Explaining "A Valley Without Wind." What The Heck Is It?

Just what is this game "A Valley Without Wind" from indie studio Arcen Games all about?  Read on to find out.

Procedural World Filled With Choice And Customization
At first glance it looks like your average 2D Metroidvania title, just with magic instead of guns.  The difference is choice: except for a brief linear intro mission, this is all a procedural open world. 

Rather than linear levels, the emphasis here is on tactical combat and strategic planning.  The overlord is strong, you're weak, and you need to figure out how to fix that and go kick his or her butt.  In a lot of respects the mentality is that of a strategy game (makes sense given our past games, eh?), but rather than it being an army of characters you control, it's just one character at a time. 

The amount of customization is pretty crazy.  There are "only" something like 40 spells you can directly craft at the moment, but there are also passive enchant buffs that you can apply to yourself.  Enchants change anything from how you move; to how your spells behave; to how you light your way, or if you can breathe underwater, etc.  Enchants are procedurally generated like loot in Borderlands or Diablo, and there are a few hundred thousand unique combinations possible at this point.  Various items can be scavenged out in the world, too, such as magic scrolls to turn yourself into a bat, heatsuits that make lava easier to deal with, and so on.  Figuring out how to best customize your character to match your skills as a gamer is one of the cooler aspects of the game.

The Community Vs The Self, Permadeath, And Thinking Outside The Box
When you choose your first character, the game warns you not to get too attached.  It's not a question of IF your character is going to die, but WHEN.  Upon death, the character is gone forever -- and most of the time, a vengeful ghost arises from their corpse and makes the area you died in even harder.  So, uh, tactical retreats aren't just for the faint of heart in this game.

It's not like permadeath in a roguelike, though, where the mechanics are overtly punitive -- we're not out to punish the player.  When you die you get to choose a new character immediately, and you keep all your inventory, enchants, and general progress in the game.  There are some minor character-specific things that are lost, but it's nothing remotely heart-breaking.

We've also tried to emphasize choice with "community focus versus focus on self."  There's a lot more that we want to do in that area in the future, but what is there is pretty nifty already.  You can rescue NPCs and construct buildings for them, and in return those NPCs can help you out via long-range magic scrolls, for instance.

I really love games where players get an opportunity to show their cleverness, rather than just jumping through a set of hoops the developer set out.  In your average Metroidvania title, each challenge has one solution (see red door in Metroid = shoot with missiles), and that can be really fun in its own right.  But in AVWW each challenge tends to have four or five solutions (at least), each with their own pros and cons.  If you play as a bat you don't have to worry about jumping, but you also deal less damage, get blown about by the wind more, and can't go into lava or ice age areas.  And so on. 

I like to tell the story of this one player who, during the beta, made essentially a melee fighter using the spell Death Touch and some jump-related and defense-related enchants; he managed to kill an overlord with this build, and I was blown away that this was even possible.  It took a lot of sideways thinking to make the build in the first place, and then a lot of skill to bring down an overlord using that build.  That's what I mean by encouraging players to show their own cleverness (as well as skill).

Adaptive Gameplay, And True Freedom Without Being Directionless
In a linear game, the difficulty curve can be set by level designers.  In an open world, that's not possible because we don't know where you're going to go.  So what we did was make it adaptive to how you play: monsters have a general baseline difficulty to start with, and then they upgrade as you demonstrate your proficiency.  Killed 100 regular bats?  Okay, we get it, you're good at killing bats.  Time for... bats on fire!

You can literally go almost anywhere you see in the open world -- including right into the overlord's keep at any time.  Come on, it's no secret where the oppressive dictator lives.  The problem is that the monsters surrounding his keep will probably kill you before you even reach his front stoop.  But if you're so good that you could avoid getting hit at all by enemy shots, you could just go right into his keep and take him out with your starting pea shooters.  Realistically it's a lot more fun to actually play the game and buff your character appropriately before going for the take-down, but even then you get to choose when and how that take-down is going to happen.

Each world is literally endless.  When you beat one overlord, and thus save one continent, a new continent that is bigger and more complicated opens up.  Some things carry across continents, others don't.  It's kind of like a "New Game+" option that a lot of RPGs have, except better because you can still go back to your old continent any time, and there's a lot more direct continuity.  Each continent should take most players 8-14 hours to complete, but that really varies enormously depending on how much side exploration they do.

One immediate worry with a game of such scope, with such long-form goals, is players feeling directionless.  That was certainly something we struggled with early in the public beta, and with AI War as well.  Thanks to the help of our core fanbase, we've managed to put together a system that guides without being directive.  The "planning menu" in the game gives you suggestions on what to do at all times based on your current status, but you're free to ignore those suggestions and do whatever you see fit.  It also includes the equivalent of an entire wiki right in the game itself, so that you don't have to go looking at external sources to find out where arcane ingredient #7 is, etc.

Where We Hope To See This Go Next
This has been our most successful beta so far by a factor of at least 4:1, and we had really positive showings at both Minecon and PAX East.  Players willing, my hope is to be able to focus on building more of this game for the next 3+ years to take it from what is already massive (30-40 hours to even see all the content at the moment) to something gargantuan like AI War.  As with AI War, the hope is to do tons of free content on an ongoing basis, and then a few optional paid expansions with larger content-drops along the way. 

Speaking of AI War, that game has been out since May 2009 and we're still doing almost weekly free updates to it; and we have at least two more expansions planned regardless of how well AVWW does.  We know that some folks' faith in post-release content has been shaken in light of various recent events with other developers, but we have a three-year track record of being there on an ongoing basis.  We don't intend to stop that anytime soon.

Launch Trailer For A Valley Without Wind!

Reminder: the launch for the game is coming right up on this very next Monday, the 23rd of April!  Now is your last chance to get it for the preorder discount of 33% off!

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.