Topics

1

Off Topic / Platformines

« on: October 17, 2012, 10:01:42 AM »

Someone mentioned this in the Greenlight thread and I kept meaning to check it out but have yet to get around it it.

The RPS article makes it definitely sound like something I want to play.

Anyone played it? Any good?

2

Off Topic / First Green-lit Greenlight Titles

« on: September 12, 2012, 11:39:11 AM »

http://steamcommunity.com/games/765/announcements/detail/1317557164209217868

First Titles Get The Community’s Greenlight
posted by Alden @ 08:31PM on September 11, 2012
Just under two weeks after launching Steam Greenlight, you've chosen the first group of games you’d like to see on Steam. Steam Greenlight has been hugely valuable in demonstrating community support for games across a wide spectrum of genres and styles, while providing us with a ton of data to help decide which games to release on Steam.

The first 10 titles selected from Greenlight are:

Greenlight Game: Black Mesa
By: Carlos 'cman2k' Montero
Requires only a FREE installation of the Source Sdk Base 2007! We are releasing Black Mesa to the world for FREE on September 14th! Give us a THUMBS UP to help our game get on Steam! When we are on Steam we’ll be able to reach

Greenlight Game: Cry of Fear
By: ruMpel
***Vote this if you want it to be available on Steam! This is a free mod, and should stay free. We will not sell it, it will only make it easier for you to download if it appears on Steam*** DOWNLOAD: Download Cry of Fear here: http://www.moddb.com

Greenlight Game: Dream
By: HyperSloth
Dream is a first person atmospheric exploration game that has you assume the role of Howard Phillips, a young graduate with no direction in life who develops an obsession with his dreams. Discover dreams and nightmares filled with puzzles and secrets to h

Greenlight Game: Heroes & Generals
By: Reto-Moto
Heroes & Generals is a new Free2Play Massive Online FPS with a Strategic Multiplayer Campaign that takes place during World War II. Sign up for a Beta-key at www.HeroesAndGenerals.com and help us make the game YOU want to play!

Greenlight Game: Kenshi
By: Captain Deathbeard
A free-roaming squad based RPG. Focusing on open-ended gameplay features rather than a linear story. Be a trader, a thief, a rebel, a mercenary, a business owner, a doctor, a bandit... the list goes on. Aid or oppose the various factions in the world whil

Greenlight Game: McPixel
By: Sos Sosowski
www.McPixel.net McPixel is a save-the-day guy that you guide through short challenges in an oldschool point'n'click fashion. The goal in each challenge is to prevent stuff from blowing up using available tools! You have only 20 seconds to save t

Greenlight Game: No More Room in Hell
By: NMRiH Dev Team
"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." We have been Greenlit by the community! Your support has given our mod a much brighter future! Thank you! No More Room in Hell will always be 100% free. Once officially on Ste

Greenlight Game: Project Zomboid
By: The Indie Stone
Valve have been in touch to say that, through the power of community voting, we’ve been allowed a place on Steam! It’s a massive day for us, and we’d like to take the opportunity to thank each and every person who clicked the Greenlight page on our

Greenlight Game: Routine
By: Aaron Foster
Routine is a first person Survival Horror set on a abandoned Moon Base designed around an 80's vision of the future, Your job is to find enough data and survive long enough to uncover the truth behind the strange disappearance of everyone st

Greenlight Game: Towns
By: supermalparit
WE WILL GIVE FREE STEAM KEYS TO EVERYBODY THAT ALREADY OWNS THE GAME Towns brings a fresh new take on the citybuilding/management genre by introducing many RPG features. Drawing inspiration from games such as Diablo, Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortres


These selected games will be moved to a new Greenlit section within Greenlight (section will be functional shortly), where they will live until they are released and made available on Steam, either as purchasable games, or as free downloads (as is the case with a few of these games). Some of the selected games are still a work in progress and may not be released for a few months, while others are ready to be released immediately.

This is just the beginning, and we will continue to need your help in picking some of the next games to be made available on Steam. Your votes and your feedback is important to us and to the developers in Steam Greenlight, so please keep voting for the games you want to see on Steam!

Make sure and join the Official Steam Greenlight group for the latest news and announcements.

3

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Entanglement Multiplier (or Making Death Mean Something Fun)

« on: May 23, 2012, 10:07:41 AM »

So, there's a long-standing brainstorming thread on the subject of permadeath (Brainstorming Permadeath: Making Death Significant But Not Annoying) and the topic's come up during the recent discussion on replacing the Upgrade Stone mechanic (Out with upgrades, in with initial custom characters?) but since Chris understandably wanted it to be put to one side in the continuation of that discussion (Dealing with the divide: customization vs randomization.) I thought it apt to start this new thread.

