the overlord and the specific character that defeated him/her.

It's kind of like the way AI War builds up to the final fights at the procedurally-generated AI homeworlds. There's a strategic component to even figuring out how to defeat each overlord, because each one is outfitted so differently. So you might have to do some recon and some refitting as you go, too, in order to even take them out.

I've written at length about the benefits of having a persistent world that keeps going infinitely before, so I won't go into it in depth here. But for me personally, it's a very exciting new thing.

A Focus On Magic, Traps, and "Scrolls" Instead Of Physical Weapons
You might recall that in past versions we've talked about swords and gatling guns and so forth. We've decided that this simply isn't our strength for a game like this, and those mechanics simply we're looking very good visually or feeling very good in terms of gameplay. Spells, on the other hand, were already looking good and felt really good to use. And with our slots system for combining spells to get custom effects, that made the spell system even more unique compared to the rest. So that's where we're focusing the bulk of our attention

Spell Crests And Augment Gems
My hope is to have at least a hundred distinct spells by the time we hit 1.0, many of which can be socketed into a "Crest" that allows you to charge up a more powerful form of the spell and can also take additional augment gems that add stronger and more varied effects (some of which have trade-off side effects). One simple example is shown at 0:48 in our latest video of the game, with a Ball Lightning spellgem plus a Splitter augment gem inside a two-slot spell crest that has an inherent charge ability modifier. So that lets the player charge up a lightning ball to be more powerful by holding down its key, and then it rockets out in multiple directions rather than just in one, for instance. That's just a pretty simple effect, and with two slots only (the maximum number of slots will be four).

Raw Gems Versus Gem Dust, Plus More On Scrolls And TrapsThe recipes for crafting spellgems and crests and things of that nature all have at least one "raw gem" included. When you find a vein of one of the six types of raw gem underground, smashing that vein gives you a raw gem item as well as multiple gem dust items. The raw gems all go to spells or crests, while the dust all goes to scrolls or traps.

Scrolls and traps are all consumable items, meaning that once you craft them you have only a limited number of them. This is in contrast to spell gems, which you get unlimited uses out of, but which require magic points for each time you use them. Traps and scrolls require no magic points, and in some cases are more powerful than an actual reusable spell, but you only get a limited number of them.

New Crafting System
We took a hard look at our crafting design and found it wasn't meeting our goals, so we came up with a new system that we think is much more compelling, and a streamlined interface we're pretty excited about. We'll be talking about this in detail in the next couple of weeks, but the resulting system is being polished up as I write this, and it's really very good.

The core ingredients are the raw gems and gem dust noted above, and each gem or bunch of dust has a tier. Regions level 1-5 tend to have Tier 1 gems/dust, level 6-10 have Tier 2 gems/dust, and so on. So you don't have to get all new inventory every time you level up, but you always have new stuff to look forward to as you progress. When you combine multiple tiered ingredients into a single recipe, the average tier is used for the finished product.

However, gems and gem dust aren't the only crafting materials: there are also "catalysts" that might range from anything like "iron" to "soft wood" to "plums" to "silk." These sorts of things can be found mostly above ground and inside, whereas the raw gem veins are mostly found underground. The most interesting and powerful spells, traps, and scrolls require catalysts that don't show up in the lower-level regions, so as you're playing the game you're finding both higher-tier raw gems, new kinds of raw gems (you start out with only red and white), and new kinds of catalysts. Of course, if you're an advanced player and don't want to go through the regular progression you can always jump into higher-level regions early.

But for average or new players, there's a progression of expanding options as you explore, and these form the backbone of how you outfit yourself for exploration, and how you are able to improve your settlements. There are actually other components to this as well, such as crafters needing a place to do their crafting in the settlements, and needing to be appropriately-skilled at crafting to make what you need. So you'll be finding things like memory crystals from which your civilization's crafters can learn to make new things or mix or catalyze them in new ways. We're also thinking about crafters needing certain improvements to their workshops and the player being able to help out with that, but we're still not sure if that would actually add fun to the system as it will be.

More on that in future diaries, but there's lots you can do with all this. It starts out slow and easy, and then gets more complex the higher the region levels go. Actually, that's a pretty good description of a lot of parts of the game: it eases you into things unless you skip to some higher region levels right at the start, so you can basically choose the sort of progression you want to have.

