A Valley Without Wind Progress Report 4: Multiplayer, The World Map, Regions, and Windstorms

Arcen Games continues its weekly report on its procedurally-generated action-adventure title A Valley Without Wind with information on the game’s multiplayer, server support, world map, regions, windstorms and more.

Multiplayer is coming to AVWW through the support of servers. The plan is for mainly co-op play, but there’s room for pvp content if the server administrator wants to allow it. You’ll be able to launch the game server on any computer, and then other players can connect to it (including the computer running the server, if you wish). At the moment there’s no explicit limits on the number of players per server, but a game should be able to run smoothly with up to 16 players depending on the players’ and admin’s hardware and connections.

Also introduced this week is the World Map. Each tile on the map represents a "region" consisting of one big outdoors area with a variety of buildings, caves, tunnels, and so on leading down into the earth or up into the sky. Windstorm events occur occasionally as you make your way across the map, sweeping you into the region you’re standing on, and forcing you to deal with inclement weather and more, stronger monsters than typically dealt with until all characters have escaped from that region. This result brings more risk to traveling, particularly in parts of the world map with levels higher than yours.

The development of new regions are on display as well. Currently seven different regions have been created and there will be many, many types in the game as it moves toward version 1.0, with hopes of having around 20+ in place by the start of alpha. Arcen’s own Chris Park goes into full detail on everything mentioned above and more in the game’s latest dev diary: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/02/multiplayer-world-map-regions-and.html