Games By Design

Nick Trujillo Presents: Skyward Collapse Comic Page 3

2013-05-20T12:54:00.001-04:00

The third page of Nick Trujillo's comic is now up! Here are page one and page two if you missed them. Two more pages are in the works, which will be released periodically leading up to the release of Skyward Collapse on the 23rd -- that's this Thursday. Enjoy!

Nick Trujillo Presents: Skyward Collapse Comic Page 2

2013-05-16T20:23:00.003-04:00

The second page of Nick Trujillo's comic is now up! Here's page one if you missed it. Three more pages are in the works, which will be released periodically leading up to the release of Skyward Collapse on the 23rd. Enjoy!

Skyward Collapse OST Breakdown

2013-05-13T16:19:00.001-04:00

The Skyward Collapse OST is very different from other soundtracks that I've composed for our games. To start with, this is the first soundtrack that I've co-composed with someone else. Ted Hardin is a good friend of mine, an incredibly talented guitarist, and a master of melody in my humble opinion. By that I mean that with even the most simple chord progression, he can wield some unbelievable themes and melodic lines. Collaborating on this album was a lot of fun, and also opened up my eyes to a genre of music that I haven't delved in too much. Because the game is focused around building, we wanted the music to emulate a very relaxed and calm environment. Much like the music of Sim City or even Sword & Sworcery, we wanted a laid back atmosphere for our players as they create their realms. In order to accomplish this, we decided to have a lot of the music based around the acoustic guitar (a fantastic suggestion from Mr. Arcen himself, Chris Park).

Along with that acoustic, relaxed feel, Ted and I also wanted to relate the music back to the basic themes of the game (it is a game soundtrack after all). So, as you can see from the titles, and from hearing the music, we brought in the Norse and Greek elements throughout the soundtrack and fused those themes with our relaxed, acoustic genre.

Listen To/Buy the Skyward Collapse OST on BandCamp!

Track List:

1) Skyward Collapse Theme

2) The Arrival

3) Rise And Shine

4) High Noon

5) Afternoon Stroll

6) Late Night

7) Norse Summer

8) Greek Winter

9) The Architect

10) Running In The Sun

11) The Earth And The Sky

12) Follow Me Down

Skyward Collapse Theme

The main theme of the game is based around text from the "Hávamál", a collection of Old Norse poems from the Viking age. The poems are said to be the words of Odin, presenting his people with advice for living, proper conduct, and wisdom. The particular passage that I chose is one of the more famous passages from the collection:

Deyr fé, Cattle Die,

deyja frændr, kinsmen die,

deyr sjálfr et sama; you yourself die;

ek veit einn, I know one thing

at aldri deyr: which never dies:

dómr um dauðan hvern. the fate of the honored dead.

This passage worked perfectly for the theme. When reading it, all I could think about was a viking warrior about to go to battle, and these words being his final prayer. With that in mind, I composed the theme with the lyrics sung as if they were the warrior's last lament. I did research on the pronunciation of the old words, and recorded the vocals (they should be pretty accurate).

The Arrival
For the last few years, I've had an intern from the local high school Durham Academy. After the seniors at DA finish their AP Exams, they have a week or two to do an internship in a field that they're interested in pursuing. This year my intern was Austin Mack, who will be attending Northeastern University in Boston to get his to degree in music composition and technology. He also happens to be a talented violinist, so we recorded the main melody of this piece with him on the violin. (Last year my intern was Jared Anderson, who is now at Berklee College of Music getting a degree in music technology. He recorded the electric guitar on the A Valley Without Wind 2 OST).

The Arrival is supposed to be the player's introduction in to the world of the game. The feel for this intro was inspired by the amazing wallpaper art for the game created by Daniette "Blue" Wood. That same wallpaper is on the cover of the OST.

Stages Of The Day Tracks
The next four tracks are based around different times of the day in the game world. From morning until late at night, we wanted to compose pieces to paint a picture of these various time stages. These tracks introduce the main feel of the game, with the focus around the acoustic guitar, and our relaxed building-game music genre. Ted really outdoes himself with the guitar-play.

Rise And Shine - We start the piece with some bells to represent the disappearing of stars. The strings that kick in represent the rising sun and the start of the new day. The guitar adds the rhythm to the track and creates the feel of waking up to a sunny day overlooking rolling fields.

High Noon - The guitar does most of the magic in this piece, creating an almost "western" sound. The synth pad in the intro and throughout also adds depth and helps create that feel of the midday hot sun beaming down.

Afternoon Stroll - The laid back guitar in this creates that "afternoon stroll through the fields" feel, along with the bongos playing quietly in the background to add a little motion. The bells creeping in represent the sun going down and the reintroduction of the stars.

Late Night - This piece was our homage to midnight, quite possibly the most creative time of day for any musician. So, we found our tempo, hit record, and let the late night creative juices take over. Most of this was improvised on the spot, with a few things tweaked here and there and overdubbed. This is one of my favorite pieces of the whole soundtrack.

Norse Summer, Greek Winter
In any realm of composition, opposing themes are always a cool idea. In this case, since the game is the Norse vs. the Greeks, what better way to pay homage to that then to have opposing themes from both sides. The Norse Summer theme is basically all Ted on the guitar. We recorded the background guitar first, and then overdubbed him on the melody on top.

The Greek Winter track is the complete opposite of the Norse Summer. As opposed to having a lot of motion in the backgrounds with a fluid melody, the piece is stagnant (almost cold sounding). We added the drone in the background to represent emptiness and almost a chill that passes slowly throughout. The guitar on top is based on Greek bouzouki music. Very free-form, devoid of tempo, and almost haunting in spirit.

The Architect

The Architect was my version of the city-building music you hear in games like "Sim City" (hence the name). Simply put, it's just feel good music that grooves and gets you excited about creating your realm. It's very happy in nature and a good addition to a laid back soundtrack.

Motion Tracks

The last three tracks were all composed based around the idea of motion.

Running In the Sun - Starts with a fun, in-your-face percussion, almost like the ticking of an old clock. Ted's rhythm guitar really gets the idea of motion going, and then the introduction of a moving percussion helps solidify it. This track was a lot of fun to put together!

The Earth And The Sky - While the earth is our rock, it is in constant motion. The way it moves with the sky was a really cool notion to play with. So for this piece, the interweaving of the background guitar with the melody represents this idea of the earth constantly moving, counter to the motion of the stars, the sun, the moon, the clouds, and sky.

Follow Me Down - For this piece, we thought about motion in terms of gravitational pull, but on a more human level. The earth's gravity pulls us down, but people also gravitate towards each other. We tried to represent that by having the guitar being the "instigator" in the music, and having the piano counter its melodies. This track is probably my favorite as Ted and I really got to play around with the push and pull of the music. Much like how people pull each other in, music can ebb and flow in a similar fashion.

Be sure to check out the soundtrack on BandCamp, or pick up a copy of the game to get the music in real time. As always, thank you for your continued support!

Pablo Vega

Composer & Lead Sound Designer, Arcen Games

Skyward Collapse Teaser Mini-Trailer

2013-05-10T12:50:00.001-04:00

How do you balance a war between towns without letting either side obliterate the other? How do you rule over gods, creatures, and men who refuse to obey you? How do you build a thriving landscape of villages against the threat of bandits and mythological powers? Skyward Collapse places you into the role of The Creator, and frees you to tackle these problems your own way. Brought to you by the developer of the modern strategy classic AI War: Fleet Command, Arcen's second full strategy title is equally unique (but far easier to learn): a turn-based 4x strategic god-game.

Your task is to build and populate the floating continent of Luminith. You can create -- but not control -- gods, creatures, and artifacts from both Greek and Norse mythology. The power you wield with these is immense. (As one example, Heimdall's horn causes everyone standing outside to drop dead.) Your task is to keep both factions alive until The Master calls you home -- but this is harder than it sounds. Bandits, along with periodic Woes add to the variety of challenges that you'll face in any given game. Every game plays out completely differently, and you'll need even the craziest of your powers in order to survive what lies in store for you.

Game Features
* A turn-based strategic god-game where you control neither faction, but instead strive to maintain the balance of power.
* Make towns, trade, diplomacy, and war as the boardgame-like floating continent continues to construct itself around you.
* Persuade your minions into doing what you want through incentives as well as controlling what buildings and resources they have access to.
* 16 gods, each with unique passive abilities and three active powers, help you further your goals as you pass into the Age of Monsters.
* Level up your player profile by winning games. Twelve related unlockable buildings in all!
* Straightforward controls paired with an intuitive and helpful interface make this an easy title to pick up... but the strategy runs deep.
* Multiple difficulty tiers let you play a very relaxed game up to a nail-bitingly difficult one. There's no one best way to win!
* Co-op multiplayer planned for 1.0 (but not available from the start of beta).

More Stuff!
Original teaser
Free wallpaper
Lengthy Q&A
Nick Trujillo Presents (comic)

Launches on Steam on May 23rd!

Nick Trujillo Presents: Skyward Collapse Comic Page 1

2013-05-06T10:45:00.000-04:00

I became aware of Nick Trujillo through the Strip Search reality show that Penny Arcade has been running. Nick was my personal favorite to win, so I was surprised to see him eliminated when he was. Bad days happen to everyone, though.

I have a huge love of comics in general, and so had been looking at the art that all the SS cartoonists had been doing on their websites. Hugely awesome stuff across the board. But when Nick was eliminated, I knew immediately I wanted to reach out and do a sort of PA Presents style of comic to help explain our newest game in a humorous fashion. It's always a challenge to get our message across clearly and concisely, but I also felt like Nick could create a work that would be funny and interesting on its own merits.

So here we are! This is the first of five pages, which will be released periodically leading up to the release of Skyward Collapse later this month. Enjoy!

Q&A For Skyward Collapse (Plus New Screenshots!)

2013-05-02T12:33:00.002-04:00

Even with a recent detailed interview that we did about our upcoming game Skyward Collapse, there have been a lot of questions about the game from our players in the forums. Rather than make you hunt through forum threads for the answers we've provided, we've collected them here!

Note: these are all taken out of context, and were originally comments where we are soliciting criticism of our marketing copy. None of these questions were asked in an antagonistic spirit.

Q: You've mentioned "Villages," which sounds kind of tiny and small scale, like I'm giving Bob the farmer a pitchfork to go stab Cletus on his donkey.

Well... this is a good point in some ways, but in other ways you've about got the right of it. Maybe "towns" instead of villages would give a better impression. This is not an all-out war on the scale of something like AI War, where there are vast armies going around. You are training professional military units, it's true, along with mythological creatures that do great harm. And it's also true that there are bandits that pop out to get you, etc. That said, this isn't army-on-army battle. It's about individual units running around and doing stuff for the short while that they survive, generally. ;)

In other words, the combat is consistent and potentially intense, but the scale of the units never gets too huge (that would also get tedious). In some respects that makes this a bit like a tactics game, except you can't control the tactics and you're using strategy to make the tactics play out (most likely) how you want. But I've drifted off point: what I originally was trying to say that the combat tends to stay small-scale because guys don't live very long. They're all bloodthirsty, and you can't tell them not to fight, so only one of two things are going to happen: a) they are going to go ravage the other side's towns while you do nothing; b) you're going to help the other side raise a counter-force and thus that first bloodthirsty dude is going to die. And back and forth from there.

Anyhow, there's also a distinct town-on-town flavor here. You can build multiple towns per faction (and in longer games, will need to), and each town pretty much just wars (or tries for diplomacy) with its nearest neighbor. If one town falls then it flips allegiances, and the balance of power swings pretty heavily. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you're going to wield your god powers. At any rate, it makes the town-on-town aspect pretty important.

Q: You've mentioned "artifacts" a few times, but what really are those?

