Valley 2:Beta Release Notes

Beta .716

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

• Updated the world map generation logic pretty heftily to move a lot of the level up towers away from the center of the world and out to the further reaches.
  • With the world maps having gotten so much smaller a few releases back, the logic of where the level up towers were seeded really needed another looking at; as players were pointing out, it was possible to have tier 2 or 3 spells before Demonaica even emerged. Now that is exceedingly unlikely.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where danger-to-npc values of tiles was not being computed properly on multiplayer clients (the server still had the right numbers, but it was showing wrong on the clients).
  • Thanks to Gemzo for the report.

Gamepad And Aiming Improvements

• Previously, the maximum noise canceling on an axis was 75% (which, it turns out, was internally 65%). Now it goes all the way up to 95% for greater flexibility.

• Previously, the default noise canceling indexes for all axes was 50% (really internally 40%). Now for the up and down keys, the default is 95%; and for left and right the default is 85%.
  • This seems to work out extremely well for this sort of game; the old axis canceling defaults were actually more for things like precise aiming with a second stick in a dual-stick shooter. But what we're really wanting is more the classic D-pad experience, and that is what this level of axis canceling seems to provide on at least our test gamepads; let us know how it does on yours!

• The game now only locks your character into place for angled firing when you are actually holding down one of the angled-firing buttons OR the walk button.
  • This keeps people on gamepads from "inexplicably" stopping moving if their axis noise canceling is not quite right or they are using an analog stick and have a drifting thumb, but it retains the functionality of these folks being able to lock into place to shoot at an angle when actually firing (and then they can actually see what has happened, if they're a new player, because not only does their character stop, but the shots are going in that direction, so it just immediately should make sense rather than being "why does my character keep stopping moving!?"
  • However, the ability to lock yourself into place while NOT actively firing is actually useful. At least, I certainly think it is. This is where the walk button comes in; when holding that and an angle, it works like it used to, letting you lock yourself into place in preparation for firing rather than actually firing. I think this is definitely the minority case of needed functionality, so it makes good sense to me to make this the thing that requires an extra button press.
  • Thanks to Billick for suggesting that players only stop when they are actively moving.

Beta .715 Gimme Shelter... From Monsters

(Released January 15th, 2013)

• Mouse support has been added for all the menus in the game, and the mouse cursor is now visible whenever any menu is open.

• A huge number of improvements have been made to the wall crawler logic, including making the wall crawlers now handle slopes properly (ground slopes, anyhow; ceilings ones don't matter for running into).

• Fixed a longstanding bug where the last shot to kill an enemy would not do a damage popup.

• Made it so that on the last shot to kill a non-boss enemy, it now pops up the name of the enemy as well as the damage; that way players can actually learn the names of enemies, and it's a bit of a minor visual reward for the kill as well.

• The graphics for being a Deinonychus are now fully in place. Rather than looking like a Utahraptor from the first game (that was placeholder art), you now look awesome -- like a feathery modern version of this particular raptor.

• The swamp backdrop has been finalized.

• Pretty close to all 33 interior wall backgrounds have been updated, many finalized.

• When the player is transformed into a Deinonychus, they can now exit doors properly without getting stuck!
  • Thanks to khadgar for reporting.

• Swamp gas has been turned into the "large flying" category instead of "large walking."
  • This makes room in the large walking category in the swamp for a different monster (we had to do some shifting because we wound up with some extra cool art that we wanted to use), and it also changes the behavior of the swamp gas so that it now does indeed fly.

• The falling miasma graphics are now a lot more attractive, and the particles of miasma are also a lot smaller and more discrete (rather than being a waterfall-like thing, it's more like pellets now).

• The physics of the shots from the Missile Posts have been adjusted so that they are actually now a threat indoors (and more interesting even out of doors, too).

Twenty New Monsters

• Added a new "small walking" enemy type to the game: Urban Droid.
  • These cheeky little robots are capable of putting on quite a fireworks show. And if you shoot them in their large eye, they tend not to take that too kindly, either.

• Added a new "crazy/leaping" enemy type to the game: Urban Tackle Droid.
  • These spidery robots are really tiny but really fragile. They hide in place and then come running and leaping at you when you get close.

• Added a new "crazy/leaping" enemy type to the game: Clockwork Tumbler.
  • These crablike automatons go bounding around like crazy, making them quite hard to hit, although somewhat easier to dodge as they blow past you and then try to turn around. Try to get them when they're slowed by turning.

• Added a new "large flying" enemy type: Dorygnathus.
  • This flying dino is actually seeded in the slot for the "stationary ground" enemy type of the lava flats, but that's one of those things that helps to make the various areas feel more unique; sometimes they mix things around like this, meaning that slices created for one purpose then serve another. But the monsters are always designed with the way that the slices are designed in mind.
  • At any rate, Dorygnathus is fast, mean, and... uh, explosive. Don't let them close.

• Added a new "ceiling clinger" enemy type: Earth Flinger.
  • Earth bombs! First time enemies are using bombs like you get.

• Added a new "ceiling clinger" enemy type: Earth Elemental.
  • Looks just like the Earth Flinger, so there is some uncertainty as to which you have just encountered when you near them. These have a completely different attack and generally show up in different areas (aside from the level up towers and overlord keep, where all monsters mingle).

• Added a new "crazy/leaping" monster type to the game: Deinonychus
  • Yes, these are deadly. Proceed with caution in the lava flats and bring something to mow them down quick -- they are extremely fast.
  • These work very much like the Utahraptors from the first game, except with a bit of altered physics and more speed.
  • As a general note, not all monsters are meant to be created equal; some areas are meant to be harder than others (like The Deep and the Lava Flats), and even the monsters within an area are meant to vary in terms of which are most threatening (the stationary flying are extremely threatening in many of the areas, but not so in the lava flats, for instance; the crazy/leaping are less threatening most areas, but are a hotspot in the lava flats).

• Added a new "ceiling clinger" enemy type: Snow Elemental.
  • This is actually just a recolor of the Earth Elemental, but it's such a cool graphic anyhow. These snow variants show up in completely different areas and use a snow sine attack, though, so facing them is a very distinct proposition.

