Valley 2:Pre-Beta Release Notes

Alpha .704

(We haven't released this version yet, we're still working on it.)

• You can change this in the server settings anyhow, but the defaults when starting a new server for the first time is that it no longer tries to open in fullscreen mode or in quite so giant a window. It now defaults to 1000x700 as its window size.

• Fixed a bug in multiplayer in the prior version where rocket spells (and probably some other similar ones) were causing errors and not working.

• Fixed another multiplayer bug that has been around from the start of alpha, apparently, where the ancient stones would not launch their counter-attacks against you when you shot them.

• All 160 of the achievements now have proper icons (though most of the equipment-related ones share just a few icons between them, so there are only 68 unique icons for 160 achievements).

Clarity/Training Improvements

• At the edge of inescapeable chasms, there is now a warning sign.

• Fixed the text interjection that happens when you first get a merc coin to say you need 25 rather than 75.

Balance Changes

• Monsters that are spawning in during mid-game now are insubstantial to players and spells until they are fully spawned in.

• Skelebot hacking escape spawns now vary by combat difficulty:
  • Last version it was a 33% chance every 3 seconds.
  • Now:
  • Featherweight: 15% chance every 6 seconds.
  • Apprentice: 18% chance every 5 seconds.
  • Adept: 20% chance every 4 seconds.
  • Skilled: 25% chance every 3.5 seconds.
  • Hero: 33% chance every 3 seconds.
  • Master Hero: 44% chance every 3 seconds.
  • The Chosen One: 55% chance every 3 seconds.

• Castles can now be destroyed by Demonaica, and can also be rebuilt by your characters.

• Housing nerfs -- it was too easy to get enormously ridiculous volumes of housing.
  • Deciduous Forest towns, evergreen towns, and swamp pagodas are now considered small housing and now only grant 1 housing rather than 2.
  • The various forms of large housing now only grant 2 to population cap, rather than 3. In the case of grassland homes it's 2 instead of 5 now.
  • Grassland shacks are now considered simply to be wilderness, rather than providing any benefit to house. However, they are now considered a better place to scavenge.

• Double jump, triple jump, water dash, and storm dash are all now considered mutually exclusive in order to keep them from being so unbalanced when used in combination.

Alpha .703

(Released December 17th, 2012)

• The ground background for the swamps is now complete.

• Fixed a minor visual issue with dangerfalls often causing small windows in the background.

• The graphics for the evil rains in the deep have been updated to be higher quality like the other rains elsewhere already were.

• The sand weather has been improved to look nicer.

• Found and fixed a few more bad slices.

• In all chunks, there is now an extra four tiles of ground or floor underneath the bottom of them; this is so that you don't run into situations with the HUD blocking part of the playing area or bouncing around.

• In most regions of the world, the lighting inside buildings is now not remotely so dark.
  • In The Deep, it's just as dark as before, however.
  • In the Overlord Keep, it's not as dark as it was before, but it's not as light as other buildings now are.
  • Caves are still just as dark as before, though.
  • These changes are to help provide more variety, and to reduce the amount of time you have to spend in the dark, which admittedly isn't that fun if it's happening all the time. This gives you a chance to capture some Ivory Towers to get more light before you really have to do too much spelunking.

• Condensed the main menu down a bit so that it now displays properly with the new beta updates list even on a 1024x768 monitor.

• When the level up fanfare and mage class cache unlock fanfares play, the regular music is now temporarily paused and then fades back in after a brief pause so that the two tunes don't clash on top of one another.

• Fixed a bug where wall-crawlers were immune to homing shots that were fired at them.

• Fixed the issue with wall crawlers going glitchy and climbing up into the sky. If you see any further glitches with the wall crawlers, please do let us know!

• The powersliding movement now works far better in the new game, and uses the proper animation (though not the transitionary frames yet).

• Fixed a really annoying bug where often caverns would not have proper exits back to the surface after you found the perk token at the bottom.

• Previously, if you picked up a perk token when you were already maxed out for your current level, it would just do nothing. Now it actually remembers and stores the extra perk(s) for when you next level up.
  • This doesn't have any practical advantage for players to wait on leveling up -- they're only making things harder on themselves by doing so, since turns are getting monster stats ahead of them, presumably. So on the off chance this happens, it's better not to penalize players further.

