A Valley Without Wind: Interiors, Lighting, Crafting, New Regions, Character Stats, And Perma-Death (And Much More!)
Arcen Games is downright ecstatic to share the latest updates, screens and video footage for its procedurally-generated action adventure title A Valley Without Wind. We haven't shared in a few weeks, so there's a ton of new stuff to show and tell including interiors, lighting, crafting, playable/NPC Skelebots, lava and desert regions, perma-death implementation and lots more.
Interiors -- the last remaining world building focus for the game -- have been added, though at the moment we'll be needing the proper time to populate them. These structures don't have any electrical power, making most indoor exploring pretty dark. This is where lighting comes into play, as several darker areas both interior and exterior can be lit by various spells and objects to grant better visibility and ease the search.
There's been plenty of character focus this past update as well: Perma-death and crafting in their basic forms are now in place, along with a working system for producing a unique set of stats for each individual character. A neutral Skelebot that works as both playable character and as a non-hostile NPC, a dynamic character name generator, and NPC dialog have also been thrown into the mix.
New music, regions, improvements to shadows and particle effects, a new lamp object, and two new spells: "shrink" and "flash of light," round out the sizable list of update highlights. Check out the latest gameplay video showing off everything mentioned and more here (in HD): Youtube.com
17 new screenshots can be found on the AVWW feature page: Arcengames.com
And to make up for the lengthy radio silence, we have three new developer journals available. A breakdown of the video as well as a detailed explanation of the aforementioned features, additions and improvements: Christophermpark.blogspot.com
Arcen head Chris Park goes into his approach to the design process of AVWW as compared with past works: Christophermpark.blogspot.com
Lastly, Chris discusses horizontal versus vertical game development phases, and wonders why indies can't explore the latter as much as they do the former: Christophermpark.blogspot.com
That's all for this process improvement focused update. Come back next time for an update heavier on the art advancement. A Valley Without Wind is currently set for official release on PC and Mac later this year, with a playable Alpha build available to customers who pre-order coming in April.
My only concern with the game is still present: directional movement is only available in the four cardinal directions despite the game taking place from a top down perspective instead of just side to side. It seems really easy for any enemy to take a swipe at you and any attack you throw won't hit him, especially if they're hitting from the bottom.
overlordror -- Bear in mind you can move diagonally, as in Zelda 3, but your character just only faces four directions. In Zelda 3 they also solved this problem by giving your melee swipes an arc, so that they hit both straight ahead and also on a diagonal a bit. That's something we also plan to do some for melee weapons.
However, in terms of ranged attacks, we also have a targeting system where you simple hit tab to target whatever enemy, and then most ranged attacks you launch go straight at them. There are a few types of spells that are area damage or whatever that follow specific rules based on being able to hit many enemies at once, but most work on the targeting.
Suffice it to say, there really shouldn't be cases where the enemy is easily hitting you and you are not able to hit them, based on the way you move. Hope that makes sense!
I suppose. It's hard to make that judgement without having actually had a feel for the controls, but I feel like if I have to back track in order to line up a shot with an enemy then something isn't right. We'll see when you guys release. :)