• Added a new "wall crawler" enemy type: Mechanical Spider.
  • These use a lightning rebound attack with different timings and distances from the other monster rebounds.

• Added a new "wall crawler" enemy type: Wall Probe.
  • These use a lightning ricochet attack with different timings and distances from the other monster ricochets.

• Added a new "small flying" enemy type: Owl.
  • Everybody's favorite concept sketch ("he looks so unimpressed by the world," etc) makes his debut. He may be unimpressed, but he's a zippy little fellow with an interesting insect fusillade attack that gets more challenging on higher difficulties (of course).

• Added a new "large walking" monster type: Swamp Thing.
  • This one has a pretty crazy cool pattern-based attack that it uses on you as it scoots quickly across the ground and then pauses.

• Added a new "large walking" monster type: Forest Elemental.
  • These freaky, massive, tree-like creatures use their clubs to create an earthquake shockwave that strikes any players near them who are standing on the ground at the time of their attack.

• A new "small swimming" monster has been added: Icefish.
  • This fish inhabits the ice age areas of the game, and works rather like a cross between a robot piranha and an ice bat; it lobs snowballs at you like the bat, but otherwise works like the robot piranha.

• Added a new "small flying" monster type: Miasma Bat.
  • These are like regular bats except a bit more hardy, and they also act as something of a mobile miasma dangerfall as they fly around.

• A new "small flying" enemy type has been added: Flying Eyeball.
  • These fly past dropping barrages of miasma bombs at you, then eventually wheel around and make another pass for you.

• Added a new "stationary ground" enemy type: Clockwork Blockade.
  • Normally this is completely passive, but if you touch it or shoot it, it will create a cross of "clockwork seekers" that come after you.

• Added a new "small flying" enemy type to the game: Mosquito.
  • These are definitely the smallest, weakest, but also fastest enemies in the game, by far. They zip around like crazy, and won't harm you directly; but they let off slow-moving fire embers from unexpected places. They're hard to hit with straight shots, but other weapons can work quite well against them. They live up to their name of creating distraction and so forth, but they do really very little damage even if they do get you.

• Added a new "small swimming" monster type: Fire Spitter.
  • This little amphibian swims around rather like a carp, but lobs slow-moving embers at you periodically.

• Added a new "small swimming" enemy type: Water Fairy.
  • Yes, these are very much like the fairy minibosses from AVWW1 -- the much-hated, overly-familiar red and green fairies. But we are not insane! The inclusion of the water fairies, which are blue, is actually cathartic. These are very ordinary enemies, in Valley 2, not minibosses; and they are rather pushovers here. They do produce some interesting threat and tactical scenarios as well, so it's not just a gimme either way, but we didn't put these here just to torture people who loved the first game but grew to hate the fairies.

Strategic Refinements, Round 3

• There can now only ever be one resistance member on a given tile. We have some other mechanics coming soon that will still give you a reason to keep each one in "mutual support range" of a few others, but for now this vastly helps us make the interface smoother.
  • Food income from farming has been roughly doubled since you can't turbocrop a single farm with a bunch of dudes anymore, we would increase it more but some other changes are planned to handle the rest of this.
  • Any situation which would otherwise cause multiple resistance members on the same tile (loading an old world with a multi-NPC stack, or rescuing a survivor) causes the others to be displaced to a nearby tile that is no closer to the overlord (or origin, if overlord isn't out yet) than the original tile. In the rescue-survivor case, the new resistance member is always the displaced one.

• You now no longer move resistance members through "Rally Survivors" but by:
  • 1) Move to the tile of the resistance member you want to move.
  • 2) Press enter to open the region-interaction menu.
  • 3) Press enter again to select the "Move" option (it's always on top if there's a resistance member present, and thus quick to select).
  • 4) The interaction window will close and the world map HUD will reflect that you're giving a move order; walk to the target square you want the resistance member to move to (you won't be able to walk into any tiles that are out of range or corrupted).
  • 5) Press enter again to make the move happen (cancel can be used to cancel out of the order).
  • This is much faster and more intuitive than the previous system, at least in our experience. We hope you agree :)

• Resistance members can no longer use warp points, since it's already pretty easy for them to get away from the overlord and it's harder to present a reasonable interface with them using the warp points.

• Now that there's only one resistance member max per tile, the world map icon for the resistance member is:
  • If the player is currently in the process of giving that NPC a move order, it is a blue-ish version of the normal icon.
  • Otherwise, if the NPC is wounded, it is a red-ish version of the normal icon.
  • Otherwise, if the NPC has already acted that turn, it is a semi-transparent version of the normal icon. (would have done orange and made the normal icon green, but that wouldn't work for red/green colorblindness)
  • Otherwise, it is the normal orange-ish icon.

• The dispatch-mission button on the region-interaction menu now simply says "Build Structure", because that's the only dispatch mission that's given that way anymore (all the others are still in the game, they're just attempted on a resistance member's own initiative based on where they are, or they're the rally-survivors mission that was rolled into the new movement system).
  • Further, since there's only ever at most one resistance member on the tile where you can build the structure, it no longer asks you who you're sending to do it when you pick the building to build, it just goes ahead and tells that one NPC to build the building.
    • But the region-interaction menu now shows the NPC's portrait next to their name, in case you might miss looking at their handsome mugs with the npc-selection screen no longer in the loop.
  • Since you can't have two NPCs on the same tile anymore, the rule that you only have a 75% chance to succeed in building construction with only one NPC has been removed.

• The region-interaction menu now displays a "work schedule" of what an NPC would do there, in what order, including the time consumed by moving there (unless an NPC is already there and hasn't acted that turn; then it lists the first thing that will be done as the first item).
  • We hope this will resolve some of the information-opacity issues that the move to "NPCs act based on where they are" logic initially involved.

• The end-turn check for “free healing” (not requiring a clinic) of a wounded resistance member is now only done on the lower 2 strategic difficulty levels.
  • But a wounded NPC actually on a clinic tile has a very good chance (depending on strategic difficulty level) of being automatically healed.

• Clinics now only function (and get their heal roll) when a resistance member (who is not wounded, and has not already acted that turn) is on the clinic tile at the end of the turn.
  • But each clinic roll now has a much better chance to heal someone and is not so adversely affected by low morale.