The New Magic Point SystemThis has been talked about in the forums some in past weeks, and it's only partly in place at the moment, but almost all spells will be requiring magic points for each use. This of course means that you can't just spam your best spell, but you have to use them a bit more tactically in terms of your long-term consumption.

There are a variety of ways that we're building RPG-style optimization tactics into this system. First is that enemies will often have small MP or HP drops that you can pick up and which increase either your health or your magic points immediately on contact. So if you can kill enemies while expending fewer MP than you gain in the drops, then you can adventure on indefinitely.

Another thing that provides tactical options for you the use of scrolls and traps, which do not require any MP at all, but of which you have limited quantities. So designing your loadout before an expedition (both at crafting-time and what-to-take-with-me time) takes on great importance, because you want to have enough of these to help offset your general MP use, but at the same time you want enough spellgems that are powerful that you can use for the bulk of your combat.

There are also some scrolls that actually give you more MP directly, kind of like an ether in Final Fantasy; but to get those scrolls requires the use of certain catalysts and gem dust that you could be using for other scrolls or traps... so it's always a tough economy of choice, and different players will have wildly different styles of play.

Lastly, there is also a whole category of "touch spells" that are basically the equivalent of melee weapons in other games. These spells don't require any MP, but they only work on enemies that are close enough for you to touch. With many enemies, that means you're going to take some health damage yourself if you're not skilled. But if you are very skilled, it provides yet another way to play. And another way to keep yourself steeped in magic points on lengthy excursions without having to use MP-granting scrolls too heavily.

What Is Meant By The "Depth" We Keep Referring To
When I talk about gameplay depth, the magic point system and system of choices it creates is one part of what I'm referring to. The other parts generally revolve around the macrogame and how you choose to change the world. And the other part refers to the mechanics of actual combat itself, particularly at the higher levels, where spell choice and spell combos will matter. Suffice it to say, this is a game that requires some planning on multiple levels if you really get into it; most similar games just hand-hold you down a linear gameplay path, and your involvement consists of executing that gameplay with skill.

Twitch skill can matter here if you want to play above your civ level, but even more important in all cases is the ability to make good plans and execute them. If you want to defeat an overlord or build up a specific settlement, then that's a complex undertaking that requires planning, multiple intermediate expeditions, and then skillful execution. I guess it's the strategy game developer in us: we just can't get away from that sort of thinking even when we make an action-adventure game!

Fire Touch Spell, And Environmental Interaction
This is the first of the "melee" spells mentioned in the magic points section above. So you can use and reuse this one for zero magic points, but it only hits things right in front of you and isn't overly strong. It's not the first choice for combat in most cases, but at the same time its class of spell is instrumental to bring along for every expedition. However, it also has a great value aside from direct combat:

One thing that you probably noticed in the video is that you can just walk right past trees, buildings, etc, now. This of course makes sense in a side view game, but one of the coolest things that we have been showing so far was the environmental interaction, right? Fear not: that hasn't been lost, it's just been changed around some. Most spells don't hit the background trees and such because that would be incredibly annoying.

However, when you want to knock down some trees for whatever reason, this fire touch just causes a burst of flame directly in front of you, which also hits the background. This is the easiest way to get wood from trees, or plums from plum trees, and so on. Excellent catalysts for various purposes.

Seize Spell And Combat Tactics
If you look at 0:29 in the latest video, you can see the new Seize spell in use. Basically what it does is grab a usually-non-colliding piece of destructible background or foreground (trees, plants, wire baskets, whatever) and makes it shining, spectral, and colliding. You can't get past it without destroying it, and neither can enemies. Enemies will start trying to hack their way past it if you trap them on the other side of it from you, buying you time to re-equip, heal, deal with a lone enemy that you've separated from the herd, or whatever else you need.

You can even, of course, create a whole line of seized objects for enemies to slam through, buying yourself even more time at the expense of the background objects and the MP required for the seize spell. In essence, this works kind of like a cover mechanic in an FPS game, but with destructible cover. It's actually a lot easier to use than just hiding behind stuff in the old top-down view was. And you can combine this with other abilities, such as using environmental objects to slow down enemies and then hitting them with area damage from the safety of the other side. Or it can buy you some time to lay down a line of traps.

