Our New Agenda For The Last Week Prior To AVWW 1.0.

The short version: we're going into bugfix, polish, and usability mode between now and about Thursday.  Then Friday I'll be getting stuff to the various distributors so that everything can be all hooked up for a release on Monday. 

Then this weekend I'm going to take the weekend off (barring unforeseen catastrophic issues); it'll be my first days off, weekends or otherwise, since February 16th, aside from last Monday when my wife and I toured around Boston before coming home from PAX East.

And then next week, after our release on Monday, we'll see what happens.  Keith and I have a ton of new stuff I wanted to get in prior to 1.0, but that stuff will just have to wait until... dun dun dun... next week or the week after (gasps).

Rationale For The Shift In Focus
In some recent releases from last week, we added a few new spells and various other major new features.  Initially, my plan for this week was to keep doing the same.  However, other releases from the last week focused more on general polish, bugfixes, and improvements to usability and the new player experience.

The former is more exciting for existing players, sure.  But the latter is a lot more important to new players, and to broadening the playerbase in general.  And if we want to keep developing AVWW out over the long haul, like we have AI War, then we have to actually have a playerbase big enough to support the staff we have.

In that light, the only sensible thing to do is focus on making the experience as fun as possible for as many players as possible, and to lower the barriers to entry as much as we can without actually changing the game that the experienced players already love.  Sometimes it's something as simple as improving our support for the XBox 360 controller; other times it's something like allowing custom mappings for key items like wooden platforms or light spells.

This Happens Every Time
Whenever a big release is getting near, I always start getting worried that there isn't enough content.  Because, however much content there is, it's never as much as I've thought of.  Which is actually a good thing -- it's a sign that we didn't just wring every last shred of possible interesting ideas out of our central premise.

Well, I guess Portal 2 was actually criticized by some indies for not doing exactly that sort of wringing (which is a whole other matter).  But in our case, our style of post-release support is such that having lots of untapped potential is something we view as a good thing.  That way we can still be making lots of additions to this game three years from now, players willing, and everybody is still interested and having fun, including us.

That's how you get something like AI War 5.0, which is a game so massive at this point that I don't think any indie could have made it behind closed doors on a fixed budget before releasing it into the wild.  That's what I want to see with AVWW, years from now: I want us all to be looking back at the game in its current state and going "can you believe how small it was back then!?"

And of course, by "small" I mean that there's only about 30-50 hours of playtime required to see everything the game has on offer (after which you can still keep playing because, you know, procedural).  Compared with AI War, where it probably takes 300+ hours at this point to even see all the ships and AI personalities if you're playing full games.

So, yeah -- this happens every time.  Shortly before AI War 1.0 released, I still had another 30ish ships I'd been planning on adding before release.   Then I finally hit a point where I realized "you know what?  This came is more than large enough already for 1.0."  So I focused on this sort of polish and fixes, pushed the game out, and wound up adding most of those ships in the weeks following its release.

On That Note, We're Looking For Feedback
Both on general polish, as well as multiplayer in particular.  If there's anything that's not working quite right, now's the time to let us know!

Bits And Pieces From PAX East

Volatar on the forums reminded me that I needed to do a post about how PAX went -- so here I am!  It's been a whirlwind since getting back from PAX, and I still have an enormous backlog of emails that I've not yet had a chance to respond to.  I'm getting to them -- if you've sent me an email and I've not yet responded, it's nothing personal and I will get to it soon!  Just trying not to drown here.

I'm going to do a bigger writeup about lessons learned from PAX sometime in the next month, probably after the 1.0 because ohmygod-there's-no-time at the moment. ;)  But some highlights for now:

- Coverage is already coming in, as Erik posted earlier today.  That's only a small slice of what we actually did, though, so every day there's more that seems to crop up.  Which is great!

- People seemed to really love the game; we had almost universally people walking away happy, and an enormous percentage of them saying they wanted to get the game.  Caveat: people self-select, obviously, so the people who came into the booth or stopped were the ones with the most interest in the first place; not sure how much that means in terms of wider acceptance yet.

