AVWW Beta 0.561 "Don't Follow Those Lights! " Released!

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Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2012/01/avww-beta-0561-dont-follow-those-lights.html

This one contains two new enemies: Will O' The Wisps, and Crashed Land Speeder Robots.  One very fantasy, one very sci-fi.  The swamp, the junkyards, and the thawing ice age areas definitely feel a lot more rounded-out now, although of course there's still more enemies we want to add with time.

This version also completely finishes the GUI redo: there was only a tiny bit left after the past release anyhow, and now even that little bit is done.  So everything with the GUI should be working well, and if you see something amiss please let us know.

Another welcome new feature in this version is the ability to skip the intro mission when starting a new world.  We know that more experienced players who have already played the intro mission once aren't going to want to play it repeatedly.

There's also a lot of other internal work that we've been doing, leading up to something we'll be excited to fully reveal either tomorrow or the next day (hopefully tomorrow).  Now that we have more enemies in the game, we're turning our short-term focus to improving the per-continent game flow and the missions.  Those are currently the weakest elements of the game by far, as they have been in a very incomplete state since last month, and now we have enough content to actually realize the vision that we started with the power-coding period. 

Currently our goal is to have those in a way more satisfying state by the end of the week, and then to kick into high gear with new content of all sorts.  In other words not just enemies and spells, but also new mission types, mission rewards, and lots of things to explore outside of missions themselves.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

[Toll]

It might be a bit too soon to discuss the next release, but I crunched the numbers a bit on the vitality stones. Unless I made a massive mistake somewhere, they're not even in the same ballpark anymore; it used to take 62 stones to get to 600%, which is now attainable by 8 stones. To get to 900% would have taken 510 stones in the past versions, now it takes 24. To get to 1800%, it would take 248 stones (which I can see as the normal level you could get to), which in the past would have taken 262142 stones.

While I think more health is good and all, that... might be a bit too much. Adjusting those figures to make it a steeper rise would likely solve that problem though; by quadrupling instead of doubling, you'll still only need 8 stones to get to 600%, 40 to get to 900%, and 2728 to get to 1800%. By starting at 64 and increasing it by a factor of 8, you get to roughly the same numbers as you had before the change (which might not be desirable, since you'd really only have the option to go for 600% at 64 stones; 900% would take 576 stones.)

EDIT: All those percentages are, of course, based on old health.

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New version! http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9706.0.html