A Valley Without Wind 1&2 Catch-all

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IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/RVSGP.png)

So, we finally have screenshots and video of Arcen Games' (AI War, Tidalis) next project A Valley Without Wind.

What is A Valley Without Wind? Well, it's a procedurally generated action-adventure game. Forgive me, but I'm just going to quote directly from the features page.

Description

Environ has been shattered in the wake of an unknown cataclysm, with only small pockets of humanity left in its wake... What will you do in this strange new world?

The creators of AI War bring you a procedurally-generated 2D side-scrolling adventure of limitless proportions. Survive and explore a vast persistent world filled with dangerous creatures, powerful magic, and ancient technology. Do so while helping other survivors establish settlements, gathering resources to craft, fending off evil invaders, and more.

Description

Environ has been shattered in the wake of an unknown cataclysm, with only small pockets of humanity left in its wake... What will you do in this strange new world?

The creators of AI War bring you a procedurally-generated 2D side-scrolling adventure of limitless proportions. Survive and explore a vast persistent world filled with dangerous creatures, powerful magic, and ancient technology. Do so while helping other survivors establish settlements, gathering resources to craft, fending off evil invaders, and more.

Features

Explore the beautiful and dangerous regions of Environ in a sprawling adventure. Travel through lush countryside, ruined towns, deep subterranean caves, and buildings of all shapes and sizes.

Procedural-generation ensures no two worlds will ever be the same. Your planet unfolds as you discover it, and once you've discovered something it becomes part of your Environ for good.

Take command of survivor settlements. Scout surrounding areas for rare crafting materials and fend off invaders in the turn-based strategic overlay. Improve resident productivity and quality of life through the city-building interface at each settlement.

Bring to life an infinite amount of characters, settings and stories. You don't just represent an individual, you represent an entire civilization and its indomitable will to survive in a shattered world.

Everywhere has treasures to discover, people to help, and evils to confront. Craft a variety of spells, scrolls, and traps to help you on your way.

During beta, there are new updates nearly every weekday -- packed with additional content, improvements, and much more.

This game is in beta, and as with all other Arcen's games they update frequently to keep us not only interested, but involved. AI War has changed dramatically since it was first released and many of the features were added in from user input. The same has been true for A Valley Without Wind.

Edit: Chris posted some higher res artwork below and I think the style shines through much better than in the pics I posted (I lowered the resolution for the board, bad idea apparently ;)).

IMAGE(http://www.arcengames.com/w/images/stories/cedar.png)

I'm there. And would it kill other devs to come up with titles this compelling and unique?

Exploration is one of my favourite things in games. Oblivion, Fallout 3/NV, Minecraft -- any open world game that rewards you for leaving the beaten path is incredibly fun and addictive. This looks like it could be another one of those games.

Here are the first released screenshots. I implore those of you who aren't familiar with AI War to keep in mind that this is a rather small indie team and art isn't always their strength. AI War's art continued to develop with each successive release, free or expansion, and I expect the same here.

That said, I think the environments look pretty good for having been just recently implemented. Then again, there isn't much to look at other than environments.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/jxA6i.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/O5VkV.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/PHddM.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/kcwzR.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/ByYiq.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/k8Eeg.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/N5W6W.jpg)

I'm really excited about this one. I'm sure the art will improve somewhat, and even if it doesn't, I love games with procedure-based "emergent" content. I love what Chris and crew did with AI War and the amazing support it continues to get. This will be a day-one (or before) purchase for me, guaranteed.

Seems awesome, just the kind of thing I'm interested in. They're really pushing all of my interest buttons, save for undeveloped art.

I'm in.

I don't even need to know more, I've even barely played AI War, but Arcen is a company, and Chris Park is a developer, I just want to support.

And I really will give AI War the attention I know it deserves, one day.

Gremlin wrote:

And would it kill other devs to come up with titles this compelling and unique?

I hear that. I only got here because I saw the thread title—"That's the name of a vidja game?" It's rhythmic, evocative: from just hearing the title, I want to know what this game is about. Contrast that with Bulletstorm, Killzone: those already tell everything I need to know, and make me want to gag.