- We had numerous people bringing back their friends, though, so that was cool.

- It quickly became clear how much of an unknown Arcen is with the US press.  The UK press and other European press knows us really well because of AI War, but in the US strategy games just aren't news unless they are Starcraft.  Out of some 30-40 interviews (not sure how many exactly), there were only 3 who had ever heard of me.  One of them was a certain major gaming TV channel, so that was wicked awesome actually. :)

- Given that basically nobody knew anything about us or our game there, that gave us a really good opportunity to figure out how best to explain the game to people who are coming to it cold.  We got really, really good at it.  I definitely plan to make a video with a short version of my explanation of the game with voiceover and video clips prior to 1.0.  Also we have some marketing copy adjustments to make based on what we learned.

- I felt like all but maybe two of the press that I interviewed with seemed really impressed with the game and excited about it.  The other two were hard to read, and so I just don't know what they felt like.  With some other members of the press they were clearly telling other press about it because by the third day we were getting press stopping by and saying things like "I hear this is one to watch."  And at least one guy who I had a really great session with sent his senior editor back later in the day, which was quite cool.

- Four or five people said, literally verbatim, "so this is like Terraria but better?"  That's certainly positive, and I'll take it, despite the fact that I don't know that I agree with the sentiment -- Terraria and AVWW focus on really different things and each fills a different niche.  I took those comments to mean that those people had wanted more on the adventuring side rather than the construction side, in which case AVWW is going to be the one that's potentially more tailored for what they were looking for.

- We quickly learned that the first half an hour of the expo hall is just a waste for indies.  You can pass out some little things to folks as they pass, but nobody is going to stop.  At ANY of the smaller booths.  Everyone is running to the largest AAA games on the floor to try to avoid the super long lines that otherwise form there.  Then as soon as those lines fill up, the rest of the expo hall floods and it's time to get down to business.  Even places like the Wizards of the Coast booths were pretty dead for that first half an hour simply because they were more open and not prone to lines -- players were able to get at them all day, anytime they wanted, and knew it.  Kind of an interesting effect.

- We did indeed learn that dry air (compared to North Carolina) and talking for 8+ hours a day straight is a bad combination for the throat.  Erik and Pablo and I kept getting into a pretty bad way and really didn't sound like ourselves a lot of the time.  Monday morning Pablo apparently couldn't speak at all.  My voice still isn't fully back to normal yet, but it was totally worth it.

- Personally I thought I would have been more nervous, especially with the video interviews.  Over the last three years I've gotten really used to audio interviews and podcasts, and I'm always super pumped up to meet and talk to people (introvert? me? well, yes, but in a somewhat nontraditional way).  But normally being on video would have been butterflies-city, and I had to do that maybe five or six times.  I'm not sure exactly.  Thing is, once that first half hour of dead time is past and players are in your booth and press is coming by at a good clip, it's all one big thing.  You don't have time to get nervous about anything, and there's never the sense that all eyes are on you -- to the contrary, even if you're working the largest booth there, I think the scale of the expo hall still must drive home your own relative insignificance.  I mean, that place was absolutely enormous in all the best ways.

- Pro tip for anyone who plans to expo at PAX or similar: bring granola bars, power bars, or similar with you.  Friday we did not do this, and we wound up eating nasty pizza for $60 way late in the afternoon.  It was welcome, because there had been no break until then (and I had to eat during interviews anyhow, because they were so nonstop).  Saturday was even more busy, and I was constantly behind.  Thankfully the others started out the press sessions with the press getting some hands on experience with the game before I wrapped up my prior press session.

- There were at least two press sessions on Saturday that I just missed entirely because I was somehow double-booked (I think someone just showed up unscheduled, actually), but Erik took those and handled them really well.  Anyway, on that day there was literally no time for food at all, so it was just powerbars while still trying to talk and not be rude about eating.  People could see we were slammed and were understanding, though.