• The housing “population cap” mechanic is now gone as it felt very weak in practice and didn’t make a lot of sense.
  • In its place we have implemented a “shelter” mechanic where each resistance member is in danger at the end of every turn, which danger can be increased or mitigated by the tiles around them.
    • Housing tiles are the best shelter, along with the more special positive tiles (chateau, amp towers, etc).
    • More mundane positive tiles (farms, factories) are also good shelter, but not as good.
    • Multipurpose tiles that haven’t been built into anything are mediocre shelter.
    • Rubble of any kind is poor shelter, but it doesn’t add to the threat either.
    • Wilderness areas are low-level threats; caverns are actually somewhat positive, forests are slightly negative, open areas are moderately negative.
    • Evil outposts and impasse tiles are very negative.
  • Each tile impacts all tiles within 3 distance, with the impact halving at each step. Accordingly being in the middle of an abandoned town area (that the overlord hasn’t rubble-ized) is generally pretty safe, but being in the middle of a bunch of evil outposts is exceedingly dangerous.
  • If the NPC fails its “shelter roll” at the end of the turn, it will be wounded. If it was already wounded, it will die.
    • The strategic difficulty substantially impacts how hard this roll is.
    • Having one or two other (non-wounded) resistance members within 2 tiles improves the NPC’s chances of not being hit. Having more than 2 other resistance members in the area does not provide further benefit.
    • Already wounded NPCs get a further bonus on this roll that varies substantially by strategic difficulty level. Generally speaking they’re much less likely to die than they were to get wounded in the first place, unless they’re in a really bad place.
  • The game displays the chance of an NPC failing the roll (assuming no support from other NPCs) as “Danger To NPCs”; this can be seen in a number of ways on the interface, including a new world-map-overlay that can be activated from the region-interaction menu.

• The end-turn check for an NPC naturally dying of wounds no longer happens. So now wounded NPCs are now simply out of commission and will wait for healing, unless the overlord catches them.

• There is no longer a morale penalty when the overlord destroys a useful building.

• Instead of losing 1 morale per turn automatically, you gain 1.

• The overlord’s number of moves per turn has been scaled down (the world is generally smaller now than it was some patches ago, and the shelter mechanic adds a lot of threat).

• The overlord now comes out one turn later than before (otherwise on the highest difficulty he was going to kill the wounded survivor before the clinic could heal them).

Boss Updates

• The boss rooms have been adjusted so that not only do they no longer have water, they also generally won't have the little traps areas in them.
  • This keeps the boss fights more focused, and avoids some of the particular pitfalls they were common to.

• The physics of the henchmen in how they jump and fall after you, and when they generate magma exhaust, has been altered fairly substantially. They now pose a much more interesting challenge.

Beta .714 Monstercopia

(Released January 11th, 2013)

• The sprite graphics for Elder are now in place, although there is still some work to be done on them.

• The Warehouse interior wall graphics are now in place.

• The eels now use a "moderate static discharge" instead of the "major" one they were previously using.

• Fixed a number of bugs for wall crawlers that were all relating to the fact that they could not decelerate fast enough to make certain turns, and so would go sliding into walls or open space or other things.

Eleven New Monsters

• A new "wall crawler" type of enemy has been added to the game: Elephant Snail.
  • These have an occasional ranged attack, and are only vulnerable to your attacks at certain times, too.

• Added a new "small walking" type of monster: Firewalker.
  • These are pretty different, for sure. Fairly easy to kill, but dangerous even in death, even at a distance.

• A new "large walking" enemy type has been added: Swamp Gas.
  • We'll just see what folks make of it, we won't say anything here.

• Added a new "ceiling clinger" monster type: Medieval Ceiling Trap.
  • Watch out for the streams of darts!

• Added a new "stationary floor" enemy type: Medieval Flag Trap.
  • Again, watch the darts!

• Added a new "small flying" enemy type: Archaeopteryx
  • Don't worry about finding these -- they'll find you. ;)

• A new "stationary floor" enemy type has been added: missile post.
  • Careful attacking these!

• A new "ceiling clinger" type of monster has been added to the game: Ceiling Asp.
  • Given these are desert creatures... watch out for fire!

• A new "large flying" monster type has been added to the game: Dark Imp.
  • Lurking in the highlands with their eerie dark forms and whips of fire... yeah, you'll want to be killing these as quick as you can when you see them.

• A new "wall crawler" enemy type has been added: Clockwork Pigeon.
  • These mechanical birds crawl along the walls, flinging bursts of feathers at you that shattered into multiple bursts after a while or on contact with the ground.

• Added a new "wall crawlers" enemy type: Wall Croc.
  • These are speedy little guys, for being so pudgy!

Beta .713 Scatter And Gather

(Released January 10th, 2013)

• The "individual specials" on characters have been removed.
  • This was something that mostly messed with the feeling of balance in invisible ways, or more particularly messed with the feeling of the controls (usually not for the better).
  • The perks are all still there of course, but those are things that the player gets to decide on and experiment with AFTER starting the game, and change at will. Generally we like to avoid making players have to make crucial decision about their character before they even start playing, but that's what the individual specials were doing.
    • These were a holdover from Valley 1, where it wasn't a big deal because your characters die all the time and you get new ones, anyway. But here your characters are permanent, and the physics of movement are a lot more fine-tuned anyhow.
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290 for suggesting.

• The characters in the pick new character menu now show their actual attack animations rather than just standing still in their first frame of their attack animation.

• In the first room with Demonaica at the start of the game, the game controls now show up even during the conversation you are having with him, rather than waiting until after that conversation is done.
  • Thanks to madcow for suggesting.

• Fixed an error in a chunk slice that would throw up exceptions when loading it.
  • Thanks to isil for reporting this.

• The game no longer pauses for the local player when they are in a text interjection; that led to all sorts of bad behaviors, like animations being a bit stuck and odd, and in general just feeling rather jarring.
  • Instead, what now happens is that the invincibility lightning turns on for the player whenever they are somewhere where there are monsters, and this thus signals that they are safe (which was why we had it pausing before).
  • Overall this leads to a smoother experience while still making it clear the player is safe (which they are).

• Fixed a bug that was preventing the last page of multi-page text interjections from showing.