• The "End Of Turn Results" page now lets you use either the Cancel or Confirm buttons to close it, and notes such.

• Thirteen old achievements that were no longer relevant (mostly from the old game, or not always calculated right) have been removed from the game.

• Twenty-one new achievements have been added to the game.
  • There are five new achievements for defeating each of the henchmen once.
  • There are four new achievements for permanently killing each of the henchmen that can eventually be killed.
  • There are seven new achievements for killing the overlord on at least action difficulty 1-7.
  • There are five new achievements for killing the overlord on at least strategic difficulty 1-5.
  • This gives us a current total of 160 achievements for the game, although eventually we do plan more.
  • Note that the icons and text for these are not fully in place.

Clarity/Training Improvements

• The results text of NPC dispatch missions is now colorized so that you can tell at a glance if it was a success, failure, or a total party kill.

• Feathery Debris Field was mis-labeled as Summon Owl in the game. Oops! Text fixed.

• Feather Spray was mis-labeled as Summon Mosquito in the game. Oops! Text fixed.

• In the first screen you start on in the game, there is now a tombstone with a message about how to climb down ladders, like we did in the first game; we had forgotten to include that in this game.

• The current controls no longer draw on the main menu.
  • Instead, in the first screen of the game, after the intro dialogue, the controls panel appears.
  • Also, the controls panel appears in the armory of the overlord keep, where you respawn after dying.

• Where the "Current controls" was previously shown on the main menu, now a "Current Beta Progress" message is instead shown. This gives players an at-a-glance view into where things stand on our roadmap in whatever version they are playing at the time.

• Text interjections can now only be advanced or closed with the Confirm button, rather than that button plus all the combat buttons. This prevents players accidentally closing an interjection that pops up during combat.

• Certain text interjections that are both brief and critical and which pop up during combat now don't allow you to hold the Confirm button to make them scroll by faster; this is again to prevent players from accidentally missing critical info.

• Previously the two dispatch missions you had to undertake on turns 1 and 2 secretly had a 100% chance of success, but showed whatever their chance would really be if it were not turn 1 or 2. This was definitely confusing. It now shows 100% chance of success on turn 1 and 2 dispatches, instead of just acting like it.

• Fixed some terminology referring to "post-release beta updates" rather than "beta updates."

• On the first two turns, the game now only shows the "Check Your Strategic Overview" and "Dispatch Survivors On Missions" buttons on any region tiles until you've completed the required dispatch mission.
  • This helps keep the clutter out of the way, and automatically guides players to how to dispatch their NPCs without beating them over the head with it.

• In corrupted regions and warp regions, where dispatch missions can never ever be run, the game no longer shows the "Dispatch Survivors" entry in the "interact with region" menu.

• The game now more obviously pauses when a text interjection is up, making it clear that you're not going to be hurt while reading; some players were missing interjections out of still trying to fight!

• The first time a player picks up a perk token, there is now a brief multi-page text interjection explaining about what the heck perk tokens are good for.

• The first time a player picks up a piece of equipment, there is now a brief multi-page text interjection explaining about what the heck equipment is, and the very basics of how it is used. It also advises further reading in the Help section of the escape menu if more info is desired.

• The first time a player's spell is blocked by an enemy shot of a higher caliber, there is now a brief multi-page text interjection explaining what just happened and how spell calibers work. It also mentions that there is more info in the Help section of the escape menu.

• There is a new "Allow Skipping Text Interjections With Cancel Button" option in the settings menu that defaults to off. When enabled, this allows the escape/cancel/menu button to be pressed to immediately end the current text interjection.
  • This is great for advanced players, but we default it to off so that new players don't accidentally miss critical info.

• The spell descriptions now include better colorization for easier reading, as well as more info: they describe the attack power, cooldown, caliber, and speed of each shot.

• When viewing the region details window (that shows up next to the Interact With Region window), the names of the survivors that are stationed on that square are now shown.
  • Additionally, if a given survivor is wounded they are shown in red and with text next to them noting they are wounded.
  • There was already a global list of survivors in the Strategic Overview, but this gives a per-tile look at them.

• When you have already dispatched survivors on the current turn, it now shows "Already Dispatched Survivors This Turn" instead of the usual "Dispatch Survivors On Mission" text that would show in the Interact With Region menu.