- Sunday was surprisingly more quiet, by comparison.  The last hour or so of the convention in particular, the expo hall was noticeably emptier.  A few companies were actually tearing down their booths early in violation of their contracts.  And by "noticeably emptier" I mean probably "only 3,000-5,000 people in the hall."  So we still had people swinging by, but we were actually having terminals open more.

- Oh yes, the terminals!  We had four computer stations that people could play on for 15 minutes.  In all, we estimate about 300ish players were able to partake of this over the three day span, and there were another 300 that stood very close and watched intensely -- friends or family, or just people who wanted to watch rather than play (some people get embarrassed they will do badly on their first try with a game and don't want to check it out in an expo hall, even if they do want to watch, which I can understand).  Anyway, the terminals were a really big success.

- For that matter, so were the banners, the 32" TV screen, the flyers, the AVWW cards, and the buttons.  The banners really grabbed people's eye it seemed, and the TV in particular was something that people could see from the MTG booth and the Sega Aliens line.  Lots of heads looking our way, and several people mentioned stopping because they saw the video, even though they had no idea what the game was.  With the flyers, cards, and buttons, those were things people seemed genuinely interested in, and hopefully those are now things that people are finding in their swag bags and reminding them about our game.  We'll see.

- I ran into perhaps a dozen or two players who were fans of AI War, which was super cool.  Never have met any AI War fans in real life before (this was my first gaming convention).  Actually, never had met anyone who had even heard of AI War before, so you can perhaps appreciate the scale of how cool that was.

- Also cool?  On the unpacking day (Thursday), I saw Jerry and Mike walk by, not 40 feet from me in the expo hall.  They were just walking along talking about something, and didn't notice myself or anyone else right around there.  Probably for the best, as I would likely have gone all fanboy on them.  Seriously, I've been reading their strip since something like 4-5 months after they started.  I was in high school, and tried getting one of my best friends into the strip.  I made the mistake of showing him the current day's strip, which involved a lobster, a handgun, and a wristwatch.  I believe his words were "it seems kind of low-brow."  Gah!  Thirteen years later, I still hold that against him, a little. ;)

- If you are going to the expo hall to exhibit your game, don't expect to see much other than the expo hall.  We had offers to go out with other indies, and we chatted with them some during the exhibitor meet and greet on Friday in particular.  But at the end of each day we were just beat, and we also had a lot of shop we still needed to talk on our own team; each person was learning different things about how best to handle the booth and how best to explain the game, and we needed those nights in order to collate all that data and make sure we were all on the same page.  We did manage to stop by the retro arcade, which was pretty awesome, though.  And we did catch a little bit of one concert, but it wasn't one of the better ones; I would have loved to have seen the Minibosses in particular.  And why weren't The Protomen there?  Seriously, they should have been there.

- Lastly, we really learned a ton from watching the attendees play our game.  It's not a substitute for the forums and mantis and our whole beta process that we go through, but neither is our normal beta process a substitute for this, I'm learning.  They're just two completely different bands of data, both valuable.  At this point I think that the cost of the trip (about $10k) was worth it even just solely in terms of what we learned and are thus able to improve about the game.  All the rest of the stuff makes it even more of a win on top of that, so that's good.

And with that... I'd better get back to work!

Images Of Our AVWW Banners For PAX East!

These are all at a lower scale, of course, but I thought you might enjoy these.  The first two are being printed at 3 feet by five 5 feet in size and will go on either side of our 33 inch video monitor mounted at the back of our booth. 

The third image is being printed at eight feet by three feet and will be running along the outside of our booth toward the adjacent walkway outside our booth.  That wall is only three feet high, but is ten feet long, so we'll be covering part-but-not-all of that otherwise-just-black wall outside our booth.

Our booth itself will have four computer stations in there where attendees can try out the game, and you'll be able to stand outside the booth and see other people play, too.  We have several kinds of swag we're going to be giving away, but quantities are limited so if you want a button in particular be sure and get there early on each day; we'll be rationing the buttons so that no matter what day you come to the conference you can get one if you get there early enough.

And now back to work for me on the game itself!