• After the oblivion crystals have been smashed, Demonaica retreats to his keep. On the overworld, Elder takes his place in harassing you, since Elder is the one henchman who does not need an oblivion crystal to remain immortal.
  • This was always the plan, however since we don't have the Elder graphics finalized yet we couldn't really implement this properly. However, this was leading to some confusion evidently, so we've used the "Dark Avatar" graphics that are currently a stand-in for all the Henchmen, so that it's clear that something has changed on the overworld after the oblivion crystals are gone.

• Inside freefall rooms, your falling rate is no longer slowed when you are in water or lava; that was making them untenably slow.
  • Thanks to jruderman and theqmann for reporting.

More Angled Aiming Refinements And Controls Updates

• You can now fire downwards at an angle while standing on the ground and by holding down and forward or backward. Normally when you hold down and no direction and fire, you do low-shots, which are still possible as long as you don't hold forward or backward.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

• When you have locked your character into place and then fire behind yourself at an angle, it now turns your character around to face that direction so that things look more sensible graphically.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

• The contextual aiming on slopes that was added a couple of releases ago has now been removed since the manual "deployed aiming" has come back and does a better job at this sort of thing.
  • More to the point, the contextual aiming was interfering with a couple of different kinds of other aiming (the ability to fire over the edge of a slope from cover, and the ability to do low-shots horizontally while on a slope), so removing this retains all the flexibility of the manual controls without ever making the game do something you didn't intend in an automatic contextual fashion.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting.

• The "Open Menu" and "Cancel" functions have been split out into separate keybindings so that there is more flexibility with how you map them on gamepads. So have the Confirm and Interact functions.
• Thanks to Nypyren for suggesting.

• The "Interact" and "Confirm" keys now default to E instead of S, making them consistent between Valley 1 and Valley 2 again.
  • The only reason we had changed this was so that Q and E could be used for the aim up/down in this game, but since those have been phased out we can now go to something that makes for less of a jarring difference between the basics of the two games.

• The "Use Secondary Ability" default keybind has moved from W to S, again for the sake of simplicity. The keys thus all line up as ASDF rather than AWDF for the spells.

• The gamepad button and gamepad axis settings section in the input bindings windows have been combined into one to prevent confusion.
  • Now it checks for either a button or an axis input when you click the gamepad button panel, and then it switches to showing the axis and the axis noise canceling options only when you choose an axis.
  • This should prevent all the confusion people were having with sometimes "not being able to map" certain buttons that were actually axes, etc.
  • Thanks to Itchykobu, isil, and zaaq for suggesting these changes.

Cheats! Plus An Easy Way To Test The Strategic Game Only

• Added new admin command: cmd:set_cheats_enabled (followed by a 0 for false, or a 1 for true)
  • When this is active, you can use a new "Cheat: Purify" button on the interact-with-region menu to purify from the world map.
  • If this has ever been active in a world, achievements cannot be earned in it.
  • Thanks to madcow for the suggestion.

Strategic Refinements, Round 2

• There is no longer a limit to the number of dispatch missions that can be launched each turn. However, each NPC can still only act once.
  • The idea here is that this reduces the incentive for blobbing your NPCs together all in one group, and -- when paired with some other changes to be detailed below -- encourages a very different style of play where more NPCs are deployed more distinct places, but you're not HAVING to move them all each turn.
  • Obviously one big concern with a mechanic like this is if players wind up getting very grindy in later turns with giving orders to dozens of NPCs -- how tedious. That was something the previous dispatch mission limit was intended to solve. However, we've found a more organic way to solve the same issue, which you'll read about below.

• The concept of individual survivors having different skill levels has been removed, for a variety of reasons.
  • This was one of those things that sounded good on paper, but in practice it hasn't been too useful to the game mechanics; it adds the bad kind of complexity and encourages players to "optimize" their play in un-fun ways such as sending key survivors on long treks all over the place rather than using everyone more equally.
  • Also, because the change to letting the player give each one an order each turn is increasing the complexity of play a fair bit, and the value added by the skill mechanic was somewhat dubious to us in the past.

• The "convert region to (whatever)" success chance is now 75% if you send 1 resistance member, or 100% if you send two (or more, but there wouldn't be a lot of point in that).
  • The rest of the mission types have a 100% chance of success now, given the lack of skill levels.
    • We may dial the complexity back up some here in a future version (we have some ideas on this front), but honestly we're going for depth of mechanics rather than breadth. With this new release the strategy for winning the game is actually a lot more complex and interesting despite the streamlining that we've done, which is something we're really proud of. There are more interesting choices with less obvious answers.

• Now, only Rally and "Convert Region To (whatever)" missions can be given directly through the dispatch interface; all the others are still possible but are done by moving a resistance member to the target square and giving them time to get it done.
  • The first turn after the move they won't do anything (their action that turn was moving) but at the end of the following turn they will check for doing the following:
    • If there is an attackable enemy structure in the region itself, attack it.
    • Otherwise, if there is a recruitable survivor in the region, rescue it.
    • Otherwise, if there are any eligible adjacent targets for the attack-adjacent-enemy-structures mission, do that.
    • Otherwise, if the region can be worked (farm, scrap factory, etc), work it.
    • Otherwise, scavenge for food and scrap.
  • So if there's a tile where you want to do more than one of the above, either send multiple resistance members, or just let the one member stay there enough turns to get it all done.
  • The idea here is to automate things a little bit more, certainly, and not make it so that you have to hand-hold your NPCs each turn so much. The idea is to let you express your will as quickly as possible and then just get on with the game, so that you can manage more NPCs doing more things without that bogging down the game in an un-fun way.

• The end-turn report now shows:
  • One line for the amount of mana spent attacking buildings.
  • One line for the number of buildings that could not be attacked due to lack of mana.

• There is now a text interjection for the first time an NPC could not attack a building due to lack of mana.