• At the bottom of the escape menu, there is now text that says "Your Progress Is Automatically Saved," since it was brought to our attention that players not familiar with the first game wouldn't be expecting this!

Balance Changes

• The game in the early turns now ramps up the number of monsters faster, through turn 5 when they are fully around, rather than through turn 10.

• The balance of the early game has been adjusted so that monsters do far less damage to you when you are just starting out, but their increase-per-turn damage is now about 3x higher than it was before (3% rather than 1% on Adept, for instance).
  • The idea here is to change the difficulty curve so that it's not so hard at the start, and so that it gets progressively harder toward the end without getting impossible.

• Mercenaries now cost 25 coins to hire rather than 75, although that will change in future versions as more mercenary coins populate the world.

• Reckless Forest now does a bit less damage to the player.

• Warerats now don't hit quite so hard.

• Homing spells now have a longer cooldown so that a player can't simply walk through a chunk with that button held down to win. :)

• In chunks generated as of this version, crates are now seeded differently. Whenever a chunk is loaded from disk, it now will automatically regenerate any previously-destroyed crates. This is pretty critical for certain boss rooms!

• The caliber on all henchman shots is now increased across the board, making them very tough to block compared to normal monster shots. This also goes for the overlord.

• The caliber on all melee shots has been increased substantially, keeping them in line with the henchman shots and making them significantly higher than most other monsters' shots.
  • The idea here is that these melee spells are very much skillshots for blocking enemy spells. They are quite hard to use, and only a few classes have them in general; but if you get good with them, they are extremely powerful.

• Previously, in multiplayer the bosses could be cheesed by having the boss chase one player while another player hangs out safely below the flying boss.
  • Now if there's a player that is close to a flying boss and below the boss, then the boss starts dropping fire downwards as a free action while they keep using their normal spells on you elsewhere.

• The amount of terrain you have to traverse to approach a skelebot research facility has been reduced enormously.

• Skelebot Research Facilities now have vents that you can use to get back to the mainframe room from their atrium if you've been to the mainframe room in the past but failed to escape.
  • This is a one-way passage from the atrium to the mainframe, though, unlike the passages in the overlord's keep.
  • The idea here is to reduce the amount of backtracking players have to do if they fail a hacking attempt.

• Fixed a bug that was causing far too many monsters to spawn in skelebot hacking escapes and overlord keep switch rooms during multiplayer.

• Made it so that stationary fliers (right now just the floating slime masses) no longer appear as part of skelebot hacking escapes and overlord keep switch rooms.
  • Also made it so that instead of every three seconds like clockwork there being a new monster, it's now a 33% chance of a monster every three seconds.

• The five snake maximum ranges have been reduced from the insanely-unbalanced 8000 to a still-a-bit-high 1000. We'll see how this feels.

• Previously it was possible, though supposedly unlikely, to run into multiple "unexpected" henchman fights in a single region. In other words, when one or more of the henchmen chased you down.
  • The odds of a henchman encounter are in general pretty low for this, but we had one alpha player who apparently had three such encounters in one region. That's when you really come to "Yeah, Actually We All Expect The Spanish Inquisition" territory.
  • What we've done is made it so that now only a single unexpected henchman fight can happen in a given region; and if you keep "rolling snake eyes" after that, the subsequent "unexpected" boss rooms will be eerily empty.

• New rule for Area Of Effect spells: each spell that is cast can only strike a given monster once, regardless of how many particles of the spell actually collide with the monster.
  • This makes these spells actually balance-able for us as developers, and predictable for you as a player.
  • Previously, a rocket fired at an enemy might do a wide variety of damage to the enemy depending on exactly how the rocket burst and how much shrapnel went tearing into the enemy. This tended to make it so that we could only balance it so that the spell was useless if you didn't get a perfect shot, or incredibly overpowered if you hit an enemy with a good shot (or hit a particularly large enemy, since they were more likely to get hit by more particles).
  • Now the entire point of Area Of Effect spells is based around two things: hitting crowds of enemies at once; and not having to aim too precisely to hit enemies that you are targeting.
  • This applies to all of the "Explosion" spells; the "Crescent" spells; the Water Ring, Bolt Implosion, and Meteor Storm unique spells; the "Cross" spells; and the "Rocket" spells.
    • Hopefully the balance on these spells is now closer to appropriate, but if any of them still seem underpowered or overpowered, do let us know!

