So... today for me has been pretty much all about the documentation. I
wanted to go ahead and get this done so that Erik could start using it
in his emails to press.
I had something similar for AI War that was hugely useful for explaining to new players (and to press) just what it was that made AI War unique. It wasn't a substitute for a tutorial, but it was infinitely better than coming to the game blind and not knowing if it was just a cheap Sins of a Solar Empire clone or what.
At any rate, now we have this Fast Facts crash course wiki page for AVWW, and I heartily recommend it even to players who are mildly familiar with the game. It has some tips in there that you might be surprised by, and especially if you're coming back after a long absence you might be surprised by quite a bit more.
Everything else stems from that one wiki article, and you can get more detailed information on specific sub-topics if you so desire.
If you know the game well, please take a look at the fast facts and let me know if anything seems
off or seems missing. Or if you don't know the game well, I'd love to know if it's losing you anywhere in there.
But how on earth did constructing that one small page take me all day? Well, as part of making that page, I also had to add or majorly update the following pages:
Added: What Genre Is This, Anyway?
Added: Everything You Wanted To Know About Missions, But Were Afraid To Ask
Added: How Do I Know If I'm Prepared For An Expedition?
Added all but the destroyed rooms bit:
Why Being A "Completionist" Is Both Futile And Boring Here
More minor; Added the hierarchy section, and the section about graphs vs
maps (Josh had already done the rest):
What are all these maps for?
Added: Permadeath: It Means Give Your Health Bar The Respect It Deserves
More minor; Completely Rewrote: Pausing The Game
Added: What Is The General Game Flow?
So, yeah. That's been my day, but I think it's been a day well spent.
That's pretty much our reference manual right there, and if there are
gaps we now have time to fix it. Plus, people can now come into the
wiki and read in good depth about what makes this game unique, as well
as how things are supposed to work. Hopefully this should cut down on some
confusion from people who read old interviews, too.
Tomorrow, I'm back on the coding warpath for the new mission types and things of that nature!
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
AVWW - Locales And Enemies Version 2
As you journey through your own unique world of Environ, you'll primarily be splitting your time between exterior landscapes, building interiors, and underground caverns. Not only that, but you'll be traversing shards of nine different time periods, ranging from the prehistoric, to medieval, to modern, to far-future. Each has a very different feel, often different enemies, and often unique rewards.
A lot of the fun of a game like this comes from simply exploring it and seeing what cool things you can find. So we won't provide an exhaustive spoiler-laden list here, or attempt to show everything. We've already had players who have sunk dozens or even a hundred hours into the game, and they still haven't even seen everything that the game contains. A big part of that is because the game is always evolving through ongoing updates that add more content, new features, and more polish.
Here's a few specific snapshots to give you an idea of what you might encounter on your journey. All of these are full-resolution (no downscaling, no JPEG or video compression, etc), just cropped down to make them fit in to 600px wide:
Fighting A Blue Amoeba In An Underground Cavern
As you progress, you'll actually start running into the even-more-deadly red amoebas, so watch out! This is also a relatively close-to-the-surface underground dungeon; as you delve further underground, the number of wooden platforms decreases, the monsters become tougher, and eventually you'll find yourself in a heated lava climate.
As you progress, you'll actually start running into the even-more-deadly red amoebas, so watch out! This is also a relatively close-to-the-surface underground dungeon; as you delve further underground, the number of wooden platforms decreases, the monsters become tougher, and eventually you'll find yourself in a heated lava climate.
Destroyed Room
This is an example of a destroyed room in a modern building. There is never, ever, anything interesting in these; and they are marked with really decrepit-looking doors so that you can see to ignore them. Why have bombed-out rooms? Because players -- including us -- hate doors that your all-powerful magical character mysteriously can't open. It's like the chain-link fence kryptonite joke. At any rate, in the wake of the cataclysm, buildings are in varying states of destruction -- some are all but impassible, others just have a few clocks knocked off the walls. You can go into any room in any of the buildings, but the bombed-out ones are items you can easily (and happily) mark off your exploration list. The spell shown is Douse Monster Nest, by the way.
Clockwork Probes
The industrial age in general follows a very steampunk style, and that's where these hail from. Seen here in the rural grasslands, these probes will take a real beating before going down. And they hit back hard.
Meteor Shower
Some of the spells you can learn are completely devastating. Meteor Shower launches four meteors into the sky that come back down, crushing your enemies. Be mindful of the powerful spells, though -- they can be a severe drain on your mana.
Desert Battlefield
There are a lot of forces at work against you, and though you normally fight alone, there are times that you'll need some minions to help you. In this picture is a shot of the player taking part in a battle in the desert. The skelebots shown are actually minions of the player, helping to push back the enemies.
Moon Rising
Even Environ's moon didn't escape the carnage of the cataclysm, as you can see. Every 10 minutes of game time is a day/night cycle, although you can accelerate to morning or evening using the Sunrise and Nightfall spells (if you can get your hands on some of the rare sunstone or moonstone, that is). Every ninety days, the season changes between Dewbloom, Solswell, Ashfall, and Frostmoon. Solswell has the longest daylight hours, while Frostmoon has the shortest.
Modern Ruins
Here the player is standing in front of a Modern Ruins building, which can be found in abandoned towns. These buildings tend to have labyrinthine interiors with a lot of good stuff that you will need on your journey. But, with all the rooms, that means there are a lot of enemies to be found as well...
Ice Pirates
Ice pirates are actually classed as an "environmental threat," and don't start appearing until your second continent. The pirates are actually visible on the world map, and they will indiscriminately rain down destruction from above on any region in range of them. Rumor has it that the guardian Ilari are working on a way to get you inside their massive ship so that you can put a stop to their terror...
The World Map
Here's a small slice of the world map, an overhead view that is how you get between the various regions. As you can see, the cataclysm has thrown the time-shards together in a haphazard fashion. The entire continent is roughly the same difficulty -- unless you delve into very deep caverns or approach the overlord or his lieutenants -- and that difficulty increases up as you complete missions. Eventually, you will have to face the overlord directly. If you are victorious, then another oppressed continent will become available to you, with even more new things to discover.
Sapphire Gem Vein In Ice Cavern
Here in the ice age, even the underground caverns are so cold that you'll freeze to death in under a minute if you don't bring along a heavy snowsuit. A couple of Icicle Leaper enemies are guarding a sapphire vein -- split that open, and you'll get a pair of raw sapphire gems. Gems of all six colors are very central crafting ingredients.
Giant Skelebot
Here's one of the minibosses from the game: the giant skelebot. He hits you with his spear if you get too close, and he shoots fireballs at you when you're further away. The giant skelebots, believe it or not, are actually by far the tamest of the minibosses in the game.
But depending on the boss room layout and what regular enemies are spawning to help out, even a weaker miniboss type can give you quite a fight. This is a case where we're starting to see some combinatorial emergence in the same fashion that we see with AI War battlefields. The way that the environment and various enemy types combine to make emergent challenges is quite interesting!
The Above Was Just A Taste!
There are tons of locales, enemies, crafting ingredients, missions, building types, and obstacles for you to discover in Environ. To give away too much in advance would be doing you a disservice -- try out the demo, and if you like what you see, you can keep playing your demo world after you upgrade to the full version!
