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Arcen Games has revealed some more information about its upcoming game, A Valley Without Wind. The updates include a new blog about the game's current development, and a new animation test video showcasing all the latest upgrades to A Valley Without Wind.

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. More details on the new developments, including a basic timeline for the known history of Environ, can be found on our updated feature page for A Valley Without Wind.

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. Chris has written up a technical outline in this  developer journal thoroughly explaining the step-by-step process of the program for those interested.

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. While a complete explanation on everything that's been touched on can be found in our latest  Games By Design post.

AVWW Development Blog

YouTube: AVWW Animation Test Video

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