Alright, so having taken into account much of the criticism that I received both through here and various other outlets, I've released the first of several updates to ANoW!
This update mainly aims to address some of the concerns that the game was not very user friendly, I've added descriptive text to all of the Units and Magic, so you can quickly get an idea of what each one of them does without having to open the manual up or go through the tutorial!
Starting a new game is much easier in 1.2. While in the previous version the islands would get more difficult as you ventured outward from the capital simply in terms of enemies and their spawn frequency, the resource scarcity was entirely random. That is no longer the case! Now it is nearly impossible for one of the initial 6 islands to have anything less than a ranking of 3 for Mountains, Forests, Towns, and Water. This makes those initial stages much easier!
I've slightly decreased the number of enemies that spawn on lower difficulty areas too.
Probably most important of all though, I have sped the day cycle up! This has made the game much more fun in my opinion, as there is very little downtime where the player is forced to wait for long periods in order to obtain resources. The days are roughly 20% shorter, this gives you enough time to harvest, build, terraform, fight enemies, etc, but you will quickly find it increasingly difficult to efficiently manage a productive colony!
I've also optimized some things, specifically enemy AI, there should be fewer performance issues on low end PC's as a result.
Of course, all work and no play would make A Nation of Wind a dull game, so while a lot of the things that I worked on were technical, I did add at least one little bit of fun content too!
There are two new items in the SkyHarbor shop. One of them is fairly utilitarian, for 1000g, you can fully heal all of your units. Useful, but not particularly compelling. Also for 1000g, you can hire a Wind Sprite, pictured here in-game:
You can only hire one Wind Sprite at any given time. Her power is based off of the number of Wind Temples you control, and she's fairly self sufficient, regenerating HP at a rate also based on the number of Wind Temples the player controls!
That in and of itself is
okay I guess, but if you have a gamepad recognized as Controller 1 by the PC, you can play ANoW in Co-op! The controllers left analog stick will move the Sprite, and the face buttons will have her fire in the four cardinal directions. She can also pick up loot dropped by enemies for the player!
There are some other small bugfixes and tweaks as well, but theyre mostly more technical issues that I addressed. I did however do two things that some of the users here asked me to do:
Alt+F4 now shuts down the game.
You can now choose to download ANoW as either a .zip file, or continue to use the installer!
Let me know what you guys think of Beta 1.2!
Developer