• Map tiles no longer ever produce food, scrap, or mana on their own -- in other words, just passively by your holding them. They now all have to be worked by resistance members.
  • Desert Pyramids and Magic Focal Towers can now be worked in this way (to produce mana), though as with the other production missions you won't actually give that order directly. Just move them there and they'll get to it.
  • This is the lynchpin in the revised strategic design:
    • Having to deploy NPCs around the world to gain resources means that they are now a lot more useful than just for rebuilding structures (which they used to do, but cannot do anymore), building structures, or going on dangerous missions. This greatly increases the complexity of the resource management simulation by the late game in particular, particularly on higher difficulties.
    • It's also the reason why you could have dozens of NPCs without it being a hassle to manage all of them every turn. It's actually to your advantage to leave most of them where they are most turns, since most of them are working for you. And then your decisions come in as to when to move them where, and when to capture what buildings for use.

• Convert Tile to (whatever) missions now can only be performed by resistance members actually on the tile.
  • So now missions either move a resistance member, or have them do something, but never both at once.

• The initial "tutorial" logic that affects the first 2 turns has been updated to reflect the above changes:
  • On the first turn, you must first move a single resistance member to an abandoned town city block tile (potential clinic site) and then move a single resistance member to a grassland farm tile.
  • On the second turn, you must first build that clinic, and then you're free to do as you please.
  • Also, the instructions you get on the third turn are now updated to reflect the above changes.

• The overlord will now not target or destroy buildings that have never helped the resistance. A building is considered to have helped the resistance if:
  • It provides a passive benefit (housing, clinic, city hall, etc).
  • It was built (converted from a multi-purpose tile) by the resistance.
  • It has ever been worked by a resistance member to produce food, scrap, or mana (scavenging doesn't count, but the resistance never scavenges in a square that can be worked).

Strategic Interface Improvements

• When sending survivors on dispatch missions, it now properly sorts them so that the ones who can't participate (for whatever reason out of the many possible reasons) are at the bottom of the list.

• NPCs that have already acted this turn now show up in the strategic interface, but with the explanation that they have already acted that turn (versus just being invisible like they previously were).

• In the dispatch interface for specific survivors, it now doesn't allow keyboard selection for those who are unable to act the current turn; this saves you a lot of skipping around manually for people you can't interact with anyhow.

• In the "interact with region" menu on the world map, the "Dispatch Survivors On Mission" line item is now the topmost item, as it is the thing that you'll be selecting most frequently.

• In the "interact with region" menu on the world map, the "Dispatch Survivors On Mission" line changes to "Rally Resistance" if that's the only type of dispatch mission that is available at the region in question (which is what happens quite a lot of the time). This is basically a convenience to save you an extra click.

• "Rally Resistance" has been renamed "Move Survivors Here" so that it's more immediately clear what it means without any extra explanations.

• When a mission that you are sending NPCs on has a 100% chance of success, it no longer asks you for confirmation that you wish to send them on this mission.
  • That was an extra two keypresses that were superfluous for movement orders in particular.

• After a move survivors mission, previously it was showing an emoty results window. Now it just skips that, saving you yet another button press.

• The text interjections have been moved down 40px on the screen so that you can actually see your resource bar on the main menu while the text interjections are playing past.

Upgrades To Several Spell Groups

• The "Magnetic" spells have gone from being pretty lame to being some of Chris's very favorite spells in the game now. We think you'll agree.
  • They no longer die when they collide with the ground, for one thing, which makes them much longer-lived.
  • But they also now mirror your movement sort of like a drone, while at the same time seeking back toward you. The overall effect is much more like what we were going for at the start with these -- a mobile wrecking ball that you swing around yourself, smashing through enemies in an extremely satisfying fashion.

• The Tridents all now have 2.5x as long attack lengths. This makes them much more useful for hitting things above or below you without having to get too close to them.

• The striking distance of the whips have all been reduced by a fair bit, but they have given a powerful new ability that lets them cut right through enemy shields as if they were not there.
  • This makes whips really useful in close combat, but of course close combat is riskier than just firing at weakspots from range.

Three New Monsters

• A new "stationary flying" monster has been added to the game: Steamship.
  • This is another steampunk enemy that is heavily armored in interesting ways.

• A new swimming monster has been added to the game: Eels.
  • These are mainly a melee monster, but if you get too close to them they have big bursts of electrical current that can also strike you.

• A new "stationary flying" monster has been added to the game: Floating Bone Mass.
  • This is definitely the easiest enemy in the game to kill... and at the same time, one of the more dangerous ones. It certainly adds some spice to the lava flats areas, heh.

Beta .712 Chipping Away Everything That Doesn't Look Like An Elephant

(Released January 9th, 2013)

The Welcome Return Of Angled Aiming

• Angled aiming by holding two arrow keys has been added back in.
  • However, the problematic "lock in at a fixed upward angle" and "lock in at a fixed downward angle" will not be coming back, as there was just too much negative feedback on those. We're trying to find better and simpler ways to solve those same goals, such as the (so far well-received) control additions in the last release.

• When you are standing on the ground and holding up or down plus forward or back, it now stops you from moving and lets you fire shots in either direction.
  • This makes it easy to do precise unloading of a barrage into a target without needing special keys like we used to have.
  • This also allows you to aim up and behind you without turning around, actually, which was not something that was ever possible before.
  • Thanks to Professor Paul1290 for suggestions that led to this.

So, when you combine this with the changes from the prior release, what you've got is the complete return of angled aiming -- as many have been clamoring for -- minus the fiddly bits that were requiring finger ballet -- which many were complaining loudly and often about before we removed the angled aiming. The new system is a lot more contextual, and it also really gives a different feel when you are in the air versus on the ground, which is also interesting. When you are jumping, you have complete freedom of movement and can aim in any of the 8 directions with ease. On the ground you lock into position when you aim at an up-angle or down-angle, which means you have less mobility (obviously) during that period, but a greater ability to deliver concentrated barrages into specific locations. I think that this duality is pretty useful, because it lets us do away with a couple of keybinds in favor of basically "deployed" and "mobile" modes of operation.

• Thanks to Misery, among others, for helping us to reconsider this and come up with more creative solutions.

A Tale Of Morale: The New Death Penalty

• In the prior version, the scaling of monster strength had not been adjusted for the fact that there are now fewer levels between mage classes, and thus fewer turns overall. That is now fixed, making the monsters ramp up difficulty more like they used to.

