AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Tuesday, February 4, 2025
The undead must be tragically low on deodorant.
If you enjoyed last week's daily AQW: Infinity progress posts, then... you must be crazy. And I like that about you. This week, we are going to have more animated GIFs and less words.
...well, slightly less words.
You know the deal. This page will be updated daily with the latest behind-the-scenes things happening in AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity.
Our full-team meeting was pretty intense. Everyone is pushing to complete the game features and content for the next test.
Here is what everyone is up to...
"Hydra, how you doing?"
Nulgath sent in this freshly animated hydra this morning. We read the animation thread on Reddit and sort of liked the debate over the new animation vs the old. You probably do not know this, but I HAAAAATE Unity animation. I loved that old school 24 fps Flash animation... it felt like anime. So if Unity's ultra smooth, 240+ FPS animation just looks a little off to you, then know you are not alone. While the animators are using techniques to get that action and "pop" that our previous game's animation had, it is unmistakably different. I do appreciate that some people said they like it better. They said we were no longer limited by the lag and performance issues of Flash. This is true. The world definitely feels more alive when you walk around the game. The one thing that really matters to me... is that we did not hire some random 3rd party company in another country to re-animate our stuff. The same people who originally animated AQWorlds came on to this project and are here creating these new animations. I appreciate that a lot.
"OUCH! MY EYES!"
OK... so we are fixing this. Large monsters can have their hit flashes disabled. But if your eyes can handle looking at that atrocity of flashing... you will quickly notice that it is not the monster that is flashing, but the smoke cloud that appears when they die. This is because the flash effect is currently impacting all of the monster's sprites (art)... even the ones that are supposed to be invisible. So we are going to try solving this by tagging the parts of monsters that are supposed to flash when hit. Also, it will be possible to toggle off of the flash so it does not happen at all.
Oh, so last week Despair and I tried doing a multiplayer VTuber thing. It worked pretty good. Might be a fun to try doing a daily update like this. Is this something you would enjoy? What could possibly go wrong? In the GIF above, Despair is using one of the default avatars... as I write this, we are in voice chat looking at how to convert her character art (and the other team members).
In other random (and intentionally mysterious) news, it seems Kickstarter has no problem whatsoever with our video game doing the unusual thing I want to do. Which is great. Because, as my late Father often told me, "If you are going to mess up, you might as well mess up big." (Paraphrased). So, as of today, I am officially green-lighting the creation of an AQW Infinity Kickstarter. The only rule is that a sustainable Alpha needs to be ready to launch right after the Kickstarter ends (like we did with AQ3D.) That really only gives us two windows to do it... which is either Summer (which is too long to wait), or we do an absolutely stellar job in the next test (which I would prefer).... Spring Break. So the pressure is on. When do you think would be a better time to do it?
See you tomorrow.
Today was... Dialogger day!
Here is a secret behind-the-scenes peek at our cutscene/dialog editor in action....
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: You think she'll hold together?
Zoë: She's torn up plenty, but she'll fly true.
Our dialog editor may not be pretty to look at, but it now allows the team to build anything-goes cutscenes in Infinity! When the cutscenes play in game, it will look normal... and not have all those weird bars and buttons all over the place.
I spent the day with Ghost & Tunik working on motion tweening and easing. We talked about easing in last week's post a bit. That is a way of controlling how something moves. Maybe it starts off fast and gets slower... or maybe it moves at a constant speed... or maybe it bounces? These are extremely important to creating good looking animated cutscenes. Flash had some pretty simple easing controls. We now have the ability to add as many as we want. Here is an example of three characters moving for exactly 1 second. The only thing different between them, is their easing curves. (Notice how the frogzard actually bounces until the 1 second ends. Hard to believe he is actually just moving in a straight line with a special ease curve.)
"Ease-y Zooming"
Easing has also now been added to the scaling objects. This allows Ghost to achieve what looks like a cinematic 3D zoom.
I have said this before... but what is absolutely wild about this, is it is not in Flash. The editor just saves some data stored in the database that we can edit in real-time. Which means we can change a cutscene in Infinity immediately, without needing to upload any new files nor restart the server. While animators like Ghost can still do special custom animations, this tool will let any dev made and editor cutscenes. The feature creep on this tool really did spiral out of control-- but ultimately, it was worth it.
This cutscene editor tool will allow us to do a lot of the things that made AQWorlds interesting and memorable.
Check back Wednesday.... and I do have a legit NES related announcement to make. The "Best Game" winning game that I created in last year's game jam was chosen for <message redacted>.
Check back Thursday.
Best day of the week. Time travel for early access. (You know, I never remember to copy/pasta these... I actually type this out each week... and it gets funnier every time.)