There are tons of locales, enemies, crafting ingredients, missions, building types, and obstacles for you to discover in Environ. To give away too much in advance would be doing you a disservice -- try out the demo, and if you like what you see, you can keep playing your demo world after you upgrade to the full version!
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Thoughts On Post-1.0 AVWW In The Wake Of Terraria's Development Halt
Like many others, I recently read the news that Terraria is no longer going to be actively developed
1. It's sad news for the fans of the game, but ultimately they more than got their money's worth. The game is complete in and of itself and well worth $10, and is worth having even if it could have grown more than it did (this is true of our game Tidalis as well, which is the only game of ours which has had development halted). Having untapped potential left in a game concept largely just means that it was an awesome concept.
2. It's unfortunate that there won't be ongoing bugfix support, and that's something that I would handle differently (and in fact we do, for our game Tidalis). Hopefully they will reconsider their position on that at least for bugs of substantial importance. But either way it's none of my business, and they seem to have done right by their players so far, so I have faith they'll do whatever winds up being best.
3. Also unfortunate is the fact that more wasn't communicated in advance about their intentions with the game. I'm sure that they themselves didn't know, but having a grace period where they said "we're ending support for this in 6 months, so let's get in the last things we can between now and then" might have done more to appease fans. We didn't do that with Tidalis, for the record, but that's because Tidalis financially bombed. Terraria made such excellent money that they shouldn't have had that concern.
4. I think that embarking on a new project, after so long spent on Terraria, is probably a healthy thing. Having a break to work on Tidalis was an enormous help for reinvigorating us to work on AI War versions 4.0 and 5.0. Maybe the same will be true for the Terraria devs. Or maybe their next project is actually going to be the successor to Terraria.
5. My own strategy with AI War has been to release paid expansions periodically, which both earn us more money directly, as well as making the base game sales spike, earning us more money indirectly. Both of those are how we pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that's but one of two paths. The other path is the traditional sequel/succesor-game path, and it sounds like the Terraria devs are going that route. It's not what I would do with my own games, purely for matters of personal taste, but it's an enormously valid choice to make.
TLDR: I don't think that the Terraria devs acted in bad faith with anybody, but a little more forewarning would have smoothed things over better with their fanbase. Either way, they still seem like really standup folks to me. And the reason I've not played their game yet is that I'm worried I'll get hooked and spend too much time doing that rather than coding my own games!
For AI War, we have an incredibly lengthy history of post-release support spanning since May 2009 up until the present (and still going). You may notice that there are two big gaps, though:
1. During the time we were developing Tidalis, AI War development really scaled back for about six months, and all but disappeared for two.
2. During the time we've been developing AVWW, AI War development scaled back even further, and daily releases became weekly, then monthly, and only recently have resumed being weekly again.
What's different about both of these cases from Terraria or Minecraft is that we gave at least three months of warning before these events happened. There was lots of "hey guys, we're pushing out an enormous number of features here for 5.0 in preparation of taking a while off after 5.0/Light of the Spire releases, just so you know!"
The break turned out to be substantially longer than we had expected (5 quarters instead of 2-3), but sometimes that's how it goes. And the game has still managed to grow and get better polished during that time... just at a much slower rate.
We've also made it clear that we plan at least two more expansions for AI War. This is still true, despite the fact that we've had to push back the release dates because AVWW development has run over-long. It's those sorts of expansions that really keep the game growing in leaps and bounds, and which make for one really large experience rather than a string of similarly-sized sequels.
That's why I like expansions instead of sequels, as a player and a developer: you get to keep all the content from the first game, as well as get all the new content from the second game. If Left 4 Dead 2 had been a $50 expansion pack to the first game, with the same content it had plus the ability to keep the characters and maps from the first game if I had the first game also, that would have been awesome. I still bought both games anyhow, and both were worth it, but it would be better if I could put them together rather than having them as two isolated experiences. As it is, I pretty much only play L4D2 now, never L4D1.
Our plan is to take the AI War route, and release tons of free DLC as well to do at least a couple of paid expansions. Hopefully in 2-3 years, we're still developing both AI War and AVWW -- that is the ideal scenario for me personally.
Really, the only way I could see that not coming to pass is if AVWW financially bombs like Tidalis did. Tidalis was simply too niche, and I personally still have lost about $50,000.00 out of that entire endeavor of making that game. I'm glad that we did make that game, and I think it's a great game, but we spent way too much money making it and it never made that money back. Developing more content for that game would be simply a fool's errand for us at this point.
If we somehow have that happen with AVWW as well, then... well, a lot of my plans for post-1.0 work probably won't materialize. But we'll give it three months at least, and pack in a lot of free DLC during that time, to make sure that we give it a fair shot at succeeding if it has any chance of doing so.
But all of that is really very negative speculation: signs are excellent that AVWW is going to be our biggest hit yet, and absolutely blow AI War out of the water in terms of the audience it reaches. And if it does that, great -- we'll proceed as planned, and AVWW is going to go from massive to incredibly massive, same as AI War did between it's 1.0 and 5.0 versions (all of which were free upgrades, by the way, released alongside the paid expansions).
On the other end of the spectrum, what if AVWW goes viral and gets super incredibly popular? AI War's income will seem paltry and sparse at that point, right? And wouldn't it be better just to let that game quietly die and focus on the big moneymaker at that stage?
Well, no -- that's how a "suit" thinks, isn't it? I'm not a suit. If AVWW goes sky-high popular then that will certainly put more demands on our time because we'll have a lot more fans to please all of a sudden. But that's not going to mean we're going to give up on AI War, or that we're going to do lesser expansions for that game because of it. It just means we'll have to work harder to divide our time effectively between the two, which I believe is something that Keith and I are equipped to do (especially with Erik handling PR and Josh helping so much with QA and support).
As we move forward toward AVWW's 1.0 and beyond, that communication is going to be something we maintain. We'll try to give you as accurate of updates as we can on the timing and plans for AI War's expansions, and for the free DLC and paid expansions for AVWW.
You won't ever wake up some day and hear "oh, by the way, the last-ever patch for AI War or AVWW was today." You might someday hear "unless something changes to make this financially viable for us to continue, we've got three months left to work on patches for this or that game before we have to stop indefinitely with that title."
If there's anyone who was feeling doubtful in the wake of recent events, hopefully that helps to set some minds at ease. With regard to Arcen titles, at least!
As typically happens, the discussion about this has continued on our forums. Feel free to drop by to read or comment!
First, A Few Thoughts About Terraria (Full Disclosure: Which I Still Have Yet To Play)
1. It's sad news for the fans of the game, but ultimately they more than got their money's worth. The game is complete in and of itself and well worth $10, and is worth having even if it could have grown more than it did (this is true of our game Tidalis as well, which is the only game of ours which has had development halted). Having untapped potential left in a game concept largely just means that it was an awesome concept.
2. It's unfortunate that there won't be ongoing bugfix support, and that's something that I would handle differently (and in fact we do, for our game Tidalis). Hopefully they will reconsider their position on that at least for bugs of substantial importance. But either way it's none of my business, and they seem to have done right by their players so far, so I have faith they'll do whatever winds up being best.