When I talk about the depth of combat that we are going for, this is one example of what I mean: you use spells and environmental objects in various combinations, rather than just button-mashing the fireball spell into every enemy you meet. Developing out more ideas like this is something that we'll be doing over the next few months, and I'm sure players will also have many interesting ideas to contribute if AI War is any indication. We also have a cache of other ideas for tactical combat options, but since they haven't been playtested yet I'm reluctant to talk about them in case some of them don't work out.

Vertical Terrain Traversal, and the Ride The Lightning spell
The latest video shows a lot of walking around on the surface, but probably only a third of your playtime would take place there. The other two thirds take place either underground or in the interiors of buildings (more on interiors and undergrounds below).

Moving around underground or inside now has both a horizontal and a vertical component to it, of course. Gravity is your constant enemy, even though this isn't a platformer game in the sense that Mario games are platformers (aka, no precision jumps needed). To that end, you will have a variety of tools at your disposal for getting around.

The first is shown at numerous places in the latest video, and it's a spell called Ride The Lighting. It can be used at any time, even when you're falling or already having jumped into the air, and it boosts you up about 4x higher than you can normally jump on your own. Each time you do costs magic points and requires a recharge of 1.5s afterward. Higher-tier Ride The Lightning spellgems let you jump progressively higher.

The second method for traversing terrain, and the one that will be more commonly used by most players, is wooden platforms. These aren't implemented yet, but basically you'll be able to place wooden platforms from your inventory into the game world. This is in no way a construction game like Minecraft or Terraria, but you will be using wood for things like building platforms and so on. These platforms can be arranged like bridges or like ladders, so you can get through most of the game without having to have any particular skill at jumping if you want to really stock up on a lot of wood instead. Or you can get by with very little wood if you prefer the jumping.

These sorts of things also have combat benefits: you can use these sorts of spells and consumables to avoid enemies (thus carrying forward the minor stealth component we've been talking about in the top-down view), or to get a better tactical position that you can then attack from. We haven't done a whole lot with that yet, but as a longtime RTS developer it's the sort of thing I've always wanted to be able to do. In a top-down game every direction is functionally the same as the last -- if you attack from the north, south, east, or west, it doesn't matter. But from a side view, suddenly attacking from the side, bottom, and top of an enemy all have really different meanings. This is quite exciting to me to get to work with.

The wooden platforms are another way in which the game emphasizes expdition planning, too -- if you go into a really deep cave without enough wooden platforms to get back out, then you are going to die down in that cave! Unlike Minecraft and Terraria you can't just dig yourself a way out through the rock. This game is about exploring and traversing the hostile environments that you find, rather than being able bending every part of the world to your will -- this world is way too hostile for that. And in a lot of respects this makes the underground sections feel a lot more like real spelunking, even if it is still highly fantastical.

Enemy Generation
One thing that has really changed in how we're handling the game is how we're handling enemy generation and monster nests. Initially in the top down view we just had enemies seeded into each chunk, and you ran into them when you ran into them. They would respawn over a long period of time after you left the chunk. Then we added the concept of monster nests, which spawn monsters more rapidly, and which you could seek out and kill. That's when you started seeing incredibly huge swarms of bats in our tests builds (that was only ever a testing thing).

Now what we are doing is scrapping the directly-seeded monsters, and just having nests that are seeded around, but not letting those nests be touchable by players. They are essentially just visible spawn points for enemies. They also now spawn fewer enemies than the monster generators in preview #11 did.

The net effect is that there are now always monsters present (it gets pretty boring when there aren't), but they don't clump up too much, and you can enact strategies around where you can see them visibly spawning. Such as laying traps or whatever else to suppress them for a while. It offers a lot of future tactical options for us as game designers that simply wasn't there with something that is easily destructible.

You'll probably notice from the video how much better balanced the number of enemies is throughout compared to last time; you're never getting swarmed by 50 enemies, but there also aren't large periods of time where there's literally nothing going on.

