Valley 2:Pre-Beta Release Notes

Alpha .703

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

• 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.

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.

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.

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