Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .722 "Concentrated Reports " Released!

This one is, without a doubt, the largest release of our beta period.  I've said that before, but this one tops the rest -- and won't be topped between now and 1.0, either, I'm quite confident.  There's so much in this one it's almost hard to know where to begin...

Equipment
Let's start with equipment, because it was definitely the single weakest mechanic in the game circa release .721.  These have had quite an enormous overhaul in a lot of departments based on player feedback.  The clarity of just what the heck equipment does, and what you are wearing at the moment, has been vastly improved.  But along with that, the actual utility of equipment has gone through the roof compared to what it was, too -- the actual functions it performs is more useful, and its durability is way higher, too.

To be honest I found myself skipping equipment most of the time, like a lot of players were reporting they were doing.  It was to the point I was very seriously considering just removing equipment all together.  But now I find it personally exciting to find what is in a chest when I find one, because it's actually useful and interesting and changes how the game will play out for my character for a little while.  I'm quite excited about how that changes the weakest mechanic into something that I think is actually quite strong now.

Strategic End Of Turn Report
This is the big thing that Keith has been working on for most of the time since the last release -- this has been quite a job, but the results are stunning.  Before the end of turn report was basically a "wall of tiny text." 

Now the report has a sidebar of easy to read, color-coded buttons with summary-style information.  You can use the arrow keys to move your cursor over the various buttons and see details in a much larger, more readable font.

As Keith pointed out to me, the lack of clarity on the old end of turn report was actually making the game artificially harder.  Players were not recognizing trouble spots (like dwindling food) until it was too late.  They'd notice when people started dying or morale was in the pit, but not when there was a negative food trend just starting.  The new end of turn report really makes all of those sorts of trends and events a lot more obvious -- I think all of us are about to get a lot better at the strategic game!

Combos Out, Concentration In
Back on the adventure mode side of things, we've removed the extremely opaque "combo" system that was previously in the game.  It was so unclear that even most advanced players didn't know it was there -- and a few who had noticed the effects of it thought there was some strange glitch!

The purpose of the original combo system was to encourage players to use a variety of spells; but that's already being handled via monster variety and circumstances of the level design.  To my great delight, actually -- handling this intrinsically is much better than trying to lead the player by the nose to using multiple spell types.

The new Concentration system has an entirely different purpose: rewarding perfection during high-level play.  Basically, it's something for the really hardcore players to focus on improving their skills at.  If you are at full health, then every enemy you kill starts giving you progress toward increased Concentration.  When your concentration is higher, you do more damage.  But any time you take a hit, you lose a single bar of concentration.

So it really is something for the perfectionists, particularly on higher difficulties, and otherwise this mechanic mostly stays out of the way and isn't something that we're balancing around for normal players.  It's kind of a "stretch goal" for those who like that sort of thing, but not something that is expected for normal play.  This was the result of several player suggestions, so we'll see how the community likes it -- should be fun.

Yet More Strategic Refinements
In general it seems like people are loving the direction that the strategic game has been taking lately, which is great.  But there were some definite problem spots that we've now ironed out.  Specifically:

- The wounds system was rather frustrating in practice.  It was too easy to get into a death spiral with that.  We've taken away the wounded status on NPCs, and changed around how the clinic works to more generalized healing.

- The mana resource had become pointless/frustrating, and so has also been removed.  The mana producer buildings have been given new NPC-class-specific functions that you can activate, instead.  These are basically like single-use powerups on the map that you can use at your discretion -- new weapons in your arsenal!

- There was a persistent complaint that all of the wilderness areas were kind of useless / that you were too powerless in wilderness areas.  Having these open areas for maneuver is important, but having the ambient threat be something you can't deal with in these areas was definitely problematic.  You can thus now build fortifications on all the base wilderness tile types.  The fortifications act like small housing, providing some cover from ambient threat for nearby NPCs -- and like hovels or shacks or groves, they are too small for the overlord or his monsters to bother smashing.

- There are also a number of other important improvements, such as to ivory towers, infighting, and so forth.  But these are more minor by comparison, and you can read about them in the full release notes.

Art Updates!  And Furniture!
There's a ton of new and updated art in this version, and a ton of new background objects -- furniture, rocks, other small objects, etc -- throughout the game now.  The Vorgga henchman now has his graphics, and Demonaica has a near-final version of his graphics minus a final round of shading.