1. Mythological Tokens (Global Effect): These are kind of like "global enchantments" in MTG. Basically, you place one of these for a faction (at a hefty specialized resource cost), and then something happens to all your dudes (or all the enemy dudes, or all buildings of a certain sort, or whatever) for X number of turns. Typically something substantial changes for 3-5 turns.

2. Mythological Tokens (Unit Pickups): These are kind of like "enchant creatures" in MTG. You place one of these for a faction (again at a hefty specialized resource cost)... and then various units vie for it. Typically the first 5 units of either side (or bandits) to reach it will get whatever the bonus is. Some of them are limited to only ranged units or only mythological creatures or whatever, so everyone else ignores it. But these things confer a permanent status effect of some sort onto the units that pick them up, making them more powerful in some unique way.

3. Ruins (Unit Pickups): Sometimes you can control these, a lot of times (depending on the map type) they just pop up themselves. These work basically like mythological tokens in that they give status bonuses to the first 5 dudes to reach them. Anybody but a god can go visit these, and will, of their own accord. There's a set list of more generic bonuses here, rather than the faction-specific stuff from the mythological tokens. But these upgrades can still swing the normal balance of power around in a moderate fashion for a short while.

Thus far, the first three things we've talked about are all "moderate effects" for the most part. These have a sizable effect on the game, but it's not nuclear-warhead levels of drastic.

4. God Tokens: Each god has 3 of these, so there are 48 of them in all. There are a very small number of duplicates between gods (maybe 6-8 out of 48, I've not counted it up), but the gods themselves are all unique. These god tokens range from "very serious" in consequences to "cataclysmic." Holy moly are these OP. That's not exploitable, that's actually a problem for you since you're trying to maintain balance. But if you want to really do well, you need to use these things... and then figure out how to recover from what you just did to yourself. ;) The mechanic is that the god related to the token immediately seeks it out once you place it, and then when they reach it the effect immediately happens.

A few example god tokens:
Mjolnir (Thor): When he reaches Mjolnir, he immediately destroys the entire nearest enemy town, including the town center. This token cannot be placed on a building.
Reginnaglar (Njord): All allied buildings that currently exist get a permanent 100% bonus to their health based on their base health.
Skadi's Skis (Skadi): All allied units currently on the board gain the power to cross mountains at no movement penalty.
Gjallarhorn (Heimdall): All non-god units on the map, allied, enemy, and bandit -- all get killed at once, and his faction gets the destruction points for all of them. (This is the horn he blows at the start of the end of the world, in mythology).
Bow (Apollo): All allied archery range units on the board at the time become invulnerable for 10 turns. (Um... ow. Archery units are already really intense as it is, since they can attack from range without taking damage).
Necklace of Harmonia (Athena): Every unit on her faction is killed, however your resources are increased by 4x the number of resources required to create each unit.
Serpent (Ares): All bandits on the board join your faction.

And so on and so forth. So when it comes to "artifacts," I was referring to these various kinds of tokens. These aren't things that just come out of the woodwork to mess with you (ruins aside, and those don't have an enormous impact most of the time). They are things that you willingly, intentionally, do to yourself. "Bring me the whipping switch, boy." In order to meet the criteria of your edicts, or complete challenges, or just pursue a high score, these are things you have to inflict on yourself. And then once you've inflicted one thing on yourself, that kind of sets of a chain reaction of things you have to do in order to continuously try to maintain that balance of power.

Round 1 of the game is comparably tame because you don't have any gods or god tokens yet. It's all positioning and setting up your towns, and other moderate effects like the mythological creatures and mythological tokens. You can rack up a lot of success there, and it's an important part of the game, but you're not likely to completely blow your leg off by accident in that round. Once the gods come out... watch out.

Q: I get the impression that a town is a single-tiled object that contained a list of building, and units will spawn from these building. Do they instead sprawl and visibly grow as you develop then?

Yeah, that's a good point -- our screenshots thus far have not shown that, or even the units, for that matter! Will have to rectify that soon. At any rate, town centers are a single tile, and then there are two rings of town buildings possible around them (for a total of 24 buildings that can be ringed around a single TC). We started out with just one ring, aiming for smaller (more specialized) towns, but with just 8 slots for buildings it's impossible to fit everything in. Towns need a variety of buildings to stay healthy and not succumb to crime, bandits, or the other faction.

And that's just the buildings in a town. All of the raw-resource producers (as opposed to "finished goods" producers) are located outside of town. Your chapmen ferry goods from the raw resource producers into the town center, from which the raw resources can be used in any town. The finished goods require a producer in a specific town for when it comes to military units that are auto-produced there, though. So your store of pigs and sheep from outlying pig farms is universal, but your supply of bacon or mutton at a single town depends on the presence of a butcher. Same with the need for fletchers, carpenters, stone masons, and so on and so forth. As you unlock further things, you get into stuff like wells and breweries.

Q: It's clear that there is no doctrine of total-war intrinsic to the people, but they fight and many of the example artifacts boost that rather than work on towns themselves. There also does not seem to be an over-arching empire with each town doing their own thing with every other town (i.e. not killing their allies).

Right. It's a collection of independent towns. There's no organization of the units at all, they all pursue their own independent agendas. The agendas are fairly predictable (except when things get complicated), so you can guide your folks by guiding the circumstances. That's a big part of how you "trick" your guys to doing what you want: give them few options in a given circumstance, or put them into a situation where you can predict their reactions with some fairly high degree of accuracy.

Q: How many god tokens are there versus mythological tokens?

Overall there are 64 tokens, and 48 of them come from the gods. 8 mythological tokens are available to each faction throughout each game, and then a further 3 god tokens are available to each faction per each god they choose (so by round 3, if both your gods are still living at a given faction, you've got 14 tokens total available to you). So it depends on how you look at it: in the course of a given game, the larger number of tokens are actually the mythological ones. But overall the god tokens vastly outnumber the mythological ones.

Q: Whenever I'm describing AI War to people, the part I always talk about is the attack on the AI Home Fortress: my fleet of thousands upon thousands of ships, firing everything they've got at this massive, impenetrable shield while the AI's gigantic guns hammer back. Dozens or hundreds of ships dying with every blast of the fortress's cannons. That, for me, is the defining moment of that game: the experience it offers that no other game does. Is there a similar defining moment for Skyward Collapse, and if so, what is it?

It's hard to say, honestly. Even with AI War, it's hard to say to some extent -- that's the defining moment for you when it comes to AI War, but to me that's just kind of the last formality. It's not that victory at the end of a long game is a formality, as you know (unlike other RTS games), but what I mean is that it's just not that exciting for me. What I love most in AI War is split between the early and middle game: a) I really love the expansion into nearby planets, and the sense of that "gold rush" to set up an early empire based on what I find before the AI can really react; and b) I absolutely love the back-and-forth in the middle of the game, when I am overreaching myself a bit and the AI and I are trading control (militarily speaking) of a central planet or two while I look for further targets to jump off to.

In other words, I think that the defining aspect of the AI War experience is that it makes you feel like an awesome space commander, based on what most people have said and how I myself feel. But what evokes that feeling most varies from person to person. I think that some people get that feeling most just from the mere fact of playing 10/10 difficulty games and being in a constant struggle with the AI. So in other words, I think that the defining feature is more of an emotion, more of an abstract feeling, rather than a specific event -- when you're talking about general people, not a specific individual.

Speaking of Skyward itself... I think that the emotion (to me) boils down to a few things:

1. Building a really pretty and satisfyingly functional landscape.

2. Having the godlike power to really smash up anything I feel like. If bandits are really giving me problems, I have some pretty huge things I can use against them if I've played it smart up until that point. In other words, really feeling somewhat all-powerful despite the challenges and constraints that are put on you.

3. Figuring out ways to kick myself in the teeth as hard as I can, and then get back up and use that as an actual advantage. Most of the god powers, in some senses, are a kick in the teeth. Josh has actually been a bit worried that people won't use the more powerful ones, some of which I detailed above. Those things are devastating to whatever you were doing. But the thing is, if you want to win and win well, there's so much cleverness you can exercise with those god powers. Which gods you choose matters, and which god powers you activate when matters, and how you set up your towns prior, during, and after that matters. You can do all sorts of (for lack of a better term) combos with those pieces, to get desired effects. To me this sort of thing is fun, because I'm setting the bar higher and higher for myself, and then struggling to reach it. The edicts and so forth set minimum bars, and the challenges cause you added troubles if you reach for too many at once, but there's also a certain "what awesomeness can I pull off today" aspect to the game, which gets expressed as a high score. Normally I'm not the sort to care about scores, but I think it's more interesting here.

4. Speaking of emotions, this game is mostly pretty chill. Like Sim City or Pharaoh or Civilization, I find all those games pretty relaxed. They are turn-based, the music isn't trying to freak you out, and the pace and scale is such that you can understand things from the starting small scale and then all along as the scale grows. It's really different from AI War where it's hugely intimidating from the start, both in terms of complexity (as a new player) and in terms of the scenario (in terms of your odds of winning even if you are extremely experienced). That is in no way saying that Skyward is an easy game (heck, SimCity and Civilization are both extremely difficult, or can be), but I think that being fairly chill is common to most simulation games and god games. Sure there are times when you are ripping your hair out or screaming at the screen, but it's different from being on a clock or being David vs Goliath. I don't think I expressed myself very well on this point, but hopefully that makes some semblance of sense.

Q: Just to clarify. Are you actually building the continent? Or are you just building on it?

Yes, you are building the continent itself. You can't place buildings on existing land, for instance. Instead, you place pieces of land that have buildings on them, making the continent bigger. You can also directly place land pieces yourself, or smite them and replace them (which sometimes you want or do not want a mountain range, or want to use some marshes to your advantage, or whatever).

Q: At the moment, I don't quite see how the replayability will be extended beyond the number of edicts I choose to take and the units I can set loose. Does the creator controls almost every variable in the eponymous creation of the island? Where are the potential sources of randomization?

In terms of controlling every variable: no, you don't. Most of the land tiles that pop up are not by your choosing, and the bandits popping in are also not by your choosing. We also have some other stuff that we probably won't introduce before profiles reach a few levels in (to give players a bit of breathing room at the start). Josh and I have talked about a "suggestions" mechanic from The Master, but lately I've been thinking a "propositions" (not in that sense) mechanic from units themselves might be more interesting.

There's also randomization in a very butterfly-effect sort of fashion. In other words, just having a few tiles different, or a guy making a random roll slightly differently, means that the outcomes are different. For instance, I had a scenario that I was testing just last night to make sure something worked: Adamantine, a mythological token. It gives the one dude who picks it up 100x his normal health and attack -- holy heck, right!? But it also spawns 20 bandits at the end of that turn. In one outing of this, he killed all the bandits within a few turns and had 65% of his health remaining. In another 14/20 of the bandits were remaining after he died. The difference there was both in which bandits appeared, and where.

Anyhow, there are already a triumvirate of goals in any game as it stands:
1. Make it to the end without failing your edicts or having genocide.
2. Make the highest score possible... because, come on, it shows you're awesome. ;)
3. Work on the 100 challenges, which unlock new stuff, and which are not something you'll blow through in a couple of hours.

In other words, for $5 the replay value is completely off the hook. I wouldn't say that it has AI War levels of replayability by any stretch, but neither did AI War when AI War first came out. If Skyward takes off, I hope to do with this what we've done with AI War, in terms of the combination of free DLC and paid DLC to keep it growing for a long time

Q: When I create the island, do I play a game of Carcassone with all the tiles in my hand?

It's funny you mention the randomization of what you can place in Carcassone-like fashion. That's exactly how this game started and was conceived. And oh MAN was it not fun.

