ANN BREAKING NEWS! on Adventure Quest 2D

This just in....

In addition to this week's AdventureQuest 2D Worlds (Mobile/Steam) progress update, how about we shine a spotlight creative players in our community. I was browsing YouTube and my jaw dropped seeing that a player built their own animated news network talking about our games. You have to see all of these YouTube channels! O_O

End of the World?

ANN (AdventureNetwork News) by Lanky

I saw the ANN: Breaking News video after our April Fools releases went live. Featuring an lip-synced news reporter, game news, and even an entire Scarbucks commercial... this is fun and absolutely amazing. See for yourself.

See the Lanky YouTube Channel

Scarbucks Commercial

Community YouTubers

If you like that, be sure to check our other favorite YouTube channels. Putting love and handwork into a YouTube channel is a lot of work. So if you like what you see, be sure to subscribe.

Korey (64.2k subs)
Maicompdr (44.4k subs, Brasilian)
Shiminuki (28.2k subs)
MrGoonVids (15.2k subs)
Camarguets (12.5k subs, Brasilian)
Ahiz AE (11.3k subs, Brasilian)
I Am Ray (10.2k subs)
Ricochet (5.96k subs)
Renegade (5.79k subs)
MrLothbrokAQW (4.75K subs)
Rainbowstar (3.13k subs)
Farofa Gameplay (2.9k subs)
AE How (long-time VIP community member that started making vids last year)

Am I missing any? Know of a channel I should check out? Let me know on Twitter.

Now.... on to this week's AQWorlds Mobile progress update!

Everything is fine

Progress Update # 7

We just wrapped today's weekly AdventureQuest 2D Worlds big team meeting. Tester feedback on the new movement controls (WASD, Joystick, and Click-to-move) has been overwhelming positive! Having been back at the lab for a little bit now, things are starting to settle into the "new normal". Zhoom and I started going to the gym in the mornings again. They have a shower there, which is good, because one time I went straight to the office without showering and could not figure out why everyone in the meeting was was sitting on the other side of the room. Also, one time I forgot pants. Now I keep a full extra set of clothes in the trunk of my car just in case. Yes, the same clothes you see me wearing in 99.9% of every photo you have ever seen of me. My closest at home is a long row of the same black sweat pants & black T-shirts. If I ever go missing, you can safely assume all of my dark clothing collapsed into a black hole and took me with it. (Important note: after re-reading this highly technical progress update post it is important that you know that I have, in fact, never showed up at the lab without pants.)

This week's notes

All monsters resized and have a default scale of.... 1
- Thank you to Ghost for doing all of the conversions
- We have not changed the size overrides in the map yet, so monsters are all wonky sizes.
- Walking through the game is sorta comical right now.
- Galanoth was so small he was no taller than your knee
Need to add a watermark to show the current version number of the game
- Some testers have been on the wrong version
- This is a good idea in general
Lair Map Still needs polish pass
- We have been focused on the individual components. So we have not done the big polish pass on the Dragon's Lair... yet. Going to wait until after all of the dialogs, APOPs, server dysyncs, and combat stuff is 100% working first.
Animation Cancelling Bug - FIXED!
- Yorumi uncovered and fixed the weird animation bug reported in previous updates.
- All animations now send an event when they start and finish so our controller stops getting confused and making our characters do the 2D equivalent of a T-Pose.
"Don't Interrupt me when I am casting!"
- We have a new, and very strange bug, that happens when slaying a monster with a projectile attack. But it only happens when they are actually doing something else. We are still investigating this one. Zhoom will be helping on this issue this week.
Cutscene Editor Improvements (The Dialogger)
- No longer loses all data when you press the setup button (O_O Yeah, that is good!)
- Multiple actors of the same type can now be on the screen at the same time (Yay for Undead armies!)
- You can now hit ESC to cancel when trying to move something. (Before you had to move it... or else!)
- Speech Bubbles now have more options.
- You can move the little dongles that point speach bubbles towards the speakers mouth with left and right buttons
- The adding/removing actors bug that borked the whole cutscene has been fixed! (yay for not breaking stuff)
- Started work on new editor interface... More on that next week. But we had to make a "picture in picture" mode to make it work without needing to re-code everything
- Added admin login along with a mandatory 1000+ character long private Still security key. (Security overkill?)
- Next up is getting the scaler working so we can change the sizes of characters.
- Also, we need the "Player" actor type which will use "Mr. Guy" in place of the player when we are building cutscenes outside of the game.
Bugs & Issues
- "Mr. Guy" our player placeholder in cutscenes is not spawning correctly
- Chat does not scroll correctly sometimes.
- Other players pets are getting stuck
- Players (testers) on older version of the game client are able to break things on the newer one... this needs to be made bullet proof.
- DragonUltraMaster is always invisible to us when he joins a room.... why? O_o What cursed item does he have equipped that breaks the game this triumphantly.
- ...some continued bugs from previous updates are still being fixed.

Can you see me?

Next Big Steps

Normally I put the "Big 3" here, but my panic button is activating on how long this current steps are taking. Our goal has been to complete the Dragon's Lair, an area which contains at least one of every function and feature that we need to build the entire game. Perfecting that is critical before we summon an army to mass port our insane amount of content to this new version of the game. Our top focus needs to be on the combat and loading issues... closely followed by the APOPs and cutcenes. So that is exactly what we will be working on during the next 7 days. In my long experience, this is a game of "fix one bug and congratulations... you created 6 new ones!" But that is all part of the game making progress. I really, really, really, really want to be in mass content conversion mode by summer. It is scary how much we need to do between now and then. When we are ready to hire an army to convert assets, we will do a Kickstarter. Ideally that would happen this Summer... then Alpha/Beta testing could start before our 20th year anniversary in October. We have started looking for a senior level C#/Unity dev to bring on the project. That would really help us boost the code side of the game. I think it might be a good time to build a Steam page for our game too. This would help in three ways. 1st, you would be able to Wishlist it. 2nd, we could do all of the testing directly from Steam. Steam lets you have different branches, so you can have a testing branch. 3rd. I think seeing it on Steam would make it feel.... really real. Do not get me wrong, I wholeheartedly appreciate the "Our Great Grandchildren will be old by the time this game releases!" jokes.... to the point that I considered making everyone's hair white w/ a beard when you first logged your character into the game as a joke. But it would feel pretty good seeing the official game page appear on Steam. What do you think?

Battle on!
Artix

P.S. Sometimes we do these live audio things on Twitter. (Listen here: https://twitter.com/ArtixKrieger/status/1516548775548002313) Fast forward this one to about 26:00 for info on that Adobe Air version of AQW that players were trying to make and a deep dive into CANI (the real reason we have weekly releases).