AVWW Beta 0.538, "Intro Mission At Last," Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/11/avww-beta-0538-intro-mission-at-last.html

This one is one that I've really been looking forward to ever since beta began: the intro mission for the game is now complete!  Pending feedback and further testing, of course, but so far it seems pretty good to me.

Intro Mission Notes
The goal for the intro mission is to give new players a linear way to get acclimated with the game before they ever encounter the world map or have to make broader decisions, etc.  This is a more traditional intro for any sort of platformer, really: you start out with no ability to do anything except run and jump, and rapidly gain new abilities that have to be used immediately.  My inspirations for this ranged from the original Metroid, to Braid, to Limbo.

Other goals for the intro mission included to make it so that it has some goodies that you want, some side (fairly mild) secrets to find, and some optional challenges to face to get ahead in the game if you want to tackle them.

Oh, and another goal was to make it so that if you want to speedrun the intro mission, you can do so pretty quickly.  I just clocked myself at three minutes and three seconds on a speedrun, and I: 1) detoured to get storm dash; 2) took two very minor wrong turns; 3) took the time to stop and kill the optional miniboss in the last surface chunk just to get the EXP.  I imagine that if someone were so inclined, they could shave as much as 30 seconds off my time, if not more.

For an actual new player who is playing through the intro mission for the first time and who is stopping to read the tombstones, explore all the little caverns, and so forth... I'm not sure what the completion time would be.  I imagine it would vary; anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes seems likely to me, but that's just speculation.  There are 24 hand-crafted chunks to explore, but about half of them are completely optional.

But the important thing is that a new player isn't just sitting there reading a boring tutorial, or doing boring tutorial-style things.  This is why I'm not labeling it a "tutorial," although it does serve that purpose.  It's more like the first 10-30 minutes of Metroid, where your character has fewer powers and fewer options on where to go, but still full autonomy within those constraints.  This is also where the inspirations from Braid and Limbo come in, is that they weave their tutorial into the main gameplay in this way, too.

Once you complete the intro mission, will you be an expert at AVWW?  Of course not.  But you should be comfortable navigating around the world in the side view, and familiar with how buildings, surface areas, and undergrounds all work.  You should be able to feel comfortable striking out on your own to explore the world map -- which is kind of the point.  People were getting to the world map too fast before, and feeling intimidated by it rather than excited.

Hopefully this changes that first encounter with the world map in a fundamental way, but I guess we'll see.  Whatever the case, the new player experience is vastly better now than it ever was before, anyhow.

Oh Yeah, There's Other New Stuff In This Version, Too
Well, there's a laundry list of bugfixes and tweaks that I won't just repeat verbatim here -- check out the full release notes for those.

One big change is that enemies no longer die from environmental factors like walking off the side of the chunk or falling into water/lava, though.  Instead, at the side of chunks they just turn around, and with the water/lava they now have a little meter that quickly fills up before they shrink away to nothing and respawn at some random monster spawner.  This style of respawn, in practice, isn't much different from what the game was doing before, but it will have some major positive ramifications for multiplayer (and several smaller positives for solo).  See the release notes for some details.

The next really big change is to how damage gets calculated for your equipment.  The details are once again in the release notes, but the general message is that way-outdated stuff is now worse than it was before, while better-than-your-current-tier stuff is now more useful than it was before.

More to come tomorrow: I'm excited to finally be able to get back to some content development, so expect some new spells and possibly some new enemies.  This week is going to be a quite odd schedule for me, as I have some personal stuff going on and I'll be out of the office from this coming Thursday through Sunday; so this weekend I'm getting in some extra time to get ahead of things.  Anyway, I know folks will be pleased to see me working on stuff for existing players rather than new players again.  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.

[Commiesalami]

Did you intend for the player at the end to have 3 Saphirres and 3 Emeralds (Along with 60 Health & 60 Mana scrolls conveniently ) as opposed to a more diverse set of spell gems?

[zebramatt]

Sounds like it might be new world time!

[KDR_11k]

I'm not sure it's a good idea to tell the player to break monster spawners in the intro mission, they might get the idea that they're supposed to do that everywhere.

[x4000]

Did you intend for the player at the end to have 3 Saphirres and 3 Emeralds (Along with 60 Health & 60 Mana scrolls conveniently ) as opposed to a more diverse set of spell gems?

Yep, sure did.  In fact, for less-skilled new players they'll only have jade alone.  A lot of the goal of the intro mission was to reduce the number of overwhelming choices that players were facing right at the start, and then let them really grow outward into the larger game.  This way, also it's more exciting when they start getting new colors (and thus new abilities) that they never saw before, I think.

Sounds like it might be new world time!

At least for testing the intro mission, if you want to.   It doesn't have any longer-term ramifications on the game beyond the first 30 minutes or so, though, so it's not like old worlds need to be replaced.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to tell the player to break monster spawners in the intro mission, they might get the idea that they're supposed to do that everywhere.

Good point.  I've just changed "If only he had thought to destroy the monster nests with fire touch." to "If only he had thought to destroy some of the monster nests with fire touch."  My core challenge is getting players to know that they CAN destroy the monster spawners and other background objects with fire touch but not all other abilities. 

I think that it will be more natural for them to decide "eh, why bother killing that one" when it's a monster spawner they don't need to kill, but at the same time it's a good idea to not make it sound like the game expects them to kill them all.  I think that some caverns can be unwinnable in like-level combat for your average player if they don't take out some of those monster spawners, though!

[zebramatt]

My thinking is that the intro mission + the elemental damage merits starting the whole thing over, to see how different it is from the last time (about a fortnight ago).

The elemental damage particularly is such a game changer I've been looking forward to retooling from the outset, and the addition of the intro was just an excuse to do so.

I can see myself starting a couple more worlds before all said and done yet.

[x4000]

Makes sense to me!  To each their own.

[Dizzard]

I'm probably the opposite to that, you're going to have to rip the original world save from my cold dead hands.

I'm a terrible hoarder too, my inventory is a nightmare.

[x4000]

Don't worry, we always aim to maintain forward-compatibility with all worlds.  Like we always have with AI War.

For the inventory, though, you're going to need to get rid of some of your older low-level stuff.  You don't have to completely get rid of it, but you'll need to at least dump it into bags in your settlements, heh.

[x4000]

New one: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9450.0.html