The main menu has been finalized now as well, and the graphics for several parts of menus in general have also been improved.  The intro story scroll is gone, and there is now a briefer intro story that is just fixed on the screen when you start a new world.  The intro credits scroll is still there, but split into two columns -- one for Arcen and co., and one for the community.  The new main menu is now actually fitting with the awesome intro music that plays, and finally delivers the first impression that we wanted people to have when they start up the game.


And there's a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff, too -- various bug fixes, changes to how lighting works for your character, enormous numbers of wall crawler behavior improvements (I spent a solid day and a half on that alone), and a lot of HUD improvements.  Also one new enemy.

Starting tomorrow I'm going to be back on the new-monsters trail, trying to wrap up the new content of that sort before we hit our two weeks of polish and bugfixing.  I'm clearly running a few days behind on my monsters work, but given all the other things we've been able to accomplish I think that the temporary re-prioritization was definitely the right call.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Friday, January 25, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .720-.721 "Treasure Swap" Released!

This one has a laundry list of smaller stuff, all of which is explained in the release notes.  Solid minor improvements on a number of fronts, but nothing earth-shattering for the game as a whole.  Although not having the confusion of the new boss rooms frequently being backwards will be really nice, I must say.

I really will be getting back to adding monsters soon!

UPDATE: .721 is now out to  fix a bug in the prior version where crates could not be destroyed by player spells.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .719 "To One Who'll Stand And Fight" Released!

This one is another "after just one day" release, but it's pretty epic nonetheless.

Soundtrack Complete: New Vocal Title Track
Check. This. Out.  This is one of Pablo's best tracks ever, and I had no idea that his wife Hunter had such an amazing singing voice, either.  You can bet this will be the track to our next trailer for the game, and it's the first thing you hear when you launch the game now.  The link above takes you to a number of comments from Pablo, which give some great insight into the creative process on this one.

Strategic Refinements, Round 5
In round 4, we added the first overland spell for the Demonaica, letting him summon monsters on the world map -- definitely a big deal!  This release adds five more, all of which let him cast debuffs on tiles on the map.  There is one more overland spell that we are considering adding for him, and that would be the full set of overland spells for him for 1.0 -- too many and you get out of the realm of depth and into the realm of more complexity than is good for the design.

There are also a number of other refinements, tweaks, and bugfixes in the strategic area on this one.

Completely Redesigned Henchman Boss Fights
These were definitely the weakest part of the game as of the prior release, and I think that this release really addresses all the largest points.  I'm sure there will be more tweaking and improvements, but I think the fundamental premise here is sound and fun now, rather than being iffy all the way down.

A Really Good Question About Boss Battle Design Goals
On the forums, the following comment came up today from madcow: "I hope we get some multilevel arenas. And some really interesting boss behaviors, boss battles in metroidvania games tend to be epic and what I remember the most in them."

Here was my response:

They're just never going to be a centerpiece of this game, I'm afraid.  I've made things more varied, but I've focused on making things more in line with the rest of the game just on hyperdrive.  Thinking about games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, that's a game that had a lot of great core mechanics, and what they did for the final level was pit you against more of those core mechanics in a really interesting way. 

Or thinking about recent Mario games, Super Mario 3D Land had a final boss fight where Bowser is chasing you and things are crumbling and you're running for your life.  It's a lot more interesting than the Bowser boss fights in Mario Galaxy, for instance, which strayed into completely different mechanics from the rest of the game and were shallow and repetitive for it.  Same with Mario 64, really.

Metroid games are kind of a different beast, and the boss fights are built in as a really core mechanic.  That requires a really intense amount of AI and design for a specific boss fight, however, and I think we can all agree that playing the same 6ish boss fights from Super Metroid over and over again wouldn't be terribly compelling.  They are epic in the context of that game because each only happens once, period. 

But with a procedural game like we have here, especially one that encourages serial playthroughs because of the strategic component, that's just not something that fits with the design -- having hugely involved battles on the level of Super Metroid would either lead to huge amounts of repetition of really specific stuff (ugh), or it would lead to an exponential increase in development costs due to us having to spend ridiculous amounts of more time to create dozens or hundreds of boss battles where the entire Super Metroid staff at Nintendo just had six.