Q: Or do I play whatever is available to me at the time so I can't easily do things like place village on hill -> make killzone with marsh -> stock archers -> village become invincible to melee units.

Bear in mind that everything costs resources, and you are pursuing multiple objectives at once. If you had no secondary objectives, then sure you could just set up a stalemate in various ways and everyone would be safe and happy. However, if you don't create military units then your cities crumble into crime. And your military units won't stay still if they have access to enemy towns or enemies in general: they will run off and attack. So that archery stronghold you mentioned would instead be a breeding ground for archers running around the map, not staying where you wanted them to. If those archers prove TOO effective, you're going to be struggling against yourself on the other side to fix what you just wrought.

On the other hand, if you block off your archers so that they can't reach the enemies directly but can just shoot at them, that actually would work... for a little while, until you die. ;) See, the military units won't actually move unless they have an enemy in their sight range or an enemy town center that they can path to. So if you make the enemy fortifications perfect, you'll get a backup blockage of guys in your "perfectly safe" town. That sounds fine, until you learn that more than one unit can't stand on a tile. And that military production facilities can't produce units while someone is standing on them. And then you remember the crime factor, and in a dozen or so turns that perfectly safe town belongs to the bandits from forces within.

The whole "do I do whatever I want" sort of argument is kind of like saying the same thing in any any strategy game. And I know the next argument in that: "but you're playing against a (human or AI) opponent there, rather than playing both sides." Which is true, but here you are playing against an equally challenging... let's call it "environmental situation." If you just doodle around, the game kills you.

Q: I can bring into being any god in every game?

Yes, but for purposes of challenges and otherwise you're encouraged to choose different ones at different times. Also, depending on the map or on other circumstances (ie what else you are trying to accomplish in a specific game), you'll find that some gods are way better suited for some things than others. Lots of bandits around? Yeah, you're going to pick Ares most likely. Working on lots of trade? Foolish not to pick Pan.

But the thing is, you're rarely doing just ONE thing at a time if you're playing at an advanced level... so the choices aren't so obvious. Or even if the choice of a god is obvious, choosing when and how to use his/her powers certainly is not.

Q: I foresee complaints along the lines of "I buffed the Greek archers with invincibility, but they didn't go on the attack!" Free-will is a fickle thing.

Your archers will never just sit around if they have any route to enemies. If they are sitting around, it's your fault. The complaints would come in the form of "argh, you made small decision X instead of Y, and now my larger schemes need some adjusting." That's part of what Josh and I both were adamant the game needed somewhat predictable AI in the units. If you have archers, and they have somewhere to go, you can be 100% sure they will start heading out. Which exact place they go, or who they meet and how they fight along the way... that's a different matter. But since this plays out over turns, you can kind of see how things are developing and airdrop minotaurs or whatever where needed. ;)

The free will here isn't terribly fickle: it's where the rand() you're looking for comes from.

Q: The AI is sounding a lot like Dwarf Fortress'. The potential for carnage is unlimited!

DF is a lot more complex in that you can set rules for individual dwarves, whereas here the rules are built into the unit type from the get-go. But otherwise, yeah; I think there's some similarity there.

Skyward Collapse Wallpaper

2013-04-25T09:21:00.003-04:00

Skyward Collapse is heading to 1.0 in just about a month, and beta within about two weeks. We'll have more details on the game as we get closer and closer to that time, plus a few other surprises that I think you'll find very fun.

In the meantime, I'd like to share with you this awesome wallpaper that was created by our very own Daniette "Blue" Wood. I haven't officially announced this before, and should have, but we have a new art director! You can read a bit about her on our About Us page. Folks in the forums for the game have been enjoying periodically getting to watch her livestream her work on this particular piece.

This wallpaper is also the background of the main menu for the game, and you'll be seeing it as the main "promo art" for the game in general. Click on the above image to get the full-size 1920x1080 version for you to download. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Apparently blogger sized down the image to 1600x900 without my realizing it. I've uploaded the full-size version on the forum thread about this post.

Skyward Collapse Teaser 2: Unit Sketches and More Details

2013-04-14T12:46:00.001-04:00

So, we recently announced Skyward Collapse. If you missed it, it's something we're really excited about.

However, we only showed a single screenshot with some of the final-quality map tiles, tokens, and skies in them. Needless to say, the rest of the art is still in various states of completion, ranging from sketches to coloring to getting final polish on it. We have a great pipeline going with about 11 artists (10 at Heavy Cat, and then our new art director Blue on our side), so that's all proceeding well.

When it comes to the units themselves -- all the Greek and Norse people and gods that move around the map like boardgame pieces each turn -- we haven't shown anything with them until now. We're still working on the final coloring style for them, so I don't want to show any of the colored ones yet.

That said, we have a lot of wonderful sketches of them that will be directly translated into the final unit graphics shown in-game (in other words, these are more than concept sketches -- they are the actual graphics that will be used in the game, minus color and shading, at a larger scale than you'll see in the final game).

Norse Chapman -- The chapmen are the main civilian workers for each faction. Their primary responsibility is carrying raw resources from the resource producers to the town centers. The raw resources themselves are produced by different civilians (unseen in the buildings that they work in, though you have to staff those buildings), and the finished goods are created in a similar way in the town buildings related to each kind of finished good.

Norse Arsonist -- Since there's a limit to how many siege-type weapons the Norse actually historically used (that just wasn't their main fighting style), we had to get a bit creative. While our game is historically-based in some ways, it's also set in a fantasy world that is merely inspired by those civilizations. That gives us some creative license. In this particular case, we didn't have to take that much. The arsonists are considered a "siege unit," and their primary purpose is setting enemy buildings on fire. The buildings then take damage over time, while the arsonist moves from building to building in the enemy town or territory.

Norse Berserk -- Give these guys some bacon and weapons, and they're ready to rock. The Norse don't have any cavalry at all in this game, but they make up for it with several intimidating kinds of infantry. The Greeks and the Norse have very different units all around! Even their chapmen have different stats.

Pan (Greek) -- This is one of the Greek gods that you can choose to call to your aid as the game progresses. The gods all stand taller than the regular units (fit into a 128x128 square instead of a 96x96 square), making them more obviously and imposing.

Zeus (Greek) -- Here's an obvious example of one of the four "greater gods" that you get to choose from at the start of the third round of each game. The greater gods are a lot more powerful and have a big impact on the game... but each side has one!

About That Whole "Peacekeeping" Thing
We've had a lot of awesome coverage for the game already, for which we're extremely grateful! That said, there is a bit of a misconception based on my first blog post about this (which is my own fault) about your actual role as The Creator.

Basically, the perception was that you're in a peacekeeping role where you're trying to keep the two factions from fighting. This actually isn't remotely true: you want those dudes fighting as much as possible if you want a real score. What you're trying to prevent is genocide, or one side thoroughly dominating the other.

You want both sides to have some heavy warfare, in other words, in order to get the maximum sort of score. But while you're doing that, you want to prevent the following:

- One side obliterating the other (you lose if this happens).

- One side getting far ahead of the other (your final score is likely to be quite bad if this happens).

- Either side getting their economy so crippled that it's hard for them to carry on with their warfare (again, your final score is likely to suffer quite a bit, and/or the risk of genocide goes up).

Think of this kind of like the hundred years war, not the cold war. This isn't about creating an uneasy armistice with spots of minor conflict here and there; it's about creating all-out war (on a village-versus-village scale) with possible periods of calm (where the sides are rebuilding as needed). As a supreme being, you're not exactly that... benevolent.

Why is this distinction important? Well, the implications are pretty huge, really: your job is that much harder. If you're trying to maintain an armistice, that only involves so many moving parts. If you're trying to maintain heavy warfare while not absolutely crippling critical infrastructure or allowing either side to overtake the other too much... well, there are a lot more moving parts there.

Overall I think the press still has a pretty good bead on what this game is in general, but that was one point I thought worth clarifying!

Skyward Collapse Teaser 1

2013-04-11T16:40:00.004-04:00

Purely by coincidence, it's been exactly two weeks since we did our first teaser for our upcoming game Exodus of the Machine. But did you know we're actually working on two new titles at the moment?

Our second upcoming game is called Skyward Collapse, and it's just now reaching a point where we're ready to show our first screenshot of it. Aside from overlaying the logo in the lower left corner, this is exactly how the current build of the game looks as of about 10 minutes ago:

So just what is Skyward Collapse? It's a turn-based 4x simulation god-game.

Overall Gameplay
Set high in the sky atop a floating landmass that you are actively constructing as the game progresses, you oversee two warring factions (Greeks and Norse). Via solo play or co-op, you play as "The Creator," helping both sides of the conflict -- granting each side buildings, resources, and even new citizens.

However, the multitude of villages you create all have minds of their own, and will actively try to stomp the nearest still-standing village of the other faction. Given the resources and appropriate buildings, your villagers will gear up for war without your direct interaction, and will fight it out to the best of their abilities.

Unlike most strategy games, your goal isn't to have either of the sides win. "You" aren't represented by either of the sides, after all. Instead your goal is to balance this conflict as best you can so that neither side gets wiped out. You win by having the most points generated (read: most carnage) without either side committing genocide.

But you can't just strip them of the ability to gear up for war: roaming bandits make defense essential. Not to mention, crime in each village goes up and up the longer it's without a military presence, until it collapses into anarchy. You can construct embassies and assign traveling diplomats to them in an effort to reach a state of enlightenment where crime is no longer a threat, but this is difficult and only affects the two villages that are undergoing peace talks; their neighbors will remain as warlike as ever!

UPDATE: While we hadn't originally planned this, because of reader comments in a variety of places we've decided that we'll be adding a way to lose a campaign. Here is our current brainstorming on how to lose.

Game Structure And Objectives
Gameplay takes place over three rounds (with a brief setup round occurring prior to that), each with a fixed number of turns that you can choose when you start the game. During the time before your game ends, the goal is to get the highest possible score: your overall score is based on the lowest score of the two factions, so again keeping them in balance is key.

As you play, you'll also be trying to complete various meta-missions to increase your personal rank. Every 10 missions you complete, you unlock not only the next rank, but also a new building for your towns!

Units, Economy, and Mythology
Oh, did I mention mythology yet? Looks like not. During the first round of the game, it's mostly just you and your villagers. You can also directly summon certain powerful mythological creatures like minotaurs or the midgard serpent and so on, but these cost a lot of specialized resources that it takes a while to build up.

In round 2, you get to choose a Lesser God for each of the two factions. Hermes, Idunn, etc. Which one you choose out of your four options (per faction) has a big impact on how the rest of the game plays out. Then when round 3 starts, you get to choose a Greater God to go along with them. Zeus, Thor, and so on. There's four choices per side here, too.

All in all the economic and military options are what you'd expect for a simulation game, but it's also probably our most streamlined game ever. Easy to pick up, but there are already some really tricky advanced strategies that we've been coming up with.

Advanced Strategy Example
As one example of an advanced strategy: normally you can't control what units are being produced at, say, a barracks. There are four units that get created in rotation at the barracks, archery ranges, and siege workshops (four per building, all unique per side, I mean).

So there's no control there for you: presuming that the resources are in place for the next unit in the rotation, it just creates that unit. For a novice player, there's nothing here to think about, and it's all very simple. The barracks do what the barracks do.

However, the tricky part is that if you don't have the resources for the next unit in the rotation, then it keeps checking the other potential units in the queue until it finds one that it can create. Do you see the trick now?

I suppose I also now need to mention that there are a lot of resources in the game. Both "raw resources" which are collected and stored globally per faction, and then "finished goods" that are created on-demand by specialist craftsmen in an individual village. Pigs are a good example of a raw resource, whereas bacon is a finished good.