3. Also unfortunate is the fact that more wasn't communicated in advance about their intentions with the game. I'm sure that they themselves didn't know, but having a grace period where they said "we're ending support for this in 6 months, so let's get in the last things we can between now and then" might have done more to appease fans. We didn't do that with Tidalis, for the record, but that's because Tidalis financially bombed. Terraria made such excellent money that they shouldn't have had that concern.
4. I think that embarking on a new project, after so long spent on Terraria, is probably a healthy thing. Having a break to work on Tidalis was an enormous help for reinvigorating us to work on AI War versions 4.0 and 5.0. Maybe the same will be true for the Terraria devs. Or maybe their next project is actually going to be the successor to Terraria.
5. My own strategy with AI War has been to release paid expansions periodically, which both earn us more money directly, as well as making the base game sales spike, earning us more money indirectly. Both of those are how we pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that's but one of two paths. The other path is the traditional sequel/succesor-game path, and it sounds like the Terraria devs are going that route. It's not what I would do with my own games, purely for matters of personal taste, but it's an enormously valid choice to make.
TLDR: I don't think that the Terraria devs acted in bad faith with anybody, but a little more forewarning would have smoothed things over better with their fanbase. Either way, they still seem like really standup folks to me. And the reason I've not played their game yet is that I'm worried I'll get hooked and spend too much time doing that rather than coding my own games!
Now, How Our History With AI War Compares
The big thing that worries me about Terraria halting game development, as a game developer, is that this will create a perception that "you never know when developers will just randomly close up shop on a game." Minecraft is still sort of being developed, but really slowly, and that was a game I played a lot of -- I remember when the update frequency suddenly plummeted, and it was jarring. My worry is that players will be mistrustful of post-release support from indie developers for this reason.For AI War, we have an incredibly lengthy history of post-release support spanning since May 2009 up until the present (and still going). You may notice that there are two big gaps, though:
1. During the time we were developing Tidalis, AI War development really scaled back for about six months, and all but disappeared for two.
2. During the time we've been developing AVWW, AI War development scaled back even further, and daily releases became weekly, then monthly, and only recently have resumed being weekly again.
What's different about both of these cases from Terraria or Minecraft is that we gave at least three months of warning before these events happened. There was lots of "hey guys, we're pushing out an enormous number of features here for 5.0 in preparation of taking a while off after 5.0/Light of the Spire releases, just so you know!"
The break turned out to be substantially longer than we had expected (5 quarters instead of 2-3), but sometimes that's how it goes. And the game has still managed to grow and get better polished during that time... just at a much slower rate.
We've also made it clear that we plan at least two more expansions for AI War. This is still true, despite the fact that we've had to push back the release dates because AVWW development has run over-long. It's those sorts of expansions that really keep the game growing in leaps and bounds, and which make for one really large experience rather than a string of similarly-sized sequels.
That's why I like expansions instead of sequels, as a player and a developer: you get to keep all the content from the first game, as well as get all the new content from the second game. If Left 4 Dead 2 had been a $50 expansion pack to the first game, with the same content it had plus the ability to keep the characters and maps from the first game if I had the first game also, that would have been awesome. I still bought both games anyhow, and both were worth it, but it would be better if I could put them together rather than having them as two isolated experiences. As it is, I pretty much only play L4D2 now, never L4D1.
How This All Relates To Our Plans For AVWW
Sometimes these things just need to be explicitly stated: again, otherwise you're leaving players wondering. I keep talking about how we are approaching 1.0, and about various things that we'd "like to be able to do" after 1.0. But what's really going to happen after 1.0?Our plan is to take the AI War route, and release tons of free DLC as well to do at least a couple of paid expansions. Hopefully in 2-3 years, we're still developing both AI War and AVWW -- that is the ideal scenario for me personally.
Really, the only way I could see that not coming to pass is if AVWW financially bombs like Tidalis did. Tidalis was simply too niche, and I personally still have lost about $50,000.00 out of that entire endeavor of making that game. I'm glad that we did make that game, and I think it's a great game, but we spent way too much money making it and it never made that money back. Developing more content for that game would be simply a fool's errand for us at this point.
If we somehow have that happen with AVWW as well, then... well, a lot of my plans for post-1.0 work probably won't materialize. But we'll give it three months at least, and pack in a lot of free DLC during that time, to make sure that we give it a fair shot at succeeding if it has any chance of doing so.
But all of that is really very negative speculation: signs are excellent that AVWW is going to be our biggest hit yet, and absolutely blow AI War out of the water in terms of the audience it reaches. And if it does that, great -- we'll proceed as planned, and AVWW is going to go from massive to incredibly massive, same as AI War did between it's 1.0 and 5.0 versions (all of which were free upgrades, by the way, released alongside the paid expansions).
On the other end of the spectrum, what if AVWW goes viral and gets super incredibly popular? AI War's income will seem paltry and sparse at that point, right? And wouldn't it be better just to let that game quietly die and focus on the big moneymaker at that stage?
Well, no -- that's how a "suit" thinks, isn't it? I'm not a suit. If AVWW goes sky-high popular then that will certainly put more demands on our time because we'll have a lot more fans to please all of a sudden. But that's not going to mean we're going to give up on AI War, or that we're going to do lesser expansions for that game because of it. It just means we'll have to work harder to divide our time effectively between the two, which I believe is something that Keith and I are equipped to do (especially with Erik handling PR and Josh helping so much with QA and support).
The Bottom Line
For Arcen, communication is really a key part of how we do business. Having an open development process has been a blessing and a curse -- early on with AVWW, a lot of people thought we were crazy, but now it's all coming together in a really positive way and there's this great public record of how the game has evolved.As we move forward toward AVWW's 1.0 and beyond, that communication is going to be something we maintain. We'll try to give you as accurate of updates as we can on the timing and plans for AI War's expansions, and for the free DLC and paid expansions for AVWW.
You won't ever wake up some day and hear "oh, by the way, the last-ever patch for AI War or AVWW was today." You might someday hear "unless something changes to make this financially viable for us to continue, we've got three months left to work on patches for this or that game before we have to stop indefinitely with that title."
If there's anyone who was feeling doubtful in the wake of recent events, hopefully that helps to set some minds at ease. With regard to Arcen titles, at least!
As typically happens, the discussion about this has continued on our forums. Feel free to drop by to read or comment!
AVWW - Learning The Game, FAQ, and Wiki Updated
Environ is a hostile place, but the game itself endeavors to teach you everything you need to know as you get started. However, if you wish to know more about how the game works before playing, or if you're the sort of person who simply prefers external manuals, then these are the links for you!
A Valley Without Wind Wiki: Learning The Game
Getting Started Guide
What Are All These Maps For?
Frequently Asked Questions
Multiplayer Co-Op: Differences From Solo Play, And Other Notes
We'll continue to update the wiki as our centralized resource for this sort of thing from now on, rather than having it spread throughout our blogs, the forums, the main website, and so on. Big thanks to Josh Knapp for getting the vast majority of these updates in place!
A Valley Without Wind Wiki: Learning The Game
Getting Started Guide
What Are All These Maps For?
Frequently Asked Questions
Multiplayer Co-Op: Differences From Solo Play, And Other Notes
We'll continue to update the wiki as our centralized resource for this sort of thing from now on, rather than having it spread throughout our blogs, the forums, the main website, and so on. Big thanks to Josh Knapp for getting the vast majority of these updates in place!
