Valley 2 Official 1.001-1002 "Mouse Aiming For Those Who Stood And Fought" Relea

[Cinth]

Guess I need to ready one of my computer killing saves that need to be "troubleshot" 

[TechSY730]

Part of it, to me, seems to be one very simple fact:   Alot of people just seem to not have a clue what it is, or that it even exists.   I dont know anyone that's played it, or actually knows what it is at all, and that includes just people I know on various other forums.  Havent seen much in the way of talk about it, or anything like that, and that's a real shame, it is, since it's a bloody excellent game.  Saw a tiny little blurb on Steam, and that's it so far

Ah, the classic problem of indie game and advertising/exposure. It's a tricky problem.
Sadly, I don't have much advice with this sort of thing (though I guess that is mostly due to the fact I am in programming and not in business management or PR or commercial advertising or anything like that)

....and of course you're also going to have the "bah this looks like some stupid retro game with the 2D and the jumping and the 2D and dying over and over and it's 2D, that's not enough D, why's it not in 3D with anti-aliased hyper-bloom, did I mention it's only 2D?" crowd.   Granted those guys are there for LOTS of indie games whining about the same crap, but it never fails to annoy the hell outta me.

Well hopefully things will pick up once reviews start coming in and (hopefully) the big youtubers start doing videos for it.

Edit: it's kind of bizarre that all the hate I see in the steam forums basically comes down to "this isn't like the first one, I don't like it". Makes me wonder if they even have the first one! Trolls gonna troll I guess.

The Internet has this disease where no one can ever be happy. Its frustrating at times...

Ahh. Don't you just love the internet's culture? 



P.S. To whatever admin added it, thanks for finally adding a maniacal laugh smiley.
Much fun shall be had with it.  >D

[Vangamar]

Well, after reading most of the posts in this thread, I have to say my dreams of what indie games can accomplish, and why they're so important in the world, have died a little.  AVWW1 had big dreams, it didn't sell well.  The devs answer was to get less "indie", and go for more of a low budget mainstream approach....  :sigh:

The problem with low sales of AVWW1 wasn't necessarily because you were thinking outside the box or bad marketing, Steam got your message out adequately for AVWW1, that's how I found it and bought it.  I played it and was verily impressed with the gauche audacity of an indie developer to go for this scope of a game.

Crazy intricate mouse/keyboard UI that had me binding all 10 of my extra buttons on my G700 Logitech laser gaming mouse, crazy "graph mapping" that made me read up on wtf that even is (and loved it).  Insanely ambitious procedural gen levels that never end, the continent just keeps evolving into harder forms as you get better, harder mobs as you kill more.

But there were things still not so hot about it.  The procedural gen levels needed work, the mob AI needed work, the repeatable quests needed tweaking, the overhead strategy game needed more to it.

Strategy game improvements on the side table for now, it didn't need to have AVWW1's big dreams abandoned to make some ode to retro 8-bit platforming game with focused linear platforming level design...  It didn't sell well for one simple reason, the seed group such as myself, played the crap out of AVWW 1 and realized it had an awesome design premise but still needed work to be the game we could go to all of our gaming friends with and brag up as awesome then they go buy it and brag it up to their friends etc, and away your Minecraft feedback loop goes with sales aplenty.

That work wasn't abandoning your big dreams to go more low budget mainstream, the seed group *was in it* for the big dreams, and the big dream had *nothing what so ever* to do with getting our hands on an ode to retro 8-bit platforming experience.  What we (the main contingent of seed group AVWW 1 fans) wanted was keep your gouche big indie dreams alive and improve the implementation of them so we could go brag the game up to our other gaming friends and get them playing it.

Just my two cents, since you added back in mouse aiming, I'm going to wade back in again, give it another serious go.

[Panopticon]

Well, I'm a AVWW fan and I love Valley 2. I have had a ton of fun with the first game too, but Valley 2 is where I'll be spending most of my time. That's not to say that I won't go back to some Glyph Bearing action. I'm sure I'll get an itch for the fun I had in the first game again some time. That said, Valley 2 delivers a pretty amazing experience. I'm glad I have both.