Currently there are 15 raw resources, and 11 finished goods. We're still polishing the exact mix of all those, though, so that may increase slightly by the time beta starts. If that sounds overwhelming, it's not: the resources all have clearly-defined straightforward ways of being produced, and clearly-defined ways of being used. Mostly your choice of how you gather and refine resources boils down to what you're trying to accomplish for a given faction or a specific village. The resource production pipeline is actually one of your primary ways of exerting indirect control over your factions.

See the advanced strategy now? Each unit at a military training facility has at least one resource that is unique to it, as well as some that are common to all of the units in that facility. Therefore, you can control what units get produced in the rotation based on which finished goods you make available to that village. Even better, you can figure out ways to manage the resources such that there are synergies between the different training facilities in a single village.

Other Things
Let's see, there are trading posts with a pretty straightforward trader model (but your traders are at risk of being attacked as they travel, which is what makes it interesting). There are the aforementioned embassies. There are three levels of schools to buff units in the towns containing those schools. There is an (non-visual) upgrade model for all buildings and units.

You can place dozens of "special tokens" that are either general-mythological or specific-god-related. You can smite land tiles, or make "military commandments" that gives some overriding orders to all the units of one faction (so that's a pretty big broadsword to be used carefully).

And there's some other stuff too, but this hits most of the high points from a broad level. We're quite excited to be sharing this with you soon -- hopefully beta will be starting before the end of April, with a 1.0 in May! When we hit beta we'll have everything in place and it will mostly be a matter of balance.

Exodus Of The Machine Teaser 1

2013-03-28T10:36:00.001-04:00

Exodus Of The Machine is a new strategic journey game by Arcen Games, set in the universe of the cult classic AI War: Fleet Command. Lead a team trapped on a hostile planet and desperately pursuing a threat which could destroy humanity outright.

Vicious predators, clashing armies, and political intrigue stand in your way. None can stand before your modern weapons, but where do you use your limited ammunition? Do you resort to diplomacy, or native weapons? Will you fall to disease or run out of food stores? Can you get to the end in time?

Exodus combines Arcen's love of all things strategic within a framework reminiscent of our old favorite Oregon Trail.

This is a title we've been quietly working on. It's "coming soon," which is a vague way of saying that it will be in 2013 but that we don't want to commit to a date yet. We wanted to share a bit with you about what we're working on, but right now the above is all we're comfortable revealing. We'll have something a bit more meaty for you next time!

Two Shattered Haven Let's Plays With Developer Commentary

2013-03-22T08:34:00.000-04:00

If you missed the announcement on our main news blog, Shattered Haven 1.0 is now out! You can pick it up on Steam, Gog.com, GamersGate, Green Man Gaming, or the Arcen site.

In this below video, I walk you through parts of two overworld areas, and completes three levels in the Snow Hill section. For those looking to get a better feel for how the game flows, including seeing both single-screen and multi-screen levels, look no further!

The start is a bit slow with some cutscenes, skip ahead to about 3:00 if you just want to get straight to the action.

In this next video below, I walk you through the process of creating a new level using the built-in level editor for the game. This includes doing a bit of minor scripting, even -- definitely a hugely helpful video if you're looking to get into the nitty-gritty of the level editor with Shattered Haven.

This level editor is hugely powerful, and is the same one used to create the intricate levels and storyline of the game itself. If you're into level creation or even adventure design, this editor is a dream come true!

While reviews are still coming in, we were late on getting things to the press because of wanting to get the game polished up before sending it to them. Still, a few choice quotes:

We’ve been talking about Arcen Games for a while now and if there is one thing you can certainly appreciate about them is that every one of their games is a unique product. Shattered Haven which was released this week is a different title from their previous games and may be their strongest showing yet.
-- Josh Bycer, Game Wisdom

Overall, “Shattered Haven” is a solid action / puzzle game that will certainly get the adrenaline pumping. 8/10
-- Dad's Gaming Addiction

Enjoy!

Just What Is This "Shattered Haven" Thing, Anyway?

2013-03-18T11:53:00.001-04:00

Recently we put up a couple of gameplay videos, and hopefully that helps answer a lot of the questions right there. But if you're not into videos, or still have questions, read on.

Story-Driven Structure
When you first start a new game, it takes you through a brief tutorial level that also contains a goodly bit of story. On "new game plus," it skips these levels. Once you're past the tutorial, you emerge into the first overworld area, the Phoenix Forest.

The Phoenix Forest is the first of nine main overworld areas. Each one contains a number of required levels in it, as well as some bonus levels that are hidden and/or harder. Not all of the overworld areas are accessible in a single playthrough, as the story branches. And one overworld area isn't available at all until new game plus.

What Are These Levels?
The levels themselves are basically what you're seeing in the videos linked above. A single level typically has you coming in with no weapons or tools, and then having to make do with whatever you can find in the level. They're basically environmental puzzles, and many of them have multiple solutions.

There are also bonus objectives on each level that you can complete to get a better score and a gold marker outside the level. These bonus objectives are a lot more challenging, and generally also require knowledge of the level to complete, so you won't do them on your first try. New game plus remembers all your scores and level completion statuses, which is handy.

Each level usually has the goal of killing all the grays (zombies) inside it, although sometimes your goal is just to escape or to kill any one evil animal or similar. The grays are only weak to iron, water, and fire, so things like regular bullets don't hurt them. However, you can use a handgun (or if you later find it, a rifle) to stun them momentarily. Those same guns can be used to kill hostile animals or other creatures.

Lots Of Variety
There are almost 100 levels in the game, and there's twelve main weapons as well as thirteen main tools, and a handful of other items. There are also some levels where you use the environment itself to kill grays in novel ways, such as stunning them with your whip so they get caught in an avalanche, or pulling a lever that causes a trapdoor to open.

A lot of the tools and weapons can be used in multiple ways, or combined to create novel effects. As one example the lantern can be used to light your way, or it can be used to set sticks and so forth on fire. Grenades are useful for their initial blast, but also for creating holes behind them. Shovels can dig through dirt walls, or fill in those same kinds of holes the grenades leave. Hmm. And so on.

The styles of levels vary pretty widely, too. Some are incredibly head-scratchingly tricky. Often those are bonus levels. Some are a little more reflex-oriented, and aren't really much of a puzzle at all. Others are mazes, others are logic puzzles.

The vast majority, however, are tactical engagements where you get dropped into hostile territory, grab for weapons and other deterrents, and then set about dismantling the enemy in the most efficient manner than occurs to you. Rather like being a lone special forces dude dropped into a hot zone. All of the levels are hand-crafted to make this as interesting and varied as possible.

Thick Atmosphere
During the alpha and beta we ran, one of the big things that kept coming up was how cool the atmosphere of the game is. The graphics and lighting, and in particular the writing and music and sound work, combine to create a world that is decidedly creepy and mildly unsettling. There are a few segments that will get your pulse going more, in particular related to story events that you probably won't see coming.

The story itself is a bit unusual, in that it's about adults looking out for their families, rather than adolescent adventurers out to save the world. These people don't want to be out doing what they are doing, but they're forced into it by circumstances. That's interesting to me, and it also affects the general tone and mood.

Full Level Editor
All the levels in the game were created by an in-game level editor that is included with the game. It's right there on the main menu. It's a little complex, particularly if you get into scripting events or cutscenes, but it's also possible to do some straightforward stuff pretty easily. The key thing is that it's extremely powerful, so for people who really get into this they can create some entire stories and adventures of their own.

And that's about it!

Shattered Haven Launch Trailer -- 1.0 is March 18th!

2013-03-15T09:55:00.004-04:00

Shattered Haven goes to 1.0 on Monday, March 18th, 2013! Get the game from the Arcen site, Steam, Gog.com, GamersGate, or Green Man Gaming!

An Environmental Puzzle Game About Family, Grit, and Survival

Grays roam the land, largely in the absence of human interference. These aren't your typical Zed -- theirs is a very different sort of apocalypse. Animals spontaneously transform into twisted, violent beings. The earth decays, collapsing into a network of abysses. The wilderness thickens.

It has been nine years since That Day when it all started. Pockets of humanity still exist, but are ignorant of one another. Within these isolated havens people try to live as best they can -- for even in a world so broken and dark, daily life must go on.

Darrell and Mary Williams were able to build such a life inside a five-acre fenced yard out in the country. They were even secure enough in their isolated compound that they had a daughter five years after the zombie-like grays appeared.

Life carried on as normally as it could, until another refugee on the run is killed during a nearby attack. Her son is saved and taken in by the Williamses -- who do not realize that this kind action will destroy their home and threaten their entire family. They find themselves caught in the midst of a struggle between two eldritch horrors, and the path to survival is anything but clear.

Two Shattered Haven Videos (Oh And Beta Started Today)

2013-03-08T21:11:00.002-05:00

If you missed the announcement on our main news blog, Shattered Haven has now entered beta! I didn't quite have any video footage ready for the launch, but now I've got two for you.

The voiceovers are done by Prince Taylor, who is the voice of Darrell in the 11 voiced scenes in the game (the bulk of those are part of the various endings you can get, but 4ish of them come during the game itself).

These two videos are pretty much the first public footage of the game, other than a shaky-cam sort of video from a trade show last fall. It was hard to see much of anything on that older video, and it was a much older version of the game, too. A lot of players have been trying to get a sense for how this game really plays, and so both of these videos include a solid segment of continuous gameplay footage.

If you like it, remember that the game is 25% off its normal price of $9.99 USD through March 18th, when it goes to 1.0.

Enjoy!

Twelve Shattered Haven Screenshots

2013-03-07T10:59:00.001-05:00

I can't quite say that these are the "first" screenshots of Shattered Haven, because there were some really ancient ones posted of the game way back in 2009, and more recently I posted about the evolution of the graphics of one particular level.

So there have been little peeks here and there, but by and large we've not shown the in-game graphics for the game because we wanted them to be final or near-final before getting too much scrutiny of them. As you can see from the older screenshots linked to above, the game has evolved a LOT.

We're now imminently close to starting beta, and actually 1.0 is darn close, too. Beta will likely start tomorrow, and 1.0 is expected to be on the 18th. We're finally very, very close to being done with this game, which started development in January 2008 (there were some large gaps in those five years where we didn't work on it at all, obviously).

Anyway, with all that in mind, here are twelve screenshots of some of the various levels in the game. There's not anything particularly spoiler-y in these, by design, so you can look at them freely. There are a very few non-finalized bits of art here and there in some of the screenshots, but I doubt you'd be able to pick out the differences between this and final if I showed you these and final screenshots side by side. So this is pretty much what 1.0 is going to look like!

Soundcloud Player: Valley 2 Theme Song - To One Who'll Stand And Fight

2013-01-31T09:11:00.000-05:00

For anyone who hasn't heard it yet -- or who wants to share it, as we've had some requests for that as well -- here is a soundcloud player version of Pablo's amazing new theme song for Valley 2. To One Who'll Stand And Fight features both him and his wife Hunter singing, with her singing the main lyrics in the middle of the song. This is definitely some of Pablo's finest work ever!

Valley 2 and Shattered Haven Plans and Status

2013-01-18T09:37:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to clarify where we are with Valley 2, what our goals and priorities are at the moment, and what's been happening lately. We're getting close to the end, and things are getting quite busy (as if they weren't already), so clarifying these things might help our beta testers in particular know where things stand.

What's Been Going On Lately
Me -- As you've noticed, I've been mostly focused on the monsters, but also with some asides for a few other things like controller support, aiming, and various miscellany. I've also been working on coordinating everyone else, the art, and working on getting the code for Shattered Haven where we need it to be. Right now I'm kind of running a mile a minute, and actually worked all through last weekend to get more stuff done.