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Before And After Screenshots Of AVWW With The Recent Visual Improvements
Since the game has gone through so many graphical improvements in the last few weeks -- first GUI, then the skies, and now the HUD -- I thought I'd post some before and after screenshots.
Here's the first pair:
This one I managed to get pretty close between the two versions: both in grasslands areas, although the top shot is actually grasslands with groves; and both even show the same spell in use and the sun in a similar position, and the same building on the screen.
Note how much more colorful and vibrant the skies are since we moved away from the old style of "dynamic and static" split skies and into one unified animated sky system. Also note how crazy much better the HUD looks, if I do say so myself. All in all these screens do a really good job of showing how much more cohesive the art style has become as we move toward 1.0.
Now the next (and last) pair of screens to show you:
These two versions of the main menu obviously aren't as close as the first screenshots were. But since we already had a pair of shots of the grasslands above, I didn't just want to repeat that here.
So now you see the desert -- and again, note how much more vibrant and personal the sky is compared to before. All the skies before tended to look very similar, just with some color variations between areas. Here the clouds and everything actually look different, and the animations are really different in each one.
Also of note is the awesome new GUI that Phil did fo the game a while back, and which finally made it into the game a month or so ago. And then this also really shows off the difference between the older style Unity text and our newer sprite text, as well: we're able to do colors and borders with ease, and everything looks more polished and easier to read in the new fashion.
Even the logo has been updated to look more stylized!
Anyway, we're hitting the home stretch now as we moved toward a version 1.0 hopefully hitting in March, and I wanted to do a post that showed off just how much has changed graphically about the game.
Here's the first pair:
This one I managed to get pretty close between the two versions: both in grasslands areas, although the top shot is actually grasslands with groves; and both even show the same spell in use and the sun in a similar position, and the same building on the screen.
Note how much more colorful and vibrant the skies are since we moved away from the old style of "dynamic and static" split skies and into one unified animated sky system. Also note how crazy much better the HUD looks, if I do say so myself. All in all these screens do a really good job of showing how much more cohesive the art style has become as we move toward 1.0.
Now the next (and last) pair of screens to show you:
These two versions of the main menu obviously aren't as close as the first screenshots were. But since we already had a pair of shots of the grasslands above, I didn't just want to repeat that here.
So now you see the desert -- and again, note how much more vibrant and personal the sky is compared to before. All the skies before tended to look very similar, just with some color variations between areas. Here the clouds and everything actually look different, and the animations are really different in each one.
Also of note is the awesome new GUI that Phil did fo the game a while back, and which finally made it into the game a month or so ago. And then this also really shows off the difference between the older style Unity text and our newer sprite text, as well: we're able to do colors and borders with ease, and everything looks more polished and easier to read in the new fashion.
Even the logo has been updated to look more stylized!
Anyway, we're hitting the home stretch now as we moved toward a version 1.0 hopefully hitting in March, and I wanted to do a post that showed off just how much has changed graphically about the game.
Monday, January 16, 2012
One More Piece Of High-Res AVWW Concept Art
Been working on a variety of things today, but among them was a third piece of concept art. I feel like this one emphasizes the sci-fi side of things more than the second one, but I'm not sure I actually like this one better than the second one; the composition and the colors aren't quite as good, in my opinion. But still a piece worth having around.
Most of the work today was design work for the actual game, so don't worry that all we're doing these days is concept art. Some pretty major stuff should be coming this week!
Most of the work today was design work for the actual game, so don't worry that all we're doing these days is concept art. Some pretty major stuff should be coming this week!
Friday, January 13, 2012
Two Pieces Of High-Res AVWW Concept Art
I've been working on doing some new concept art today so that we'd have a better boxart image than the old one, which has been feeling embarrassingly lame lately. Here are the first two that I've created, and I plan to do at least one more in the next week.
The second one at the moment is the one that I currently plan to use as boxart unless I come up with something better; while I do like many aspects of the first one better, the second one looks better when reduced (which, selling online, is what people see most of the time).
UPDATE: It appears that these weren't quite as ultra-high-res as I'd originally intended. I uploaded 2200x3300 px images, and blogger sized them down substantially. Oh well, these are still really large.
The second one at the moment is the one that I currently plan to use as boxart unless I come up with something better; while I do like many aspects of the first one better, the second one looks better when reduced (which, selling online, is what people see most of the time).
UPDATE: It appears that these weren't quite as ultra-high-res as I'd originally intended. I uploaded 2200x3300 px images, and blogger sized them down substantially. Oh well, these are still really large.
Friday, December 16, 2011
The Power-Coding Sprint Is Over -- So What's The Agenda Now?
For the last week, we've been working on power-coding. That took us through multiplayer sync models and enemy/character stats balance, to a whole new health subsystem, to the addition of continents and a whole new mana subsystem, to a new mission system, and finally ending up with the removal of tiers, the complete revamping of crafting, and the transition of the strategic map functions into the mission system. Whew! Busy week.
During that power coding period, we were essentially asking people to hold the bulk of their commentary until we got through with the power coding. We'd been in a huge design phase for a week or two prior, talking with players in the brainstorming subforum about a lot of different things. After all that talk, a lot of things had firmed up and it was time to actually implement! Which meant we had to take a step back from design for a while, and couldn't get sucked into long discussions if we had any hope of meeting our power-coding goals.
Now that the power-coding is done, we're pretty much back to our regularly-scheduled programming style. Essentially, where we mix together design, coding, bugfixes, new features, and enhancements to existing features. There area few specific issues I'd like to make a note about, however:
Enemy Balance/Difficulty, Mana System Stats Balance
This is something that we know isn't right at the moment. The power-coding phase got us a lot closer, and players are reporting that this is way more fun and interesting (and challenging) than before, but it's definitely not yet polished. This is definitely something we want feedback on!
Civ Level Relative To Region Level Balance
Right now, when you go up one region level relative to your civ level (so, you go to a level 5 region when you are level 4), the difficulty is increasing about 100%. This is something that we're doing because of how the missions are designed to play out, and it's something that I want to leave in the short term.
We need more meat on the mission system bones before we can really evaluate if this is working as intended or not. If we get to that point and it still isn't feeling right then we'll change it up, but for now this is working as intended.
EXP Balance
Right now, minibosses and microbosses are still granting EXP, and EXP containers are still scattered out in the wild. Once the mission system comes better into its own, those sources of EXP will be going away, and only missions, overlords, and lieutenants will be granting EXP.
New Warp System
There was a brainstorming thread on potential new warp systems even back before we started power-coding, but that was basically one change too many at the time. Now this is going to be a focus again, probably with some form of Warp Statues that you can freely warp between in a region (once you've visited them), but without the current style of freeform warp.
We already took a few steps down the path of making the world feel more sizable by making the missions not allow warping in them at all, but then having a form of warp stone that takes you directly to the mission exit upon successful completion of the mission. That's something that, at the moment, we plan to keep indefinitely.
But not needing to have warp potions out in the wild would be a great thing, I think, and players have been pointing out the merits of making some terrain traversal necessary rather than being "too convenient." It's an interesting thread above, if you are inclined to read and comment.