Poison Water
One of the new things in the game is the ability to fall into water. When you do, you move more slowly and can't jump as high, but otherwise keep moving as normal (in other words, similar system as Cave Story and Metroid). While in water there is no air gauge, because the bigger threat comes from the toxins that are in all pools of water -- if you just stand there in the water, and are at full health, you'll be dead in 60 seconds.

That's actually not a very stiff penalty, which is great because this game has permadeath. Death in this game should not generally be because your finger slipped or because you missed a jump, but rather because you made a series of bad choices. In that way, it's much more Metroidvania than Zelda, even.

Anyway, so being in water for long is a bad idea, but falling briefly in isn't going to kill you unless you're already on the point of death. But for most enemies, being in water is much more quickly fatal: when they fall into water, they die within about 5 seconds instead of 60. This makes it so that the enemy nests can keep spawning more enemies as the older ones reach the lower limits of the level and die off in the water, which makes for constantly shifting "patrols" of enemies in many cases, which is pretty neat.

I should also go ahead and mention that you can't use water to farm enemy drops: when an enemy dies in water, they don't drop anything. While I'm at it, I'll also mention that when a loot drop or player item bag falls into water, it floats at the top instead of sinking. Thus you can build some wooden platforms to skim across the top of the water and get your stuff back without having to step in the water. This is also true for lava (see below), which is even more important).

Falling Damage, Lava, and Platformer Elements
One of the first things that we prototyped with the side view was the characters taking damage from falling too far. This is something that works in FPS games, but my experience has been that I don't really like it outside of that -- in Minecraft, for instance, I'm on the record as asking for there to be no falling damage.

So we took out falling damage for most of the regions, but one of the things that I'm really angling to do is make it so that regions are unique not just in look, not just in rewards, and not just in enemies, but also in larger gameplay mechanics. For the lava areas, that's always been something that has been intended to be very difficult as a region, but it's also a region that lends itself well to platformer-style elements.

Now, I'm an absolutely enormous fan of Mario games and Donkey Kong Country games and other things of that nature. Have been all my life. But the switch to side view for this game doesn't signal that it is in any way becoming a platformer -- it's action adventure, just rotated on its axis. But since it is side view and gravity does exist... well, there's no reason that the lava areas can't be a haven to stick all the platformer-type stuff that we might want to do.

So in the lava areas there is falling damage, and there are pits of molten lava that kill a full-health you in about 5 seconds instead of the 60 that water takes. There will also be timing-based lava waterfalls and things of that nature. If you don't like platforming elements you can stay out of the lava areas and not miss anything; and you won't be seeing anything like that in any other part of the game. But if you do like platforming elements, then this is a pretty interesting area to go into, and it contains rewards that are relevant to being able to do even more platforming.

Speaking more about the falling damage, that is all handled based on your velocity when you hit the ground. Normally in most areas your terminal velocity is capped such that you never take any damage. In the lava areas it's about 4x that, such that one a really long fall you will die on impact, an on more modest falls you will take 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 damage respectively

This is the only region type in the game that will have any falling damage at all, and it's also the most blatanty-hostile type of region. The sort where you don't send a fully-equipped character, because the risk of death is astronomically higher than anywhere else. Don't worry, there will literally be signs posted at the entrances to the lava areas warning you of this, and to go back if you don't have a deathwish. My view is that it's fun to have a couple of rare pockets in the game that have this sort of unbridled hostility against the player -- it's the sort of place I'll enjoy going occasionally, myself -- but it can't be more than 1% of the areas in the game, if even that high of a percentage.

If everything in this section sounds like a horrible idea to you, then no worries -- you can simply always go around the lava flats and even the deep and pretend they don't exist. If that's how you feel, you won't be missing anything you would care about, anyway. Think of these as the rare and isolated "challenge areas" for players who like an insane challenge, and who like platformers at least some. For everyone else... there's a massive infinite world that doesn't have any mechanics remotely like this. This section should thus actually come as a comfort to players that don't like traditional platformers, because we're making a commitment to keep any and all such mechanics limited to just the lava areas.

Surface Chunks and Underground Caverns

So at this point there is a single "surface chunk" in each region, but we're actually going to be expanding that this week to being a long list of surface chunks in each region -- really expanding the amount of above-ground area that you can cover, so that there is enough to the surface that you can actually spend 33% of your time above ground doing interesting things, rather than spending all your time underground or inside. I like underground and inside as well as the next fella, but I also like seeing the sky!

