A Valley Without Wind's Switch To Side View -- The Big Picture

[x4000]

Original: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/06/valley-without-winds-switch-to-side.html

There comes a point in every good game's life where it stops feeling  like a prototype, and starts feeling downright fun.  For AVWW, that time  is now, and it came about because of a fundamental shift we made to the  game: rather than being a top-down 2D game in a faux perspective that  is common to SNES, DS, and pixelart games, it is now a side-view 2D game.   It's still a sprawling adventure game in an infinite world with a  top-down overworld map, but the perspective of the actual  action-adventure bits has now flipped.

It's amazing how obvious this change seems in retrospect: it fits  perfectly with the rest of the game's design, and in fact augments it.   There was recently a three-page feature on AVWW in PC Power Play, and  literally the only thing that's now outdated in that article is the  screenshots.  Settlements, crafting, hopes, deeds, NPCs, and so on have  been completely unaffected by this shift.

The perspective change has been a unifying force for the art as well  as the gameplay, while ditching the camera angle that was  bothering so many people in the previews.  All of the individual  graphics in the last video diary were high-res and attractive, but the  overall composition was never able to gel until now.  I find it really  telling that when our PR guy Erik saw an early side-view build,  his first comment was to compliment me on the new art -- and that was  before I'd changed any significant portion of the art he was seeing. 

The traditional faux top-down perspective blends elements that are  side view and elements that are top-down and elements that are partway  between; this works with pixelart, which is more abstract, but really  bothers people increasingly as you move into higher res stuff.  So what  Erik was seeing was all the side-view stuff that I hadn't even changed,  just with the top-down stuff lifted out.  Scene composition counts for a  lot, as any photographer will tell you.

Keith and I originally talked about making a switch to side view on  the day after Christmas.  I felt like it would give an enormous boost to  the art, but Keith worried that the game would feel more arcade-like in  a bad way, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to implement the  sort of tactical combat that I was hoping for.  Just when I had  convinced Keith to do it, I flipflopped and we stuck with a top-down  view.  It's funny looking back at those emails now.  On May 27th, after  months of trying to make the top-down view work, I finally realized that  the side view was what we needed to do.  Blue's News has been calling  it a side view game every time we do a dev diary, so I guess Blue has a  pretty good crystal ball!

Part of what convinced me that this was the right direction to  take the game in, and not just for art reasons, was the evolving design  of the combat.  I wanted a reasonably tactical gameplay experience, but  in realtime that comes down to the choices that you make more than  battlefield position.  Location changes too rapidly in this sort of  realtime game to be a substantial force for tactical maneuvering, so the  bulk of the tactics come down to what abilities you use, and when, and  in what combinations.  And I realized that would be absolutely killer in  a side view game -- as a kid I had a special love for side scrolling  games such as Zelda II, Faxanadu, Ironsword, Metroid, and Castlevania II.

It's the sort of game design challenge I just absolutely salivate  over, and I think we'll have something really fresh and exciting even by  beta.  The last few weeks have been euphoric for me, as this one simple  change just solves so many problems that had previously seemed intractable.  Even Keith, who really doesn't like twitch games or  platformers, has been remarking on how much more fun the game is lately,  which I take to be a very good sign.

Also in the time since the last developer diary, we've added  over a hundred new objects to the game, a handful of new spells, several  dozen new buildings, and several new animations.  Oh, and we've added  chains of underground caverns, which are a major new thing.  This means  we're getting started on vertical development in a major way.  However,  at the same time we managed to completely redo the inventory interface,  get most of the work done on an all-new crafting system, redo the bulk  of the art that we already had, do all the new physics for the side view  mechanics, and in general convert over all the adventure-related and  graphical-related code so that it is now side view instead of top view.   That's exactly as much work as it sounds like.

So how were we able to get so much done on the vertical development  front while we were still making so many structural changes to convert  this to side view?  Simple: it's incredibly faster to do work for a side  view game.  I don't have to spend hours fiddling with new pieces of art  to get them in the exact right fake perspective that people will  complain about anyway; I just render it from the front side, and that's  that.  I don't have to render front, back, and side perspectives for  every character and monster (and even with that, people still complained  about not getting front-angled and back-angled versions); instead I  just render the side view, and that's that.

The result of this side view switch is something that looks  incredibly better, that's orders of magnitude faster for us to create,  and that's more fun to play.  It also helps give a much stronger sense of place: partly it's seeing  the sky when you're outside, but it's also the varied terrain height,  long falls, poison water, and so on.  There is more interesting stuff visible on the screen at all  times now, but amusingly the new perspective is still about three times  lighter on the graphics card thanks to not having to render quite so  much grass; my average framerate is now about 250fps instead of 80fps.

