Messages

1

Skyward Collapse / Animation Suggestion

« on: Yesterday at 11:44:10 PM »

I'm not in the alpha or anything, but I have seen the video on youtube. One thing I noticed is that the death animation for tiles is the same flipping + reduced alpha thing from Valley2 and SH. IMO it's not a great animation. It worked pretty well in SH, not so well in Valley2, and I think in this game there's a much more natural suggestion. Why not have dead tiles fall down into the void? I mean that's such a big part of this game, right?

I would even say that dead units could do the same. They could either phase down through the ground, or the ground could 'swallow them whole' by falling down. The tile would then come back up (maybe even with a slight bounce as it reaches its proper altitude) and the unit would be gone. This would all happen simultaneously for all dead units and would be pretty fast, but it would exploit the dynamic of the game to help cover up for missing animations.

Another, less important idea, is to have the units have 'weight' to them: as they move on the map, they'd cause the tile under them to sink a little, and to bounce back up once they leave the tile. This kind of thing would again serve the purpose of making the feeling of the animation more dynamic.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Valley 2 Official 1.001-1002 "Mouse Aiming For Those Who Stood And Fought" Relea

« on: February 20, 2013, 08:56:45 AM »

The only way this doesn't completely break the game is if you can only shoot in 45 degree angles (as others have suggested) and you can't shoot behind you -- you must turn first. In fact, with this kind of control scheme, the mouse would be completely equivalent to the gamepad/keyboard.

I understand this was a desperate move, but you guys need to realize that artistically, you're breaking your game here. I don't know if that's going to attract sales long-term.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Nominations for "Most Needed Change To Strategy Game" poll

« on: February 06, 2013, 08:40:11 PM »

I just played a long-ish session a few nights ago.

It seems to me that the tower that purifies a whole 'layer' further than what your survivors have done so far is immensely powerful and important. I can't imagine doing well in the game without it (and I'm on default difficulty). The town hall is also very powerful, but because it needs to be constantly activated to be useful, it has a much better chance of being destroyed before you get too many survivors out of it.

Compare these two to the pyramid. I'd love for it to stun Demonaica, but all it does it prevent spell casting for 3 turns (IIRC), which is not nearly enough to compete with the other structures.

Also, I can't figure out what Demonaica's range is (3 or 4?) and that makes him very unpredictable. I'd like to be able to see how far he can go in a turn.

I'm also not sure what use shelters (of different varieties) are. A survivor can be
a) powering an artifact of some sort (town hall, tower)
b) tending to a clinic
c) farming
d) clearing out impasses
e) building a factory or a clinic
so why would I want the survivor in a shelter? It's a waste of a resource. Is the shelter only there to improve the safety of survivors as they cross the continent from one useful thing to another?

What does it mean that forest shelters are ignored by Demonaica? Do most things attract Demonaica? How does that work?

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Is there backstory for the henchmen?

« on: February 04, 2013, 12:11:37 PM »

One of the issues I see in the game is that the player has no idea that each region is supposed to be from a different time period. In the first game, the clear borders between regions gave you some of that feel, but even there it was missing. There's nothing in this game that really suggests the whole jumbled timeline narrative device -- it just seems like each tile is naturally different, as it would be on a 'real' map. As a result, there's no sense (IMO) that monsters come from different time periods. Instead, it feels more like the devs just got high and thought up an eclectic collection of monsters.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Do warp points do anything now?

« on: January 18, 2013, 01:50:14 PM »

As a general rule, we make it so that strategic and platforming actions never, ever, overlap.  Either the NPCs can do it or you can, but you can never choose between who does it.  That's something Keith and I both settled on and were really believing had to be true right from the start with designing the strategy game.  Otherwise it's not really a strategy game, because you can always just bypass parts of the strategy game by grinding things out yourself.  And if people believe that's the optimal way to play, then that's what they'll do; so the strategy game kind of disappears.  That separation is really mandatory to keep things remotely balanced.

Fair enough -- that makes sense.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Some general notes on where we are and what plans are (Valley 2 and Shattered H)

« on: January 18, 2013, 12:38:27 PM »

Re: Heavy Cat - They going to clean up the current character art, right? I find it a bit inconsistent that the player character sprites are significantly lower-quality than the monsters in AVWW2 and always assumed they were WIPs. Then again, that's just my opinion.

I'm going to second that. The characters could use graphical improvements, and they also need more frames. If it's too much, I suggest following the recommendation that was made of narrowing the playable characters to just 2 (male and female) and making those 2 look really good and well animated. The others could be used just for NPCs, and don't need to look as good.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Do warp points do anything now?

« on: January 18, 2013, 12:32:05 PM »

In general, it would be nice if there were platforming options to do some things. For example, I sent a survivor to take out a strengthening tower (I hope you know what I mean by that), but the area's too dangerous and he got wounded, and I don't have a clinic. So he's stuck there and I can't move anyone else in to do the job for him.

It would be nice if I could go in and take out the tower myself. ie. many survivor actions could translate to things for me to do in the platforming section, but at a penalty. For example, if I take out the tower myself, I lose a turn. So I usually want my survivors to do things for me, but I can also take their place, at a cost.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: AVWW2 - Early impressions/feedback (now with more feedback and less derail!)