At any rate, these surface chunks have the sky, and buildings on them, and you can go in all the buildings. Then most of the surface chunks also have one or more holes in the ground, as seen in the video (some chunks are just swiss cheese with holes, of course), and when you go down in these holes you can find underground doors like what you see at 1:53 in the video. These doors lead into completely-underground chunks that are filled with all sorts of interesting things, including sometimes underground buildings.

In most regions, these only go down so far -- you'll find chains of caverns that take you an interesting amount downwards but not infinitely so. This is where you find the raw gems and other cool stuff that you can use in crafting. Sometimes this is where enemy lairs or even overworld keeps are. All stuff is down there. In a few region types, there is literally an infinite downward progression of caverns taking you downward. Keith and I have been talking about various fast-travel mechanisms for making it back up and down for these infinite areas, but we haven't settled on anything definite yet.

Interiors
Exploring inside buildings is the other third of the action-adventure parts of game, and that has probably grown in importance even since preview #11. One of my big goals is to make the interiors really feel distinct from the undergrounds -- to that end, there will probably be a lot less darkness inside, and of course the actual interior construction in general is really different.

So what's inside that you're exploring for? Mostly it is catalysts for crafting, but it's also memory gems. Some of the most important spells will require components from interiors of certain regions, so there are some really substantial rewards to be found inside buildings.

I don't have as much to say about interiors this week because the switch to side view has invalidated most of the work I previously did on them. However, the new task is a much simpler one, so I'm hoping to have basic interiors up and going this week, and ready to be shown next video. Also, I will still be releasing the old top-down interior generator tool as an open source program for others to use, even though AVWW now won't be using it. I'll try to get to that this week, too.

Terrain Generation Techniques
The basic technique for cavern generation in AVWW is the one proposed by Noel Berry here. However, I've extended on that a fair bit to make various flavors of caves, and to make caves that can intersect with variable-height rolling surface hills like you see in the videos. It's a really cool system, and it's completely removed the need for the hand-crafted maps that I talked about at length in preview #10.

It's all procedural now, and it's providing really, really varied results including cliff overhangs, floating islands, and so on. All inescapable pits have some poison water somewhere down at their bottom, which is handy so that if you are being foolish and don't have enough wood platforms or spells to escape the pit, you won't have to suicide yourself -- the water will take care of that for you.

And of course, the water takes care of any enemies that fall into such pits as well, as noted above. Which means that you don't wind up with all the enemies just hanging out at the bottom of a pit, fruitlessly trapped. And you don't need enemies to avoid falling off ledges, because enemies falling off ledges adds so much to the gameplay -- you have to watch out for them coming at you from above!

New Objects And Buildings, Removal Of Broken Vehicles
As you can see in the latest video, there are tons and tons of new objects and buildings in the game, aside from all the existing ones being re-rendered from a side view perspective. I think the count of objects has roughly tripled since #11, up to something like 150 objects, and the number of buildings has gone from about 20ish to about 50ish. Nowhere remotely near all of them are shown in the video.

One other change going along with the new objects is that I've taken out all of the various broken vehicles in the game. In a magic-using world, such vehicles would never have really been needed anyhow, and they were never going to be something you could actually drive. I simply had cars and similar because I wanted to have highways full of broken cars, like in The Stand.

From a side view, though, it's really impossible to do a highway that looks good, and the cars were one of the most boring parts of the art from #11 and before. So now highways and cars are gone, and in their place is an incredibly more varied and interesting selection of objects more fitting with the new theme of the game.

From now on I'm going to be dedicating one solid day per week to simply making more objects and buildings and other art elements, to make sure that this game really has a ton of content even by the start of beta. Last Monday was my first stab at having a day of that sort, and I was able to get 116 objects and buildings all done in one day, so that's a good sign. I should be able to kick that number up even higher as I get more practiced at it. Already these new buildings and objects are just giving an incredible amount more character to the various areas, though; my favorite at the moment is the telephone poles that are sometimes in the Small Town regions.

Streamlined Inventory System

Another thing that we've been working on in the last couple of weeks has been getting the inventory and crafting systems really working as smoothly as we can. The crafting interface we'll talk about in depth in a future week, but the inventory interface is done already.

