AVWW Beta 0.553 & 0.554, "Shield Dash" Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/12/avww-beta-0553-0554-shield-dash.html

This one is actually a series of two releases.  The first was purely a bugfix version to avoid more people having issues with world corruption that could happen in 0.552.  The second release has new tweaks and features, mainly centering around mana recharge and how mana can be expended.

This will have an effect on a variety of spells coming up, but most notably at the moment it completely redefines how both Storm Dash and Rush work, and how the four different elemental shields work.  Players had found the shields really difficult to use in particular, and now they should be far more useful.

There are several other small-but-really-nice tweaks in here, too, such as a rebalance of the espers.

More to come soon.  At the moment we're working on things like weakspots for enemies, new enemies and environmental objects, and new on-death effects for various existing objects.  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.

[Bluddy]

Wow, it's been really quiet here for the last day or so.

Just wanted to say I really like how storm dash works. It feels like a natural fit. The espers are much better now, but I still see a few too many of them inside confined spaces sometimes.

[x4000]

Thanks!

And yeah, right around Christmas things tend to go suddenly dead every year, heh.  It picks right back up after, though -- people have so much else going on during the holidays, though.

We're working on a big update with more enemies and spells and such, the first of what will be a goodly number of that sort of thing.  Some of the new enemies are really pushing into broadly new mechanics for our engine, which is great because that then allows us more combinatorial flexibility when designing new enemies.  And a lot of the various new enemies and environmental obstacles and such are really kind of prerequisites for doing missions of any substance, so we decided to switch the order of those around and are doing the enemies first, and the missions that rely on those enemies second.

[tigersfan]

Thanks!

And yeah, right around Christmas things tend to go suddenly dead every year, heh.  It picks right back up after, though

Or right on it. The record for the most people ever on this forum was during Christmas last year.

[x4000]

Yeah, that was a really odd thing -- there were like 200+ people on the forum at once, which blew my mind.  I certainly wasn't one of those 200!

[tigersfan]

As for the coming update, I'll say that I've been having a LOT of fun with one of the new spells while testing.

[zebramatt]

When's the next one out?

I had a little play with 554 yesterday and for the first time since the big shake up everything really fell into place!

[tigersfan]

When's the next one out?

I had a little play with 554 yesterday and for the first time since the big shake up everything really fell into place!

I can't say for sure, but soon.

[x4000]

Should be sometime this morning, as soon as we can get some of the last stuff fixed up.  Glad it's feeling like it's coming together again!

[x4000]

Here's that next one!  http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9618.0.html