• Ammo drops from enemies are no longer harmless if they just sit there uselessly in the air and fade out (aka, when you're full on ammo). Now they explode in a small blue shower of energy that hits nearby objects, enemies, players, and player allies (mercenaries, etc).
  • If you're full on ammo, you can thus use the enemy ammo drops as little traps against other enemies if you wish; or, more likely, this is a good incentive to use more ammo spells yourself and make sure that ammo is simply quickly absorbed into you rather than expiring in this fashion.
  • Important note: ammo that is flying towards you will never explode. It only explodes if it has no player to fly toward and sits there for a few seconds.

Major New Strategic Rule: Survivor Proximity

• This is one of those "simple rules that changes everything.
  • Essentially, for a survivor to participate in most missions, they must now be within 4 tiles of the mission target in order to be able to help.
    • Rally Survivors missions are the sole exception, with them having an 8 tile limit instead of 4.
    • On lower strategic difficulties than the default, the limits are eased to 5 tiles for normal and 10 for rally.

• Additionally, Castles (three of which are scattered around the map) now have a revised purpose. Capturing each of them now adds +1 and +2 to normal and rally mission ranges, respectively.

• The Dispatch interface has been updated to reflect this information in an easy format.
  • For survivors that are out of range of participating in the current mission, it shows both what their range is and what the current maximum range is for the mission in question.
  • While we were at it, we also made it show wounded survivors (which cannot participate thanks to being wounded), and it notes that they are wounded and thus can't help.

• There are a lot of ramifications from this one rule addition, and so we definitely wanted to have this in before beta. It makes it so that having more survivors matters more, and so that the strategy behind how you position your survivors given your limitations of "one dispatch per turn" is a lot deeper at advanced levels of play in particular.

Alpha .702

(Released December 16th, 2012)

• The ground graphics for The Deep have been finalized.

• Fixed a crash issue with the first OSX version; we had mistakenly released that as partially .700 and partially .701, which really didn't work out so well!

• You fight Demonaica in several instances, and in several of them his collision offsets were off and he hovered over the ground. Fixed.

• Level Up Windmills on the world map now automatically get purified if their neighboring tiles are purified (like caves, etc) since there is no direct way to purify them.

• In new worlds that are created, the armory in the overlord's keep now has a conspicuous hatch that lets you quickly escape right to the world map.
  • This prevents players who die from needing to spend time trekking back through even just the atrium of the keep.

• The characters' stance on the world map has been improved to not just be blindly running all the time.

Clarity/Training Improvements

• Improved the clarity of the wording on many of the world map tile descriptions.

• When you first attack a slime mass with a character during the time when it blocks all shots, a text interjection now pops up letting you know that there's a timing pattern that you need to figure out (though you have to do the figuring-out yourself).

• The first time you attack a steam cannon and hit it in its armor playing, there is now a text interjection that tells you that you'll have to search for a weakspot, although it doesn't say where that weakspot is.

• There are certain areas in the game where you need double jump, triple jump, miniature, or water dash in order to proceed. However, previously the game did not make this particularly clear. Now there are gravestones on the safe side of these obstacles with epitaphs letting you know what is required to pass ahead.

• Level Up towers now show the text "LEVEL UP HERE" on them once they have been discovered on the world map past turn 2. It just wasn't clear enough to players where they could level up, although the text interjections we added last release probably solved most of it.

• There is now always a giant cliff of some sort to the left of the evil overlord's keep, so that players just starting the game can't go wandering off the wrong direction into the overlord's territory. Instead they'll find the world map much faster.

• Rather than there being a bunch of different hotkeys to bring up the various functions on the world map, there is now just one button that brings up all possible actions (including "embark into region").
  • The functionality is the same as before, but this leads to a cleaner and clearer interface; plus has room for expansion if we ever need to.
  • Also, the details about the region type now automatically show up to the side of this new menu, which makes it one more convenience of this method.

• The world map resources display and region header display both now keep displaying when you have the strategic overview open or the chat window open, so that you can see what you're talking about or thinking about more clearly.

• Corrected the cave tile description, which said there was nothing much of interest to be found there -- in reality, it's a great place to find perk tokens.