All in all, what that really means is that the the boss fights need to overall stay out of the way; they are now a lot less frequent than they were in prior versions, for one thing.  And for another, they are mixing the general game mechanics (rooms with other enemies in them) up with the bosses themselves to create a combinatorial effect.  It helps bring some of the feel of the tactics of the combat of the rest of the game to the boss fights, while not making them too overwrought or lengthy.

Based on my playtesting I think that this is enormously more successful than the past boss fights were, but we'll see where there is room for improvement as more people get their hands on it.

Everything Else
There are also new slices, fixed slices, tons of balance improvements, an interface for changing the difficulty during an existing game, and a variety of bugfixes.  Busy day!

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .718 "Sightlines" Released!

This one comes just a day after a whopping large release, so it's understandably smaller.  However, I think that this release might be cause for no small amount of joy.

I decided to spend today just working on fixes and tweaks and polish, particularly in the area of general monster behavior (as opposed to any particular monster).  The overall experience is thus something that feels a lot better and more polished, and it actually helps quite a bit with balance when monsters aren't all stacking into inappropriate pits, too.

One of the big things that changes with this version is that enemies now require line of sight on you in order to start chasing you, or to fire on you.  After they lose sight of you they'll remember you for five seconds, and if you don't reappear in that time then they'll stop chasing you.  That right there really changes the feel of a lot of the sidescrolling bits of the game massively.

Really these sorts of changes were in the realm of what I was planning to start working on at the start of February once all the monsters are completed for the game.  Still 52 out of 116 monsters to go!  However, the issues here were largely significant enough that I think they were impacting our ability to properly work on testing and balancing the game, so I decided to accelerate them.

The two really glaring adventure mode things that have yet to be fixed are the henchman boss fights and the scaling of enemy attacks on higher difficulties.  Those are both things that I'm intending to look at tomorrow, and then I'll be back to mainly enemies aside from any other significant issues until I get the enemies all finished.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .717 "Strategory 64" Released!

This one comes almost a week after the most recent release, so you know it's going to be packed to the gills with stuff!  As an aside, if you missed it I recently posted an update on our status and plans for Valley 2 and Shattered Haven.

So, let's see -- this release has a lot of new stuff.

Strategy Improvements Round 4
This version really takes several leaps and bounds ahead, building on what we did in the prior three rounds of strategy improvements. 

The overlord now gets spells that he can use on the overworld, including summoning monsters that your survivors can then defend against.  This makes it so that the overworld isn't just that "invincible steamroller of inevitability" anymore -- now there is more give and take and strategizing like a proper strategy game should have.

Your survivors now come in one of three classes, each of which is a slightly different flavor with different strengths and weaknesses.  And survivors now also have a power level (as do monsters), which is just a single number that is shown next to them right on the world map -- this is used in monster vs survivor combat, among other related areas.  We happened to notice that this is very vaguely Stratego-like, hence the pun of this release's title.

At any rate, the details on all this are in the release notes here, but the short of it is that we've increased the depth of the strategy game by quite a bit without increasing the surface complexity at all -- the first few turns of the game play out the same now as they did last release.  However, as your familiarity with the strategy game grows, the game inherently grows more complex as you have more pieces on the board and the overlord is also getting more pieces and threatening more at once.

One of the problems with the strategy game prior to now was that it started out intriguing, but then got boring once you figured it out -- it was too easy to fall into a rut.  With the new system, the complexity grows alongside your capabilities in a similar manner to a lot of board games -- not by adding tons of pieces or lots of "breadth" to the game, but instead by focusing on depth when you reach advanced board states.

There's still inevitably more for us to polish and balance here, and we do have another five or six overworld spells planned for the overlord to make for even more variety (these are things he'll gain access to as the turn count increases).  But I'm quite confident in the direction this is heading at this point; the shape of the final strategic game is becoming increasingly clear, which is very satisfying to see.

I suppose it goes without saying that, while old world upgrades are perfectly acceptable, you may find all sorts of oddities in the balance depending on just how old the world is.

Twelve New Monsters
This latest batch of monsters brings us up to a total of 64 out of the planned 116ish monsters for the game.  Only 52 left -- that's well more than half at this point!  It's looking quite likely for us to have all of them in there by the end of this month.