• As of a few releases ago, a death penalty was imposed where every time you died the monster aggression would go up some.
  • As players rightly pointed out, this just led to more stalemate sorts of situations rather than actually causing you to lose.
  • The suggestion from several quarters was to instead have a hit to morale, which makes thematic sense as well as causing the appropriate damage to your prospects.
  • Now on Adept through Hero, there is a morale hit of 1 every time a player dies; on master hero there is a morale hit of 2; and on the chosen one there is a morale hit of 3.
  • Thanks to madcow, LaughingThesaurus, and Misery for suggesting.

• The game has had the concept of "monster aggression" as distinct from "game turn" removed. That was only added so that the old death penalty could increase aggression without increasing the game turn. Now it's back to just being based on the game turn like it had been prior to that release.
  • Additionally, the monster scaling no longer includes an extra 3 turns' worth of extra space in the scaling algorithm for player deaths; that was making it harder if you died a lot, of course, and easier if you didn't die much at all.

Farewell Powerslide

• The Powerslide feat has been removed from the game.
  • This was another thing that was kind of just for show, and really very useless. All it really provided was something for players to get themselves into trouble with.
  • There was lots of complaining about this feat from all quarters, most people viewed it as serving no point, and most people left it off. We really don't want to have stuff like that in the game, and part of the purpose of a beta period is to identify things like that and either excise them or improve them. It varies which approach we take, depending on how central the mechanic is and if it really adds anything. With powerslide, it doesn't really serve a gameplay purpose and so was an obvious candidate for excising.

• Previously, the feats list was: Powerslide, Double Jump, Water Dash, Miniature, Triple Jump.
  • Now the feats go: Water Dash, Miniature, Double Jump, Triple Jump.
  • If you pile on the jump height increases, it's possible that you might be able to win the game without Triple Jump (just having Double Jump), which is pretty interesting.

• New world maps now only have 4 skelebot research facilities rather than 5, since there are now 4 feats rather than 5.
  • This seems particularly fitting because it makes the skelebot facilities a little more rare than they were, and thus not something as repetitive. Now you definitely have to complete three, possibly/probably have to complete four, to win the game.

• This also shrinks the baseline world size from 695 to 688.

Beta .711 Trimming The Fat

(Released January 8th, 2013)

• The character Limon has now been integrated, complete with his new art.

• Fixed a pair of rounding issues that were likely causing a number of inconsistencies in multiplayer.
  • One that was definitely being caused was that Auroch Warrior shots were all right on top of one another rather than spaced out like they should have been.

• The graphics for the ocean shallows ship background wall have been added to the game.

Limited Context-Based Auto-Angled Shots

• Limited context-based angled shots have been added back into the game.
  • 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.

Strategic Refinements, Round 1

• Desert Buildings, Ocean Shallows Buildings, and Abandoned Town City Blocks can no longer be destroyed by the overlord.
  • Same with cold dispersal, heat dispersal, and ivory towers.

• Now when the overlord destroys tiles it's permanent, no more rebuilding the stuff to kite him around infinitely by rebuilding stuff just outside his reach but nearer than anything else, etc.
  • But now the cold, heat, and light towers are indestructible, since they're needed to access certain areas in side-view.

• The second turn's mandatory dispatch objective has been changed from "rebuild destroyed farmland" to "work farmland", since rebuilding it would now be impossible.
  • New worlds will now seed intact farmland instead of destroyed farmland for that, and old worlds will automatically purify a path to a farmland tile if none is currently purified.

• The overlord can now move through corrupted tiles normally.
  • But he won't destroy anything on a corrupted tile since it isn't helping you (yet).

• It is no longer possible to select the world size.
  • We were finding this impossible to balance around, as the world size really means something different here than in a standard RTS or similar. Normally in an RTS the world size means how far you have to travel to meet your enemy, but here you start at the same place as your enemy. So really world size was just affecting tedium and the ability to kite the overlord over long distances, etc.
  • Now everyone plays on the same size world -- same as you get the same size board in Chess or Triple Town or Tetris or whatever -- and we find this should be a lot more straightforward to balance, and to provide a consistently fun experience for everyone.

• The baseline size of worlds has shrunk from 1300 to 695, so it's basically slightly more than half the size of what a Normal map used to be.
  • Going along with this, the actual composition of the worlds has changed quite a bit. There's a lot less empty wilderness space, and a lot more density of the things that matter. The idea is to keep things moving without there being stretches of downtime, which has always been a goal for us with this game.
  • Additionally, there are now far fewer warp points -- only 5-7 on average, rather than a couple of dozen. This makes it substantially more difficulty for the overlord and your survivors to just jet around the whole world.
  • There are also five fewer level-up towers; the maximum level is now 16 rather than 21, which again is in the interest of somewhat shorter games that do not overstay their welcome and encourage replay.

• The points at which you can invade the overlord's keep now come at levels 3, 6, 9, and 12 rather than levels 4, 8, 12, and 16, given the new level cap of 16 instead of 21.
  • Again, this is going for faster, more vicious games.

• The assignment of the perks in relation to what level you find them at has been massively altered.
  • In general, there are now 10 fewer perk tokens to find since there are 5 fewer levels. And in all, there are 20 fewer perks.
    • Most of the perks removed were the critical hit chance increases, which have been completely removed as perk options.
    • There is also one fewer heart (100 health) available to you, but the chances to select hearts/health to add to your character now come earlier and more frequently.

• Pre-existing worlds will upgrade into the new version fine (though let us know if you find any problems), with the following caveats:
  • If your level was higher than 16, it will be dropped to 16.
  • The perks you had assigned may be wildly out of joint compared to what they were, since everything moved around. You may need to reassign those upon upgrading.
  • The balance of the game might be a little bit easier or harder than intended given your larger or smaller map with more warp points than are now expected. But this shouldn't be vastly off in most cases.
  • That's about it.

The Rationale Behind The Strategic Changes

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).

Beta .710 More Monsters At Last

(Released January 7th, 2013)

• Fixed a slice that had an invalid character in it.
  • Thanks to Smiling Spectre for hunting that one down.

• New background wall graphics for the elizabethan rural interiors, pyramid interiors, swamp hovel interiors, time of magic building interiors, the deep general interiors, and the deep mausoleum interiors.

