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

That description sounded incredibly pretentious and over-wrought, didn't it? Sorry about that -- but it's the best we can do. Gameplay takes place from the side view, and you run around and shoot at stuff. This leads some people to make comparisons to the Metroidvania subgene, including ourselves, but that's only partly apt (this game doesn't employ the "lock and key" system that many consider vital to that subgenre).

In terms of the combat itself, it's all magic-based and mostly done at some range. Your shots move relatively quickly, but enemy shots tend to move much slower while being quite plentiful -- causing you to have to jump or dodge them while positioning yourself to take your own shots. This is what we mean when we say it's a lot like a Shmup.

This Game Has 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.

This Game Has 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.

Further Reading

• Getting started with A Valley Without Wind
• What are all of these maps for?
• How Does Multiplayer Work?

A Valley Without Wind