Keith -- He is spearheading the implementation, internal testing, and balancing of the strategic side of the game. He and I are working together on actual design of this. When he's not on strategic stuff, he's on mostly multiplayer-related bugs, most of which take a really long time to solve individually compared to most other kinds of bugs.

Josh -- He is spearheading the monster and spell balance fine-tuning, and anything to do with bad slices, as well as overseeing the slices that are coming in. He's also been overseeing some parts of object artwork that are coming in, although that's been put on hold for a few weeks for him due to time issues. And most importantly, he's been reading all the feedback on the forums and mantis, and trying to come up with a concentrated list of what is most important for us to address sooner than later at any given time; Keith and I also read, but it's a big job to get to everything and someone needs to hold it all in their head; someone who is not me, because my head is full of design and code right now. The problem is that Josh has been seriously ill for about 12 days now, though he's getting better now. That's made us a bit short-handed, and so some of these things have fallen behind temporarily. Nothing to worry about, but it's why some of the balance isn't more finely tuned than it is thus far.

Where We're Headed - January
Me -- Overall, we're planning 116ish monsters for Valley 2. I say "ish" because it was 114 just a week ago, but two got added because I had ideas and art for them. My goal for January is to get most, or if possible ALL, of those monsters in by the end of the month. In addition to that, I'm trying to get all the remaining base code in place for Shattered Haven by the end of this month, and do my various managerial/design things as needed also. Aside from that, I'll also be addressing the most critical bugs and other issues that I (or Josh) think are really detracting from the game in the short term and/or need a lot of testing. That's pretty much all I'm going to have time for this month, and it's going to be a stretch (and tons of overtime) for me to hit just that.

Keith -- The big goal for Keith this month is getting the strategic game settled down. We have a fourth round of major improvements to it that we came up with yesterday, and I think that you'll be really excited to see these. But anyway, there's lots of testing and balancing and implementation work on the strategy side, and then after each round of changes we sit down and talk about what we think can be improved from there based on our own experiences and your feedback. We feel we're getting close on this one, but I've reserved most of the rest of January for Keith to focus on pretty much solely this (getting in more multiplayer fixes as he can beyond this).

Josh -- Balance balance balance is the big priority for Josh this month. My goal is for all of the monsters and spells to be in the right ballparks by the end of the month, and that's a big job. It's hampered partly by the fact that I'm still constantly adding monsters, and that underscores another reason why I'm making such a concerted push to get all of those out this month. Beyond this, Josh is still fixing bad slices that are identified as soon as possible whenever they do happen (those tend to be game-breaking), and he's also still internalizing and reporting on the cumulative feedback from mantis, the forums, and so on. That way nothing that's too huge an issue completely escapes our notice, and that way we have a solid work-list in hand for after the January sprint is over.

Where We're Headed - February
As Keith puts it, "there are two phases to coding: bugging and debugging." My goal is to get as much of the bugging as possible, and all of the broad balance and design, implemented and done in January. Once we transition to February, the focus will be on polish, finalizing balance, getting everything tuned up and fun, and so on. Also getting the last of the art in place, and getting all of that finalized by mid-February, when our 1.0 is going to be ready.

So that's pretty well the plan -- I thought you might like to know the schedule, and where our focus is at each point. Right now we're busily "bugging" as fast as we can, and if we're not responding to all bugs as fast as we often do, it's because of the two-tier structure that we decided to go through this go-round. Come February, if we hit our January goals properly, we'll be doing nothing BUT debugging and balancing. On this game and Shattered Haven, actually (though with Shattered Haven, there will still be some story bits, and some later overworld bits, that are being implemented; but that's level design, not code; and largely Zack is the one doing that).

Everyone Else!
Oh, and not that I'm ignoring Pablo, Erik, Zack, or all the fine folks at Heavy Cat -- they're all working like mad as well.

Pablo has only one remaining track for Valley 2, but it has some choral vocal bits that he's still waiting on one voice recording from a colleague for. Beyond that he's working away on the soundtrack for Shattered Haven.

Zack has been working steadily on level design and story integration for Shattered Haven since September, and he's done an amazing job.

Erik did a lot of writing for Valley 2, but we're all set on that now; he and Zack and I were also coordinating on the story and writing for Shattered Haven, and now he and Zack have taken up the mantle of finishing that without quite as much input from me since I'm stretched so thin. He's also been coordinating with Kevin about trailers for both games, doing all his usual PR and marketing work, and so on and so forth.

Heavy Cat has a core of around sixish artists finishing up the art for Valley 2, and I'm really excited about how that's going. At one point there were 23 artists working on the game, but having a smaller core to do the finishing touches makes it feel more cohesive and consistent all around. A couple of their artists are solely focused on polishing existing pieces at this point, while the rest are focused on getting the remaining art assets in place largely by the start of February as well. Then they'll have a little more breathing room to do any final polish in Feb as well.

Heavy Cat also has a talented team of pixel artists working on finishing up the last 380 or so sprite frames for Shattered Haven; I believe it's three or four people working on that at the moment. For the comic panels, we have all that we're going to need for now with that game, although post-release (or in an expansion) we might do more. Work on this pixelart is going to extend into February some, but in plenty of time for Shattered Haven's 1.0 to release about a week after Valley 2's 1.0 version comes out.

Both games are really coming along super well, and our schedule for both seems very attainable (if hurried this month in particular), but with 2-3 weeks remaining after the main schedule for us to just focus on polish for both of the games. It's really important, and really nice, for us to have that breathing room. It's something we didn't do with AVWW1, to my regret. Anyway, there's a sense of high excitement both at Heavy Cat and Arcen about both of these games, as they each close in on the end of quite long journeys. Shattered Haven goes all the way back to January 2008 for me!

That's the news. Cheers!

Valley 2 Enters Private Alpha -- First Alpha Screens And Video!

2012-12-14T00:17:00.001-05:00

Up until now, I've been guarded about showing media relating to A Valley Without Wind 2, and with good reason, I think. These things take time to do right, and we're now hitting the point where we're really proud to start sharing this with a wider audience.

First off, here's the new video -- it's more or less a Let's Play where I walk you around through a bit of the early game. Apologies for the sound of the game kind of drowning out my explanations in a few parts there.

And screenshots (you can click them to enlarge them):

Heavy Cat Studios, who has been contracted to do the art for this game, has really been doing a superb job, eh? Bear in mind that some of this isn't final yet, and there's still more to come. All in all the art for this game involved over 3,500 individual pieces of art (including animation frames in that number), and that's an enormous order that they've been turning around in a really stellar amount of time.

Did Someone Say Private Alpha?
I did, indeed. The first batch of players has the game now, and we'll be doing more batches over the next few days. We only get to collect each person's first impression once, and having a strong start to the game (with it being easy to pick up) is important to us. So we're doing alpha in multiple groups in order to make sure we make the best use of the first impressions available to us at this early stage.

What About Public Beta?
We're expecting to hit public beta early next week, probably Monday or Tuesday. We still have a lot of art to add and monsters and characters to add before we hit 1.0 in January, but the game is imminently playable at the moment and quite a bit of fun.

As soon as we're certain we've got the initial experience down the way we want based on player feedback, and have a few more coats of polish here and there, we'll be all set for beta.

So What, In A Nutshell, Is Different From A Valley Without Wind 1?
Well, the art is obviously very much better -- that's an easy one. But pretty much the entirety of the gameplay has been revamped, too. The original game had drifted a lot toward the MMO genre in its design, and we've reigned that back in and are planted solidly back in Metroidvania territory where we had always intended to be.

Even within the genre of Metroidvania, we're doing some really interesting and unique things, though. Combat is more visceral and tactile this time around. Spells have mass and can block each other, and the way enemies are designed and placed has been re-thought from the ground up. Combat has been slowed down to some extent, but also made far more intense.

The "mage classes" give defined loadouts that are still way more flexible than your average Metroidvania title. And the feats and perks give interesting customization. While our interpretation of equipment gives a mild taste of random loot drops, though that's not a major focus here; if you're expecting a Diablo or a Torchlight experience, you're going to be sorely disappointed with that aspect. But it's really cool and unique for the Metroidvania genre.

With AVWW1 we first tried having a strategy game and a citybuilding game as part of it. Then we cut the strategy and just focused on the citybuilding. Then we revised the citybuilding bits several times. It never really accomplished what we wanted, although each iteration was interesting in its own right.

Here there is a very defined strategy game that is extremely tightly coupled into the main Metroidvania gameplay -- you literally can't progress in either mode of play without playing them both, and you'll find yourself flipping back and forth between modes every few minutes, keeping either one from getting monotonous. I'm extremely excited about how this is turning out on the strategic side.

The other thing is that with the first game there wasn't much of a story to speak of -- lots of backstory, sure, but not much going on with your specific characters. Since there was permadeath, you had just a run of bunches of Generic Character #5s that you'd never get that attached to. Here you play as one character the whole time, and there's a lot more dialogue and interactions with both your rebel allies and your evil foes. The overlord isn't some abstract presence that is "oppressing people" in ways unseen -- he's actively out there in the world oppressing you at every turn. No NPCs are going to have to tell you that guy has it coming. ;)

And lastly, the design has really been tightened. Gone is the crafting, the permadeath, the missions that you go on (NPC dispatch missions are still here), the worlds of infinite size, and a host of other extraneous things that were getting in the way of the core experience. That sounds like we've stripped a lot out, and that's true -- but what we've built instead is something more focused, and something that is actually quite a bit larger than the first game in its own way. Rather than going for breadth of features, we went for depth, and that shows all throughout the design, I hope.

In a nutshell, I'd have to say that Valley 2 is the game we originally set out to make when we made AVWW1. But we had to make AVWW1 first in order to gather enough research and do enough experimentation in order to make Valley 2 possible.

If you want to discuss it, the forum thread for this article is typically the best place.

Oh, and I almost forgot: we have a google spreadsheet with the status of where we are on our roadmap to 1.0.

Until next time!

The latest on the Valley 2 schedule

2012-11-07T09:12:00.003-05:00

Without preamble: I had been hoping to have the Valley 2 beta out to folks by around next week, but for a variety of reasons that's no longer feasible.

The short of it is that we could definitely get you a playable beta then, but it wouldn't reflect the level of polish that would do well by us. We're getting there, but one more week just isn't going to be enough. We're now aiming for more like 3 weeks from now until beta, and 5-6 weeks from now until the 1.0 (knock on some serious wood for the latter). In other words, we aren't planning a long-term and protracted beta with this one. Folks have given us vast amounts of feedback for the last year+ on AVWW1, and Valley 2 is the mature successor that's resulting.

Another way to look at it is this: it's very hard to take out much from this game and still have it completely work. That's a good sign. The first game was so loosely tied together, such a big collection of semi-related things, that you could easily add and remove stuff without affecting the core experience all that much. With the sequel, there's not really anything I can think of that's in the game and not directed towards the core experience.

Anyhow, don't take this as too much of a downer message. I've actually been on a super high since late yesterday when I finally got the new lighting model (complete with colored and shaped light sources) working. Man but this game is night and day different from the first one -- and we just mainly want to ensure that you see it on the best possible terms when you first do see it in action.

Until next time!

AI War 6.0 Trailer (Also Featuring Ancient Shadows)

2012-10-17T11:59:00.004-04:00

Version 6.0 of the cult classic strategy game AI War: Fleet Command arrives this Friday the 19th, along with its fourth expansion: Ancient Shadows. One of the best-reviewed PC games of 2009, AI War has continued to grow each year with new expansions, new free content, and continual refinements to the deep strategic gameplay it already boasted.