Rest assured that we're committed to the same  "easy to get into, but incredibly deep" gameplay that we've been talking  about since the start on AVWW.  The last few weeks we've been making  huge strides along that very path.  We look forward to sharing even more  of our progress with you over the coming weeks, and we expect to hit  beta in early August.  Player feedback has been instrumental for us in  helping to polish this game and particularly to make the perspective  shift -- that's something I can't emphasize enough.  People tried to  help us improve the faux top-down perspective, and when that didn't work  as well as anybody wanted we went another direction.  I think people  will be really pleased with the result.  If you haven't already, be sure  to check out the latest video and see for yourself!

Speaking of player feedback: we are hearing the requests for  more  concrete information and visual demonstration of what's going on with  the NPCs and settlements and so on.  In response we've been working on a  dev diary that gets into some of those details.  So rest assured that  more info on that is coming (currently targeting one of the next two dev diaries, along with crafting, for the next few weeks), but it's going to take a bit longer to do well.  A  bit later today I'll have a more detailed developer diary talking about  specific new elements that are already in the game in greater detail.   Enjoy!

Here's the new video:

[Nalgas]

Ok, as interesting as all of that is, and as interested as I am in finding out more from the post later today, the only thing I have in my mind right now (thanks to the picture on the left) is fighting the gazebo.  If there's some way that can be arranged, even if it's just by screwing around with the user-editable scripts for how stuff in the world is generated, I think I will be satisfied with the game.  Heh.

[x4000]

Hahaha, that's great!  I've never read that before, but it's hilarious.  I'll have to see if I can't work in some way to awaken the gazebo.

[Nalgas]

Ok, now that the video's loaded and I've watched it (someone else is heavily using my Internets at the moment), is that Ride the Lightning I see at 0:38 (and several times after)?  Clearly a bunch of things are going to be different from before with vertical movement, but it already looks a lot more dynamic after only a few weeks of changing which two Ds you're using for your 2D game (swapping one of your horizontal ones for vertical).  It does look a bit off to have every single jump they do be a long jump animation even when they're jumping nearly straight up, but in general movement and interaction with the world and enemies looks like everything fits together better already.

[x4000]

Yep, that's ride the lightning several times through.  Glad you're liking the changes in general.

[chemical_art]

As always, honesty is through my love of these games. You can never improve without honesty.


What to say about all this?


On the one hand, I can agree that a 2D game is faster to make, is easier on hardware, etc. etc. This whole post does a great job of illustrating why this is so and I can add nothing to it.

However, none of these features take the sting out of the potential recoil of not having 3D movement  limitting feeling of side scrolling. I wonder how stealth works with only 2-D's. Exploration now doesn't sound so fun. Yes, the backgrounds look more detailed, but I still worry I'll just want to move left to right or right to left.

The fact that you describe all of these problems fall away with 2-D makes me wonder why I'm not happy with it. I should be happy. The only conclusion I can tell at a glance was that despite all these dairies  I got the wrong expectation of this game. Or maybe the game was not as in line with me to begin with, but now I'm just now realizing it.

I don't want to knock these dairies. I love them. I don't want to sound hypocritical in asking for more info and then crying over things that never worked to start with. But now I'm not quite as excited. I'm sure through example you'll win me over, but I say at the moment the game is off my wish list.

[Nalgas]

I will be very surprised if the "falling down an unlit hole into a cavern" part in the video, now that it's 2D and sidescrolling, doesn't get you a bunch of "I remember playing this when it was called Terraria" comments.  The rest of it doesn't really seem too much like it, but that part really jumped out at me.

However, none of these features take the sting out of the potential recoil of not having 3D movement.

It never had 3D movement in the first place.  It was 2D before, and it's 2D now, just a different choice of which two dimensions and which direction you're looking at them from.  You could move left, right, forward and backward before, but not up and down.  Now you can move left, right, up and down, but not forward and backward.

[chemical_art]

It never had 3D movement in the first place.

Poor word choice. Downright wrong word choice on my part. You may move in two dimensions, but the perspective felt 3-D (is that called 2-D isometric or something? I don't know. I just woke up)

In any case, the change in perspective narrows movement because gravity pulls you down unlike the other choice.

[Nalgas]

You may move in two dimensions, but the perspective felt 3-D (is that called 2-D isometric or something? I don't know. I just woke up)

Technically it wasn't isometric, because it was such a mishmash of different types of projections, but yeah, it's that kind of idea.  Trying to figure out even which combination of projections to call it hurts my brain.  Heh.

