Valley 2:Beta Release Notes

Beta .708

(Not yet released; we're still working on it!)

Retirement Of Angled Shots

The "Vastly Helpful New Control Option" in the prior release turned out to really just underscore some of the more fundamental issues with angled shooting: namely, that it's really difficult and fiddly to do, no matter how you cut it. I (Chris Park, lead developer) remember feeling the same way when I played Super Metroid, honestly; despite the presence of those shoulder buttons to aim at an angle, this was something I rarely did in that game. Too much "finger ballet," while at the same time it really wasn't needed in order to play well.

We've had enough players here in Valley 2 that didn't know about the angled-shooting options, and have still been able to play just fine. To me that says that the entire angled-shooting mechanic is superfluous, and that any enemies that require angled shots (none of which I'm aware at the moment) need to be redesigned. I might point out that the great Metroidvania title "Cave Story" does just this -- there are no angled shots in that game, either, and now I fully appreciate why. And why there have been so many complaints about the angled controls during the beta for Valley 2.

It boils down as follows:

• 1. On the one hand, if a game has functions for all sorts of complicated aiming, but you find those functions difficult or fiddly to use, those are "bad controls." It seems like the game expects you to do some finger ballet that you are not capable of doing. This is how some people have been feeling about the controls in Valley 2 because of the complexities that angled aiming brings into play.
• 2. On the other hand, if a game has limited functions for aiming, and that makes hitting enemies difficult unless you find ideal positions for yourself, then that's part of the gameplay. "Hitting enemies is hard" is not a bad thing inherently -- if hitting enemies is trivial, then in order for enemies to be a challenge it has to be a matter of your pumping shots into them like crazy. Boring. But if hitting enemies is hard, then lining up fewer skillshots to take them out can be quite satisfying.

All in all I think it's the difference between something that is simple and designed well, and something that is complex and feels fiddly to play.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that we've removed the ability to shoot at angles at all, except for for the shots that inherently move at angles (like the sines).

Related: A Reminder Of Why The Game Does Not Have Mouse Aiming

That whole mouse+keyboard thing in AVWW1 was really a bad idea, as some players pointed out to us. That sort of freedom of aiming really kills the classic Metroidvania style of a game like this, and makes it so that keyboard-only players and gamepad-only players are at a huge disadvantage. This is why we've moved down to two streamlined control schemes that are equivalent with one another: keyboard-based and gamepad-based. And yes, the tab-targeting from the first game is gone since that basically acted like a cheat at this point without free-aiming of the mouse.

Please note! We're not just taking away control options for kicks, or because we think people were "doing it wrong." But the fact remains that generally a game is built around its controls, especially as an action game. We're trying to maintain as much flexibility in the controls as we can while not making it so that people are playing fundamentally different games that we can't make universally fun. Placing wooden platforms was trivial with the mouse, and so is killing a bat. But it's incredibly frustrating with any other sort of input. When you get right down to it, what we're trying to make is a Metroidvania game, and I don't personally know of any of them that use a mouse-style of control. Hence we're going a bit more standardized with that.

The same thing applies with not having angled shots in general -- when you're trying to kill a bat, you need to first align yourself on its horizontal axis, and then fire a shot or shots into it. That's where the skill comes in. Bats (and enemies in general in this game) move far slower than they did in the first game, largely so that you have time for this sort of maneuvering. Whereas before you might have just quickly aimed your mouse cursor at a bat and pressed the "you die now" button, I don't think that this is particularly rewarding gameplay. For this kind of genre, anyhow.

Losing the mouse controls and the angled shots both have an enormous impact on balance (same with not having the shield spells that were so popular in the first game). You could argue that these things are a matter of taste and customization, and I'd have to agree -- that's why they are in the first game, and why they remain there. But these were one of the biggest ongoing challenges to balance in the first game for me, and they are things that really put large segments of the player populace at a disadvantage if they don't use them.

Here again, it comes to getting back to the roots of what we were trying to do. Yes, Terraria uses the mouse controls -- so do numerous other PC action-adventure games with a 2D sidescroller view. So do a lot of MMOs and RPGs.

In the first game we were really enticed by the allure of all those things, and so we let our design drift and become unfocused. In other words, the design tried to become all things to all people, and Environ became a world that you could come and do whatever you wanted in. That's pretty fun! But it's very difficult to make a truly compelling game that way. What we needed to do with this sequel was really focus, and make the original game we set out to do.

In terms of Mario Bros. games, what if Mario had a rocket launcher he could aim in any direction? What if he had a force field he could toggle on and off periodically at will? That might be entertaining for a bit, but that would fundamentally make a different game, I think. And I don't think a better game -- for Mario, all the enemies are designed around him not having abilities like that. So to give him those abilities means the levels would be crazy easy and hollow.

On the flip side, the game Intrusion 2 uses mechanics like aim-anywhere firing, and it's a brilliant game. All the enemies are designed around the powers that your avatar has, and so everything fits together just right. But of course the character there doesn't have the movement abilities that Mario does -- if the character there had that kind of speed and jumping ability, then I suspect its mechanics would really start to break down -- in the same way Mario would if you gave the wrong weapons to him.

What I'm saying is, games are additive in nature -- you can't just throw any old thing in there and expect it to be the same game. If you add a single new piece to Chess, you've dramatically changed that game. It doesn't matter what the piece even does.

In the case of AVWW1, we had the movement speed of Mario 3 or so, and the aim-anywhere nature of Intrusion 2. We also had control schemes that did not support aim-anywhere, and that made it so that players were playing two different games. And that meant that enemies really couldn't be balanced around either, since in some cases could aim super-precisely and in others they could not aim remotely that well. What a mess.