Selected Reviews

AI War breaks most of the genre's rules. Which is precisely why it's incredible... This out-of-the-blue one-man passion project is one of this year's finest strategy games.
- Alec Meer, PC Gamer UK, November 2009

It's a balancing act, with your own strength on one side, and the AI's opinion of you on the other. Piss it off before you're ready to face it, and you're going to get squashed. That moment, when you're finally in a position to turn the tables, is about as glorious as gaming gets.
- Phill Cameron, Eurogamer, February 2011

I think I've stumbled across this year's Really New Thing. There's a lot of 2009 to go, but I'll be surprised if anyone else twists the RTS formula this dramatically and this effectively. And I'm hoping it'll be the Next Big Thing, because it's big, different, entirely unprecedented and an exciting way to play an RTS.
- Rush, Boom, Turtle: And Now for Something Completely Different, by Tom Chick (Crispy Gamer)

Want more reviews?

More About Ancient Shadows

Not Even The Machine Sees All...

Introducing Champions: These modular behemoths can be upgraded, gain EXP, and lend powerful aid to your main forces. But champions possess a unique power that sets them even further apart from other units: they can explore entirely new parts of the galaxy where the AI cannot reach. Splinter factions of humans, zenith, neinzul, and spire all dwell in those backwater nebulae. Some are hiding. Some are plotting. Some have gone totally insane. It is there, in the shadows, that your champion can find relics from the ancient race which constructed it. What power awaits? At what cost?

Key Features:
* A whole new kind of human player. It's possible to control champions alongside your main fleet, or to have a friend or family member control just one single massive ship.
* Several new sub-races dwelling in the backwater parts of the galaxy for your champions to interact with.
* Modular fortresses.
* 9 new bonus ship classes.
* 3 core AI guard posts and one new minor faction.
* 2 new AI types.
* 2 new map types.
* 98 minutes of awesome new music by Pablo Vega.

For the release notes from version 5.0 to 6.0 (warning: 65k+ words!): http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_Post-5.000_Beta

New AI War Screenshots (base game + all expansions)

2012-10-16T15:44:00.003-04:00

It's been a couple of years since we've updated our screenshots for AI War: Fleet Command, and version 6.0 really improves the visuals of the space backgrounds. So here's our new selection of screenshots.

As a reminder, version 6.0 of AI War is going to be coming out officially on this Friday the 19th, along with the latest expansion -- AI War: Ancient Shadows. This will also be the debut of the latest expansion on Steam and Gamestop (which has thus far been available only through our site and GamersGate while in beta).

One more reminder: if you've had the beta of the expansion, don't forget to download the full installer on Friday. That's the only thing that will include the new music for the expansion, which you won't want to miss out on!

Meet Some Of The Monsters Of Valley 2 (Concept Art)

2012-10-09T09:31:00.000-04:00

I thought that folks might enjoy seeing some more of the concept art sketches for various of the 120 new enemies that are coming for A Valley Without Wind 2. These concept sketches are done at Heavy Cat for purposes of informing the final sprites that will be created of each monster; these aren't the actual sprites themselves, in other words.

The Overlord And His Henchmen

Demonaica -- The Evil Overlord

Slender

Fanzara

Lilith

Vorgga

Wordrak

A Few Monsters

Swamp Thing

Wall Crab

Pigman

Clockwork Blockade

Floating Bone Mass

Hungry Ghost

Insect Fiend

Steam Cannon

Steam Flyer

Urban Tackle Droid

Submersible Suppressor

Slug Fiend

Owl

Deepwoods Gargan

Landshark

Ceiling Vampire

Flying Eyeball

Clockwork Avian

Auroch Warrior

AI War: Ancient Shadows Includes Almost 100 Minutes Of Music!

2012-10-05T13:46:00.000-04:00

Reminder: AI War: Ancient Shadows is going to come out of beta and arrive on Steam on October 19th! You can currently preorder and get in on the beta at the above link if you wish. All of the features are now in place for it, and we're just going through final polishing.

Well, except for the music -- we never release the music for an expansion until it comes out of beta. Makes it all that much more exciting, we think. Speaking of music...

Previously, we simply said that AI War: Ancient Shadows would include "a lot" of music. Internally we were actually shooting for 90 minutes of music, which is almost double what any of our other expansions for AI War have ever had. We didn't say that publicly since we weren't sure that we could pull it off in such a crazy short time period -- that was certainly asking a lot of our composer!

But Pablo, true to form, not only met the goal but came in with 98 minutes and 5 seconds of music in all. Here's the full track list:

AI War: Ancient Shadows
Music by Pablo Vega

Chapter I: The Human Awakening

1. Arise Sleeping Warriors
2. An Unfamiliar World
3. A War Worth Fighting
4. Ambitious Design
5. AI Revolution
6. Ancient Shadows

Chapter II: The Zenith Revival

7. Immortal
8. Imminent Annihilation
9. Inquisition Of The Stars
10. Incarnate Race
11. Imitated And Integrated
12. Ironclad

Chapter III: Revenge Of The Spire

13. Waking To Darkness
14. Worshipped Wasteland
15. Watching The Night Sky
16. Whispers Of Hope
17. Wrath Of The Spire
18. Welcome To The End

Bonus Track: 19. Ancient Shadows - Title

And here are some previews on soundcloud, the first two of which are being shown for the first time today!

A Valley Without Wind 2 - a full sequel free for existing customers - is coming.

2012-09-28T21:04:00.000-04:00

I've been hinting about this over here, and actually answered a lot of questions about it. However, we were planning on doing a big announcement through an interview with a major news site to announce the game, and so we didn't want to say too much.

We're now reversing that stance, however. We actually don't particularly want major news coverage about this in advance of it being playable, we decided. Why? We don't want it to be over-hyped, and we don't want to run up against potential skepticism for people who didn't like the first game. We're still in the process of getting the art assets together to where we could really do a true announcement, and so we haven't even contacted any of the press just yet about it.

Warning: extremely long post incoming. But you already know that if you read this blog much. ;)

Is this really a sequel?
Make no mistake, Valley 2 is a true sequel -- it's a lot more different from the first game than many sequels are compared to their original. There are a lot of changes I've been wanting to make for a while to the game, but these changes were too deep to do without angering players who bought one game and then had us change it on them to that degree. This way players can keep playing the original in its current state (though we won't be doing much more of anything to update the original game from here on out), and they can also enjoy the awesome sequel for free as well.

A Time Of Magic object in a finished-but-for-final-shading-and-texturing state.

And I get this for free if I already have the first game?
Yeah. Basically everyone will be getting both games whenever they buy either one. Kind of like what Zeboyd Games does with Breath of Death 7 and C Saves the World. You get both for the price of one.

Why do it this way? Well, we think that's fairest to existing customers, for one. And for two, we don't think anyone will be much inclined to buy the first game after they see the second. But the first game is cool in its own right, and so that's something we wanted to preserve. It breaks a lot of new ground that no other games have ever experimented in before, and we didn't want to just throw that out. The game isn't perfect, and it doesn't last forever, but it's fun for a goodly number of hours and it's something that people should be able to experience for years to come if they're into that sort of thing. Meanwhile we get to move the "Valley franchise" forward in the manner of our choosing with the sequel.

Cool "Pencil test" of a burly man walking animation.

So what's different, already!?
It's almost easier to define what is not different. But here are some of the highlights in no particular order.

- Completely new enemies. At the moment, 120 have been designed and are scheduled for art and programming, but not all will be available right at first beta. They have a lot more variety of designs both artistically and in terms of gameplay, and they are in general a lot smaller and thus something you can get more up close and personal with. In general the feel is closer to a Metroid game or similar in terms of the scale of enemies (whereas previously in AVWW1 the enemies were 4x to 8x larger than in Metroid in many cases).

- Completely new procedural generation methods. We'll be using a "slices" methodology to create undergrounds, interiors, and exteriors. This basically uses pieces of chunks that are created by hand in a level editor and then assembled and populated randomly. Although enemy placement will be done by the 11 broad classes of enemy, and thus will be hand-done. That way you'll get much more interesting and unique scenarios with enemies compared to what you did in the first game.

-Huuuuge new citybuilding game that ties everything together. This is much more descended from Actraiser now. Keith and I spent four days on skype designing out the new game, and this was one of the biggest topics. The new citybuilding game uses dozens of buildings on the map that you capture, and some of which you can convert into other building types. You can give your survivors orders, and they gain skills in five skill categories based on what missions you send them on.

- The dispatch model for NPCs is completely different and much improved now; no more moods, profession books, or gifts. No more professions at all, in fact. These were grindy and annoying, and we have a much better model that involves multi-NPC dispatches and skill points in five categories that improve based on successful missions. Plus the risk of death on missions will be a lot lower than in the first game, meaning you're not feeling so heartless sending these poor folks out. There's more strategy and less cannon fodder.

Incomplete view of one generated world map in an external diagnostic tool.

-Entirely turn-based in the macro-game. The citybuilding stuff is all turn-based, and even the day/night cycle is now turn-based. It flips back and forth between day and night as you change turns. There are thematic reasons for this, and it lets us have a unified timescale rather than a separate day/night cycle and time period cycle.

-It is actually possible to win the game. Each game is more randomized in how it unfolds, and basically plays out across what would be a super-continent in the old game. Much larger than a single continent, but not infinitely large. In fact, the entire world is generated right when you start it (as with a galaxy in AI War) and that becomes the basis of how you plan out your advances and strategy of how you're going to become more powerful. When you actually defeat the overlord, you win the game. If you play it again, the game will play out quite differently.

-Since these are now more finite campaign-style engagements more like we have with AI War, this also means that you won't be able to change the difficulty once you start the game. This makes each campaign a finite experience that you play, win or lose, and then play again if you like. You can even set the size of the world that you want from a dropdown, and that will also affect how many levels you get from each level-up tower that you conquer on the map.

-Isometric world map! Enough said. :)

-You are not a glyphbearer. You're actually a former henchman-in-training of the overlord; so kind of a bad person turned good. You've got an Oblivion Crystal which serves a different function from the glyph but occupies the same space.

-No more permadeath. The oblivion crystals prevent you from dying, and instead bring you back from the dead anytime you die. Your survivors can (and will) still die permanently, however. The overlord and his other henchmen also have oblivion crystals, however, so they are literally invincibile also. They can be killed same as you, but they'll come back to life and return to fight another day if you defeat them. You'll face the henchmen several times and defeat them several times on your quest to beat the overlord, but if you see the overlord before the end of the game (which will happen from time to time) you had better run instead of trying to fight him.

A Bronze Age object in a finished-but-for-final-shading-and-texturing state.

-Ilari are nowhere to be found. All those guardian stones, and indeed the glyphbearers in general? It's not just that you aren't a glyphbearer -- they don't exist in this part of Environ. Similarly, the wind never reached the level where it drives people crazy here. Wind is still a big problem all over the world map, and prevents your movement -- you'll have to "purify" tiles in order to be able to advance further on the world map because of the wind. But in general, this means that there are pockets of people all over the place, rather than people coming together for big settlements huddling around the Ilari. Environ is a big world, so this is just a part of it that is neglected by the Ilari and thus has woes of its own.

-No more settlements, and survivors don't need to be rescued. It's been a year since the events of the first game, and people are pretty used to what has happened by now. Your problem isn't to rescue the survivors, it's to recruit them. For that you'll use other survivors who will be dispatched to convince them to join your uprising against your former master.

-The overlord and his henchmen actively terrorize the countryside. You'll see their tokens moving around and literally destroying buildings of yours every few turns on the macrogame side. Your survivors don't stand a chance against them in combat, so the only thing you can do is to try and create "reverse traveling salesman" problems for the overlord and his minions, while also rebuilding as you go.