The "Feel" Of Exploration, Specifically On The World Map
As has been pointed out by a few players, some of the feel of freeform exploration has been lost with the addition of the new mission system. Because of this, we're getting all sorts of suggestions on various ways to put back the feel of exploration, such as making missions optional, adding implicit missions, adding a fog of war to the continents, redesigning the entire flow of region levels... etc.
Whoa, folks! This is an area that is basically right in my wheelhouse, so to speak. For the moment this isn't actually one I particularly want any feedback on, because while in the short term exploration has indeed taken a hit, we already have plans on how to put it back better than it was before. Once we have those things in place we'll welcome commentary, but right now this particular aspect of the game is in too much transition for anyone to make much commentary on it.
Things that need to happen before we'll be soliciting feedback on this:
1. We need to get a really solid core of missions in place.
2. We need to get some of the planned "secret missions" in place.
3. We need to get crests and other elite loot in place (traps, other outfitter-type stuff, etc).
There might be a few other things as well that we also need (possibly some seafaring exploration for small hidden islands, etc), but the above should give us a solid core that will once again really reward exploration in a way that currently it isn't. Suffice it to say, we have plans upon plans for all sorts of cool ways to make exploration feel awesome -- it's one of my favorite things about any adventure game -- but I'm in no way wanting to reevaluate region levels, missions, or fog of war at the moment.
Crests Are Coming. Soon.
These have been one of those mythical features that we've been talking about for what seems like forever. We actually had them working in the game at one point, and they sorta kinda work in some dev builds even now. As noted above, these will be some elite loot that you can find.
Enchants
The whole idea of enchants is something that we've revised a lot from our original plans. Emit Light is the first example of an enchant that is already in the game, actually, but at the moment it's all very freeform and nonstructured. You put on emit light and it lasts a certain amount of time, then you put it on again. Yawn.
What we'll actually be doing once we add some more enchants, is making it so that each enchant can only go into a certain Enchant Slot on your character. You'll have a finite number of enchant slots, and each one would have a certain type. So you might have a movement enchant type, which would let you run faster or jump higher, etc.
And you might have a couple of body enchant slots, which could hold a light source or some sort of defensive modifiers. Suddenly ball of light and the other light sources actually have some attractiveness, versus emit light beating them all out, right? Emit light would mean only one defensive enchant rather than two, potentially.
Anyway, some of the details are still not firmed up, but that's the generality of what we're planning on enchants now.
More Missions, New Mission Content!
This is a really huge one, and something we're going to be focused a lot on soon. Right now we only have three types of missions, and all of them use the exact same mechanics. We're going to have not only more kinds of missions, but new mechanics for existing ones and new ones.
This is the "putting the meat on the bones" that I was talking about above. Once a lot of this is done, then that's when we'll make the EXP changes.
Old Strategic Map Functions Carried Forward Into Missions In New Ways
Consciousness shard nodes and vortex pylons and all that. We're going to be revamping how those work, and pulling them into the missions framework. Keith and I have a design call today to talk about some of those specific things, actually.
Citybuilding Interface Revamp
This is something that Keith and I are also going to be talking more about today, but the core idea is that you won't be placing buildings directly or any of that sort of thing. You'll still be able to get to the citybuilding screen as sort of a status-of-your-settlement screen, as well as potentially a way to make some more indirect changes to your civilization. But a lot of what used to be directly handled via a point-and-click interface on this screen will instead be handled through missions.
Permadeath
This is something we're still brainstorming, although the recent changes to the game have made death more significant again in some ways. Permadeath has always been a part of the game, but the issue we're brainstorming is how to make it feel more significant and poignant.
More Monsters, New Environmental Hazards, More Spells
In order for there to be a proper reward structure, and in order for there to be a proper escalating threat that requires the reward structure, we need more content!
Other Miscellany
There are lots of other things on our list, too. Monster weakspots. Multiplayer position smoothing. Multi-part monsters. And so on and so forth.
So, That's The Agenda
The above list is going to be pretty much what we're focusing on between now and 1.0, which means that this is pretty much the overall agenda between now and sometime in February, when we'll hit more of a polish phase if we hope to release in March. We'll see what actually happens -- we all know how schedules tend to be -- but it's a good list, I think.
During that power coding period, we were essentially asking people to hold the bulk of their commentary until we got through with the power coding. We'd been in a huge design phase for a week or two prior, talking with players in the brainstorming subforum about a lot of different things. After all that talk, a lot of things had firmed up and it was time to actually implement! Which meant we had to take a step back from design for a while, and couldn't get sucked into long discussions if we had any hope of meeting our power-coding goals.
Now that the power-coding is done, we're pretty much back to our regularly-scheduled programming style. Essentially, where we mix together design, coding, bugfixes, new features, and enhancements to existing features. There area few specific issues I'd like to make a note about, however:
Enemy Balance/Difficulty, Mana System Stats Balance
This is something that we know isn't right at the moment. The power-coding phase got us a lot closer, and players are reporting that this is way more fun and interesting (and challenging) than before, but it's definitely not yet polished. This is definitely something we want feedback on!
Civ Level Relative To Region Level Balance
Right now, when you go up one region level relative to your civ level (so, you go to a level 5 region when you are level 4), the difficulty is increasing about 100%. This is something that we're doing because of how the missions are designed to play out, and it's something that I want to leave in the short term.
We need more meat on the mission system bones before we can really evaluate if this is working as intended or not. If we get to that point and it still isn't feeling right then we'll change it up, but for now this is working as intended.
EXP Balance
Right now, minibosses and microbosses are still granting EXP, and EXP containers are still scattered out in the wild. Once the mission system comes better into its own, those sources of EXP will be going away, and only missions, overlords, and lieutenants will be granting EXP.
New Warp System
There was a brainstorming thread on potential new warp systems even back before we started power-coding, but that was basically one change too many at the time. Now this is going to be a focus again, probably with some form of Warp Statues that you can freely warp between in a region (once you've visited them), but without the current style of freeform warp.
We already took a few steps down the path of making the world feel more sizable by making the missions not allow warping in them at all, but then having a form of warp stone that takes you directly to the mission exit upon successful completion of the mission. That's something that, at the moment, we plan to keep indefinitely.
But not needing to have warp potions out in the wild would be a great thing, I think, and players have been pointing out the merits of making some terrain traversal necessary rather than being "too convenient." It's an interesting thread above, if you are inclined to read and comment.
The "Feel" Of Exploration, Specifically On The World Map
As has been pointed out by a few players, some of the feel of freeform exploration has been lost with the addition of the new mission system. Because of this, we're getting all sorts of suggestions on various ways to put back the feel of exploration, such as making missions optional, adding implicit missions, adding a fog of war to the continents, redesigning the entire flow of region levels... etc.
Whoa, folks! This is an area that is basically right in my wheelhouse, so to speak. For the moment this isn't actually one I particularly want any feedback on, because while in the short term exploration has indeed taken a hit, we already have plans on how to put it back better than it was before. Once we have those things in place we'll welcome commentary, but right now this particular aspect of the game is in too much transition for anyone to make much commentary on it.