I'm particularly pleased with this batch of monsters because they really introduce some very different monster movement or attack mechanics compared to the other monsters that were already in the game.  And considering that this release is heavy on the robots and clockwork machines, it's fitting that they should have a bit of a different "feel" from the more magical monsters elsewhere.

The monster planning for this game has been an interesting process, starting three or four months ago:

1. First of all I sat down and designed 11 different "monster groups" with the help of Josh (things like Small Walking, Large Walking, Leaping/Crazy, Wall Crawler, etc).

2. Then I divided this into 12 different biomes, each of which would have a unique feel and mix of monsters.  All in all, that would be 134 monsters if we were having a unique monster in every slot of every biome.

3. What I did was actually come up with 114 monsters to fill those slots, with some monsters for more minor roles (like the Carp in the Small Swimming, for instance) filling their role in a number of biomes.  At this point it was just a thematic name and the plans for where reuse would be so that we could shave 20 monsters off the total.

4. Next I had to come up with detailed designs for each of the monsters, so that the artists could actually start working on them.  This also came with having to know a fair bit about how the monsters would act, although there was a lot left to interpretation at this point.  We needed to know if a monster would walk or fly, if they would use ranged attacks or if they'd be melee, if they'd have any obviously armored spots, etc.

5. At this point I handed this off to the artists at Heavy Cat, and work on the concept art started in earnest.  Some of the concept art wound up being so good that later we were able to animate directly from that -- some of the best-looking monsters in the game fall under this category.

6. Next I handed off the list of monsters to Josh, so that he could design the spells in detail for all of them.  In a lot of cases this included progressions for spells becoming more powerful and/or complex as the game proceeds.

7. All of the above was completed by sometime back in October or November, it's hard to remember exactly when.  Next came the implementation phase, which of course is the hardest -- some of the original ideas that I had had weren't all that great, some of the specific spells that had been laid out turned out to be less interesting than new things that occurred to me at implementation time, etc. 

8. All in all, the implementation makes for something of a third major draft of the monsters, as they all change substantially as they are implemented -- this has been really rewarding, because it allows for a lot of latent creativity to get in there at the last minute.  Sometimes new groups of monster mechanics occur to me, and then I'll implement some variant of that across several monsters in different functional groups in different biomes with different mixes of other mechanics.  You can see several examples of that in the twelve monsters of this release, for instance.

9. Finally comes the balance and polish.  I playtest all of the monsters thoroughly before they are released, of course, but there's a difference from playtesting them in a test arena with mostly just you versus that monster, and in seeing them "in the wild" with other monsters around.  And on various difficulties, at various points in the game, etc.  When it comes to numerical balance in particular, Josh is again point man -- he's keeping track of all the details of how things feel and what people are reporting, and doing plenty of playtesting himself to make sure that all the numbers come together in a cohesive way without making the game overly hard or any monsters tediously sponge-y.

And that's how a Valley 2 monster comes to life -- the implementation process alone (step 8) takes me 1-2 hours per monster on average.  When you add in all the rest of those steps, you're looking at one to two thousand man-hours to bring you the monsters of Valley 2.  Given how this is affecting the feel of the game for the better, and given how the lack of monsters was such a drawback to Valley 1 in its early 1.0 days in particular, that's a decision that sits easily with me.

Anyway, I thought that those who follow the blog might find that to be an interesting insight into the monster-creation process!

There's other smaller good stuff in this release, too -- and more to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .716 "Control Freak" Released!

This one is a very small one compared to the last couple of release, but it has some important fixes and tweaks that we wanted to get in your hands as soon as possible.

Gamepads should control much better now, the issues with the tutorials being able to get you stuck in the first or second turn are now fixed, and there are no longer so many level up towers right on your front doorstep when you start a new game.  Also, a hefty number of new slices!

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .715 "Gimme Shelter... From Monsters" Released!

This one adds a massive twenty new monsters for your enjoyment.  I thought that last time having eleven monsters was a huge update, but this one certainly tops it. 

Monsters!
We're now up to a total of 53 monsters in the game in general, and I'm pretty sure that makes it so that Valley 2 now has more monsters than Valley 1.  In that ballpark, anyway.  And we've still got a lot of monsters left to add; around 60ish.