There are now two kinds of inventory: usable inventory, and crafting materials. Crafting materials that you pick up (such as raw gems, gem dust, and catalysts) all immediately go into "the vault," which is a central personal repository that you can access from anywhere. If your character dies, nothing happens to anything that's in the vault. If you go to any crafter or any workshop to do crafting yourself, you can access everything in your vault at that time. None of this stuff ever shows up in your main inventory, taking up space.

Usable inventory, on the other hand, is actually stored on your person. The ability bar at the bottom screen is now 9-wide instead of 6-wide, and each slot corresponds to the same number key on your keyboard. Your entire usable inventory is 9-wide, and up to about 10 rows tall, although it only shows as many bars as you are actually currently using. If you press the 0 key at any time while playing, then your active ability bar will switch between different rows of your usable inventory.

In this way, you can get at your entire usable inventory without ever having to open a menu. And in fact when you do press the I key, it brings up a very minimal interface that is just however many ability bars you actually have in use at the time in your inventory. You can drag items with the keyboard or mouse between the different bars, or onto a new bar. As you pick up new usable items, they go into any empty slot or onto a new bar, and you can then rearrange them as you will. Thus the entire usable inventory interface is for organizational convenience, not functional necessity, which is pretty cool.

When you die, your entire usable inventory gets dropped in a player item bag right where you fell. It never disappears, so if you remember where it is you can go back and get it at your leisure. It's planned that there will be no way to send usable items back to the vault while you're out in the field, or to get other usable items out of the vault. But the plan is that when you are in settlements you can access your vault and put usable items into and out of it. Your actual field inventory thus is no longer unlimited like we'd once planned, but it's still enormously, uncommonly large. Most players will likely never use even 50% of the available space of usable inventory in the field.

Other QuestionsQ: Will this affect multiplayer at all?
A: No, we've done all of this in a way that is fully compatible with the multiplayer code we already had.

Q: Is there a day/night cycle now that we can see some night areas in the video?A: Actually, there's not a day/night cycle. We do have regions that are clearly at night, but those regions are always at night while you are in them. It seems like a lot of games have a day/night cycle, and that's just not something that we saw as adding value in this game. Instead, what we have is the windstorm cycle, which is a lot more unique to this game and which has been discussed in the past. The basics being that every four moves you make on the overworld, you run into a windstorm, unless you're standing on a settlement or a wind shelter at the time. So it's kind of a musical chairs thing, and you can build "roads" for safe travel via the wind shelters, etc, etc.

Q: How does this affect the size of regions?
A: It doesn't particularly. Individual surface chunks are now a functionally smaller since large parts of them are now taken up with showing sky or ground that you can't interact with. However, to compensate for that we're making it so that regions are made up of multiple surface chunks rather than a single one, which actually lets each region become much larger and more interesting. And it makes the surfaces actually something that can go on infinitely like an interior or an underground area can, so we've actually bought ourselves a lot of flexibility there.

Q: Does this affect the overworld map at all?
A: Not one line of code has changed for the overworld map. I improved the graphics there, and that's it.

Q: Do you still get dumped mid region by windstorms?
A: Oh, yes. It's actually a lot more threatening now than it was before, because of the presence of pits and such. And also, once we have the linked surface chunks going, it will be even more threatening because of the fact that you might be multiple chunks away from the overworld -- this is quite exciting for me, actually, as I never felt that in the prior versions the windstorms were really notable enough.

Q: Was it not insanely hard to throw away so much hard work on the top down version to make the switch?
A: You'd think it would be, but I can honestly say that it was the easiest thing I've done on this project in a long time. Remember, I'd spent the last six months not really having things turn out the way I wanted, and listening to everyone complain about the camera perspective, eight-way sprites, etc. That was hard, and extremely frustrating, but ultimately fruitful. Once this idea had fully formed to the point that I knew it was something we needed to do, it came together really fast. I think I had all the side view code, up to and including physics, done within about three working days. Then it was just a matter of all the art rework, and introducing new mechanics, etc. And other content generation things like really getting the caverns feeling different between different areas, things like that. It felt really, really good to be making those changes, and consequently they just flew by.