Things that need to happen before we'll be soliciting feedback on this:
1. We need to get a really solid core of missions in place.
2. We need to get some of the planned "secret missions" in place.
3. We need to get crests and other elite loot in place (traps, other outfitter-type stuff, etc).
There might be a few other things as well that we also need (possibly some seafaring exploration for small hidden islands, etc), but the above should give us a solid core that will once again really reward exploration in a way that currently it isn't. Suffice it to say, we have plans upon plans for all sorts of cool ways to make exploration feel awesome -- it's one of my favorite things about any adventure game -- but I'm in no way wanting to reevaluate region levels, missions, or fog of war at the moment.
Crests Are Coming. Soon.
These have been one of those mythical features that we've been talking about for what seems like forever. We actually had them working in the game at one point, and they sorta kinda work in some dev builds even now. As noted above, these will be some elite loot that you can find.
Enchants
The whole idea of enchants is something that we've revised a lot from our original plans. Emit Light is the first example of an enchant that is already in the game, actually, but at the moment it's all very freeform and nonstructured. You put on emit light and it lasts a certain amount of time, then you put it on again. Yawn.
What we'll actually be doing once we add some more enchants, is making it so that each enchant can only go into a certain Enchant Slot on your character. You'll have a finite number of enchant slots, and each one would have a certain type. So you might have a movement enchant type, which would let you run faster or jump higher, etc.
And you might have a couple of body enchant slots, which could hold a light source or some sort of defensive modifiers. Suddenly ball of light and the other light sources actually have some attractiveness, versus emit light beating them all out, right? Emit light would mean only one defensive enchant rather than two, potentially.
Anyway, some of the details are still not firmed up, but that's the generality of what we're planning on enchants now.
More Missions, New Mission Content!
This is a really huge one, and something we're going to be focused a lot on soon. Right now we only have three types of missions, and all of them use the exact same mechanics. We're going to have not only more kinds of missions, but new mechanics for existing ones and new ones.
This is the "putting the meat on the bones" that I was talking about above. Once a lot of this is done, then that's when we'll make the EXP changes.
Old Strategic Map Functions Carried Forward Into Missions In New Ways
Consciousness shard nodes and vortex pylons and all that. We're going to be revamping how those work, and pulling them into the missions framework. Keith and I have a design call today to talk about some of those specific things, actually.
Citybuilding Interface Revamp
This is something that Keith and I are also going to be talking more about today, but the core idea is that you won't be placing buildings directly or any of that sort of thing. You'll still be able to get to the citybuilding screen as sort of a status-of-your-settlement screen, as well as potentially a way to make some more indirect changes to your civilization. But a lot of what used to be directly handled via a point-and-click interface on this screen will instead be handled through missions.
Permadeath
This is something we're still brainstorming, although the recent changes to the game have made death more significant again in some ways. Permadeath has always been a part of the game, but the issue we're brainstorming is how to make it feel more significant and poignant.
More Monsters, New Environmental Hazards, More Spells
In order for there to be a proper reward structure, and in order for there to be a proper escalating threat that requires the reward structure, we need more content!
Other Miscellany
There are lots of other things on our list, too. Monster weakspots. Multiplayer position smoothing. Multi-part monsters. And so on and so forth.
So, That's The Agenda
The above list is going to be pretty much what we're focusing on between now and 1.0, which means that this is pretty much the overall agenda between now and sometime in February, when we'll hit more of a polish phase if we hope to release in March. We'll see what actually happens -- we all know how schedules tend to be -- but it's a good list, I think.
Monday, December 5, 2011
AVWW Multiplayer: The Shattering Of The Multiverse
On Friday we announced the first public alpha of multiplayer, and feedback on that was very positive except for one major point, which was could not have been received more negatively. The point in question is the "multiverse thing," which is detailed here.
What Happens Next With "The Multiverse Thing"
Firstly to go ahead with the most important news, we're working on an update that will negate most of the stuff with the intentional-desync effects. We're instead going to be moving to a model where the enemy logic is run on the server and the state will be as consistent between clients as most other games.
To accomplish this, there will have to be some slight wiggle-room in terms of monsters allowed to be in slightly different spots, but it's the sort of thing that I don't think you'll be able to tell even if you had two clients running on computers sitting right next to one another. Keith came up with this idea over the weekend and was talking about it with players in the forum, and those who have played multiplayer so far seemed optimistic that this would address their complaints.
Timeline?
The good news about this particular fix is that it's really replacing only part of the networking model, since the networking model is already such a multi-headed hydra. So it's possible we might be able to have this out tomorrow.
Downsides?
The short-term downside for this particular fix is that it's going to really require a lot of rebalancing of enemies, and some complete scrapping of some enemies, to make the model work. But this is something I was planning to do anyway, just in the interest of making even the solo experience tighter and more fun. As was discussed prior to this multiplayer fiasco ever coming up. But we're quite confident that players will help us iron out those temporary bumps in the balance road, and both the single player and multiplayer experiences will be a lot stronger for it inside a week or two.
One more serious downside is that certain things that we would otherwise be able to do, like "offscreen spawning of enemies" for one example. Or stuff like having bats flee from the cursor. Or even things like having 300 eagles in a chunk like we currently do. This isn't exactly a new sort of restriction class for us, as most action games have restrictions along these lines, and even network strategy games like AI War wind up with certain kinds of restrictions on what can and can't be done for reasons of multiplayer.
That said, after much discussion today, Keith and I have explored a lot of the various issues that arise from this change, and things that players were hoping we would change about the existing game even prior to multiplayer (monster spawners, etc), and we both are now feeling really confident that we can simply find lateral solutions to all the various issues.
For the monster spawner example, for instance, we have plans for how we'll be able to remove monster spawners (a popular idea with players) without having to do "offscreen spawning of enemies," which is something infeasible in the new model. There are several bigger things that will be resulting from that particular change, which I won't get into here, but the general effects are that: "trash mobs" will be fading into obscurity; enemy projectiles will be vastly slower and yet more plentiful; what were formerly trash mobs will become more interesting, more powerful foes; interiors, surface areas, and undergrounds will get differentiated even more heavily; and environmental hazards of new sorts will be playing a much larger role in the game. Most all of which were things that players were asking for, anyway.
Benefits?
The largest benefit is that we'll still be able to make the sort of game we want to make, while having it work well in multiplayer. The performance characteristics that you're seeing now, including that extreme latency-tolerance for general gameplay, should largely remain. Enemies will now jitter around some if you have a really latent connection, but it shouldn't be horrible and that's basically in keeping with any other action game, if not a little better than many of them.
That's part of the benefit of the existing hugely-hybrid networking model that Keith has spent the last two months implementing. We're able to re-tool part of it without having to affect any other part of it, and the general performance characteristics still remain quite high even though we're treading into some territory now that we'd initially hoped to avoid. This should be what players are looking for in terms of multiplayer performance/sync, I'm pretty sure, and it represents a technical middleground that until a few hours ago I didn't think would be possible to do. But Keith's idea, plus some refinement that we came up with working through it together this morning, strikes me as really solid. Knock on wood!
What Alternatives Were Considered?
Prior to ever implementing the model that we released on Friday, we had implemented a more traditional action game model that just performed completely unacceptably compared to solo play. We also looked at pretty much every other major networking model that we could think of when it came to other genres that are similar to a lot of what AVWW does. Nothing really fit this game perfectly, which is why we went with the model we did.