The effect that all this variety has on the game is surprising even to me; as some players have pointed out, it really makes you consider your tactics and loadouts for each area differently.  With each of these releases with monsters in them, the variety of challenges you face and how you deal with them really increases.

A few existing monsters were also improved a bit.

Strategy!
This release is a big one on the strategy front, too -- our third major round of strategy updates for this game during beta. 
  • Round 1 made the game harder and more condensed; basically a more intense experience.  
  • Round 2 vastly improved the flow of the interface, and laid the foundation for a more in-depth strategy game.  However, it also temporarily over-simplified the game; merely a byproduct of us not being done yet, not an attempt to "dumb down" the game (though definitely an attempt, and I think a successful one, at making it more surface-accessible).
  • Round 3, aka this release, is focused on building back up parts of the strategy game that got a bit stomped-on in the interface redo of round 2.  In general there's a lot more clarity here, and the difficulty and interestingness of the strategy situation has also gone back up.
This version also gets rid of the "population cap" mechanic, which was something from early in our strategy game designs that really just didn't fit anymore after the evolutions the strategy game had during our internal alpha.  Your resistance members are constantly on the move -- when do they have time to care about housing!?

In place of the population cap, there's a new "shelter" mechanic.  This mechanic, plus the fact that you can no longer stack NPCs on one tile, basically changes the whole focus of the strategy game.  The details are in the linked release notes, but I think it's pretty cool; it's a good example of the sort of "depth, not breadth" we're going for in the strategy design.

The problem with the strategy game before we went into Round 1 of the changes was (aside from interface irritations) that it was too easy to get into a rut.  Aka, you learn that when the overlord does A, you do B.  When he does C, you do D, and so on.  It's the sort of system that is interesting to learn because it's complex enough to be satisfying, but once you learn it you're basically done with it.

It's the sort of thing I think is the worst thing that can happen to a strategy game, and with AI War we have a lot of practice at avoiding the issue (people are still playing AI War after nearly four years, after all).  In the case of this game, it was clear that the threat from the overlord against your buildings and survivors, and the constant "rebuild after he trashes the place" was not enough. 

There needed to be more long-term consequences (so no building reconstruction), plus more things to weigh against one another: so now the ambient threat and shelter; the way the overlord only attacks useful-to-you tiles once you start using them; and the way that buildings no longer passively generate income but instead have to be worked by NPCs.

Cumulatively, these changes make it so that instead of just super-stacking your NPCs and dragging them around on missions, you now have to really weigh how much they go out alone versus in groups.  You can't stack them, but NPCs on tiles near to one another help shelter each other -- safety in numbers.  That's good when attacking the enemy, but what if you need those same NPCs back at your farm or clinic?  And so on.

There is inevitably more that we'll need to do to really polish the strategy side of the game, but it's hitting a point that Keith and I are both really pleased with, pending further playtesting.  Sometimes the only way to really iron out all the logical kinks is playtesting, and that's a big part of why we do betas in the first place!

Art!
Lots of art updates in this one, too.  Mainly the backgrounds to buildings, but some enemies also have updated art (aside from all the new enemy art for the new enemies, of course).

Mouse Support In Menus!
We've re-enabled mouse support for menus, which we know a lot of people were wanting.  I felt it was annoying to be tempted to constantly switch back and forth between being keyboard-only and using the mouse, but it's something a lot of people wanted.  And to be honest, I kept finding myself reaching for the mouse in menus, too.

Enemy Names!
When you kill enemies, it now pops up the name of the enemy you just killed (like it does the amount of damage to them).  Now people can actually know the names of enemies and refer to them by their real names, rather than calling Snow Wererats everything from "monkeys" to all sorts of other stuff.  It's so much clearer for all of us when we're all using the same names for things, especially with so many enemies!

Henchmen!
The henchman boss rooms have been improved a lot to no longer cause issues with their AI or exploits with cover for the player.  The physics for the henchmen have also been improved such that they are now a more interesting threat in how they move.  Hopefully this will help boss battles feel more well-balanced than they have been, although more refinements will come later; right now it's mainly a push to get all the base content in there so that any issues with any of it can be identified.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Friday, January 11, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .714 "Monstercopia" Released!

