Interested in being a part of a private alpha for Valley 2? Read here.

[x4000]

By the by.

If you've been wondering about the second round of alpha testers, and figured you were not in that batch last night, I just wanted to note that we did not actually send out a second batch last night.  The reason was that we simply didn't have our next build ready for the next group, because we managed to waste a lot of time yesterday trying to get Unity 4 (and thus Linux support) working satisfactorily.  It worked great except for some intense slowness on loading images on some machines, so we had to go back to 3.3 for now, sigh.  Wasted 18 man-hours on that yesterday.

But anyway, the next batch of 20ish alpha testers should get their emails around noon today.  I believe there were 23 people in the first batch.

(sorry for the giant font at the top there, but I needed to catch people's attention if they were skimming, since this was important info in a big thread).

[Professor Paul1290]

                       forgive me if i sound a little upset, it is not personal, but i take strong issue with you saying 'other indie games of this similar size and detail... Where, pray tell please, do you get this understanding of 'similar size and detail...'?  I am not a developer, but certainly though there are some on these forums who are, but even so, by what general and generic standard do all other indie games of similar ilk suddenly become superior based on 'better' art or 'animations'?

Let me clarify something as I probably didn't connect this with my previous post well enough to provide context.
This is not about me presenting my own opinion, it was me presenting what I believe the opinion of others to be. (My opinion of other people's opinion? Is there a word for that?)

In my personal opinion, AVWW 2 looks fine the way it is. I like the way it looks.

What I'm stating is why other people think the way they do, regardless of whether or not it's fair or rational.

Several indie titles come immediately to my mind, and though interesting i would hardly call them superior, but rather inferior in my mind... such as 'Vessel', and 'Limbo'... or 'Bastion' or 'Braid'.  The 'Dead Pixels' or 'Home' or 'Defenders Quest' or 'Resonance' or 'Gemini Rue' or 'Hotline Miami' or 'Triple Town' or 'Sine Mora', "Castle Crashers' and 'Don't Starve' and 'Anna' and 'Thomas Was Alone' which all strike me as indie games, and certainly-certainly interesting and perhaps even fun to play. But superior on the same budget? I hardly think so, and also i have no idea of what their budgets to produce these other  games were. Much less am  i in a position to certify them as 'better' due to some internally defined, though certainly unmentioned and uncorroborated measurement of quantity or quality per pixel.

The problem is, as far as most gamers are concerned, these games and AVWW 2 are of the same "class" and as such they expect similar quality visuals. As far as most of the gaming public is concerned, they are of similar budget.
That may not be true at all, but that's what a lot of people are going to believe, regardless of what's actually true.

Now there's lots of reasons why AVWW 2 looks the way it does, but by and large the gaming public does not care for these reasons and so they're always going to complain about the way it looks.

Is it rational or reasonable? Hardly, it's pretty unfair and silly.

I'm not saying that AVWW 2 looks terrible, I'm saying that there are reasons why you shouldn't expect a lot of gamers to like the visuals.

If you can substantiate your statements with something approaching some 'norm' standard that everyone is aware of and agrees applies to the games you haven't mentioned and their comparison to AV2 then i would certainly be willing to digress my remarks, but without such substantiation, then i must assume that you are expressing an opinion in light of your own biases and opinions without balancing them against some agreed on standard that everyone agrees with.

I wish I could but again, I wasn't stating my own opinion nor a very rational or informed opinion, but rather what I believe other people's opinions be.
(though looking back there was probably too much space between that and my previous post for this context to be clear)

Because of that I'm not trying to explain a "truth" or what is, I'm bringing in something rather irrational and ill informed into the discussion because it is (unfortunately) relevant to the discussion.
Now maybe my interpretation of other people's opinions is incorrect, I don't know. I'm trying to explain what I believe to be the beliefs of somebody else and that's always going to be messy.
(That and as I've probably demonstrated before, I can sometimes be really cynical about what other people think!)

I guess to provide context. I was attempting to provide a better explanation for people's disapproval of the graphics other than "people always expect million dollar budgets" or "people always hate 2D games".

[Oralordos]

we managed to waste a lot of time yesterday trying to get Unity 4 (and thus Linux support) working satisfactorily.

If you ever decide to try that again, I would be willing to test the Linux versions and report any and all bugs that show up.

[tigersfan]

Heh, we didn't even get that far. The update was causing issues on Windows machines. Namely mine and Keith's.

[Mánagarmr]

Heh, we didn't even get that far. The update was causing issues on Windows machines. Namely mine and Keith's.