It's almost as brilliant a title as Sins of a Solar Empire, or Beneath a Steel Sky.

I must be one of the only ones who watched the trailer and thought "WTF?". It looked like SkiFree without the skis, to the point where my first thought was that the yeti was going to pop out and start chasing the guy any second.

I'm still as interested in the game as I ever was solely on the basis of being a pretty big fan of Arcen and their business model. Whatever they were trying to convey with the trailer has evidently eluded me.

Hmm...the concept sounds great, but I hope that the ideas themselves in the filler art are not representative of the direction as a whole. If you're setting something in the "far future" you need to come up with something other than asphalt roads and Jeep Wranglers. That's just anachronistic.

Elycion wrote:

I must be one of the only ones who watched the trailer and thought "WTF?". It looked like SkiFree without the skis, to the point where my first thought was that the yeti was going to pop out and start chasing the guy any second.

Minarchist wrote:

Hmm...the concept sounds great, but I hope that the ideas themselves in the filler art are not representative of the direction as a whole. If you're setting something in the "far future" you need to come up with something other than asphalt roads and Jeep Wranglers. That's just anachronistic.

Two weeks of development guys. Two weeks.

Here's what Chris wrote in the bottom bar over at YouTube.

A Valley Without Wind is the latest exciting game from Arcen; it will be our third full title. This video represents the culmination of about six months of design work, but we're only about two weeks into the actual implementation of the game. It's super early days yet, but we've made a lot of exciting progress already, and wanted to share.

The art that you see here is expected to be pretty close to the final version used in the game, if not the final version, in most cases. The office buildings in particular need a lot more work, though, and of course we need thousands of more images in general to get the variety of location that we need for the game. And yes, the character's running animation is a bit funny at the moment -- we need to add a few more frames to that. :)

You think?

garion333 wrote:

Two weeks of development guys. Two weeks.

Okay, but I was talking about the concept itself, not the actual art displayed. Your quote below undermines what you're trying to say here. Six months of conceptual work already? If they're trying to set something in the far future, they need to spend some time to think about what that far future would actually look like.

Minarchist wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Two weeks of development guys. Two weeks.

Okay, but I was talking about the concept itself, not the actual art displayed. Your quote below undermines what you're trying to say here. Six months of conceptual work already? If they're trying to set something in the far future, they need to spend some time to think about what that far future would actually look like.

I was about to post something similar. I understand that what's being shown isn't representative of the final product. I'm trying to understand why they're showing what they have, it's so rough that it would seem more likely to scare people away than interest them. It's a lot like me telling you about this awesome cake I am going to bake, and then showing you a picture of a sack of flour because the cake is still a work in progress.

Elycion wrote:
Minarchist wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Two weeks of development guys. Two weeks.

Okay, but I was talking about the concept itself, not the actual art displayed. Your quote below undermines what you're trying to say here. Six months of conceptual work already? If they're trying to set something in the far future, they need to spend some time to think about what that far future would actually look like.

I was about to post something similar. I understand that what's being shown isn't representative of the final product. I'm trying to understand why they're showing what they have, it's so rough that it would seem more likely to scare people away than interest them. It's a lot like me telling you about this awesome cake I am going to bake, and then showing you a picture of a sack of flour because the cake is still a work in progress.

I was already sold on the title, the video doesn't bother me.

Minarchist wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Two weeks of development guys. Two weeks.

Okay, but I was talking about the concept itself, not the actual art displayed. Your quote below undermines what you're trying to say here. Six months of conceptual work already? If they're trying to set something in the far future, they need to spend some time to think about what that far future would actually look like.

Yeah, they've been (or just Chris has been) working on the concept for six months but that doesn't mean they've been working on art. As far as I know Chris has actually been doing all the art up until this point and not their actual art people (whoever that ends up being, I'm not certain on who works there anymore).

Anyway, as he points out in the same thing I quoted they need to add a lot more stuff. In the comments he specifically mentions putting cracks in the road. And the far future may not be the same type of far future you're thinking of. We don't know what all happened during that ice age. I mean, we're trying to draw conclusions based off a few paragraphs and some pre-alpha artwork.