This one adds a whopping eleven new monsters for your enjoyment.  Not a whole lot else to say on this one; there were a few bugfixes and tweaks as well, but mainly this is a big content dump.  I'm pretty excited about how these affect the feel of the game, but that's a given!

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .713 "Scatter And Gather" Released!

This one further refines the controls to a really precise degree, majorly upgrades three spell groups, and adds three new monsters.

As if that wasn't enough, this one also comes with our next major batch of strategic game changes -- perhaps the most major we'll be making this month, we'll see.  There will certainly be more refinements to be made, but I think this is -- knock on wood -- likely to be the largest fundamental shift.

Then
The strategic game, circa a week ago, centered mostly around capturing buildings, holding them to gain resources, and repeatedly rebuilding them as the overlord knocked them down.  You'd increase NPC skills by sending them on missions, and you could only undertake two missions per turn, regardless of how many NPCs you had together. 

So there was strong incentive for banding together.  Having NPCs attack buildings or convert/rebuild structures was their main function, because to do scavenging or "working a tile" (such as a farm or scrap factory) was too wasteful with limited total dispatches.

Now
The strategic game, as of this release, focuses a lot more on individual NPCs in a bit of a different way.  Gone are their skill levels, and gone are the overall limits on how many dispatches per turn you can make (but each NPC can still only do one thing per turn).  Also, critically, gone is the passive income from buildings you hold.

In order to gain income from buildings, you have to station NPCs there.  But it's a bit of a game of "chicken," because the overlord will eventually be bearing down on their building (to destroy it permanently), and they need to wring all the resources they can out of that building before it goes down.

Similarly, with buildings that can be converted to other buildings types, you want to do that with care.  It's a matter of managing the resources of your NPCs (where they are and how many you have) as well as managing the resources of "potential buildings I can use that the overlord hasn't torn down yet."

This isn't a sustainable situation, critically -- as with a Warcraft II map, for instance, if you play long enough then the map runs out of resources and that's just the end of things.  In the case of this game, by the time you'd hit that point you'd likely have lost anyhow for other reasons, but it is a pretty fundamental difference in terms of how the game plays out compared to a week ago.

Going along with this, since you've got to be ordering around so many more NPCs so much of the time, rather than just a few groups of many of them, we've really streamlined the interface for giving them orders.  Also, a lot more of the orders you give are implicit.

NPCs can only do one of two things on a turn: take some action on the tile they are on, or move.  You give them their movement orders, if any, and you also give them orders to build structures (since otherwise there's no way to know what sort of structure you want them to build).

Otherwise, beyond that, you express your will simply by positioning them -- put them next to enemy structures, and they'll attack.  Put them on a farm, and they'll farm. 

Our goal has been to make the strategy game deeper than it was a week ago, which I think we've accomplished, while at the same time making it something that takes less time for you to input your decisions with.  And I think we've accomplished that also.  Certainly there are more conveniences and tweaks that can be made on that front, and the balance is preliminary at best with the revised  mechanics. 

But these mechanics do really seem to get at our core goals a lot better without really changing terribly much of the code or interface in the grand scheme of things.  In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the sort of changes that were being made to AI War late in its alpha/beta (which was private), rather than the flailing that sometimes went on with Valley 1.

Once again, thanks for bearing with us as we go through this refinement process; pre-existing worlds can certainly be upgraded into this new version, but you may find that the balance is really off with them if they came from before 0.712 release.  Sorry about that; it's not something we intend to do a lot of.  But it definitely improves things for the better.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .712 "Chipping Away Everything That Doesn't Look Like An Elephant" Released!

This one refines several core game mechanics further.  Most notably, the aiming and the death penalty mechanics.

Thanks for bearing with us as we go through this refinement process; we're intending to be done with this and fully stabilized by February, but in the meantime some fluctuations are inevitable.  As the old joke goes: "How do you carve an elephant out of a block of stone?  Chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant!" 

That's basically what we're doing right now: we know what the intended feel of the game is, and we're very close with the design, but there are occasional nits and burs that dampen enjoyment and smoothness in one way or another.  Anyway, so that's what's going on.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .711 "Trimming The Fat" Released!