In Conclusion
Whew, that was a really long one. But hopefully this goes a long way to reassuring folks that all is well in the valley without wind, and that the side view is in no way a dumbing-down or a reduction in tactical options. We thought this through in great detail before pulling the trigger, and I think that over just under 300 emails between Keith and myself have now been exchanged on the subject. Most of those 1,000+ words.

And you guys have seen the sort of games we make, right? Look at AI War, for goodness sake. If we'd felt that the game would be poorer for this, but only the art would be better, we'd have gone with the better game and worse art. It's been our very good fortune to realize that not only is the art better in this perspective, but so is the gameplay as well! In the coming weeks we'll focus more on the crafting mechanics and interface, as well as some of the macrogame stuff to do with NPCs, settlements, and so on. And of course the various new spells and enemies, interiors, and all that good stuff.

Thanks for taking the time to read, and here's the new video again in case you missed it. Enjoy!

A Valley Without Wind's Switch To Side View -- The Big Picture

2011-06-20T10:23:00.001-04:00

There comes a point in every good game's life where it stops feeling like a prototype, and starts feeling downright fun. For AVWW, that time is now, and it came about because of a fundamental shift we made to the game: rather than being a top-down 2D game in a faux perspective that is common to SNES, DS, and pixelart games, it is now a side-view 2D game. It's still a sprawling adventure game in an infinite world with a top-down overworld map, but the perspective of the actual action-adventure bits has now flipped.

It's amazing how obvious this change seems in retrospect: it fits perfectly with the rest of the game's design, and in fact augments it. There was recently a three-page feature on AVWW in PC Power Play, and literally the only thing that's now outdated in that article is the screenshots. Settlements, crafting, hopes, deeds, NPCs, and so on have been completely unaffected by this shift.

The perspective change has been a unifying force for the art as well as the gameplay, while ditching the camera angle that was bothering so many people in the previews. All of the individual graphics in the last video diary were high-res and attractive, but the overall composition was never able to gel until now. I find it really telling that when our PR guy Erik saw an early side-view build, his first comment was to compliment me on the new art -- and that was before I'd changed any significant portion of the art he was seeing.

The traditional faux top-down perspective blends elements that are side view and elements that are top-down and elements that are partway between; this works with pixelart, which is more abstract, but really bothers people increasingly as you move into higher res stuff. So what Erik was seeing was all the side-view stuff that I hadn't even changed, just with the top-down stuff lifted out. Scene composition counts for a lot, as any photographer will tell you.

Keith and I originally talked about making a switch to side view on the day after Christmas. I felt like it would give an enormous boost to the art, but Keith worried that the game would feel more arcade-like in a bad way, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to implement the sort of tactical combat that I was hoping for. Just when I had convinced Keith to do it, I flipflopped and we stuck with a top-down view. It's funny looking back at those emails now. On May 27th, after months of trying to make the top-down view work, I finally realized that the side view was what we needed to do. Blue's News has been calling it a side view game every time we do a dev diary, so I guess Blue has a pretty good crystal ball!

Part of what convinced me that this was the right direction to take the game in, and not just for art reasons, was the evolving design of the combat. I wanted a reasonably tactical gameplay experience, but in realtime that comes down to the choices that you make more than battlefield position. Location changes too rapidly in this sort of realtime game to be a substantial force for tactical maneuvering, so the bulk of the tactics come down to what abilities you use, and when, and in what combinations. And I realized that would be absolutely killer in a side view game -- as a kid I had a special love for side scrolling games such as Zelda II, Faxanadu, Ironsword, Metroid, and Castlevania II.

It's the sort of game design challenge I just absolutely salivate over, and I think we'll have something really fresh and exciting even by beta. The last few weeks have been euphoric for me, as this one simple change just solves so many problems that had previously seemed intractable. Even Keith, who really doesn't like twitch games or platformers, has been remarking on how much more fun the game is lately, which I take to be a very good sign.

