Valley 2 Beta .728 "What A Horrible Night To Be In The Forest" Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2013/02/valley-2-beta-728-what-horrible-night.html

This one finally brings us up to the complete monster set: in the end, it turned out to be 125 monsters.  A couple shy of the 127 I thought it might be yesterday, but considerably more than the 114 that we originally set out to create.  And somewhere in the realm of 3x as many monsters as Valley 1.

This has been a long road, but I think it was definitely worth it to get all the monsters in there the way that they are.  Each biome really feels unique and requires different strategies with different mage classes, which is a really good thing.  We couldn't have done that with fewer monsters.  Plus the feeling of exploration is just much higher this way, too.

Anyway, now that the monsters are complete, the game is essentially feature complete.  What that means is that all the major mechanics are in place and working, and so now it's just a matter of bugfixes and polish, and more minor improvements.  There's a lot of that still left to do, but we're expecting to go to 1.0 early next week -- so we're definitely in the final days here!

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the  in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  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 the standalone game, you can download that here.  If you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!

[madcow]

Like the name of that patch Good thing we control when its a horrible night.

Congrats on making it through all the monsters!

[Panopticon]

Yeah, amazing work hitting that milestone.

Looking forward to experiencing the biomes as they are intended to be experienced now.

[Professor Paul1290]

There seems to be an issue with the "debris field" ammo spells where they don't seem to come out properly and hurt you upon use.

[Misery]

One other thing:

Did the overall biome size on the world map decrease a bunch?

Seeing alot of really small ones, including ones that are exactly one tile.

[Pepisolo]

Congrats. I'm very impressed with what you guys have managed to achieve in such a short time. Hopefully it will be enough for the game to be the success you want it to be.

[x4000]

Thanks for the congrats everyone!

Like the name of that patch Good thing we control when its a horrible night.

Indeed, that's exactly what I was referencing -- and I love that we get to control it by which turn it is, too.

There seems to be an issue with the "debris field" ammo spells where they don't seem to come out properly and hurt you upon use.

There are a couple of other issues with those, so I'll check those all out at once.  Thanks!

Did the overall biome size on the world map decrease a bunch?

Seeing alot of really small ones, including ones that are exactly one tile.

No, or it shouldn't have at any rate.  However, the one-tile-exactly biomes are something else.  Basically, earlier biomes left a one-tile spot, and then the new biome started trying to fill in from there.  After the first one it failed and moved somewhere else to finish the rest of the biome.  So what you wind up with is a split biome in that case.  That's something that shouldn't happen terribly often, but some map seed have that happening more than others.  That makes your biomes actually split up, and thus seem a lot smaller than they really are (but also seem like there are more of them).

I suppose one way to combat that would be to have the game check for any one-tile-only holes after each new biome is seeded, and then just fill in such a hole with a random wilderness version of one of the tiles next to it or something.  But I'm not sure how big a deal that really is, and it's also not something that's going to be hugely prevalent in every map.

[Nanashi]

I think that's the benefit of small and dedicated indie developers - they're able to work so efficiently. If it's the opposite of development hell, you could say it's coding heaven, because there's probably less death by committee.

Congrats, everyone! I'll be sure to hop in and see the pretty new monsters later today. (By the way, you might want to wait a week before release, I think Dragonborn just released for Steam yesterday)

[keith.lamothe]

I think that's the benefit of small and dedicated indie developers - they're able to work so efficiently. If it's the opposite of development hell, you could say it's coding heaven, because there's probably less death by committee.

We have our own challenges, but yea, it's a lot better than the larger setups I'm aware of.  Though I imagine some place like Valve has managed to find ways to get high efficiency out of larger software teams.

[Billick]

I do have to say, as somebody who works in the software industry myself, I'm really impressed in how quickly you guys are able to take ideas, refine them, and implement them into the game. 

[x4000]

Well, we very much have our 10,000 hours at it.

[x4000]

New one!  http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,12422.0.html