Side Note: We actually went with that model knowing we might have to change something about it, but we weren't sure what player reaction would be to it since no game had ever tried anything quite like that before. So we made sure to have the general networking be as flexible as possible so that changes would be possible. And that's part of why we didn't want to talk about the specifics of the model in advance, because we knew folks might not like the idea on the surface of it, and we wanted their feedback on the actual playtesting of it rather than the concept.
Since the release on Friday, and what can only be described as a "polite outcry" from our core playerbase about this one specific design choice (after playtesting, which is precisely the sort of feedback we were looking for), we've been wracking our brains to figure out a better alternative, and players have been making suggestions as well. Not really any of the suggestions particularly fit with the technical constraints of this game, which are really unique and particularly challenging to work with and explain, but we did get a razor-sharp insight into exactly the sort of performance characteristics that players were expecting and where our current model let them down.
Anyway, so we've been all over the board since then, thinking of radical other models, major changes to solo play to make multiplayer fit, and even not having multiplayer at all (since if the execution of said multiplayer was going to be a detractor, better not to have it at all). In the end, after many hours of discussion and modeling and remodeling, we came up with the above changes which are actually pretty slight. Key to being able to settle on that model was talking through solo-affecting core gameplay changes that solo players were already asking for anyhow, and which would be more compatible with multiplayer than the current model.
Conclusion
We think you're really going to like what's coming up, and you won't have to wait long this time. There are lots of changes coming to the game in general, as anyone who's been following the brainstorming subforum already knows. The game is really undergoing a transformation from something more rough and alpha-like to something more polished and release-like, which is a great thing all around.
Most of those changes are unrelated to multiplayer specifically, but a lot of them actually do happen to make the new model of multiplayer easier. And given that we keep getting comments to the effect of "this is how I was imagining the game back when I was first hearing about it" when people read about the coming changes in the brainstorming forum, I take that as another really positive sign.
We really do appreciate all the feedback, and for people taking the time to run through the early alpha of multiplayer for us. It sounds like overall people were having a lot of fun despite being hugely frustrated with "the multiverse thing," so I think that once we get that shored up we're going to be in happy territory.
What Happens Next With "The Multiverse Thing"
Firstly to go ahead with the most important news, we're working on an update that will negate most of the stuff with the intentional-desync effects. We're instead going to be moving to a model where the enemy logic is run on the server and the state will be as consistent between clients as most other games.
To accomplish this, there will have to be some slight wiggle-room in terms of monsters allowed to be in slightly different spots, but it's the sort of thing that I don't think you'll be able to tell even if you had two clients running on computers sitting right next to one another. Keith came up with this idea over the weekend and was talking about it with players in the forum, and those who have played multiplayer so far seemed optimistic that this would address their complaints.
Timeline?
The good news about this particular fix is that it's really replacing only part of the networking model, since the networking model is already such a multi-headed hydra. So it's possible we might be able to have this out tomorrow.
Downsides?
The short-term downside for this particular fix is that it's going to really require a lot of rebalancing of enemies, and some complete scrapping of some enemies, to make the model work. But this is something I was planning to do anyway, just in the interest of making even the solo experience tighter and more fun. As was discussed prior to this multiplayer fiasco ever coming up. But we're quite confident that players will help us iron out those temporary bumps in the balance road, and both the single player and multiplayer experiences will be a lot stronger for it inside a week or two.
One more serious downside is that certain things that we would otherwise be able to do, like "offscreen spawning of enemies" for one example. Or stuff like having bats flee from the cursor. Or even things like having 300 eagles in a chunk like we currently do. This isn't exactly a new sort of restriction class for us, as most action games have restrictions along these lines, and even network strategy games like AI War wind up with certain kinds of restrictions on what can and can't be done for reasons of multiplayer.
That said, after much discussion today, Keith and I have explored a lot of the various issues that arise from this change, and things that players were hoping we would change about the existing game even prior to multiplayer (monster spawners, etc), and we both are now feeling really confident that we can simply find lateral solutions to all the various issues.
For the monster spawner example, for instance, we have plans for how we'll be able to remove monster spawners (a popular idea with players) without having to do "offscreen spawning of enemies," which is something infeasible in the new model. There are several bigger things that will be resulting from that particular change, which I won't get into here, but the general effects are that: "trash mobs" will be fading into obscurity; enemy projectiles will be vastly slower and yet more plentiful; what were formerly trash mobs will become more interesting, more powerful foes; interiors, surface areas, and undergrounds will get differentiated even more heavily; and environmental hazards of new sorts will be playing a much larger role in the game. Most all of which were things that players were asking for, anyway.
Benefits?
The largest benefit is that we'll still be able to make the sort of game we want to make, while having it work well in multiplayer. The performance characteristics that you're seeing now, including that extreme latency-tolerance for general gameplay, should largely remain. Enemies will now jitter around some if you have a really latent connection, but it shouldn't be horrible and that's basically in keeping with any other action game, if not a little better than many of them.
That's part of the benefit of the existing hugely-hybrid networking model that Keith has spent the last two months implementing. We're able to re-tool part of it without having to affect any other part of it, and the general performance characteristics still remain quite high even though we're treading into some territory now that we'd initially hoped to avoid. This should be what players are looking for in terms of multiplayer performance/sync, I'm pretty sure, and it represents a technical middleground that until a few hours ago I didn't think would be possible to do. But Keith's idea, plus some refinement that we came up with working through it together this morning, strikes me as really solid. Knock on wood!
What Alternatives Were Considered?
Prior to ever implementing the model that we released on Friday, we had implemented a more traditional action game model that just performed completely unacceptably compared to solo play. We also looked at pretty much every other major networking model that we could think of when it came to other genres that are similar to a lot of what AVWW does. Nothing really fit this game perfectly, which is why we went with the model we did.
Side Note: We actually went with that model knowing we might have to change something about it, but we weren't sure what player reaction would be to it since no game had ever tried anything quite like that before. So we made sure to have the general networking be as flexible as possible so that changes would be possible. And that's part of why we didn't want to talk about the specifics of the model in advance, because we knew folks might not like the idea on the surface of it, and we wanted their feedback on the actual playtesting of it rather than the concept.
Since the release on Friday, and what can only be described as a "polite outcry" from our core playerbase about this one specific design choice (after playtesting, which is precisely the sort of feedback we were looking for), we've been wracking our brains to figure out a better alternative, and players have been making suggestions as well. Not really any of the suggestions particularly fit with the technical constraints of this game, which are really unique and particularly challenging to work with and explain, but we did get a razor-sharp insight into exactly the sort of performance characteristics that players were expecting and where our current model let them down.
Anyway, so we've been all over the board since then, thinking of radical other models, major changes to solo play to make multiplayer fit, and even not having multiplayer at all (since if the execution of said multiplayer was going to be a detractor, better not to have it at all). In the end, after many hours of discussion and modeling and remodeling, we came up with the above changes which are actually pretty slight. Key to being able to settle on that model was talking through solo-affecting core gameplay changes that solo players were already asking for anyhow, and which would be more compatible with multiplayer than the current model.
Conclusion
We think you're really going to like what's coming up, and you won't have to wait long this time. There are lots of changes coming to the game in general, as anyone who's been following the brainstorming subforum already knows. The game is really undergoing a transformation from something more rough and alpha-like to something more polished and release-like, which is a great thing all around.