This one adds in limited context-based angled shots, as well as making a lot of strategy-related changes.  This will be the first round of several as we refine the strategy game during this month.  From the release notes, here's my explanation of what we're up to:
While we do feel that we have a solid strategic game here, we do think that it can also be better. More engaging, more challenging (on higher difficulties), more streamlined (in terms of how easy it is to express your will), and more thought-provoking (in terms of how many things you must consider at an advanced or semi-advanced level of play when deciding what actions to take).

Additionally, we're really trying to streamline the game itself a little bit more -- it was already extremely streamlined in the main, especially compared to the first game, but this is trimming off some of the last of the fat. The last thing we want is for any particular game element to overstay its welcome; we'd rather you were hungry for more and play a second game of it. All in all this is leading to a game that is a bit shorter than it previously was, but also one that is going to be substantially more intense given many of the overlord's actions are now not possible to undo (you can't just rebuild what he knocks down).

There are more changes planned -- or rather, we have a variety of ideas that we think might work well to continue to bring this from being a good strategy game to a great one. These will be something we experiment with throughout the course of January before settling on final mechanics by February. The game isn't far off, and it's just a matter of getting all of the existing pieces we have to fit together in the most ideal way possible at this point. Right now we're just taking the first steps with the strategic game, and then reassessing from here (thus to better inform our further changes).
And as for the context-based angled shots, here's what those are about:
  • If you stand on a slope facing into the slope, and fire your spell straight forward, it will angle up instead (firing directly forward would accomplish nothing, after all).
  • If you stand on that same slope facing away from the slope, any shots you fire go forward like normal. However, if you duck, then your shots will go down the slope at an angle instead of doing your normal low-shot.
More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Monday, January 7, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .710 "More Monsters At Last" Released!

This one has a few tweaks and bugfixes, but mainly it's focused on adding more monsters.  Prior to this release we had 13 of the target 114ish monsters implemented.  Now we've added 5 more. 

The effect that this has on the game in terms of the feeling of variety as you explore around is pretty substantial, but that's only going to get compounded as we add more and more monsters.  We're going to try to make huge strides on the monsters this month, so there's going to be a lot of releases like this with lots of monsters.  Exciting times!

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Friday, January 4, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .709 "Water And Wind" Released!

This one is mostly smaller improvements to the game, but this sort of thing adds up.  We're not going to be focusing on this sort of smaller polish to the exclusion of new content (like enemies and so forth) for very much longer, but we had a backlog after the holiday break and are trying to clear that out reasonably well.

It's nice to be fully getting back into the swing of things after the holiday break, I have to say.  Still, with three projects going on at the moment in the studio, I'm being pulled a lot of directions for getting everyone ramped back up.  I would have wanted to add some new enemies in this release, but I just didn't have time.  I expect to have time for a lot of that sort of thing next week, which is exciting for me.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .708 "Aggressive Angles" Released!

This one is the first beta update since our return from the holidays.  Yesterday I was in meetings practically all day about our various in-work projects, making sure that we hit the ground running in the new year.  Things are looking good on that score!

In terms of this new version of Valley 2, there's a lot to love, but it's mostly tweaks and fixes and the like. 

The number one complaint we've had is about the controls feeling awkward with the game in terms of shooting at angles.  And players were right -- that was awkward.  A lot of us didn't really pick up on that because we simply ignored the existence of the angled shots and then things were great.  But if you actually felt like you needed to use the controls that were there... well, then it felt like uncomfortable finger ballet.

After a lot of mulling, we decided that if shooting only in the four cardinal directions was good enough for Cave Story, then it's good enough for us as well.  The release notes contain much more detailed notes on the reasoning and rationale behind these control changes.

Another big item is monster aggression on player death, which you can read about in greater detail there.  But basically, it was pointed out to us that there was just no incentive at all to avoid death, and so we introduced one that is based off of player suggestions but a bit on the kinder side.  Unless you're playing on a higher difficulty than your skill matches, this shouldn't really be an issue of a change for you; and on the lowest two difficulties it actually flat-out makes the game easier.

Lastly, there was a whole laundry list of fixes and tweaks and balance adjustments, including some that were game-blocking in the late game if you hit level 21 before doing certain other actions.  And including some that were causing unnecessary confusion about what can and can not be walked on in terms of tiles on the world map.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that hereIf you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!