Elycion wrote:

I was about to post something similar. I understand that what's being shown isn't representative of the final product. I'm trying to understand why they're showing what they have, it's so rough that it would seem more likely to scare people away than interest them. It's a lot like me telling you about this awesome cake I am going to bake, and then showing you a picture of a sack of flour because the cake is still a work in progress.

Well, really, the only people who are seeing this are Arcen fans (I have their blog in my RSS feed). I doubt this was meant for Rock Paper Shotgun's front page. This is how they work. They're completely open about their development and for some that is perhaps showing too much.

It's still really early in the development of this game, which is actually two games combined into one. They scrapped their zombie survival horror game in favor of using some of those gameplay elements in this game. It's entirely possible in three months this could be set a couple hundred years ago in the wild west.

Elycion wrote:

I must be one of the only ones who watched the trailer and thought "WTF?". It looked like SkiFree without the skis, to the point where my first thought was that the yeti was going to pop out and start chasing the guy any second.

I thought it was some internet meme I wasn't aware of. I have to say that I hate the art style. I love style and retro in my games, but it looks like something a kid worked on with RPG Maker...in the mid 90's. Even if the gameplay and exploration were great, I'd have to wait until someone mods the game graphical.

Hmm... ah, um. *cough*

I love AI War, and I'll tell everyone I know to the point of obnoxiousness about how great that game is. I think Christopher Park has done a great job supporting and developing the game. I'm a fan of the studio in general.

But damn this looks rough. I don't know what I was expecting from the upcoming shots/videos of this game, but this is not anywhere near it. I have no idea what they're trying to do here. I'll keep an open mind, of course, and they'll get the benefit of the doubt from me because of how amazing AI War. But I'll admit that I am really, really confused by this video.

I know Park has posted on these forums in the past, and maybe we'll benefit from him chiming in!

The concept is great, but the video and music in the trailer are... hmm. If they've only put two weeks of development time in, they should hold off releasing trailers until they've got something that resembles their final product.

Subscribing, so I don't have to track this thread down later. Thanks for putting it together, Garion.

Michael wrote:

But damn this looks rough. I don't know what I was expecting from the upcoming shots/videos of this game, but this is not anywhere near it. I have no idea what they're trying to do here. I'll keep an open mind, of course, and they'll get the benefit of the doubt from me because of how amazing AI War. But I'll admit that I am really, really confused by this video.

I'll willingly pay $10 just for the title and the concept, but I agree that the aesthetic seen in the trailer leaves something to be desired. You can do quick, classy art that's abstract enough to get the point across, but this looks like undifferentiated collage and magazine cut-outs. It could work, but not as the mixed-up mess we've seen of it so far. With only two weeks, I'm willing to cut them some slack though.

As I said, I'm willing to cut them all kinds of slack because I respect the hell out of them and what they did with AI War. But I have to wonder what they thought the benefit would be of sharing something that rough.

Welp -- there's a lot of snark about the art, but I'm not sure how many folks have actually looked at it in HD on the trailer, at full res. I'm actually really proud of the art, aside from the office building which I know sucks. Granted, there's a lot of empty space in these particular chunks of the world at the moment, but the reason we made the video and screenshots and shared them is because we're proud of it. And because we can't really talk with most folks about the game without showing something.

To some extent it doesn't compress well in the video, which makes the edges of stuff look funny and everything has a lot of distortion. Looking at the screenshots as they are shown above in this thread, I also see that it's hugely distorted and low-quality looking because of the JPEG compression. In terms of the Jeep there, it's actually got a really cool painterly comic look when you see the full thing. I suppose I'll post that here:

IMAGE(http://www.arcengames.com/img/Jeep.png)

You might think it's crap, but... whatever, I guess. It's a valid style and looks pretty unique, I think. It's clear we aren't going to make something that looks like Crysis, and pixel art is done, done, done (and not something I'm good at personally), so we wanted to go with something that looks more hand-drawn.