Bluddy, you see, had an idea which I think is rather wonderful. I suspect it won't be to everyone's tastes but go have a read on Mantis if you're curious to see it in all its glory: 0008017: Character growth in non-strength-oriented ways. Basically, the idea is you have a multiplier which increments based on you doing things of significance with a particular character, and that multiplier grants you one or more bonuses of (very minor) significance. When you die, it resets to zero. And the only way to get it back up again is to invest some serious time pursuing a variety of important goals - i.e. playing the game. Hence "Entanglement Multiplier".

Bluddy presented a number of ideas for specific bonuses including:

• Giving you more consciousness shards so you can get more stuff at the store
• Getting enchants faster
• Making your NPCs more effective at what they do (more on that in the Mantis issue)
• Increasing your abilities in the strategy portions

Now, I'm not certain that those sorts of bonuses are precisely the right fit - but maybe they just need a bit of tweaking; and/or there is almost certainly some other way of expressing the same idea.

Even at its most basic - affecting a score of some sort - I know I, for one, have felt a substantial sense of loss in other games when my multiplier has fallen from a great height back to zero. And I think it could work in Valley! (But maybe I'm in the minority!)


Edit: In fact, Bluddy also had the idea about scores: 0008054: Stats and scores.

4

AVWW Mods & Maps / [GFX] A Valley With More Depth (v3.1 WIP)

« on: May 10, 2012, 05:19:11 AM »

OK, so I wanted to try throwing all the subtlety I was aiming for with version 1 & 2 completely out the window - and this the result!

It's still very much a work in progress and I may go back to v2 altogether, but I thought it was worth chucking it out there to see if anyone got along with it.


It includes the following:

Quaix
----------
* Depth of Field D20


zebraMatt
----------
* Character Sharpner
* Total Asset Saturation & Contrast Adjustment
* Monochrome Puzzle Planets
* Background Simplifier
* Monster Sharpner
* Tiled Texture Biggifier
* Ground & Wall Shadower

Some screenshots for comparison:

Outside

Original Valley


AVWMD v2.1b


AVWMD v3




Inside

Original Valley


AVWMD v2.1b


AVWMD v3



Download v3.1 here!


(Download v2.1b here - v2 thread here.)

5

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Whoops... anyone spare the default ground images?

« on: May 08, 2012, 10:51:15 AM »

I may have inadvertently FUBARed my entire default Ground texture folder!

I don't suppose any of you nice people might supply me with a copy? Just the Ground folder itself - my Background folder is thankfully unscathed!

Whoooops...

6

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / More widespread incentives for killing x monsters

« on: May 06, 2012, 04:25:03 AM »

From Mantis:

There's been some discussion on the forums about how killing monsters often feels like it's penalised more than it's incentivised - what with a 'Kill x monsters to unlock more powerful monsters' gate for every monster type, it seems, but not an equivalent reward for same (apart from the slightly more incidental recently introduced money drops).

More widespread gameplay incentives directly linked to number of monsters of certain types killed would help redress the balance.

It occurs to me, however, that I don't have any strong specific ideas of what incentives might be linked to killing specific numbers of specific types of monsters - so I'm throwing it open to the floor!

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / A Couple of Points on Keybindings

« on: May 05, 2012, 07:45:52 AM »

1. If I've not bound ability slot 1 to any key but have bound Mouse Ability 1 to a mouse button, the GUI shows "L-Click (Unbound)" - have I just done something wrong there?

2. Rather than L-Click and R-Click, couldn't we say LMB and RMB? Those are fairly standard abbreviations, are they not? And they'd fit slightly better.

3. I'd really like if at least Middle Mouse Button (MMB or M-Click) had its own GUI element for the ability bar, rather than just leaving it blank.

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AVWW Mods & Maps / [GFX] A Valley With More Depth (v2.1b)

« on: May 02, 2012, 09:55:09 AM »

Building on and incorporating the work Quaix did in his Depth Of Field texture pack, I present A Valley With More Depth.

It includes the following:

Quaix
----------
* Depth of Field D20


zebraMatt
----------
* Character Sharpner
* Total Asset Saturation & Contrast Adjustment
* Monochrome Puzzle Planets
* Background Simplifier
* Monster Sharpner

Beautiful Original Valley


AVWMD v2.1



Download v2.1b here.


Let me know what you think!


Now at version 2!

9

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / An alternative approach to windstorms

« on: May 01, 2012, 10:23:06 AM »

Following this discussion, I thought it might be interesting to slightly change up the mechanics for windstorms. To quote from that other thread:

I realise that much of the above are just general complaints about monster spawning rate/type/positions which are simply exemplified by the nature of windstorms - and thus would be relatively trivial to alleviate with just a little tweaking - but just in case there's any scope for a different design approach to windstorms altogether:

Let's say they don't buff monsters. Let's say, instead, they actually make the monsters weaker. Now, hear me out. Let's say they also, in addition to making it harder to move about and whatnot, hurt you over time. (It's an established mechanic, sure,  in water or hot or cold environments - but the physical restrictions it imposes are variant enough, I think.) Finally, let's say monsters spawn in greater numbers, and you can't warp anywhere.

