Valley 2 Beta .718 “Sightlines” Released!

This one comes just a day after a whopping large release, so it’s understandably smaller.  However, I think that this release might be cause for no small amount of joy.

I decided to spend today just working on fixes and tweaks and polish, particularly in the area of general monster behavior (as opposed to any particular monster).  The overall experience is thus something that feels a lot better and more polished, and it actually helps quite a bit with balance when monsters aren’t all stacking into inappropriate pits, too.

One of the big things that changes with this version is that enemies now require line of sight on you in order to start chasing you, or to fire on you.  After they lose sight of you they’ll remember you for five seconds, and if you don’t reappear in that time then they’ll stop chasing you.  That right there really changes the feel of a lot of the sidescrolling bits of the game massively.

Really these sorts of changes were in the realm of what I was planning to start working on at the start of February once all the monsters are completed for the game.  Still 52 out of 116 monsters to go!  However, the issues here were largely significant enough that I think they were impacting our ability to properly work on testing and balancing the game, so I decided to accelerate them.

The two really glaring adventure mode things that have yet to be fixed are the henchman boss fights and the scaling of enemy attacks on higher difficulties.  Those are both things that I’m intending to look at tomorrow, and then I’ll be back to mainly enemies aside from any other significant issues until I get the enemies all finished.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you.  When you launch the game, you’ll see the notice of the update having been found if you’re connected to the Internet at the time. If you don’t have the standalone game, you can download that here.  If you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!