The office building sucks. I know that. It's very temporary. The rest is possibly final. I'm the only artist on the team at the moment, and that's likely to remain the case unless we have some huge infusion of cash from this being massively popular or something. And if that were to happen, this art would have already been so established in the game that it might be improved some, but not wholesale replaced.

To some extent, I think that complaints about any given art style are going to happen. And we aren't known for having the most amazing art, though I think Tidalis looked really amazing (Phil Chabot was the artist on that one, I had no hand in it). But some people complained about that, too.

Not that I'm trying to duck out of having to create any good art, but I think this looks pretty darn cool and is a valid aesthetic:

IMAGE(http://www.arcengames.com/w/images/stories/cherry.png)

IMAGE(http://www.arcengames.com/w/images/stories/cedar.png)

As to the comments on the far future setting: it's going to mostly be contemporary style stuff in ruins, mixed with occasional batches of high technology that have developed, and fantasy-style stuff that developed, too. The idea being that a lot of modern-day stuff was flash-frozen and survived through the ice age, only to emerge in the setting of the game. Unrealistic? Sure. But it lets us combine a lot of things we like, such as ruins of modern-day stuff, far-future elements, magic, and other fantasy-style things creeping up from the deep.

Anyway, I know everyone is not enthused on the art yet, but it won't look so empty always. I think that's really turning a lot of folks off in a way I hadn't anticipated. That, plus the low-quality JPEGs that are being reposted some places, and the non-HD version of the trailer (flip it to 720p to see it closer to how it looks in game). A lot of the elements should look a lot more interesting when there is more variety and thus the aesthetic we're going for is a little more clear.

We'll be having screenshots and/or videos to show how things are coming along on a weekly basis, so you'll be able to see what I'm talking about soon enough! Glad people are generally enthused with the name and the concept, at any rate.

Cool, thanks for posting here, Chris. Those couple of pictures you posted look much more impressive than what is conveyed in the small screens we've seen so far. And you're definitely right, viewing the movie full-screen at the higher resolution does a better job of conveying the design.

Out of curiosity, is this game being developed using Unity like your other games?

Thanks for the kind words, Michael -- and glad to be here again, too. Even the HQ video has a lot of dithering and distorting because with so much subtle motion (all those plants sway individually), that really messes with Youtube. But, it's pretty close. The graphics shown above are the actual full-resolution images used in-game, so that's a fully undiluted look at it. Anyhow, glad that's more pleasing!

And yep, this is another one on Unity. After putting so much effort into getting ourselves set up with our own meta-engine on top of Unity, we're definitely not switching away from that at any time soon unless something drastic happens! To get AVWW started, we actually just ripped apart a copy of the AI War codebase and started from there, pulling in a few things from Tidalis that had never been backported to AI War.

All in all that process took a good week or so, and during that time we were gradually getting started on the art and the engine, too. We've had fans beating down our door to show them something after the textual preview we put up last week, so we started showing the art substantially earlier than we otherwise would have. And plus we're trying to be a bit more on the ball about PR this time, as I royally screwed it up with Tidalis and almost broke the company by doing so (hence why I'm the only artist now).

This is definitely the most exciting project we've ever had, I think, and it's coming together really fast for two weeks thanks to a combination of luck and preparedness, and our past body of engine work.

Incidentally, for those curious on how I'm doing the art, it's a pretty huge pipeline:

- Characters and similar are rendered in Poser Pro 2010 at high resolution and then cartoonized in post-processing using Photoshop CS5 and a number of custom filters by Topaz Software.

- Objects are rendered in a variety of programs, or in some cases are using photo textures as in many games, and then are run through filters by Topaz Software, Nik Software, and Filter Forge, all through Photoshop again.

- Specifically, most of the work on actual object sculpting and painting is being done using Mudbox 2010. I did most of the art for Light of the Spire using ZBrush 4.0 (and the rest in the GroBoto betas), which was great for the style of the spire ships, but for AVWW I'm only using ZBrush for the ZSphere rapid design tools, with the resulting frames being exported to Mudbox for final sculpting and painting in Mudbox.