AVWW 1.0 On April 16th, Confirmed On Steam -- Also Price Drop For Final Game

It was just two days ago that we gave you some general updates about A Valley Without Wind's launch coming the "week of April 16th," but there were a lot of specifics we couldn't give you at the time.  Welp... now have the rest of the details for you!

Release Date -- And Steam!
The actual release date will be, specifically, Monday April 16th itself.  The game will be going live on Steam on that day as 1.0, along with having its version updated to 1.0 with Impulse, GamersGate, MacGameStore, and our own site.  All of the latter already carry the game at a preorder discount.

Steam Keys For Existing Preorders?
Any keys you buy from other sources should be able to have their CD keys imported into Steam for Steam keys.  The final call on that is always up to Valve rather than us, so we can't make promises on their behalf.  But all five of our existing games/expansions that are on Steam allow for CD key imports, so we don't have any reason to believe that this sixth title will suddenly be any different.

Final Pricing For 1.0
The preorder price has been $9.99, and will remain thus until April 16th.  At launch, we'll be moving to a final price of $14.99 for the game instead of the previously-planned $19.99, however.

Insight Into The Pricing Thought Process, If You're Curious
This pricing change is something that we decided upon in consultation with our distributors, who strongly recommended it.  Looking at the market for games vaguely similar to AVWW, we had to conclude that they were correct, and honestly we'd been getting antsy about the $20 price point for a game of this genre, anyhow.

Crazy, right?  There's dozens of hours of content in here, hundreds if you really get into the game heavily, and that beats out a lot of AAA titles in terms of how much bang for your buck you get -- at $15, $20, or even $60.  But that's not how the market works, and the market is always changing.

If you think about this as your game, and you're trying to figure out a fair price, that makes $20 seem like the right choice -- after all, AI War was $20 up until this past month, and it's done very well for us.  So that's what we originally went with as our goal for the launch price.  The thing is, if I step back and think about this as a consumer (which I am -- I still buy plenty of games myself), then $20 for most small-studio indie games seems a bit steep.

The exception are those that are in niche genres: strategy titles, visual novels, wargames, hardcore simulations, and so forth.  I think that my friend Cliff has it right with his pricing for Gratuitous Tank Battles, for instance.  And I think that $20 was the right price point for AI War for most of its life (though I always had people telling me it should be $30 like some other wargames, and others telling me it should be $10 like some other indie games).

For A Valley Without Wind, looking at anything that could be lumped into its general sort of genre, the pricing is more typically between $10-$15.  Given the massive amount of playtime this game has, and the ongoing work we do post-release with titles like this, being at the higher end of that range -- but no higher -- seemed like the pragmatic move.

What's Left To Do?
Today we should have the first two mysteries released for you, which will mark the last of the overall "broad game mechanics" for the game.  Then it's a focus on:

- Polish
- Bugfixes
- Player-requested tweaks and additions
- More enemies, including enemy elites and boss modifiers
- More spells
- More guardian power scrolls
- More mission activities
- Possibly a few more enchants, although there are already hundreds of thousands of permutations of these.

If you're curious how things are likely to go over the next month between now and 1.0, just take a look at what we've been up to lately.  That's pretty representative.

And Now, Some Shameless Plugging Of Social Media
Be sure to like the game on facebook if you're into that sort of thing, follow the game on twitter if that's your bag, etc.  This game is really important to us both personally and as a company, and word of mouth has been absolutely instrumental in the past success of AI War for us.  If you like what we do and want to see more of it, be sure to tell your friends!

Thanks, as always, for your support! We really wouldn't be here without you all.  Nor would AVWW be the same without all the extensive beta involvement it's seen.  I mean, seriously.

A Crash Course On A Valley Without Wind

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!

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.

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!

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

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

A Week Without Updates!? An AVWW Status Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Valley Without Wind Getting Started Guide - Take Two!

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

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

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

A Valley Without Wind Getting Started Guide - Take Two!

by Josh Knapp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our First Building

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back Outside; aka Our First Enemy!

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

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

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

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

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

Mining Our First Gems..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going Out Into The Full World; or What Now?

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

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

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

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

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

Checklist Of General Early Game Goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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