Again, I still think that really worked out pretty well in the main, but it's definitely a more niche experience and a bit rougher around the edges because of that. By focusing on specifically the kind of game we're actually trying to make, and not dragging in stuff from other unrelated genres if it doesn't really complement it well, we have something that's a lot tighter and more fun. It's not about taking options away from players; it's about creating one game at a time rather than a whole soup of games.

• Fixed a slice that was causing issues
  • Thanks to Khadgar for finding/reporting that one.

Beta .707

(Released December 21st, 2012)

• More slices
  • c4sc4 and zebramatt are again responsible.

• Fixed bug where dispatch mission interface couldn't be successfully used to work with more NPCs than fit on a single page.
  • Thanks to khadgar for the report.

• Fixed a bug where loading a world could result in it purifying a path to a destroyed farmland and/or abandoned town block tile. This logic was intended for loading earlier worlds but there was no version check; now there is.
  • Thanks to Nanashi for the report.

• Fixed a bug where the game would display the larger of the two distances (just walking, and walking+warping) instead of the smaller when showing the range-to-mission-region for an NPC who could not reach the mission region by either method.
  • Thanks to khadgar for the report.

• Fixed a bug where multiple copies of a mercenary could wind up in a particular chunk, and generally would all trail the player in a superstack of doom.
  • Thanks to khadgar for the report.

• Fixed a bug that was causing equipment effectiveness to apply to all ongoing conditions on a player, which meant that their perks and inherent bonuses and anything affecting them from a general environment (freefall room, etc) were all getting messed with horribly.
  • Thanks to Ipkins for the report that helped us find this.

• Fixed an issue with freefall rooms where if you had too many fall speed reductions you could actually wind up flying upwards uncontrollably when you jumped!
  • Thanks to Ipkins for reporting this!

• Fixed a bug where the Rocket spells were still hitting monsters with multiple pieces of shrapnel, because they were spawned on death of the original projectile and weren't really linked to it (since it was already gone).
  • Thanks to madcow for the report.

• Fixed a bug where achievements were not being properly logged to Steam.

• Put in some error checking code to hopefully fix the bug where perk tokens and mercenary coins would sometimes respawn after you had collected them and then left or died. Please do let us know if you see it again, though!
  • Thanks to madcow, Gemzo, and nekobaron for reporting.

• Fixed several keyboard-navigation bugs/inconveniences with the perk selection window.
  • Thanks to khadgar for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where monsters killed by certain kinds of "shrapnel" (such as from rockets) would not drop anything (health, ammo) for players to pick up.
  • This was basically because of the "has this enemy been damaged by a player" logic check, that was really more appropriate in the first game. Now enemies don't take damage from any source ASIDE from players, so there's no reason to even check that anymore.
  • Thanks to madcow and khadgar for reporting.

• The freefall sections no longer adjust the camera so that you're up near the top; that was untenable on a lot of screen resolutions.
  • Thanks to khadgar for reporting.

• The text in conversations popups is no longer so visually spaced out; the line spacing is now 20% smaller than it was before, leading to more natural reading.

• Fixed a bug in the previous versions where the fireballs from mines was instead showing up like the blue ammo explosions. Oops!

• Monsters now do a damage popup when they are killed in one blow, or on the blow that killed them out of a multi-blow series (this was not previously the case).
  • Thanks to khadgar for reporting.

• The "where are you going?" message was mistakenly being applied to some kinds of evil outpost, though not all of them. Fixed.
  • Thanks to MouldyK for reporting.

Major Infusion Of Updated Music

• All of the music tracks except for the main title theme have now been finalized.

• A second Lava music track has been added to the game to provide yet more variety in the lava areas.

Vastly Helpful New Control Option

• Along with the existing control options, the following new behavior has been added:
  • If you are standing still on the X axis (you _can_ be jumping or falling, in other words), then all you have to to is hold or tap upwards, then release, and you will fire in an upwards 45 degree angle until you next move on the X axis.
  • If you are standing still on the X axis, and are not ducking (so you _must_ be jumping or falling, in other words), then all you have to to is hold or tap downwards, then release, and you will fire in a downwards 45 degree angle until you next move on the X axis. Even after you land.
  • The idea is that this is a quick way to do angled shots while stationary without having to use the angled-shots button. Positioning yourself where you want to be, then just tapping the up key and then laying loose with a barrage of shots at an upward arc is really really easy. We didn't do it quite the same way with the downward shots (you have to be jumping/falling for this to apply) because that would have eliminated low-shots.
  • This isn't an option to toggle on and off simply because it's so unobtrusive the way that it's been implemented. But if that later seems needed, we can certainly add a toggle.
  • Thanks to Chemuel, zaaq, and khadgar for suggesting.

• Added in explanation of the new controls option in the "first crates" room in the start of the game.

Beta .706

(Released December 20th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug in the generation logic that could allow certain rooms in the overlord keep to become horizontally-flipped and thus impassible when you need to get the next mage class in order to proceed (thus preventing any further progress in the game at that point). Sorry about that!

• 70 more slices added.
  • Thanks to Zebramatt and c4sc4 for these.

• Fixed a pretty bad bug in the previous version that was causing all vertically-oriented chunks to behave rather wrongly, and in all cases give TellTheDeveloper messages among other oddities. A piece of testing code had been left turned on by mistake.

Previous Release Notes

Pre Beta Release Notes

A Valley Without Wind 2 aka Valley 2