Also in the time since the last developer diary, we've added over a hundred new objects to the game, a handful of new spells, several dozen new buildings, and several new animations. Oh, and we've added chains of underground caverns, which are a major new thing. This means we're getting started on vertical development in a major way. However, at the same time we managed to completely redo the inventory interface, get most of the work done on an all-new crafting system, redo the bulk of the art that we already had, do all the new physics for the side view mechanics, and in general convert over all the adventure-related and graphical-related code so that it is now side view instead of top view. That's exactly as much work as it sounds like.

So how were we able to get so much done on the vertical development front while we were still making so many structural changes to convert this to side view? Simple: it's incredibly faster to do work for a side view game. I don't have to spend hours fiddling with new pieces of art to get them in the exact right fake perspective that people will complain about anyway; I just render it from the front side, and that's that. I don't have to render front, back, and side perspectives for every character and monster (and even with that, people still complained about not getting front-angled and back-angled versions); instead I just render the side view, and that's that.

The result of this side view switch is something that looks incredibly better, that's orders of magnitude faster for us to create, and that's more fun to play. It also helps give a much stronger sense of place: partly it's seeing the sky when you're outside, but it's also the varied terrain height, long falls, poison water, and so on. There is more interesting stuff visible on the screen at all times now, but amusingly the new perspective is still about three times lighter on the graphics card thanks to not having to render quite so much grass; my average framerate is now about 250fps instead of 80fps.

Rest assured that we're committed to the same "easy to get into, but incredibly deep" gameplay that we've been talking about since the start on AVWW. The last few weeks we've been making huge strides along that very path. We look forward to sharing even more of our progress with you over the coming weeks, and we expect to hit beta in early August. Player feedback has been instrumental for us in helping to polish this game and particularly to make the perspective shift -- that's something I can't emphasize enough. People tried to help us improve the faux top-down perspective, and when that didn't work as well as anybody wanted we went another direction. I think people will be really pleased with the result. If you haven't already, be sure to check out the latest video and see for yourself!

Speaking of player feedback: we are hearing the requests for more concrete information and visual demonstration of what's going on with the NPCs and settlements and so on. In response we've been working on a dev diary that gets into some of those details. So rest assured that more info on that is coming (currently targeting one of the next two dev diaries, along with crafting, for the next few weeks), but it's going to take a bit longer to do well. A bit later today I'll have a more detailed developer diary talking about specific new elements that are already in the game in greater detail (UPDATE: here is the new post). Enjoy!

Here's the new video:

AVWW #12 Will Drop The Pre-Alpha Moniker, And Has Big Surprises -- Hitting in 1-2 Weeks

2011-06-06T12:39:00.000-04:00

Please understand that my intent is not to tease, here -- a lot of game companies give the barest hints of information, and try to drive you nuts with speculation and extrapolation. Folks familiar with Arcen know that's not our style.

That said, what I do want to tell you is that there are several pretty major surprises coming for A Valley Without Wind in the next developer diary, but that I won't talk about specifically what until that dev diary arrives. That will be in a week or two, depending on how development goes during that time.

Why on earth would I make such an empty, teasing-style post? Frankly... because whenever Major Things Change without forewarning, certain people I know tend to get annoyed with me. So this is your forewarning: the next time you see AVWW, it's going to be pretty different in a lot of fundamental ways, although not the most fundamental stuff.

What's happened to cause this? We had the epiphany that this game didn't even know it was looking for. There was a similar point, about March of 2009, when suddenly I had the idea to make the AI asymmetrical in AI War. It had been a game about even contests of will, but suddenly it was to be a David and Goliath sort of situation. That changed everything, but also tied together all the best of what had been inwork on AI War since November 2008.

That's what's happened here: we've had our big ties-everything-together idea, and it changes a few very core things about the game, but does so in a way that keeps all the coolest stuff and in fact augments it. All that "macro game" stuff that Keith is working on (perma-death, settlements, NPCs, deeds, hopes... basically all that stuff that people are most excited about) is alive and well, just to set you at ease.

Again, sorry for the tease. We'll have videos and developer diaries as soon as we humanly can complete the work required to share them. I have never been so excited about this project, though, and I think others will share the sentiment when they see how all these changes come together.

The last thing I'll say is: thanks. The watershed moment came about while thinking about fan feedback on our existing developer diaries and videos. There have been various persistent complaints on the blog, the forums, and youtube, and thinking about how to solve all of those is what led to the epiphany. So thanks for that!