- In terms of the plants and skies, as well as a few other things like clouds and some of the ground textures, I'm using Vue 9 to do all that. I did a lot of work back in the day in Vue 6, and before that in Carrara 6, Bryce 5, 4, and 2, so Vue is a natural progression of that for me and quite a favorite.

- To set up infinitely tilable textures, I'm using a really cool piece of software called imagesynth 2. That, plus the heal brush in Photoshop, really let me get some interesting effects. That's how I'm able to make the really complex skies from Vue tile seamlessly, and things of that nature.

- I've also taken several hundred photographs already for custom textures, and those all get processed pretty heavily in Photoshop using Topaz, Nik, and Filter Forge. A lot of times, in order to get those looking at all right I have to make several passes at them through the various Photoshop plugins, then tile it in imagesynth, then do more work in Photoshop, then have another go at it in imagesynth.

- There's also a lot of hand-editing to a lot of the images, using the heal brush or just regular brushes via my Wacom tablet. The last Wacom tablet I had was from 9 years ago and was terrible, but I've been finding my new one absolutely indispensable and a dream to work with. Lets me do all sorts of things digitally that I could only ever do on paper in the past.

Finding an aesthetic with the right amount of detail to look painterly for the background without looking too cluttered was quite a challenge, and finding the right look that would look cartoony without being too "young" was another big challenge.

I keep all the original models and model rendering exports as source material, which makes it easy to go back and re-tile or re-filter them as needed. That's been really helpful, because I've gone through six or seven major revisions to the art to find a style that could be consistent for different kinds of objects at different sizes. For the office buildings, and buildings in general, I'm still working on that.

For the rest of the components in the scenes, I've finally got a look that has made folks go "wow" when they see the game in motion at full resolution. In the video and screenshots the trees are seeded a lot thicker than they normally would be (in most cases except really deep woods, I suppose), mostly to mask the fact that the rest of the space is kind of empty at the moment. Normally that space would be filled with interesting plants and rock formations, buildings, caves, monsters, rifts in the earth, and so on. So there's an overabundance of trees, which can be kind of overwhelming at times -- actually in the final game I plan to use that to my advantage in a few really deep woods, jungle-like sort of areas; but I wouldn't call that representative of the whole game.

There's actually a little bit of distortion on the outer edges of some of the graphics that I'm not in love with. To some extent it looks a little artsy, but it's also a lot rougher compared to the smooth, painterly inner lines. That's an artifact of the Topaz filters not being allowed (for whatever reason) to blend across transparent pixels. I intend to write them about that, and if that's something they can resolve then it should be an easy fix and I can re-filter the art that's presently in place (I keep macros in Photoshop for all the various common operations, and then hand-edit after). If that isn't feasible for them to do anything with for some reason, or if it will take too long, then I'm contemplating just edting those by hand. That would be rather time consuming, though, and I'd rather not have to spend quite that long on post-processing every last image. We'll see.

To me that's a fairly minor niggle, though, and only applies to some of the images. For the buildings, that's my next big challenge, but I anticipate having something awesome-looking next week. There are some perspective tricks that a lot of SNES games use that I think I can do using newer software in a higher resolution, to get something really exciting. It's always tricky with 3D prerendered into 2D, because the smaller it is rendered, the worse it looks -- something that looks amazing in Vue or Mudbox at full scale looks pretty lame when it's shrunk down to even 128x128.

The trick, therefore, is to keep the overall shape, shadows, color and such from the original renderings, and then simplify those down into a more broad, cartoony style so that it looks great when reduced. I'm particularly proud of how well the character and plants look with those techniques, that was quite a challenge to get right. The character, of course, needs another 5 frames added to his running animation, so I'll have to render those in Poser, post-process them using my macros in Photoshop, shrink them down, and add them to the list of in-game frames. It's nice that at least I won't have to re-render the existing frames to do that, thanks to having all the original documents.

Anyway, so for those folks who are thinking that the art here is casual temporary art based on looking at low-res versions of it: it's definitely not, and if you check out the full-res screenshots on our site (make sure and view them 1:1 in the lightbox thingy), you'll see the same sort of detail that is present in the sprites posted above. Hope that makes folks a lot happier, and makes more sense why we're sharing now rather than waiting!

