Two-Part AVWW Interview On Rock, Paper, Shotgun

[cupogoodness]

Chris recently sat down with RPS's Phill Cameron for a nice and extensive two-part interview on all things A Valley Without Wind.

There are new details and a lot more in-depth explanation on the features we talked about in our recent announcement. The pieces contain a couple of new screenshots put together exclusively for the feature as well.

Check it out here: Part 1, Part 2.

While I'm here directing you around the internet, I might as well quickly introduce myself. Name's Erik, I joined Arcen last month, and will focus primarily on taking the PR load off of the rest of the team as a whole--letting them do what they do best.

Nice to meet everyone! I'm genuinely ecstatic about what we're working on for AVWW, our two released titles and everything else beyond that. Look forward to talking to/working with many of you going forward.

- Erik Johnson

[TechSY730]

Awesome, welcome to the community.

I would say welcome to the team, but of course, I am not part of it myself. 

Naturally, there is no way I have looked at the interviews yet, as I wanted to welcome you first.

As a side note, when you made that post long ago about giving away extra copies of AI war to some of your followers on your other site, were you working for Arcen back then too?

[x4000]

Nope, that's new in the last two weeks.

No affiliation until then whatsoever.

[cupogoodness]

Oh yeah! I forgot all about that. It was a cross-promotion we ran on GamingDead back in 2009, but yeah as Chris mentioned I joined the team just last month.

Also, don't know if this means much to anyone here, but as you suggested techsy I've worked as a game journalist/blogger for several years now and still write on a fairly regular basis. All the publications/blogs I write for are aware of my job with Arcen, and because of what I perceive to be a pretty obvious conflict of interest I've chosen to abstain from covering our company and its games on them now that I've jumped over to the dev side of the table (not to suggest other writers on those sites can't cover Arcen.)

[Flatfingers]

Both very informative interviews.

I'm particularly looking forward to hearing more about what was referred to in Part 2 as "player content submissions" with respect to NPCs, as well as "higher-level features will be built-up with player involvement through beta and the 1.0 release and hopefully beyond" and "component of custom procedural-content-script creation that advanced players can partake in."

This definitely got my attention.

[Nalgas]

I've only read the first part so far, which mostly seems to be stuff I'd already picked up from hanging out on here but is still interesting.  Skimming through the comments, it must be a great feeling seeing that while pretty much everyone seems to love the ideas of the game, this was the reaction of about 80% of them to the screenshots/video:

[x4000]

I've only read the first part so far, which mostly seems to be stuff I'd already picked up from hanging out on here but is still interesting.  Skimming through the comments, it must be a great feeling seeing that while pretty much everyone seems to love the ideas of the game, this was the reaction of about 80% of them to the screenshots/video:

Yeah, that was peachy. Fortunately, the comments in the second article inthat regard were way better.

[BobTheJanitor]

Welcome Erik! Good to see the team expanding.

I read through those interviews the other day. Interesting stuff. And of course I read through the comments. It was interesting to see the 'Arcen effect' in there. People snidely and offhandedly commenting on something they didn't like, and then having the devs show up and talk to them like adults, and watching them do a quick 180 and start responding like much more reasonable people.

[CoyoteTheClever]

Well, you've got to realize that RPS' reader base is hardcore computer gamers. Like I said before, some people aren't really going to get the nostalgic style of the art being used in this game, because it is based so much off old school SNES games.

That being said, good gameplay will get people used to the art anyways. I'm sure Dwarf Fortress and Linley's Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup got a lot of people used to ASCII art, for instance. You start liking the gameplay of those games and then that makes you like the ASCII. So don't feel discouraged or like you need to take a detour with your art or anything Arcen guys.

[x4000]

Thanks, Coyote -- that's a really healthy way to look at it, actually.  It's hard when you're too close to it.  I try to be very self-critical anyhow, so I tend to start wondering "well, does this really suck?"  Anyway, new screens coming hopefully tomorrow, and I think even that crowd at RPS will be a lot happier with what's in them.

[Nalgas]

Well, you've got to realize that RPS' reader base is hardcore computer gamers. Like I said before, some people aren't really going to get the nostalgic style of the art being used in this game, because it is based so much off old school SNES games.

Well, I don't know about the art style itself being much like SNES games.  The view point and use of perspective definitely are, but other than that it reminds me a lot more of some 90s PC games than anything on any console that I can think of.

That being said, good gameplay will get people used to the art anyways. I'm sure Dwarf Fortress and Linley's Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup got a lot of people used to ASCII art, for instance.

Kids these days and their retro-newfangled ASCII art.  Rogue is what got me used to ASCII art (and was coincidentally one of the first procedurally-generated adventure games).  Heh.

[CoyoteTheClever]

Well, you've got to realize that RPS' reader base is hardcore computer gamers. Like I said before, some people aren't really going to get the nostalgic style of the art being used in this game, because it is based so much off old school SNES games.

Well, I don't know about the art style itself being much like SNES games.  The view point and use of perspective definitely are, but other than that it reminds me a lot more of some 90s PC games than anything on any console that I can think of.

That being said, good gameplay will get people used to the art anyways. I'm sure Dwarf Fortress and Linley's Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup got a lot of people used to ASCII art, for instance.

Kids these days and their retro-newfangled ASCII art.  Rogue is what got me used to ASCII art (and was coincidentally one of the first procedurally-generated adventure games).  Heh.

Well, it doesn't share the animesque character style of games like Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana, so in that sense it isn't like them. Mind you, if it did, then the RPS readers would have really complained even more since anything with an anime style will immediately get panned for it (They'll still buy the game though, as Reccetear showed).

[Zhaine]

Good luck with the position Erik. You've got a, um, fair way to go to catch up with Chris' post count. . .

[SRombauts]

I've also read this great interview, very good job! Loved it!!!

Then I read through the comments... ew... made me sad

Then I remembered a few things on my first reactions on screenshots :
- I didn't myself understand the sky, really strange perspective there
- I didn't like the too basic look of the ground
- the roads are too, hum, straight, too 'horizontal'

But Lasts screens are becoming nicer, more natural (plants, grass)

The video :
- I loved the way the vegetation is moving
- The character is moving in a strange way
- The video seems to me faaaaaar too long, not showing enough diversity

But please keep on the good job, we are supporting you on all this!

Regards

[Flatfingers]

Kids these days and their retro-newfangled ASCII art.  Rogue is what got me used to ASCII art

Rogue? Wasn't that created for those newfangled DEC machines running toy operating systems like RSX and eventually Unix?

REAL character-based graphics were from the EBCDIC character set printed on fanfold paper (or, if you were lucky, a 3278 terminal) from a run of the Star Trek game STRTRK on an MVS mainframe.

I'm sure I have my punched-card deck of the STRTRK source code in PL/I here somewhere....

But speaking of the AVWW art style (bearing in mind we're still seeing only tiny snippets of the early artwork now, I'd actually like to see it resemble the styles used in the superb PC game Darklands, set in medieval Europe. This had a nicely-painted overworld, and used a 2D isometric view for party exploration and combat views. In fact, it still looks and plays very well -- it even features random overworld encounters like JRPGs (though not to the same annoying frequency as most JRPGs).

Just some random thoughts from a pre-ASCII gamer.