• Improved the visuals of the region details display in order to help aid clarity.

• The opening of the game has been changed a bit for new worlds. Rather than the freefall room that comes after your first encounter with Demonaica, there is now a room with some crates and traps in it, which has two signs which explain the basics of aiming.
  • Specifically it points out low-shots and angled shots, for players who might not otherwise notice those keys.

• There is now a sizeable Help section in the escape menu, with tips about combat, explanations about equipment, and explanations about progressing your character.

Balance Changes

• The speed at which spells move has been lowered on all combat difficulties; SKilled is now the equivalent of what Adept previously was.

• The cooldown timing between monster shots is now slightly easier on Master Hero and The Chosen One, and substantially easier on everything lower than Hero.

• Campfire now lasts for 3 seconds instead of 4, and has a cooldown of 2.5 seconds instead of 6.

• Attacking a level-up totem now only has a 30% chance of spawning a monster rather than a 100% chance.
  • The health of the totem has also been thirded.

• Blade traps, mines, dangerfalls, and spike traps should no longer be targeted by homing spells.

• Flares now do damage even when stationary (rather than just when moving) and now only last half as long in their stationary mode.

• Total extra ammo, whenever applied to a character, would wind up giving them insanely nearly-infinite ammo. Fixed.

• The health perks were overpowered so that a lot of the alternatives for them really paled by comparison. Therefore, we've made the following buffs to other items:
  • The primary attack increase option is now 50% instead of 5%.
  • The special attack increase option is now 40% instead of 5%.
  • The ammo attack increase option is now 100% instead of 5%.
  • The secondary attack increase option is now 50% instead of 5%.
  • All of the ammo increases were in volumes of 1 and 2 rather than the intended 10 and 20. Oops! Fixed that now.

• The balance of how much enemy health increases per turn take has now increased since the amount of DPS that you get against monsters is much higher based on the perk adjustments.

• Well over a third of the perks have been switched around as to which level they are available at, in order to give more interesting choices for those looking to minmax.
  • It should be noted that often a true minmaxer will make one decision for a level's perk early in the game, and then will validly revise that decision later in the game. That's not a sign of indecision with this game, it's a sign of correctly adapting to the circumstances that are changing as the levels and mage classes change.

• All whips have had their calibers increased, making them much more useful for blocking enemy spells.

• Bats have had their health dropped significantly, and have had light added to them, so they should be easier to see in the dark.

• WaterSine has been buffed quite a bit.
  • It's hard to hit with, so it should hit hard when it does.

• WaterRing has had it's attack dropped by 66%, and had it's caliber dropped a small bit.
  • It was blocking everything and mowing down everyone.

Alpha .701

(Released December 15th, 2012)

• Added 57 more slices.
  • Thanks to c4sc4, Coppermantis and zebramatt for these.

• Fixed an image file that was throwing up errors.
  • Thanks to Misery for sending in the debug log that allowed us to track this one down.

• The "What's New" link on the main menu now actually links to the appropriate place.

• We managed to waste 18 man-hours chasing Unity 4.0 support (and thus Linux support), but ran into intractable performance problems with load times. Sigh. Will revisit later when we are able to talk with Unity about it.

• The default gamepad controls are actually now sane.

• Fixed a bug with the notes-to-self popup coming up about the first windstorm generator even at the end of purified regions. Oops. ;)

• Fixed some slices that were causing rooms to be impassible.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for one specific case, and to Misery, who's save pointed to a bit more widespread issue.

• The way that the dispatch mission results are now reported is that one of the surviving members of the party you send out actually makes an in-character report. We'd always planned on doing this, but hadn't quite had time to fully flesh that out before the first alpha.
  • If NONE of the members of the party you send out survive, then you get a different message informing you of their mass death...

• Previously our "text interjection" (aka, dialogue popup that temporarily suspends action) system was something that could only have one item going at a time. This was problematic if you needed to get multiple reports of survivor deaths at the end of one turn, or similar, without us having to resort to vague statements like "one or more survivors died" or 4th-wall-breaking statements like "here's the list of who died."
  • Now the game has a queuing system for text interjections that lets any number of statements get queued up at once without stomping on one another, which is a lot more flexible. The vast majority of the time you'd still get one at a time, but when a big event happens and everyone is screaming things at you, you now can hear what everyone says instead of just one thing. ;)

• The starting number of purified tiles now varies a bit more, as it makes sure that a couple of key structures start out purified so that you can get a bit of hand-holding on the first two turns.

