AVWW Betas 0.510-0.511, "I Seem To Have Dropped My Loot," Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/10/avww-betas-0510-0511-i-seem-to-have.html

These two releases are absolutely massive, so make sure and check out the release notes for all the details.  There's a lot of little features and tweaks in here.  But here's the big cool stuff:

• Monster loot drops!  Monsters of all sorts are now dropping consciousness shards, which have been split into six colors instead of just one.  Right now only the blue color are used in the macro-game, but that's going to change soon.  And minor insta-heal/insta-mana-restore drops will also be entering the mix from non-boss monsters.
• A number of new improvements for keyboard-only control setups have been added.
• Several enemy and spell visibility improvements have been made.
• Fixed several issues with bosses not seeding -- in particular giant shadow bats but really any bosses in densely populated rooms.
• Updated the doors into destroyed rooms so that they now look visibly destroyed in a much more convincing and obvious way rather than simply relying on the little bomb icon.  Much cooler this way, and clearer to boot!

Again, those are just the highlights, so be sure to check the full release notes if you want all the gory details.  Enjoy!

This is the first weekend since the public beta started, so one thing to be aware of is that while we do get some spots of work done here and there on the weekend, for most of the time for us, the weekends are family time rather than work time.  It's been a really productive week, though, and next week we'll be right back at it with even more updates.  Thanks to everyone for making this by far our best beta-first-released week ever!

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.

[TechSY730]

Cool, but aren't consciousness shards something kind of important? Is so, wouldn't this give a good incentive to farm enemies, or is the rate they drop stuff so pathetic that farming would be too inefficient?

(Note, I have never gotten beyond civ level 1, so I have no idea the average cost of stuff in terms of consciousness shards)

[mrhanman]

Cool, I like the new doors, and the monster spawners no longer being in buildings.  And the loot drops are nice, too!

[x4000]

The rate at which enemies give them is pretty pathetic, to answer the question up there. It's enough to make them work killing when you see them, but they would be incredibly slow and worthless to farm. In the time you could farm a bunch of small enemies, you could kill a miniboss and get the same shards plus exp plus whatever other bonuses you find along the way.

[Echo35]

Yay to all!

EDIT: Just patched up and played a bit. Are you sure about the scarcity thing? I'm finding an awful lot of them to be honest.

By frequently I mean, I just tabbed back into my game, killed 5 lightning esper thingys, and got shard drops from 3 of them.

[Invelios]

Yay to all!

EDIT: Just patched up and played a bit. Are you sure about the scarcity thing? I'm finding an awful lot of them to be honest.

By frequently I mean, I just tabbed back into my game, killed 5 lightning esper thingys, and got shard drops from 3 of them.

I think it has to do more with the amount they give you, not how often they drop. Normal monsters drop very few shards, but the bosses and minibosses drop quite a bit more.

[zebramatt]

Could we have an (option to display) a little indicator of how much of each shard we have? Something tiny tucked away somewhere would be good. Maybe atop the inventory? Just big enough so you can see the colour and the number, but as unobtrusive as possible. And, as I say, optional. Ooo, and maybe it could auto-hide after a few seconds, and show up again whenever you collect more - with the option button acting as a kind of 'display now' button.

I can imagine if you're aiming to acquire x number of y colour, you'd want to keep a relatively constant eye on the numbers - which means flicking the inventory open and closed often.

[KDR_11k]

The placement of the shards on spawn is probably not optimal, that line looks pretty silly. Try something like shmups do with small bonus items: Spawn them from the center of the enemy but with random velocities so it looks like they're debris exploding out of the enemy.

Also it might be worth limiting the shards to the first enemy out of a spawner, it's kinda silly when enemies keep coming out of a spawner, drop into water and die there.

[zebramatt]

Silly, or awesome?

Although in seriousness, perhaps enemies which die not by your hand shouldn't drop anything.

[Yuugi]

Hm. If you no longer get 100 shards per civ levelup, the tooltip of the shards should probably no longer state that.

[Itchykobu]

Yay loot! These drops make me destroy things more, instead of running through them just trying to find places that do have loot. Getting a reward, even if it's just a minor one, is a great motivator.

[KDR_11k]

Yeah, I do shoot more enemies now but that's also partially because in this world I rolled the ball lightning and death touch among my starting spells so I can often one-hit-kill enemies instead of having to spend multiple shots on each of them.

[Yuugi]

Would it be possible to let consciousness shards stack to more than 999?

I went to explore one desert area a little, and now I already have three stacks of yellow shards in my inventory. :|

[keith.lamothe]

FYI, the shard-costs of the various macrogame stuff is going to change a lot, in both quantity and color.  So no real use right now trying to determine from the player end whether the quantities are balanced except in the sense of whether it's more efficient to farm trash or kill bosses (killing bosses should be way more efficient).

[snelg]

Finally got around to trying the beta.
Looks great so far, only complain would be that it's really hard to tell how close you can get to projectiles before getting hit since there's effects going all over the place.

Nice to see there's something to gain from defeating lesser enemies as well now and looking forward to see what the future holds.