Valley 1:Fast Facts

Fast Facts: A Crash Course On A Valley Without Wind

Want to get up to speed quickly? This list is aimed to help you do just that (and will be refined over time).

This Is A Side-scrolling Action-Adventure With Hints Of Strategy, Shmup, Platforming, And Citybuilding

Gameplay takes place from the side view, and you run around and shoot at stuff with magic spells. The combat is shmup-like, and the platforming can be hardcore or completely tame. There is a lot of long-term goal-setting that you have to do on your own: you start out pretty pitifully underpowered, and it's your job to figure out how to improve both yourself and your civilization so that you can take down the Overlords that make life miserable for your NPCs. For details, see What Genre Is This, Anyway?

There Are Many Procedurally-Generated Elements

Most of the terrain in the game is procedural, enemy/object placement is entirely procedural, enchants are procedural, character names are procedurally combined from name lists (first name plus last name). That means, for instance, that there are over a million possible character names, that there are hundreds of thousands of unique enchants (and growing at a geometric rate as we update the game), and that there are billions of unique terrain/enemy/object combinations. Even the structures of the insides of buildings are hugely procedural.

There Are Many Hand-Crafted Elements

The spells and enemies themselves, most of individual the interior room floorplans (or at least floorplan-components), and the overall balance and progression of the game are hand-crafted. This is why you don't just get lost in a soupy mess of genericness as you go exploring out into the wild. There are billions of possibilities to explore, but those hand-crafted bits make a lot of difference.

Each Continent Is A "Game" In Itself

Like a linear title, there is a logical flow to how things progress in this game. You grow in power, so do your enemies, and you must ultimately defeat the Big Bad Guy. In this case, the randomly-generated Overlord of your continent. To complete a single continent takes anywhere from 4-20 hours, depending on how you play and how much of a hurry you're in. The earlier continents are easier and thus go faster, but even there 4 hours is practically a speed run.

Many Things Reset When You Move Between Continents, But Some Carry Forward

Think of your second continent like a "New Game+" option in another game. You're "starting over" in the sense that the monster tier has reverted to 1, you've lost all your spells, and so on. However, all of your unlockables carry forward, as do your enchants, and your other non-spell equipment. This means that there are really two progressions: your overall world progression, and your progression on whatever continent you are currently at. Thus each continent you face is more complicated and more challenging than the last, because you've unlocked more dangerous enemies as well as more interesting tools to fight them with.

This Game Evolves Through Continual Updates

After version 1.0 of this game comes out, we've committed ourselves to at least three months of free updates. That said, if the game does at all well, we plan to continue such updates indefinitely, alongside the occasional optional paid expansion pack. Look at AI War -- three years on, and it's still getting this treatment. For a game about adventure and exploration, this means that there will always be new stuff to find.

A Valley Without Wind

Further Reading

• Getting started with A Valley Without Wind
• What are all of these maps for?
• How Do I Know If I'm Prepared For An Expedition?
• How Does Multiplayer Work?
• What Genre Is This, Anyway?