[x4000]

Yeah, I suspect we will get some Terraria comparisons, same as Terraria gets the Minecraft comparisons (and actually, we do as well already).  Though Terraria and Minecraft seem to be mostly about the lego-style sandbox aspects, which has never been a focus here at all.  Minecraft I love and play, but Terraria I haven't had a chance to yet; Keith has played it and liked it, though.

At any rate, both AVWW and Terraria do have a side view perspective now, and a couple of week ago Terraira actually did remind me of Keith's and my December discussion about side view, but that's about that.  I think that the two are about as similar as AI War is to Sins of a Solar Empire, or possibly even less so.  That is to say, not very similar at all.

chemical_art, I'm sure you won't be the last to get annoyed at the switch to having a side view instead of a top-down view.  We knew that was going to happen before we ever made the change, but we also knew that there's just not going to be any way to please everyone.  

That said, if you're worried about exploration not being as fun, or not being able to have stealth -- don't be.  There's an enormous vertical component to exploration in this game now, and that's actually far more interesting than just wandering about big grassy fields ever was before.  There's also a sort of meta third dimension by going into buildings, and going into other rooms by doors inside buildings, etc.  It sounded like you'd worried that we'd dropped this to a 1D game rather than a 2D game, but that's definitely not the case!

All of that said, I'm sure this will turn some folks off for reasons that I can't dispute: such as, "I just don't like side view games as well."  Not much I can say to something like that.  But in terms of losing any of the aspects of exploration or stealth, that's definitely not a reason to worry.  Stealth we never had implemented before anyhow, and it will be the same sort of mechanics here that it would have been, anyway (although, actually, thanks to the vertical additions to the game there are now some new cool things we can do with stealth that we couldn't before).

[Cyborg]

The game looks so much better from the side. I'm still confused about the goal, though. It mentions that we should expect very deep gameplay, but so far it looks like Castlevania. No doubt that game was cool, but I'm still confused.

[x4000]

In any case, the change in perspective narrows movement because gravity pulls you down unlike the other choice.

That's only somewhat true.  If you didn't have the ability to jump, build platforms, or climb, that would be true.  But what actually happens is that now you still need to move in 2 Ds same as before, but now moving down is vastly easier (you just fall), and moving up is vastly harder (you must jump, or find other ways to move around), and moving left and right is alternately the same and harder (just walk, or walk plus avoid pits).

Let me put it another way, I guess: two of the most beloved exploration game series around are Metroid and Castlevania.  They even have their own subgenre, the "Metroidvania" games.  They are known for a sense of exploration that is incredibly deep.  I wouldn't say that AVWW really fits into that subgenre, but it certainly has elements of that now.

[Nalgas]

so far it looks like Castlevania

Oh yeah, speaking of Castlevania, if you're going to take inspiration from any of them, please do it from the more recent ones.  I <3 me some Aria of Sorrow and SotN and stuff like that, but thinking of some of the old NES ones just makes me cringe remembering spending five minutes just trying to convince it to let me walk up the stairs.  Heh.

[x4000]

The game looks so much better from the side. I'm still confused about the goal, though. It mentions that we should expect very deep gameplay, but so far it looks like Castlevania. No doubt that game was cool, but I'm still confused.

Glad you like it!

In terms of the deep gameplay, that comes down to how you build up your settlements and the world, how you manage your crafting builds, and the other larger strategic aspects.  Think of how AI War is similar to basically every other RTS game out there when it comes to the "select these dudes, now click those enemies to kill them" sort of gameplay.  If you just think about that part of it, it sounds incredibly lame, right?  And there are some very non-deep RTS games out there that use those same mechanics.  

It's the stuff that's built on top of the basic genre mechanics that make AI War deep: all the longer-term consequences of past decisions, the way that you have to evaluate difficult choices, and the way that you can form and execute long term plans.  All of those things are what will separate AVWW from something like Castlevania, or even from something like Terraria.  It's all that "macrogame" stuff we've been focusing on in so many interviews, etc.

To be fair, we haven't really shown any of that in videos or screenshots yet, because it's still in progress and isn't visually pretty yet.  But the next two videos we hope to start showing crafting and some of the settlement stuff.

[x4000]

so far it looks like Castlevania

Oh yeah, speaking of Castlevania, if you're going to take inspiration from any of them, please do it from the more recent ones.  I <3 me some Aria of Sorrow and SotN and stuff like that, but thinking of some of the old NES ones just makes me cringe remembering spending five minutes just trying to convince it to let me walk up the stairs.  Heh.

Heh, we're definitely not taking mechanical inspiration from any of those NES games in terms of things like that.   I remember the pain of those stairs all too well, too.  I also really enjoyed many of the DS/GBA Castlevania games, but nothing quite had the same impact on me from a thematic sense as Castlevania II.  What a horrible night to have a curse, and all that.