A Valley Without Wind – Story, interiors, explorers and outposts detailed

• Tweet
• Pin It

Arcen Games released today a new video for their indie game, A Valley Without Wind. This latest video showcases some improvements and additions that have been made to this survival action-adventure. The company has also revealed some new details about its story, interiors, explorers and outposts. You can view both this new video and the game’s details after the jump.

According to Arcen Games’ press release, the company will keep the broken-earth setting and former ice age focus for the title. However, they have replaced the real-world future setting. Moreover Chris Park, the game’s lead programmer, has come up with a significant breakthrough with regards to the game’s interior procedural-generation environments.

As the press release reads:

To start, there have been some major shifts in AVWW’s story and setting that we’d like to share. We are keeping the broken-earth setting and former ice age focus for the title, but the real-world future setting has been replaced. Instead the game is now set in a purely fantasy world called Environ – taking place in the year 888. We feel that exchanging the reality-based future setting for a more fantasy/sci-fi mix (that still keeps elements from the real world) gives us a lot more flexibility as we put together the major themes of the title.

Onward from that, we’ve made a rather significant breakthrough in terms of the creation and generation of AVWW’s interiors.  Interior procedural-generation was a troublesome task that others have solved in various ways, but which nobody seemed to have solved in the specific way that was needed for the game. So our lead programmer Chris Park has come up with a moderately new approach to the problem, basing part of his work on how the issue in a roguelike is dealt with, resulting in some very interesting and varied interior floorplans at this stage. In a month or two when it’s further polished, Arcen will be releasing the C# source code for our interior generator as open source under the MIT license, so that others can make use of it.

Many other additions and improvements have found their way into A Valley Without Wind as well. The game now makes use of the helpful Explorer NPC’s and the not-so-helpful Evil Outposts, there’s been major progress to settlements and the Minimap, and lots of new and upgraded visuals have been added as well. We could go on all day, but the title’s  new animation test video does a much tidier job illustrating some of the aforementioned items.

A Valley Without Wind is currently scheduled for an October 2011 release on PC and Mac. A Beta phase will hopefully start this Summer and will be available to all those who pre-order the game.

Related Posts

• A Valley Without Wind Update #10: Overworld Maps, Soft Focus, and NPCs
  A Valley Without Wind Update #10: Overworld Maps, Soft Focus, and NPCs
• Chris Park answers in what ways ‘A Valley Without Wind’ is randomized
  Chris Park answers in what ways ‘A Valley Without Wind’ is randomized
• A Valley Without Wind: Multiplayer, The World Map, Regions, and Windstorms
  A Valley Without Wind: Multiplayer, The World Map, Regions, and Windstorms