• Fixed a number of bugs where players would sometimes continue moving in their current direction (or continue moving through the arc of a jump) while paused/pausing in multiplayer with another player in the chunk. This could result in the player becoming stuck in the terrain due to the suppressed collision rules during the paused state and the local client's authority over the local player's movement.
  • Thanks to isil and Gemzo for the reports leading to finding this.

• Rather than just writing an empty lock.dat file to prevent multiple openings of the same world at one time, the game now generates a unique GUID for each process run, and writes that into the lock.dat file. This way it can never accidentally lock itself out of a world file, it will only lock other copies of the valley process out of it.
  • Thanks to Tyr for reporting a strange issue on OSX that this hopefully will solve.

• All of the player rocket spells (there are 7 of them) are now more dangerous: the actual explosive shrapnel that happens when the rocket hits a wall or an enemy is damaging to everyone -- players, enemies, allies, etc. The rocket itself, which doesn't last long, won't hit players or allies; just watch out for that blast.
  • This helps to differentiate rockets more from other spells that can be used at close range; these really do have to be used at some range from yourself, and helps prevent them from being overpowered.
  • Thanks to madcow for inspiring this change.

Five New Monsters

• A new "small flying" enemy has been added to the game: Urban Sniper.
  • This one is a re-imagining of the monster of the same name from the first game. In other words, it's sort of inspired from the first game, but a whole new monster in other respects.

• A new "large walking" enemy has been added to the game: Auroch Warrior.
  • This monster walks along slowly, dragging its shield and trying to keep behind it. Very little of it is exposed, and it shoots deadly fusillades at you periodically (fortunately, these have a very low caliber, but it's still an interesting fight because of how they get angled).

• A new "large walking" enemy has been added to the game: Slug Fiend.
  • This monster crawls slowly along the ground, rearing up when you are in range and firing masses of insects at you in curving arcs. These have exceptionally high caliber, so you have to dodge them.

• A new "small swimming" enemy has been added to the game: Robot Piranha.
  • This robotic fish works a lot like the carp, except that it moves slower and hits harder. But, more notably, it also has a ranged fusillade sort of attack that it can use at you -- so for the first time you now face threats from in the water when you are out of the water. Expect to see more of that, based on the enemies that we've designed but not yet implemented.

• A new "large flying" enemy has been added to the game: Rocket Sentinel.
  • This floating orb-like machine haunts some of the more technological areas, and fires very slow-moving miasma rockets at you. If you attack it, it responds with a volley of more rockets.

Beta .709 Water And Wind

(Released January 4th, 2013)

• The "What's New" button on the front menu used to point to the alpha change log. Fixed.
  • Thanks to zespri for the report.

• Fixed a few slices that were causing issues where players couldn't actually travel up.
  • Thanks to Khadgar for finding/reporting that one.

• Fixed a few more boss rooms to give players more room to fight.

• Added 26 slices.
  • c4sc4 and zebramatt were largely responsible for those.

• Added a bit of graceful error handling in response to some recent strange serialization behavior (chunks writing with a lone minus sign where it should have just written 0 or something like that).
  • Thanks to isil for the report and save that helped us find what we've found thus far.

• On the world map, when you walk up next to a tile that is an impasse type (that has to be destroyed), it now says "Impasse" in red text.

• No more talk of angled shots in the help section.
  • Thanks to zespri for reporting that one.

• The background wall of the evil overlord's keep has now been finalized, as has the background wall of the ice age interior wall.

• Fixed a slice that would only let you pass through in one direction. Fixed.
  • Thanks to jruderman for reporting that, and for the save.

• Fixed a slices that was causing fish to spawn in little water pockets above ground.
  • Thanks to zespri for providing the save that finally let us find this one.

• The way that the windstorms and windstorm generators are handled are now completely different. As you approach the windstorm generator in a given chunk, then clouds start to roll in (covering the moon and sun, even, which is cool). Rain or sandstorms or snowstorms or whatever pick up, and the wind starts howling. When you destroy the windstorm generator, the storm visibly abates.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for suggesting something pretty close along these lines, and then pushing us to actually think of something interesting here. It turned out to be one of the more visually stunning bits with the sky, I think.

• Fixed an issue with certain overlord keep rooms causing the player to have to swim through lava in an impossible way.
  • Thanks to lavacamorada for reporting.

• Storm dash is now completely deprecated, and does nothing even if you already have it.
  • Additionally, in new worlds that are generated, there will now only be five skelebot research facilities in existence rather than six.
  • Why the removal? Well, it didn't really add anything except balance problems and control issues in this game, to be frank. It was a remnant from the first game that just doesn't apply here.
  • Thanks to Itchykobu for inspiring this change.

• Water Dash now works completely differently, and allows you to jump infinite times while you are in water rather than giving you any speed movement abilities.

• Previously, in Tiny maps you would wind up with two fewer skelebot research facilities on the map than you actually needed in order to get triple jump and win the game. Mea culpa! We've fixed that now.
  • Thanks to Oralordos for reporting.

• Fixed a bug from the prior version where several kinds of underground caverns led back to the world map instead of where they really should have led -- affecting grounded ships in the ocean shallows, as well as mausoleums in the deep, and a couple of others.
  • This fix won't fix existing chunks that are messed up, but it will prevent future chunks from being messed up even in the same world.
  • Thanks to jruderman and Cinth for reporting.

Balance changes

• Light Snake and Entropy mass have had their damage cut.

• Sea Slider is now a smaller caliber spell.

Beta .708 Aggressive Angles

(Released January 3rd, 2013)

• Fixed a slice that was causing players to get stuck in the ceiling.
  • Thanks to madcow and isil for reporting this one.

• Fixed a slice that was causing an issue where players couldn't actually travel up.
  • Thanks to Khadgar for finding/reporting that one.

• Fixed a "Triple Jump" slice that was actually a "Double Jump" slice.
  • Thanks to Oralordos for the save/report.

• Fixed several slices that required mini, but were actually completely blocking the player's path.
  • Thanks to Lauro for this one.

• Fixed a couple slices that could cause you to get stuck in water without warning.
  • Thanks to zespri for the save that led to this.

• 54 new various slices added to the game.
  • Thanks to Coppermantis, c4sc4, gemzo and zebramatt for these!

