At A Glance

- Innovative tower defense game with casual appeal, hardcore depth.
- Many new kinds of towers, blended with AI-controlled enemies and allies.
- Unusual chapters-as-worlds method of concise storytelling.
- Play solo, or co-op with two players.
- Painterly art style with steampunk and ice age themes.
- More to be announced in the coming months!

What Makes A Valley Without Wind Unique?

Sketch 1

The tower defense genre is overly crowded and fairly stagnant, but Arcen is already making a name for itself for putting notably fresh twists on stale genres, and AVWW is intended to be no exception to this. Here are some key points about the game:

Setting & Story

AVWW is set during a fictional future ice age, starting in the one verdant valley that is known to still exist in the world, Environ. The inhabitants of Environ have been living in peace for centuries, surrounded by howling snow plains, but now a mysterious threat is causing the villagers to have to both defend their valley and explore out into the great white unknown.

The story will unfold through brief bits of dialogue and character interaction in a JRPG style very similar in its economy of language to classics such as Chrono Trigger. The narrative, which will be written by Chris Park, will be deep for a non-RPG game, but will also not be so intrusive as to be detrimental to gameplay. Most US-based RPGs tend to be overly verbose and absolutely filled with semi-interesting text, to their great detriment. One of the immutable design goals for AVWW is that the story will be meaningful, but as economically told as possible.

Artificial Intelligence

One thing that is often criticized about tower defense games is their poor AI, or the scripted nature of enemy paths. Games such as PixelJunk Monsters are excellent in that they allow for players to optimize their strategies for any given stage (this is a key part of tower defense as far as we are concerned), but the brainlessness of the AIs still bothers a lot of people. AVWW will be combining AI with path-driven enemies to create enemies that will adjust paths based on player actions, thus providing vastly more strategic possibilities while retaining that optimizability inherent to the genre.

Casual Surface, Hardcore Innards

Games such as Plants Vs. Zombies do an excellent job of ramping up complexity over time, so that the casual audience can get into them. PJM was also quite good at this, but followed perhaps a steeper curve. Our goal with AVWW is to be somewhere between those two games, but offer a similar level of hardcore depth to what PJM offers.

We'll be going about this by keeping a low amount of surface complexity to the game, especially at the start of the game. However, there will be special challenges that are more hardcore in nature in each level, aside from two overall difficulty levels. Players will be able to self-tune the difficulty based on what sort of challenges they want to complete with each level.

Co-Op

Sketch 2

All of Arcen’s titles include either local or online co-op, as appropriate to the game. AVWW is expected to include both, but will include at least local play with a camera that dynamically zooms and pans to keep both players on the screen.

Content Depth

As the story progresses, the characters will grow, as with many RPGs. The number of towers available will also become quite large, to at least 40, which is far more than most TD games. This could be quite a bad thing, but the key here is to limit the available towers in any one level to around 9 at absolute most (and more like 3-5 in earlier levels).

Games such as the card game Dominion (as well as our own game AI War) quite effectively use high amounts of content with smaller subsets in play at any given time to provide more variety and replay value without unduly increasing the complexity of any one session. In AVWW, we’ll use that same technique to create longevity and interest to the many planned levels (80+ at least). Having a large amount of high quality gameplay content in our titles is something we’re becoming known for, and AVWW will follow in that same pattern.

Innovation Mixed With Familiarity

AI War has partly been popular because of how it blends novel concepts with familiar ones. The controls and basic mechanics of that game are entirely familiar for RTS fans, but the ships themselves are unlike anything else around. With AVWW, we’ll have some conventional basics that are most similar on the surface to PJM, but the towers themselves will be quite unique, designed to fit with the future ice age setting. The TD standbys of “little guy, big guy, flying guy, fast guy” are out for AVWW – that’s been done to death. Early tower concepts (three of which you can see in the mockup below) are indicative of the direction we plan to take.

Chapters As Worlds

The game will use a unique chapter structure that blends RPG story progression with “worlds” as commonly seen in platformers such as the Mario series. The basic idea is that the story unfolds through a series of mission locations, which are just like levels in a Mario game (or many other games). Then eventaully you'll progress to the point where a new chapter opens up, which takes the game forward in time a bit -- opening up new mission locations as you explore an increasing amount of the world, and changing the state of older mission locations. Some of the older locations will have new missions available at them, and others will be more like small "towns" in the traditional RPG sense.

There will also be ongoing consequences of mission performance in terms of villagers helping your main character – gone are the generic "20 life points" of almost all TD games, and in its place is something much more interesting and evolved. More information will be available later on this, but the basic idea is that you'll have NPC partners that serve as both "life points" in the TD sense, as well as tools to complete the level. So, you'll be able to assign your NPCs to various tasks, including guarding the thing-not-to-be-destroyed. This feature will likely only be available in the hardcore difficulty level of the game, since it adds a lot of strategy but also more complexity.

Concept Art (Click To See Fullsize)