[Misery]

Well, I'm a AVWW fan and I love Valley 2. I have had a ton of fun with the first game too, but Valley 2 is where I'll be spending most of my time. That's not to say that I won't go back to some Glyph Bearing action. I'm sure I'll get an itch for the fun I had in the first game again some time. That said, Valley 2 delivers a pretty amazing experience. I'm glad I have both.

This too.


I loved the first game, but this second one was SO much better.   Both in the strategy bits AND the platforming bits.   Yeah, the exploration is gone.... but holy crap, everything else about the new platforming stuff makes up for it (and it should be noted that the new goodness UTTERLY BREAKS DOWN if you use the mouse-aim).   I know people complained alot about the lack of mouse-aim, but.... the design was that way for a reason, and I think it really, really worked out well.   Combat in Valley 1 was fun enough, but it was also kinda mindless.   Once you got the hang of everything, it was just "shoot this guy, run a bit, shoot this other guy, dont bother switching spells, just keep shooting with that first one....".   The new one is so much better about that.

I still like the first one plenty, but.... yeah, the second one tops it for me.

[primordialthought]

Honestly: thank you.

I hadn't played since since 0.7 or something, so I saw the game was released but didn't have time to check the final product and then the mouse aiming was added.

I felt honour bound to not go to mouse-aim immediately, and I stick by my previous claims that the all-keyboard controls aren't the nightmare they are made out t be, and they are decent after fifteen to thirty minutes of getting used to. That said: WASD + mouse aim is just so much more comfortable and reliable, and since switching I really haven't had a reason to switch back to keyboard only.

[keith.lamothe]

Well, after reading most of the posts in this thread, I have to say my dreams of what indie games can accomplish, and why they're so important in the world, have died a little.  AVWW1 had big dreams, it didn't sell well.  The devs answer was to get less "indie", and go for more of a low budget mainstream approach....  :sigh:

I don't mind if you're frustrated and need to vent, but honestly how is Valley2 anything like mainstream?  The last game to do anything like this (other than, maybe, AVWW1) was the first Actraiser, and we did something very different than that in so many ways that it's... well, the game is very unique.

If you'd never seen AVWW1, and picked up Valley2, would you seriously think it was lacking in indie insanity?

[Mick]

"Indie" just means made by an independent developer (i.e. they don't have to answer to a publisher). It really shouldn't mean anything beyond that.

Get your hipsterism ("mainstream") out of my video gaming!  >D

[keith.lamothe]

"Indie" just means made by an independent developer (i.e. they don't have to answer to a publisher). It really shouldn't mean anything beyond that.

Get your hipsterism ("mainstream") out of my video gaming!  >D

Right, I just assumed he was using "mainstream" to mean "anything a sane publisher might touch with a 10 foot pole" and "indie" to refer to the set of things outside that

[Jerebaldo1]

Even as I'm more a fan of loot based mechanics, I think that Valley 2 nailed it. I'll be playing it for some time yet. I'm just grieving over the disappointing sales along with you guys, because you did everything you could to make a more appealing sequel. I don't think the issue is that the first game tarnished the brand, but just that there isn't sufficient exposure yet. I think you'll see a small or better surge in sales once the entire suite of reviews come out. This may be a delayed success that sells in a pattern opposite AI Wars. I'm certainly hoping that occurs as I'd like for this game to be expansion worthy material. And though I haven't played it, I can already tell that I'll hope for the same for Shattered Haven.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm just grieving over the disappointing sales along with you guys, because you did everything you could to make a more appealing sequel.

We appreciate the thought, but don't grieve too hard   It is producing some revenue and we're pretty well positioned for a strong year in terms of all that we've learned and are able to do better now (particularly in terms of art).  Valley may just be a huge case of us "paying our dues" so we can move into a more successful future, we'll see.  Either way, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the year in general, and anyone who knows me can tell you I'm not prone to optimism

[nitpik]

Just another 2 cents for the pile ...