• Fixed a couple Windstorm Generator slices that had some funky land placement that made them look odd. As well as a couple Water Blockage slices that weren't exactly blocking. :)
  • Thanks to lavacamorada for reporting this.

• Fixed the game to no longer try to initialize steamworks when it's running in server mode.
  • This may or may not help with an OSX issue reported by Tyr, but here's hoping!

• One of the Ice Age buildings didn't have a door! Fixed!
  • Thanks to LayZboy for reporting this.

• Evil outposts are now properly automatically purified when they are next to an adjacent un-purifed tile. Basically, like caves and city halls and such, and anything else without a windstorm generator in it.
  • Thanks to Vatticson for reporting.

• For some freefall nodes -- but not all kinds -- the viewport offsets were still being improperly applied even after the .707 update.
  • Thanks to Vatticson for reporting.

• Previously, the logging of player death was not happening properly, which meant that the death-related achievements were not being logged properly. Fixed.

• Fixed a bug in the mercenary coin pickup achievement checking that was checking the wrong stats and thus never logging the related achievements (though it was counting merc coin pickups properly internally).

• The rate at which the date changes is now a bit different. Every other turn is still day vs night, but now it also jumps the date forward at around 20x the rate it previously did.
  • The net effect here is for the game to actually progress through the stated seasons in a reasonable amount of time in one game, versus not really having time to.

• At the bottom of caverns, rather than having a tunnel that leads back to the bottom of the surface tunnels (some of which can't be climbed out of without double or triple jump anyway), it now takes you all the way back to the world map. This solves the need for suicide pills after going for perk tokens, as well as saving some time.
  • Thanks to tauposaurus, among others for inspiring this one.

• Fixed an design decision that was causing the "which corrupt tiles can I enter?" logic to be needlessly confusing. It wasn't a bug per se, but some older logic that we'd put in that sounded good on paper really led to some confusing cases in practice.
  • Thanks to ShaggyMoose, LaughingThesaurus, and zespri for reporting.

• Previously there was a bug where various entities would serialize to disk and then come back to life even if they had already been slated for destruction.
  • This was only really apparent in perk tokens and merc coins, since those don't lose their health when they are consumed; with enemies or objects, their health would still be at zero after being consumed, and thus they would get discarded as soon as they were deserialized back from disk. But the tokens and coins would just pop back into existence.
  • This was something that would happen as long as you left the chunk (or exited the game) within 30 seconds after picking up the item in question. If you took more than 30 seconds, it was just gone even under the last version.
  • Thanks to madcow, Gemzo, and Itchykobu for reporting.

• Previously, when you bumped into an impasse on the world map it would only tell you the first time, period.
  • Now it tells you the first time during each play session, helping to avoid confusion about what's an impasse and what is not without being annoying with every little bump into them.

• Previously, when you hit certain levels it would stop letting you blow up windstorm generators until you went and took some other action.
  • For the case of the mage class tiers this was just mildly annoying, and really it was warning the players about this late because they could have gone into the castle a level earlier to get the cache if they wanted.
  • For the level 21 situation, it actually could be game-halting. If you got to level 21 without destroying both stratospheric citadels, you'd just be stuck and that was that.
  • Now the progression of letting you blow up windstorm generators is never halted no matter what (aside from when the trial expires), but instead the following happens:
    • When you can get the mage class tiers 2, 3, 4, and 5 it starts telling you that every 5 turns (resetting itself when you log out and back in).
    • Same for when you have mage classes of tier 5, but have not yet gotten both citadels.
    • Same for when you've gotten the citadels but not yet the oblivion crystal, and when you've got that but not Demonaica.
  • Thanks to MouldyK, khadgar, Lauro, and Boonshniggle for reporting.

Balance changes

• Updated many of the boss rooms to give players more head room to fight in.
  • Thanks to Charlotte Mays for the save which showed how much trouble not being able to dodge could cause.

• Previously, the sturdiness of equipment would be random ranging from 1 to 11, but with 1-5 far more likely than the higher ones.
  • As players pointed out, this made the equipment far too brittle to be used for very long in most cases. Now the equipment will always is random ranging from 5 to 16, with 5-11 being far more likely than the higher ones.
  • Four achievements related to equipment sturdiness have been removed, and 5 have been added, to reflect the new equipment sturdiness ranges.

• Hytelist changes:
  • Reckless Ocean has become more powerful, as well as costing less ammo now. It also has a higher caliber. Yeah, this spell was kinda weak...
  • SeaMass now hits for less, and has a slightly smaller caliber.
  • SeaBurst has a significantly smaller caliber.
    • Thanks to Gemzo for inspiring these.

• Forgician changes
  • Embershot's damage has been more than doubled.
  • To compensate, Explosive Crescent and Flameout have both gotten just a bit weaker.
    • Thanks to Charlotte Mays for pointing out that this class just didn't have the strength to hit anything at range very hard, most notably, bosses.
    • Please let us know if this class needs further tweaking.

Monster Aggression On Death

• A penalty for dying has now been introduced, since it was rightly pointed out that there was literally none before now.
  • Rather than having monster aggression be inextricably bound up in the specific turn you are on, these are now tracked separately. So on the world map it now shows both the current turn and the current "monster aggression."
  • On Adept difficulty and up (the default combat difficulty), there is now a monster aggression increase of 1 (on the default world size; it's larger of a penalty on smaller maps, and less of one on larger maps) whenever a player dies.
  • When this happens, one of your survivors from the resistance now chides you about dying and mentions that monster aggression was just increased via a one-liner text interjection.
  • However, the scaling for monster aggression based on turns has also now been relaxed by the equivalent of about three deaths per level.
  • The idea is for death to be something of a penalty when it happens, but actually a reward when you don't die.
    • If you don't die at all, the game is now actually easier by about 50%.
    • If you die an average of three times per level-up, the game is exactly the same as it was before this change.
    • If you die more than three times per level-up, the game will get progressively nastier to you.
  • More fundamentally, the idea here is not simply to make the game harder. Really, it's not to make the game harder at all. However, it is to make sure that players aren't being careless with their character's life, and to make it so that you can't play on a difficulty that is much too hard for you and just grind away at it with tons of deaths and no consequences.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting the turn penalty, which morphed into this.

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.

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