Most of those changes are unrelated to multiplayer specifically, but a lot of them actually do happen to make the new model of multiplayer easier. And given that we keep getting comments to the effect of "this is how I was imagining the game back when I was first hearing about it" when people read about the coming changes in the brainstorming forum, I take that as another really positive sign.
We really do appreciate all the feedback, and for people taking the time to run through the early alpha of multiplayer for us. It sounds like overall people were having a lot of fun despite being hugely frustrated with "the multiverse thing," so I think that once we get that shored up we're going to be in happy territory.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Work Continues On The New AI System, Among Other Things
Well, I'd hoped to have the new AI system ready for a release today or even yesterday, but things don't always go to plan.
At first I was just going to make it so that enemies could do multiple types of magic attacks. Then I decided to wrap in some of their general logic so that they could do things like chase you some of the time and then kite you and then just wander around, etc. Then I decided to wrap in a really much broader behavior structure, where enemies can flexibly switch between whole movement styles if need be.
It's not done yet, but it would allow some enemies to walk some of the time and fly others, or do things like run really fast and jump really high while having a weak attack, and move slower while having a stronger attack, etc. And to even have the various abilities be level-gated so that you'd see them with different frequencies or even not at all depending on their level.
The general idea being that this is a really flexible AI framework that can be used to manage some moderately more complex stuff in the short term, and that can then be extended without the need for any more rewrites as more and more complex enemies get added. A lot of that complexity won't actually manifest in the current enemies because they are meant to be pretty simple, but a number of them are getting more abilities that they only show under certain circumstances such as higher levels.
Regular espers start outright pathfinding after you a bit once you get to a pretty high level, for instance, and the bosses have an even better chance of doing that. Icicle leapers of a certain level, rather than always chasing you, will now sometimes do that and sometimes not, which actually makes them more dangerous because then they're harder to predict and better at navigating the terrain under some circumstances.
Whew. It's really a whole re-imagining of the entire AI system based on what I've learned with working with the mechanics of this game and its enemies so far. We started simple with the AI here specifically so that we could see what would feel good and play well, but now that we want to do real overlords (not just stat-buffed minibosses), that's requiring a much more flexible and advanced AI system. It's becoming a lot more AI-War-like in its decision making per enemy, now.
Two new enemies, the Skelebot Centurion and the Skelebot Overlord, have also been integrated into the game, and the skelebot overlord is now the largest enemy in the game. Standing next to a skelebot giant, the giant only comes up the overlord's elbow. Right now the centurion and the overlord skelebots don't actually act much differently from their lesser counterparts, but they'll be the first two enemies to very visibly benefit from the new AI system once I get that finished up. Hopefully Monday -- I'm down to 73 conflicts to fix in visual studio, so that's really getting down there from the hundreds it started out as!
Keith has also been having some absolutely amazing strides with the multiplayer, too. He and Josh have had a number of successful playtest sessions now, and there are only a few blocking issues that he's now working out. I don't want to jinx it, but it looks pretty likely that we could have this ready for some first public alpha multiplayer testing next week (though the Thanksgiving holiday might get in the way and push it to the week after). Anyway, it's getting down there.
There's a number of other cool things in the works, too, for soon after the AI update. A "mission scripting" system has really been on my mind a lot lately, and the design for that has been taking shape well. There's also a lot of things that I want to do to improve the flow of the game, providing more structure for players who want it while still allowing as much freedom as you have now for those who want that.
There are several other streamlining-type ideas that Keith and I have been talking about for a while that we're going to implement in the next month or so. There will still be more enemies and spells and such coming along with this, and yes I've got plans to address the eagles although that's going to take a bit more time to fully resolve as there's several levels of things I want to look at with them.
Lots of good stuff coming up! Just figured I'd give one last update before the weekend here.
At first I was just going to make it so that enemies could do multiple types of magic attacks. Then I decided to wrap in some of their general logic so that they could do things like chase you some of the time and then kite you and then just wander around, etc. Then I decided to wrap in a really much broader behavior structure, where enemies can flexibly switch between whole movement styles if need be.
It's not done yet, but it would allow some enemies to walk some of the time and fly others, or do things like run really fast and jump really high while having a weak attack, and move slower while having a stronger attack, etc. And to even have the various abilities be level-gated so that you'd see them with different frequencies or even not at all depending on their level.
The general idea being that this is a really flexible AI framework that can be used to manage some moderately more complex stuff in the short term, and that can then be extended without the need for any more rewrites as more and more complex enemies get added. A lot of that complexity won't actually manifest in the current enemies because they are meant to be pretty simple, but a number of them are getting more abilities that they only show under certain circumstances such as higher levels.
Regular espers start outright pathfinding after you a bit once you get to a pretty high level, for instance, and the bosses have an even better chance of doing that. Icicle leapers of a certain level, rather than always chasing you, will now sometimes do that and sometimes not, which actually makes them more dangerous because then they're harder to predict and better at navigating the terrain under some circumstances.
Whew. It's really a whole re-imagining of the entire AI system based on what I've learned with working with the mechanics of this game and its enemies so far. We started simple with the AI here specifically so that we could see what would feel good and play well, but now that we want to do real overlords (not just stat-buffed minibosses), that's requiring a much more flexible and advanced AI system. It's becoming a lot more AI-War-like in its decision making per enemy, now.
Two new enemies, the Skelebot Centurion and the Skelebot Overlord, have also been integrated into the game, and the skelebot overlord is now the largest enemy in the game. Standing next to a skelebot giant, the giant only comes up the overlord's elbow. Right now the centurion and the overlord skelebots don't actually act much differently from their lesser counterparts, but they'll be the first two enemies to very visibly benefit from the new AI system once I get that finished up. Hopefully Monday -- I'm down to 73 conflicts to fix in visual studio, so that's really getting down there from the hundreds it started out as!
Keith has also been having some absolutely amazing strides with the multiplayer, too. He and Josh have had a number of successful playtest sessions now, and there are only a few blocking issues that he's now working out. I don't want to jinx it, but it looks pretty likely that we could have this ready for some first public alpha multiplayer testing next week (though the Thanksgiving holiday might get in the way and push it to the week after). Anyway, it's getting down there.
There's a number of other cool things in the works, too, for soon after the AI update. A "mission scripting" system has really been on my mind a lot lately, and the design for that has been taking shape well. There's also a lot of things that I want to do to improve the flow of the game, providing more structure for players who want it while still allowing as much freedom as you have now for those who want that.
There are several other streamlining-type ideas that Keith and I have been talking about for a while that we're going to implement in the next month or so. There will still be more enemies and spells and such coming along with this, and yes I've got plans to address the eagles although that's going to take a bit more time to fully resolve as there's several levels of things I want to look at with them.
Lots of good stuff coming up! Just figured I'd give one last update before the weekend here.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
New A Valley Without Wind Video Trailer!
Just in time for Minecon, here's the latest and greatest trailer for the game! Erik and his friend Kevin really pulled out all the stops with this one, and I think it's our best-put-together trailer yet.
It's also far superior to the prior trailer in that it shows off a lot of the new spells, enemies, and visual effects that simply didn't exist when the other one was made. Enjoy!
It's also far superior to the prior trailer in that it shows off a lot of the new spells, enemies, and visual effects that simply didn't exist when the other one was made. Enjoy!
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