• Several keys were able to cause some background trouble while a text interjection was in progress. Fixed.

• When "random events" happen during a turn, the text describing them is now specially colored on the turn results page so that it's easier to notice them.

• Put in some added code to help prevent windstorm generators and doors and such from occasionally not showing up.

Clarity/Training Improvements

• Previously, on the world map there was a line about "press this button to view your feats" even if you had none. That was confusing and just added to clutter. Plus the window would just open up with nothing to see. Now the game just makes that button do nothing, and hides that line of instruction, until you have your first feat.

• In general, if you've already run a dispatch mission on your current strategic turn, and you try to open the dispatch menu again, the game now shows a message explaining that you can't do more missions until next turn and that you should go purify some new tiles.

• When you try to enter a pointless already-purified region (one that doesn't have perk tokens or some other benefit), the game now has a confirm popup that asks "Where Are You Going?" and explains the situation -- as well as giving you a few side tips about useful areas to look for things while it's at it.

• Previously, it was easily possible to forget to give dispatch orders to your NPCs before you went on your next purification mission. Chris even did this in his video before he remembered and went back out!
  • Now the game warns you about this and gives you a confirm prompt that makes sure that you want to enter a corrupted region without giving dispatch orders first. Given that there is really almost no reason you'd ever want to do this, this confirmation has no opt-out to "don't tell me this again." But if you want to enter the region anyway, the prompt does let you do that.

• The text for all four kinds of "A Resistance Member Has Died" messages have been updated so that they all clearly refer to only one resistance member and specify who died.

• Previously, whenever you went to the world map there was an opt-out popup (until you disabled it) explaining a bit about the world map and how things work.
  • That was clunky, and has been removed.

• Now when you first go to the world map on turn 1, there is a conversation that you have with one of your NPCs, who explains a slight bit more than before, but a more focused bit of explanation.
  • There are also instructions on your first turn to build a clinic, and the game won't let you do any other dispatch missions that turn.
  • It also won't let you leave the world map until you've done this first mission, just to make sure things are as clear as possible for the first turn.

• After you run your first dispatch mission on turn 1, the game now has another brief text interlude with one of your NPCs, where it quickly explains about your role in purifying tiles and how to choose a general target.

• As soon as you destroy your first windstorm generator, thus progressing the game to turn 2, one of your NPCs radios in to talk to you about needing to rebuild a nearby farm to improve food supplies.
  • Once you go back to the world map, it's the same thing as with the first turn where it will only let you run that specific dispatch mission, and where it specially highlights the region in question with a text overlay.

• On the turn directly before Demonaica emerges from his keep (which varies by strategic difficulty), there is now a text interjection explaining in-character what is going to happen and what you need to do about it.

• On the start of turn 8, there's a new text interjection explaining about level-up towers. It's also at this point that your strategic overlay starts showing these.

• On the start of turn 11, there's a text interjection about scrap, and the strategic overlay starts showing more about scrap.

• On the start of turn 14, there's a text interjection explaining amplifier towers, and the strategic overlay starts tracking them.

• On the start of turn 17, there's a text interjection explaining ivory towers, and the strategic overlay starts tracking them.

• On the start of turn 23, there's a text interjection with more information about level-up towers.

• On the start of turn 26, there's a text interjection explaining skelebot research facilities, and the strategic overlay starts tracking them.

• On the start of turn 29, there's a text interjection explaining the need for lots of mana in the late game, and the strategic overlay starts tracking mana sources.

Balance Changes

• The campfire spell now has very little attack power and a much longer cooldown, making it useful as a defensive blocker spell as opposed to a torch-everything attack spell.
• LightRocket hits for about half what it once did.
  • Thanks to several of our alpha players for letting us know how badly these needed changing.

• Clinging Nettles has been nerfed some.
  • There were several reports of this, thanks to everyone who mentioned it.

• Slime Mass has had his shot speed cut in half.
  • He's hard to hit as is, it's nearly impossible when the shot was coming at you that fast.

• Dangerfalls now have vastly larger gaps between when they let off particles and when they don't.

A Valley Without Wind 2 aka Valley 2