-You're not just fighting Generic Overlord #5 and his lieutenants. The sole overlord you'll be facing in this game (for now) is named Demonaica and has a specific look, backstory, and all that good stuff. His henchmen (which differ from lieutenants in many important ways) are named Slender, Lilith, Vorgga, Fanzara, and Wordrak.

A Wild Garden Age throne in a finished-but-for-final-shading-and-texturing state.

-Speaking of which, since there is no longer permadeath you won't be playing a long line of characters you barely care about. When you start a new game, you'll create your character and then that will be your character for the rest of that campaign. The basic character creation process is much like in the first game, except that you get to choose from any time period right from the start rather than having to unlock them. Then as you go through the game, there are a ton of new character customization options that you'll run into (see below for more info).

-There is an all-new roster of 24 unique characters. There are four each -- two male and two female -- from six time periods. You cannot play as Draconites (who are not in this game, though tons more dinosaurs are in general), nor can you play as Neutral Skelebots (also not in this game, though several new enemy skelebot types are), nor can you play as ice age characters (which were over-represented in the first game, so I wanted to do something different).

Some new character portraits at a finished-but-for-final-shading-and-texturing state.

-No more inventory, or loose items, or crafting (please don't freak out, you'll see why in a minute). This means no more stash rooms, and no more item pickups, and no more opal guardian store or consciousness shards. No more spellgems, no more spell scrolls, no more grinding to find stuff in various random parts of the world. No more materials, or placing wooden platforms or crates, or using settlement stockpiles (no settlements, recall?). I'm sure some of your are thinking "WTF" about this particular line item, so let me explain the subsystem we have in place of all that -- it's much more streamlined and lets you get to the meat of this game much better.

-First off, there is now a class system that lets you choose what kind of mage you're going to be. There are five overall tiers of mage classes, and you'll unlock each of them as you play through the game. The first tier you start out with, and you can choose from among 5 randomized mage classes to play as. Overall there are 10 mage classes per tier, and so each playthrough is a bit different as you have different options each time. Each player in multiplayer also has their own randomized set of classes, too.

First 25 mage class icons in a final state (plus 2 sketches).

-So what is a mage class? Essentially it defines your basic abilities. The way the game controls is now completely different, and a lot more like a classic Metroidvania title rather than taking inspiration from MMOs. This way always our goal with the first title, but somewhere along the lines we strayed. You'll always have four abilities at your fingertips, which are entirely set by which mage class you choose. Each mage class has a primary, a secondary, a special, and an ammo-based attack. This lets us hand-tune the combinations of spells to make many interesting sets that you'll switch between on occasion depending on what kind of area you're about to embark into.

-The controls are also streamlined. That whole mouse+keyboard thing was really a bad idea, as some players pointed out to us. That sort of freedom of aiming really kills the classic Metroidvania style of a game like this, and makes it so that keyboard-only players and gamepad-only players are at a huge disadvantage. So we're moving down to two streamline control schemes that are equivalent with one another: keyboard-based and gamepad-based. And yes, the tab-targeting is gone since that basically acts like a cheat at this point without free-aiming of the mouse.

Please note! We're not just taking away control options for kicks, or because we think people were "doing it wrong." But the fact remains that generally a game is built around its controls, especially as an action game. We're trying to maintain as much flexibility in the controls as we can while not making it so that people are playing fundamentally different games that we can't make universally fun. Placing wooden platforms was trivial with the mouse, and so is killing a bat. But it's incredibly frustrating with any other sort of input. When you get right down to it, what we're trying to make is a Metroidvania game, and I don't personally know of any of them that use a mouse-style of control. Hence we're going a bit more standardized with that, and I have to say the controls feel really good.

Lighthouse building in a final state.

- But back to the whole customization thing. Rather than customizing yourself with what you craft or what you happen to randomly find from missions or in a cavern, now you customize yourself with perks and feats.

-Perks: Each time the world level goes up, everybody gets a list of new perks that they can apply to themselves. You can choose only one per level to apply to yourself, but you can reconfigure your choices later if you change your mind (not in the field; when you return to certain safe places). There are 20 possible levels to attain, and 5 perks per level. However, only a randomized 2 perks will be available to all players right at the start of achieving any particular level. By exploration, players can find tokens that will unlock the other three perks on each level and thus let them further customize themselves.

Perks are basically things like improved health or speed, better jump height, etc. They are largely replacing the enchants model from the first game (enchants are also gone).

-Feats: feats are actually active abilities that you can trigger on yourself, like double jump, miniaturize, etc. You start out without any of these, but you can acquire them by busting into skelebot research facilities and hacking their mainframes.

-The last way that you can customize yourself is by the choices made on the world map, in the macro-game. These are choices that affect all players, and/or survivors. By capturing certain buildings, for instance, you can increase the distance you can see in dark places. By capturing others, you can make it so that you are able to go into excessively hot or cold areas (the heatsuits and snowsuits are replaced by this mechanic that is integrated into the strategy/citybuilding side of the game).

-In general, this game is really a mix of straight-up Metroidvania style shooting and dodging with the longer-term thinking and planning on the world map. With customization and character loadout choices thrown in -- made more interesting by the fact that you can't just line up all the "best" spells, but instead have to choose which full loadouts will best fit the current circumstances. So there's quite a few more interesting choices to make now, without there being so many individual choices to make except in the macro-game.

A Wild Garden Age statue in a finished-but-for-final-shading-and-texturing state.

-Physics! The physics of the game are also going to be tuned quite a bit. That's something we haven't implemented yet, but we're experimenting around with various ideas for it and think we know of a number of ways to make that feel smoother and nicer. Simply having it so that the terrain is actually built for you rather than just being procedural all over the place is going to make a big difference, of course.

-Bosses! There's going to be a lot less emphasis on bosses in general in this game, because they were too frequent in the previous game. However, the encounters with regular enemies will be a lot more interesting because of that. With bosses we're going to be moving to multi-stage behaviors where they shift behaviors mid-fight. We'll also be having smaller, saner boss rooms that really give a better Metroidvania vibe.

-Spells! Some of the old spells, like shields and seize and so forth, are being removed -- they either weren't useful enough (seize) or they were unbalancingly useful (shields). We'll also be revising most spells in general, adjusting their characteristics and size and move speeds and all that. These go along with the physics changes in general, and bosses will get the same treatment. And then we're also going to be adding just tons and tons of new spells and spell visuals for all the mage classes. a number of them will essentially be visual upgrades from one spell to another, but that's something players have asked for for a while; essentially there won't be any invisible "this spell is stronger but looks the same" modifiers or levels. The stronger ones will look it! Spells also will have a vastly lower cooldown across the board, meaning that you can get a much more satisfyingly fast-and-furious effect with them.

-Ammo! A single spell out of the four you get from each class will be ammo-based. Enemies will drop either health or ammo when you kill them, and each ammo pickup is only part of what is needed to cast the ammo-based spell once. So these ammo-based spells are really something that you'll want to use sparingly, but since there is a pretty low cap on how much ammo you can hoard, you're still encouraged to use them periodically. Like in a Metroid game rather than in something like Final Fantasy where I hardly ever use a consumable weapon. And not all the ammo spells are weapons -- one of the animal-related mage classes has an ammo ability to turn into a bat (as in the first game), and that effect lasts until you take a hit.

-Health! In general, after playing a lot of Cave Story and Super Metroid and similar games lately, we've realized that in AVWW1 players really have too much health. And so do many of the monsters. All in all it was trying to be a bit RPG-like and thus turning into a bit of a slug-fest. That's something we're rebalancing entirely to be more in keeping with the other Metroidvania titles, and even games like Zelda. That's one of several things that should lead to a much more satisfying experience in our opinion.

An evergreen forest object in a finished-but-for-final-shading-and-texturing state.

-I've mentioned that missions are gone, but I've not mentioned what is replacing those. That's a bit hard to answer in a specific fashion. I suppose the best answer would be "the game." In other words, AVWW1 was kind of an undirected sandbox in most areas, but in some areas you could take on these instance-based missions and have a somewhat more directed time with them. In Valley 2, the entire flow and point of everything is different. All of your adventuring is directly in service of your larger strategic/citybuilding goals, and your strategic/citybuilding goals feed right back into making you more powerful so that you can take down the overlord.

It's a much more tightly integrated loop there, AND the actual gameplay locations for the game in general are more unique and interesting, so the need for missions themselves really vanishes. Which is a good thing in my opinion, as they felt a bit artificial in execution anyhow. I really prefer how everything is so concrete here and is so tied together into your overall goals of both halves of the game.

-Call in the Mercenaries! Some parts of the game will intentionally have uneven difficulty, however. These particularly challenging areas are often caused by enemy buildings that project onto the world map tiles nearest to them (and some other enemy buildings block travel on the world map until you send your survivors to destroy them, incidentally). Sometimes you'll need a bit of an extra push to make it through an area like this. Well, another thing that you can collect out in the world are mercenary coins which you can then use to call the mercenaries in on a hotline. When you do so, they'll travel with you like a familiar (or like one of those NPCs from the first game that floats after you during a rescue). They'll stay with you until the next level-up or until they die, and the added firepower can be a real boon. It's also another decision point on how you best use your resources, which is critical on higher difficulties.

A Wild Garden Age object in a finished-but-for-final-shading-and-texturing state.

- If you're interested, the citybuilding/strategic model has five main resources: Food, Scrap, Mana, Morale, and Housing. Each one of those works differently from the other, and each one can only be impacted by your actions in the strategic mode; so in other words, you can't play a poor strategic game but then grind on the adventure side to make up for it. We've put in a lot of work to make sure that while the two modes do have tight integration between one another, you can't just grind in one mode to win at the other. You have to actually play well (for the difficulty level you've chosen) at each half of the game to win. And you'll be flipping back and forth between modes pretty regularly, to keep either side from getting stale; each enriches the other.

-Oh, and yes: you can also lose the game, as well as being able to win it, now. Despite the fact that you are un-killable thanks to your oblivion crystal, if all your survivors die then you lose.

-And also: there's all new objects for the game in terms of the art, too. As you've seen throughout this post, Heavy Cat is working on all-new time-period-appropriate art that is a lot cooler and more unique than what we had in AVWW1.

- Also also: the platforming difficulty is going away, as are most of the things it affected. No more falling damage, no more rising lava, no more bouncing spike traps (regular spike traps remain, though, as do dangerfalls, blade traps, and mines). Also the freefall missions might be gone, but their concept is retained through some freefall segments you'll run into from time to time.

Monster at the sketch stage: Procompsognathus. And yes, one mage class can transform into these.

Overall Goals

So! If you've read all of this, then I imagine you found it quite a lot to parse. It was obviously aimed at people already very familiar with the first game, and so highlights all the differences -- of which there are quite a few. But why so many changes? Did we really have to change X or Y? Wasn't X or Y feature in the first game really fun, and thus shouldn't it have been included in the sequel?

I'm sure I'm going to be fielding lots of those sorts of questions, but the general answer to those questions is: we made the choices we did because it contributes to an overall tighter, more cohesive game. A few specific examples below:

Loss of the sandbox

The first game was trying to be both a sandbox and a directed game, and that's just not very possible -- or at least not in a way we were happy with. The first game was always hugely successful at being a sandbox you could just run around in and have a good time at, but it was substantially less good at providing a forward-moving experience with tension and a satisfying game arc.

That was something we repeatedly tried to address throughout the beta of the first game and after it's release. However, we met with only mixed success. At this point I'm convinced that we took those concepts as far as we were able to in the framework of the first game.

Thus we really needed to get back to the roots of what we wanted to build in the first place before sandboxiness invaded the first game's design: a spiritual sequel to Actraiser with a much deeper citybuilding/strategic component, and with better platforming in a Metroidvania style.