« on: January 02, 2013, 07:20:03 PM »

- All this would work much better if there was real risk involved with dying -- for example, losing a turn in the strategic game.

That might be too harsh, maybe 3 deaths and you miss a go. Because for multiplayer games, that can make it go to turn 100 quite fast.

I think for multiplayer, perhaps you lose a turn if everybody on the expedition dies. That's a reward for playing together.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: AVWW2 - Early impressions/feedback (now with more feedback and less derail!)

« on: January 02, 2013, 03:30:03 PM »

As I mentioned earlier, I think some of the exploration stuff from the first game would really fit in here. There could be a deep cave system with many branching paths, or a large building to investigate. Not as much as in the first game, but some would be nice. I don't think a map is necessary. To the contrary -- heading in to investigate without a map could be more fun.

Some more ideas:
- Occasionally a tunnel could take you to another distant tile (that hasn't been explored yet).
- There's plenty of room for power-ups that give you a small advantage in the strategic game. These things should be hidden away behind fake walls in tunnels and such, and therefore hard to find/reach. Most tunnels/buildings could lead to dead ends though.
- I'd like the generator to look more dangerous. Currently the art for it is like something from Alice in Wonderland. I'd prefer something that looks bad-ass, possibly with wobbly shader effects tearing up the fabric of reality surrounding it.
- As one activity, you could send in your survivors to scout out an area and find the location of the generator. If you have the luxury of doing this, you'd have the path to the generator highlighted for you. Otherwise, you have to hunt down the generator, and it could be in several different places.
- All this would work much better if there was real risk involved with dying -- for example, losing a turn in the strategic game.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: AVWW2 - Controls

« on: December 21, 2012, 02:05:34 PM »

Just a suggestion of an alternative control scheme (that may possibly be better than the current defaults):

- The 4 powers map to the arrow keys.
- WASD to move
- To shoot diagonally, you can either combine D with W etc or use Q,E,C,Z. Having a dedicated diagonal key is (I think) easier than the shoulder button concept that exists for gamepads.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Interested in being a part of a private alpha for Valley 2? Read here.

« on: December 12, 2012, 09:55:17 PM »

My schedule's cleared up quite a bit, so I'd be happy to do the alpha thing whenever it's out.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: A Valley Without Wind 2 - a full sequel free for existing customers - is coming.

« on: October 02, 2012, 09:21:03 PM »

I'm really glad to see that you guys have done some research with regard to other platforming games, control schemes, etc. Please stand by your design - at least until it's been viewed by the ranking 'experts' on the forum (I'm sure you have a good idea of who they are) - and don't buckle under pressure to change things before they're even out.

I highly recommend the games Binding of Isaac and Spelunky if you haven't played them already. IMO they're the best examples available of random terrain generation of the kind you're talking about, and some of my favorite games of all time. Spelunky is also free and BoI has a demo.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: A Valley Without Wind 2 - a full sequel free for existing customers - is coming.

« on: September 29, 2012, 08:16:04 PM »

Very happy to hear this. I have high hopes for AVWW2.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Lousy Update

« on: July 09, 2012, 11:49:38 AM »

I don't play multiplayer, but it sounds to me like the old system is preferable since it encourages synergy between the players. If you want to promote players playing in the same chunk, there should be a bonus for that.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: The case for slowing down.

« on: July 03, 2012, 12:14:17 PM »

If any slowing down is needed, I'd say it would be so that monsters could keep up with the player in the surface chunks.

To me, the issue isn't necessarily the speed of consuming content. Rather, it's the amount of importance attached to any piece of content.

In a regular 2d scroller, every area has maximal importance for your survival. All content is important because the devs push you in the direction of the content, and you have to deal with it. It's a challenge that needs to be overcome in order to progress.

In AVWW, the openness of the world, and especially the amount of similar avenues that are open to you, neutralizes a lot of that challenge. This has been said before (including by me), but if I'm in a difficult cave that forces me to kill a boss before I can get some gems, it's a challenge only as long as I don't think about the fact that I can go to another cave in another chunk and get the same gems. This is much worse with buildings: suppose I go through a building, crafting an interesting narrative of overcoming different challenges as I go. I then exit the building, and a couple of steps to the left see a building that's almost identical. That's a real downer.

Too many buildings are being generated too close together. And too many similar challenges are available at the same time, making any one challenge unimportant. So content is just there to fly by -- none of it impacts my ability to advance in any significant way. If one avenue is more difficult, I can just switch to another avenue out of many available that happens to be easier. Even if I'm too lazy to switch, my mind knows that my situation isn't unique.

What can be done to ameliorate the situation? Imagine that gems cannot be randomly found in any cave in any appropriate region. Instead, I use some scanning magic back at the settlement to locate the gems. The magic finds one instance of gems in one specific cave. The pathway to that gem now becomes critical. Everything on the way to the gem is important, and is something I need to pay careful attention to. Similarly, stashes could be extremely rare. A rumor could direct me to a particular region that has a stash, and only one building would have one (and it could be appropriately protected).