That's never a good thing

[LaughingThesaurus]

People who complain about those 2d sprite-based graphics and stuff just don't have an appreciation for stylized art. Show them They Bleed Pixels, or Terraria, or best yet, Incredipede. They won't show any appreciation or give any care about it whatsoever.

[Lancefighter]

So I no longer have any clue whats happening on my own server (i had other stuff happening all yesterday)

apparently we already blew up those two core shield generator things.

[Gemzo]

Actually we went and beat the overlord (for realz), then proceeded to find out he is actually immortal, just now invisible. Also you can still lose after winning because of this.

[Lancefighter]

Second server is up - Huge world with slightly increased difficulty settings on both accounts.
Fun facts - the last game included over a thousand unique regions, (1303). On turn 105, the final boss was permanently killed. On turn 111, we lost the game.

Silly question - is it possible to reduce the amount of 'wasted space' the avww server takes up? atm i get a small box in the middle with useful info, then giant vast amounts of black space.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I can't beat lieutenants. =/

[Coppermantis]

I can't beat lieutenants. =/

I can only beat them with excessive cheese. Hanging just out of range and abusing their unwillingness to get close. I've beaten two of them like that so far.

I'm only level 1 though.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Spoilers: My problem is that everything in the game kills you very quickly. I got to a point where I had to escape a place. I died in probably 3 shots on adept trying to run because of the pressure. This was after fighting a big bad guy to get there with excessive cheese and shooting through traps because I was confident that his spells (which fired six projectiles in every direction) would prove to be hard to avoid and would do more than a heart of damage to my 5 hearts. Yeah, that was a ragequit. Just for laughs, I set it on Master Hero. Didn't seem to do anything to the enemy damage. It just makes all the enemies shoot around as fast as big bad guys do.
I don't know. I guess the game just got way, way harder. It's subject to tweaks, for sure, but until then if I want to test anything later game, I'll have to just set it to Featherweight or play multiplayer (I don't know how multiplayer scales, if it does at all). I mean, I'm the guy who was one level below the highest difficulty on Valley 1, and I thought that was trivial. It might just be that I'm not used to what's going on or something. I'm certainly not bad at games, though. The thing is, if it takes 40 hits to kill something, it shouldn't take 3 hits to kill me. Not unless I'm doing something very, very wrong. Maybe I missed an energy tank in Crateria?

[Coppermantis]

The only things that I find do too much damage (playing on the middle difficulty settings across the board) are bats. They're hard to hit and do almost one heart of damage per hit. If you can keep one at bay that's fine, but the problem is when they attack at an angle that you can't quite hit (too high or too low) and close the gap, doing way too much for one bat.

The landsquid-things that shoot the boomerang blue shots are near impossible for me, a stonebinder, to deal with without using my ammo weapon.

[LaughingThesaurus]

The boomerang shots I deal with as an illuminist, I can kill them. But, otherwise, that 0.2 damage that they do is positively brutal.
The thing is, I dunno, it's not like mistakes just cripple you or anything. I feel like mistakes almost kill me outright. Regular enemies, it's not too big a deal. Against a boss though, I take like 1.7 damage from a single hit of its rapidfire attacks that fill the room. What do you even do.

[Gemzo]

The henchmen really depend on which class I'm using. If I have an amazingly strong ammo spell, nuking them can end the fight quickly. Otherwise I farm HP in the previous room and then try fighting him. If it goes badly I retreat and farm HP some more...Repeat until I win (or ragequit but that hasn't happened with henchmen yet). They seem to change which spell they continuously use each time, and some are easier than others for sure.

As for bats, they definitely are one of the most difficult enemies. They need to be easier to spot. Them being difficult to hit is kind of "their thing" but it shouldn't be to the point that bats are so ridiculously feared as they are now. Maybe have them stop moving for a brief moment when they aggro you? That way, you have time to spot them. If your light radius isn't high enough, they might not be visible still, but whatever.

The landquid are probably the most OP enemy in the game, though. Their spell caliber is quite high combined with them being, as I put it in AVWW1, "insane spam kings." On difficulties past normal, anyway. If your spell caliber is high enough to win out the spam war, they're manageable. But if not, flee or use ammo.

As for things being too lethal in general... You really do have to be quite careful until you get stronger. HP perks are really good, and you should seek them out. But, despite how easily you die that early on, there is no death penalty until lategame besides "GO TO YOUR ROOM YOUNG MAN/WOMAN, also retry the whole level."