Valley Without Wind update stars Jatana Buffaloe

Posted by on June 20, 2012 in Games

In his exhaustive, frank, and informative write-up of the long journey between versions 1.0 and 1.1 of A Valley Without Wind, designer Chris Park begrudgingly concedes that maybe players will want to name their own characters. So that’s one of the many new features in version 1.1. But Park seems pretty proud of his random name generator. As he notes, it came up with the name “Judge Glass”.

I was all, like, yeah, whatever, Mr. Developer Man. I know game designers are proud of the effort they put into their fancypants randomness generators. I’m sure Valley Without Wind knows what it’s doing when it comes to terrain, because it makes really cool places for me to explore given the infinite breadth and depth of its world. But I think I’ll just stick to my own character names, thankyouverymuch.

At which point the following character name came up randomly:

Yeah, okay, you got me. Not only is that one going to stick, it’s probably going to make it’s way into other games. Well played, Valley Without Wind.

As for the 1.1 update, boy, it’s a doozy. If you played AI War, Chris Park’s last game, you know how drastically it was overhauled based on post-release feedback. That overhaul just happened in Valley Without Wind and I couldn’t be more delighted with how different it is. It went from being a game I respected more than I liked to a game I really like. No caveat needed.

  • Vinraith

    AVWW is pretty great, and I say that as someone that’s never really gotten along with platformers before. There’s a much greater emphasis on exploration and long term planning/strategy than is typical of these sorts of games.

  • Giaddon

    I tried the demo on release and didn’t take to it. I tried the demo after this update and was very impressed. I suggest others interested in the game do the same.

  • Barac Wiley

    I definitely agree that it’s improved tremendously in the time between the couple of dips into it I made during beta and now. More focused, better incentives for exploration, clearer cues what’s worth exploring and what isn’t.. etc. I’m still not sure it has real legs yet, but I’ll keep checking in.

  • BrianRubin

    Awesome, sounds like I need to dive back in, sounds like it’s really not gotten better. I tried it a while back, but had little idea where to go or what to do, but it sounds like that’s been dealt with too. :)