See, those look fine. In the video you can't see the paint strokes, plus it looks like there's some kind of fringing or blending issue on the edges of the sprites. Clicking through to the larger screenshots, they still look like a bit of a mishmash, design-wise: the colors and designs clash in the composition. Since it's the early stages of procedural generation I can definitely cut you some slack on that.

EDIT: and you posted a massive thing while I was still writing! Glad to see you're on top of the transparency thing; I think if you can get that sorted out it'll look a lot better in stills.

Oh, and have you considered using a layer mask in Photoshop instead of transparent pixels? No idea if that would be a viable workaround in your pipeline, but that's what I tend to do when I need to bring in separate transparency data and I can't use Photoshop transparency.

Gremlin -- thanks very much for the layer mask idea there. I'll have to look into that, that's not a technique I've done much with before. A lot of the problem is that once the stuff gets blended, it has a different shape if it's non-transparent pixels. Which is great, actually, because then it has that smoother look to it like the rest does. However, I suspect that if I'd pre-masked the layer, that wouldn't be the right shape any more. And sense it is nicely blended with the background, you wind up with the artifacts there.

I've had pretty good success by putting a Gaussian-blurred version of the image right under itself and then merging the layers before I run the filter, because that then lets the filter extend into space that otherwise would be transparent. That makes for nicer looking edges, but often has more whitish pixelation than normal. I guess I could hand paint those out, but I'm really hoping to figure out something easier. I hadn't thought about masking, though, so I should at least experiment.

Regarding the colors sometimes clashing... yeah, in the case of the really dark ground color, that's actually intended for use in caves. But I figured it made the fall stuff "pop" enough that it was worth doing some screenshots of just to give a sense of variety and possibility to people looking at them. Same reason I included the office building mockups. In retrospect, those might have been mistakes. Anyhow, right now I've got about 75% of three tilesets, and they all wound up getting mixed together a bit. I think the result is a little less final looking than I'd fully realized, reflecting back, because of that. Ah well -- each upcoming batch of screenshots and videos will be better than the last. I'm still really jazzed about these, in the main, despite a few odds and ends that aren't quite right as you note.

x4000 wrote:

Welp -- there's a lot of snark about the art

I can't vouch for anyone else, but my "snark" such as it is has nothing to do with the art. Pretty graphics do not a great game make, as was already shown to good effect by the initial releases of AI War.

I agree with you that you've got a perfectly valid art style going, but I want to see how that art enables the game. Watching little Mr. Paper Mario run around a Gauguin painting tells me absolutely nothing about the game play. Heck, if the Yeti from SkiFree had popped out and chased the guy it would have shown that AVWW was something more than an interactive Post-Impressionist painting.

I guess what I'm saying is that I see well considered mechanics as the strength of Arcen, yet the trailer only shows me what it's going to look like. I want to see what it's going to play like.

Try to keep in mind, this isn't coming from a hater. I own all the AI Wars releases, and I bought them directly from Arcen to cut out the middleman. Likewise, I still have every intention of preordering AVWW once it's on sale. Sorry, I'm not a puzzle gamer so I skipped Tidalis.

I gotta say those full-size assets do look rather sweet, actually.

Elycion -- I understand. Bear in mind that wasn't a trailer, though, it was just to let people see the art animations and hear the music. You're quite right that if that was the gameplay, it would be lame, lame, lame! At any rate we're on very early stages at this point, and in order to get the gameplay working we have to have the world that the gameplay will fit into. That's backwards from how a lot of games do it, but with procedurally-generated worlds that's pretty critical for this game.

Anyhow, we'll have a lot more exciting stuff to show in another week. I plan to have our man there running around setting fire to some trees with his magic, and we'll see if we can get a first enemy in -- possibly. Still a large part of our focus for the next week will be on procedural worldbuilding, but gameplay is going to be coming faster and faster as the last few art issues (like the edges, etc) are worked out.

jlaakso -- Thanks!

Thanks for stopping by, Chris, and giving full, detailed replies as you always do. This is one of the reasons I support your company as I love your transparency.

/brownnosing

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