Arcen Games revealed a good amount of visual detail back in Februrary for A Valley Without Wind after announcing the game only weeks prior. Shown in a press release today, Arcen has been hard at work at updating its procedurally-generated post Ice-Age action/adventure game. As evident in Arcen’s AI War, the team has experience with random world building generation; they look to exploit this programming technique further in the months to come.

The team aims for a summer Beta release for A Valley Without Wind and an official release in October 2011. For the sake of progress, I wanted to compare the first and latest alpha build videos. I really like the watercolor painting effects here, but I think the retro audio doesn’t quite fit the visual theme in the team’s first video.

Now check out the changes the team has made in the past few months. The audio seems to have been slightly improved in the most recent video. However, the graphics have changed, and a lot of gameplay has been implemented. Enemies, battles, maps, and user interface are shown. The main sprites still need a little finessing to fit well with the background for me, unless the idea from the developers is to present a visual representation of a contrast of eras. There was an ice-age, after all. Check out the new trailer:

The end of this new trailer seems ironic. For a valley “without wind,”  there sure is a lot of windy noise! Those five seconds are surely worth a good Q&A. Visually, I suppose the characters seem to fit more with other objects on screen. The cars from the first trailer were abstract/watercolor, but now look more defined like the playable character. Regarding the music, the more I listen to it in the latter trailer, the more I feel like it creates that isolationism that accompanied the large and eerily empty worlds of NES-era games. The trailer also shows a new playable character; it seems one can control robot creatures in addition to humans at some point. These “enclaves of skeletal robots” are mentioned in Arcen’s dev blog along with monsters and tyrants as enemies.

More difficult to discern from than audio and visuals and more important overall is the gameplay. The interesting gameplay elements are listed in the blog, which states there will be tons of exploring, scavenging time-shards to find materials needed, and enlisting other survivors to help rebuild civilization. My aesthetic critique may be picky, but now is the time for everyone to help Arcen shape the game into a polished Beta and further final product. I look forward to hearing more about A Valley Without Wind as summer approaches.  What are your thoughts on the game so far?