Valley 2:Beta Release Notes

Beta .713

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

• 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.

• 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).

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.

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.

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.

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