Then what you've got is an environmental effect which doesn't just ROLFSTOMP you into the ground but actually encourages you to fight a lot of, albeit weaker, enemies in order to maintain your health - i.e. it's a lot more interesting.

Thoughts?

Also now logged on Mantis:

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7405

Let me know what y'all think!

10

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Early Beta World - Generated Region OHMYGOSH

« on: April 02, 2012, 01:01:44 PM »

I recently loaded up one of my really old beta worlds and every time I enter a region I previously visited (like, months ago) I end up in some weird nether world with no terrain, some surface cave backgrounds and no ability to jump. (And in one of the attached pictures you can see Ice Pirate shots frozen when they hit the bottom of the screen too.)

Basically, my question is this: is this endemic of the age of the world; is there a bug; or has my world simply become corrupted somehow?

11

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Falling damage: which mechanic?

« on: February 29, 2012, 12:50:51 PM »

See the following topic for a poll on how much falling damage you should suffer; and for the discussion which prompted this poll: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9961.0.html

I've intentionally avoided overlap with BobTheJanitor's poll as I think it addresses the issue from a completely different angle.

This poll is about which mechanic you think makes the most sense for the calculation of environmental (falling, water, cold, lava) damage.

12

AVWW Brainstorming / Enchants generation general discussion

« on: February 28, 2012, 08:28:59 AM »

I posted the following on Mantis but I'm aware it's very much a nascent idea which is better off being discussed on the forum (assuming there's any interest at all!).

0006209: Enchants - implement player options

The following strikes me as non-trivial to get polished and working right so it may be a post-v1.0 feature. Or, if there's enough interest, maybe not. Here we go!

Presently whenever you pick up an enchant container (of a certain sort) you get points towards an enchant. Once a certain set of rules are met, you are given something shiny to equip somewhere on your character.

This idea is that once a (probably slightly modified) set of rules are met, the game pops up a window and present you with two (maybe more?) enchants, of which you may choose one.

The main guts of the suggestion, however, is the way enchants are generated and suggested to the player. The idea would be that any time the player is offered a choice between enchants, each of the suggestions is varied from and weighted against the other(s) - presenting the player with a very real choice every time.

In addition, I'm of a mind that stashes should no longer contain enchants - and there's just one way to get new ones, by collecting enchant containers and making choices in the direction of the stash enchants, if those are what you want. There could be some logic in the enchant generator to ensure you had more propensity for stash enchants of sorts you didn't currently possess, or something.

13

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Multiplayer and 'pause and point to see stats'

« on: December 06, 2011, 12:46:01 PM »

Now this might just be me but I'd be in favour of there being a way of checking the stats of monsters and whatnot (hold Alt or something) which didn't involve pausing the entire chunk for everyone.

Obviously stuff would still be moving about so it makes displaying it a little bit trickier - but I'm thinking there must be a way to filter between relevant information. Maybe it could show you the stat box in the bottom right and allow you to cycle with Alt-, and Alt-. or something. Any maybe it would only bother showing you bosses' stats in this fashion, since that's its most important function.

Thoughts?

14

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Elemental Damage

« on: November 03, 2011, 02:18:22 PM »

You know, I was just thinking the other day how the time feels really RIGHT to implement elemental damage, but figured it'd not happen for a while yet, whilst the intro mission was fermenting. Just goes to show what I know!

I'll reserve any serious judgement of how it all fits together until, you know, I actually get a chance to play it. The combo system sounds particularly exciting, I must say!

Until then, the release notes got me thinking about the way various elemental information might be displayed to the player. And I wondered if anyone was familiar with the DS game Monster Tale? It's got an elemental system and I've always quite liked the implementation of the GUI for it - being eminently simple yet giving all the information needed very quickly. It's a combination of simple colour coding of enemies and ability icons, in a standard rock-paper-scissors arrangement, with a little display which pops up in the top left whenever an attack hits an enemy. The latter is the really nice bit because it's completely contextual; it shows a colour coded icon to indicate your ability's element, followed by <, > or = and then a similar icon to indicate the enemies element.

I've no idea whether a similar system might work here but as I say, it struck me as so intuitive that I thought it worth mentioning all the same.

Regardless, roll on the next version!

15

AVWW Mods & Maps / [MAP] Boss room: Hadley's Hope (v0.5)

« on: October 28, 2011, 10:50:25 AM »

Wanted to do something a bit different with this one!

You know the drill: AVWW\RuntimeData\Logic\RoomMaps\GeneralBossRoom.

Have fun!