In order to do that, we needed to not have players faffing around with endless collection quests trying to find materials for crafting, or grinding for just the right spells, or doing all that manner of thing. Instead we needed to have some broad and important choices that players could make quickly to customize their character and then could later change at will if they changed their minds.

That sort of thing keeps the action and the strategy game moving, but it means that we basically had to cut out this. But that was fun! That's why we still have the first game as a separate product that we bundle with the sequel (and vice-versa). That way you can play the more sandboxy game, or you can play the more directed, intense, interesting game.

Monster at the sketch stage: Ice Esper.

Loss of the mouse controls and shield spells

Both of these things have an enormous impact on balance. You could argue that these things are a matter of taste and customization, and I'd have to agree -- that's why they are in the first game, and why they remain there. But these were one of the biggest ongoing challenges to balance in the first game for me, and they are things that really put large segments of the player populace at a disadvantage if they don't use them.

Here again, it comes to getting back to the roots of what we were trying to do. Yes, Terraria uses the mouse controls -- so do numerous other PC action-adventure games with a 2D sidescroller view. So do a lot of MMOs and RPGs.

In the first game we were really enticed by the allure of all those things, and so we let our design drift and become unfocused. In other words, the design tried to become all things to all people, and Environ became a world that you could come and do whatever you wanted in. That's pretty fun! But it's very difficult to make a truly compelling game that way. What we needed to do with the sequel was really focus, and make the original game we set out to do.

In terms of Mario Bros. games, what if Mario had a rocket launcher he could aim in any direction? What if he had a force field he could toggle on and off periodically at will? That might be entertaining for a bit, but that would fundamentally make a different game, I think. And I don't think a better game -- for Mario, all the enemies are designed around him not having abilities like that. So to give him those abilities means the levels would be crazy easy and hollow.

On the flip side, the game Intrusion 2 uses mechanics like aim-anywhere firing, and it's a brilliant game. All the enemies are designed around the powers that your avatar has, and so everything fits together just right. But of course the character there doesn't have the movement abilities that Mario does -- if the character there had that kind of speed and jumping ability, then I suspect its mechanics would really start to break down -- in the same way Mario would if you gave the wrong weapons to him.

A Wild Garden Age skeleton in a finished-but-for-final-shading-and-texturing state.

What I'm saying is, games are additive in nature -- you can't just throw any old thing in there and expect it to be the same game. If you add a single new piece to Chess, you've dramatically changed that game. It doesn't matter what the piece even does.

In the case of AVWW1, we had the movement speed of Mario 3 or so, and the aim-anywhere nature of Intrusion 2. We also had control schemes that did not support aim-anywhere, and that made it so that players were playing two different games. And that meant that enemies really couldn't be balanced around either, since in some cases could aim super-precisely and in others they could not aim remotely that well. What a mess.

Again, I still think that really worked out pretty well in the main, but it's definitely a more niche experience and a bit rougher around the edges because of that. By focusing on specifically the kind of game we're actually trying to make, and not dragging in stuff from other unrelated genres if it doesn't really complement it well, we have something that's a lot tighter and more fun. It's not about taking options away from players it's about creating one game at a time rather than a whole soup of games.

And of course then we're adding tons of options in the style of the core gameplay that we're going for, too. (As noted throughout the document above). So there is that. ;)

Conclusion

We still have a long way to go before we're ready to let people start playing the beta of this, but we should be ready for it in the November timeframe. We're really excited about how it's coming along, though!

Here's the forum thread for this post if you want to join in the discussion about it.

Evolution Of Shattered Haven

2012-09-18T09:50:00.001-04:00

Thought it was about time for a general update on our upcoming game Shattered Haven!

Art Evolution
For Shattered Haven, you may recall that Heavy Cat Multimedia is doing all-new pixel art for this game just as they are doing all-new higher-res art for AVWW. Both projects are going really well, although we've been so hard at work on both of them that we've not really had time to stop and share much yet.

Here's how that is proceeding so far, although there are still not-yet-updated bits even in the most recent version all the way at the bottom -- so these are definitely WIP images! The first image is from before Heavy Cat got involved at all, and the most recent one at the bottom was taken about 5 minutes prior to my writing this.

The thing I'm most proud of out of the recent screenshot is the new organically-shaped water. It's a lot more natural than just the pure squared-off tiles, and that's something I really like. It took me literally all day Friday to get it to work, as the various approaches that I and Heavy Cat had tried were not working and I had to think of something new. Now of course I'm still going through the collision ramifications of that and adjusting code to work with the completed visuals for the water, but that's winding down thankfully.

A New Team Member
An old friend of mine, Zack Cataldo, has joined the team to help with level design, story, and general game design tweaks. Zack and Lars and I go way back together, knowing each other from the primordial Internet days of 1998 or 1999 or so. All of us were hobbyist game developers together, and then we all wound up moving into business software development instead of games.

Then of course I founded Arcen, and a while later Lars and I worked on Tidalis together (the brilliant core design there was his). Zack is one of the best adventure level designers I've ever seen, and so I'm really excited to see him on this project -- he's been working on it for about 5 weeks now, part-time in his after-the-day-job-and-after-family-time slice of life.

Speaking of, back in 2008 or so Lars was enormously helpful to me in refining the Shattered Haven design and mechanics. So this is another game where his hand is definitely visibly felt. When he heard the news that we were revisiting that game to complete it and release it this fall, he said "Oh, good, I've been hoping you'd come back to that!"

Story Evolution (Very Minor Spoilers)
Zack and Erik and I have been meeting once or twice a week for the last 5 weeks or so on Skype to have writing session calls, and the results have been really amazing. I've never worked in a group to write/plot/plan like this before, but I've of course worked that way for game and software design many times. I find it refreshingly similar of a process.

The original story for Shattered Haven was based on a novel that I had written about 1/3 of but then never could finish. So I'd set up the world-building and the Grays and all that, but the actual storyline that was moving through that world was both incomplete and a little weak. Hence my setting the novel aside in late 2007. Still, it was a cool premise, and the main thing was that I didn't know where to go with it after about the first third or so.

Compounding problems for the game version of that story back in 2008, the story of the novel really didn't lend itself well to being an interactive game of this particular sort. So I had done kind of a half-baked version of the novel story that was way worse, and introduced a lot of new characters and so forth. My focus was on the gameplay and the environmental-style puzzles, and that was what really shone.

So what Zack and Erik and I have been doing is working on making a new and improved version of the story that would suit the game better. To be honest I wasn't expecting all that much, because writing for games is particularly hard and the results aren't usually that stellar. However, all of my favorite games tell tight and compelling stories: Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill 2, Chrono Trigger, and so on.

As it turns out, writing in a group has been one of the best things to happen to this game. Zack and Erik have both been just full of slam-dunk ideas, and their ideas have spurred me on to have new and exciting ideas, too.

There are 13 major overworld areas to the game, and 8 different endings that you can get, and we've been making good headway. At this point we have the entire intro all planned out and partially written (and Zack is partway through the level design on the new intro, too), as well as having the first of the overworld areas complete in terms of its main story arc. We've also got the broad outline for the entire story, as well as the generalities of all 8 endings, as well as the details of all of the principal characters and villains.

It's very exciting progress, and I'm really jazzed to see us so far along. We're expecting to have all of the rest of the detailed plotting done by the end of September.

Evolution Of The Villains (Somewhat More Material Spoilers, But Still Not Bad)
Remember this image from the main menu of the game? Turns out the composition of it is even more significant than we realized at the time I commissioned it from Heavy Cat (it's not an actual scene from the story, it's just more of a thematic montage showing the major characters all together).

Darrell and Mary Williams are the two adults and are the main characters. Mary Williams and the boy Pierce are also playable characters briefly at the start of the game, but mostly they are the object of the parents' quest: saving the kids is the end goal. And no, there are not escort missions, as a few people had worried about the last time we did a big update that showed this image!

At any rate, you can see that the family is beset by a variety of monsters here. Originally when I was writing the novel, there was one squid-like monster that was going to be sort of a running villain, but mainly the novel was more about the survivors vs the world. And bear in mind this isn't your typical zombie apocalypse -- the Grays are zombie-like, but are different in many significant ways that you'll discover throughout the game.

Anyway, no villain!? That's not that compelling to me, and I suspect to many people. So the squid-like monster was taking on more of an important role in the story of the game. If you look on the left side of the main menu image, you can see one of its hooked tentacles reaching up over the family.

For a while the squid seemed to be enough, and Erik and Zack and I were running with that. It wasn't too long before we had come up with a Gray that we refer to half-jokingly as "zombie mom," though, and you can see her on the right-hand side of the main menu. Exactly what is going on with her is one of the chief mysteries of the game. And actually that's true of the squid, too.

But a third villain who was just a minor (yet terrifying) monster in the game suddenly leapt into prominence during this past weekend's writing sessions: the shadow man. You can see him hulking over both zombie mom and the family on the right-hand side of the screen. The shadow man was always in the game, and hence why I asked for him to be given that sort of place on the main menu that heavy cat did. However, he wasn't really a major story figure before... and yet now the story has evolved so I can hardly imagine what the story would be without him.

So now we've got a stable of three major villains that are set against both the family as well as, in many cases, each other. Each of the villains has their own initially-inscrutable but eventually-explained motivations that make perfect sense in the context of the story while being mysteries that I don't think most people will figure out in advance. This is one of the things that has resulted from our writing sessions that I'm definitely most pleased about!

Evolution Of Cutscene Methods
All the way back in 2008, I had created an in-game cutscene engine based on a simple scripting language I created. That's really useful for doing most of the small little exchanges and happenings, and it really can help make the world feel more alive. That's something we're still using a ton, but since seeing the awesome main menu that Heavy Cat did, we've also realized that we now have a new tool in our toolkit: comic panels.

For key scenes in the game that are particularly important or emotional or whatever, we're using these comic panels to give you a more dramatic view of what is happening. The main menu is a good example of what their style will be, although the main menu is larger (it's 1024x768, whereas all the comic panels for in-game are 500x500). Overall it looks like we'll have at least 32 comic panels, and more likely that we'll have 46 of them so that there are enough for the ongoing story as well as each of the 8 endings.

I won't show any of the ones that are related to the actual story bits, but we're also using the comic panels to introduce each of the 13 areas of the overworld. That gives a really cool view of each of the areas that makes them feel much more like a real place than just seeing them with the more roguelike-looking graphics. These are from some of the earlier areas in the game:

The Phoenix Forest

Stantonsburg

The Deadlands

Ivanwood Marsh

Snow Mountain

Evolution Of... The Timeline For Beta
So, we'd planned on doing a beta for this game by the end of September, right? Well, with all the growth in the game, we're really trying to make sure that everything is in a really great state before we even start the beta.

Not all of the levels or parts of the overworld will be included in the beta initially anyway (extra regions will be coming out one or two at a time during beta). And the same with the endings coming out during beta.

However, for beta what we really want to have is the first few hours of the game there in just a super-awesome state. First 4ish overworld regions out of 13 at the least, I think. And we want everything in general to be as polished as we can make it right from the start, as well as including all the new art from Heavy Cat and no placeholder art, and so forth.

With that in mind, I think we're about 4 weeks out from when we'd want to start beta at this point. That would then leave us another 4 weeks or so before we actually hit 1.0 for the game (this is a really mature game already, with so much development history behind it). Anyhow, so the beta will likely be hitting around the same time the Ancient Shadows expansion is coming out of beta and arriving on Steam, etc.

Sorry for the delay, but I figured I'd give you an extra-meaty status update on what we're doing by way of apology. ;) Once the last of the placeholder art is gone from a few levels at least, I'll be sure to share a gameplay video so that you can actually see how the gameplay works. The one main thing that wasn't even discussed at all in this post!

Until next time...