I'm much more into strategy games than action/platformers, but I bought Valley 1 pretty much because AI War is amazing and I wanted to see what else you guys were doing

I enjoyed Valley 1, played for maybe ~30 hours around the time it came out, very glad I bought it, but after I put it down I never felt much desire to pick it up again.

So this Monday, I'm off work, and Valley 2 comes out. Yay. Spent several hours playing 1.0 and I'm enjoying it a lot. The 8 way shooting feels limiting, but I'm on Adept/Rook (first game ... ) and everything is dying. However, even in 1.0, I spent about 10 minutes shooting with keys before I configured the controls so that I'm moving with WASD and shooting with mouse buttons 1-4. That worked much better for me than shooting with JKL;

My main problem with the keyboard controls wasn't hitting the monsters though. It was the fact that to shoot up/right I had to press the fire button first then press up/right. Otherwise I'd move a little bit before firing, and often fall off a ledge, or just be a little bit out of position. The second, related thing (and I'm sure this would get better with practice) is the amount of time I spend shooting in the wrong direction.  Because to shoot up/right you need to have three keys held down and you need to press them in the correct order. So if I'm running left I start by hitting fire (now I'm shooting left), then hit Right (now I'm shooting straight-right) then hit Up. And if the order's wrong then you move a little bit out of position and may have to start over.

Note that none of this stopped me playing and enjoying the game. But then Wednesday I see the patch and try turning mouse aiming on. Everything immediately feels more comfortable. Suddenly I'm moving only where I want to move and shooting only where I want to shoot. I think that's the source of the frustration people had with keyboard controls (I can't speak for gamepad). Practicing to limit the amount of time you spend moving where you don't want to move and shooting where you don't want to shoot doesn't feel like you're mastering a core game mechanic, it just feels like the control system is unresponsive.

At the same time, I do feel unfairly powerful in combat now. And my approach to 90% of the monsters has become "jump over their shot while firing straight at them from where I happen to be at an angle that avoids their shots". And I guess there's no solution for that. Next game I will raise the difficulty, and see how that feels. And maybe I'll try going back to keyboard aiming to get the authentic experience at some point.

Out of curiosity, is playing on a gamepad noticeably different/superior to keyboard?

[madcow]

I'm pretty sure that you can tune up the difficulty without waiting until you start a new game. Achievements will be based on the lowest difficulty though. Not sure if you knew or not!

Edit: on an unrelated note that huge thread about the controls in he steam discussions is probably scaring people away. Which is a HUGE issue when it's about three control schemes out of date. Unfortunately the backlash of editing the thread might outweigh the pros of leaving it be. Wish it would die though as the title and first posts are for nearly a different game from the possible options now.

[Mysterial]

Out of curiosity, is playing on a gamepad noticeably different/superior to keyboard?

I think so, although ideally a gamepad with a d-pad would be best. The analog stick handling seems to have annoyingly small deadzones for shooting straight up or down; I've had to look at the controller to get it "right" enough for the game a few times. Everything else is good though.

[Winge]

Out of curiosity, is playing on a gamepad noticeably different/superior to keyboard?

I think so, although ideally a gamepad with a d-pad would be best. The analog stick handling seems to have annoyingly small deadzones for shooting straight up or down; I've had to look at the controller to get it "right" enough for the game a few times. Everything else is good though.

Definitely use a D-pad, if you can.  I have an X-Box controller for games like this, and I used the D-Pad even after Arcen put in analog stick support.  For 8-direction aiming, it just feels more accurate.

I'll probably be one of the few who tries out both Keyboard+Mouse and Gamepad gaming.  I suspect that I will enjoy the ease of aiming with the mouse, but will find the gamepad nicer if I want to kick back while gaming (harder to type while reclined, but I can handle a X-box controller just fine).  Incidentally, I would be for adding 8-way aiming to the mouse control either as the standard method or as an option (maybe call it "Awesomesauce Mode" ).


To Chris:
Hope the year starts going better for you & Arcen.  Unfortunately, I don't know very many PC gamers (which saddens me, as PC gaming is still boss), but I will try to introduce the few I know to AIW or AVWW2.  I'm looking forward to Shattered Haven as well, it looks very interesting.