AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Friday, August 2, 2024
Today I met with Reens, JX, and Ghost on remastering the dungeon known as Bludrut Keep. The dungeon is cursed by evil spirits. The monster filled keep descends several floors underground. In the shadows of the Keep's very bottom, there is a creature known only as the Groglurk. Brave (or not too bright) adventurers go there to obtain the fabled Bludrut Blade. We found some irony that our previous games all mentioned the Bludrut Blade, but... the weapon itself is nowhere to be found. It would appear that even our most expert players mistook the sword wielded by the Groglurk to be the fabled weapon. But it was not. The Bludrut Blade remains hidden at the bottom of Bludrut Keep, waiting for worthy hands to free and wield it... in AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity. (Or at least it will be once we finish remaking the dungeon.)
Switching to building map content was a sudden departure from the intense feature work the team have been doing for the past few weeks. But we have at least two members of the team out with Covid and we are also in a holding pattern waiting on some big code/feature changes. So the rest of us have started a major content push.
Pictured above: Diagon's new Skill Icons
It has been a few weeks since our last tech demo with the new combat system. Alina asked me if it was possible to take all the feedback from the players and do a whiplash update-- impressing players on how fast we could implement the changes and do a follow up tech demo. After an enthusiastic "YES! On it," I got to work with the team.... and ended up rewriting combat, gutting the cutscene system, and committing at least 2 "feature creep felonies" that stuck us in a holding pattern. Worse yet, I kept waiting for some super good news (like the announcement of Tech Demo #5) before making a post to update players. *gulps* I have not written an update post for weeks. So, I definitely need to write to them today and let them know everything that has been going on. Especially the news about combat & the working Android version.
Spider and Immortal Joe have been eyeball deep in combat & stats. Based on feedback from the last tech demo, we are rebuilding the core 4 classes (warrior, mage, rogue, healer) much more similar to how they are in the existing game... but with some improvements. Combat is going to be faster and the effect animations will be a little more flashy. Nulgath animated a bunch of new attack and slash animations. Many of your major skills will no longer miss. If you played the last tech demo, you will be relieved to know that movement based skills will leave you facing your target. In addition to these remastered versions of the existing classes, we will also be making new Infinity classes. These new Infinity versions of the classes will use a lot of features that are only available in Infinity... like hit box based combat and positional skills. Instead of mana, Infinity classes can now have their own resources (i.e. Fury, Chi, Spirit Energy, Darkness, erm... Bacon?) . This is still very much a work in progress and I want to be transparent that we are still experimenting with ways to make this game's combat even more fun than the original.
Spider created a system called the "Skill Forge" which is used for creating classes. It is far more powerful that what we had to work with in the original version of the game, to say the least. Last week the team focused on the timing, soundFX, and feel of combat. There were a lot of brilliant things in the existing AQWorlds that we really took for granted. For example, look at the way your weapon turns white for 1 frame at the moment of impact and how the monster also turns white. It creates this brilliant illusion that everything is contacting beautifully. There is an option that lets you turn that off. Nevertheless, little details like that define the style and feel of AQWorlds.
While testing the two games I would often sit in both games comparing the screens – and inevitably go AFK. Players would find me and hang out which was really nice.
Damage number popups seemed like a good place we could innovate. In the existing game, the damage numbers are just white text. Drawing inspiration from games including Diablo and Maple Story, we made a super customizable damage pop up which features color gradients, the ability to be hit at an angle (which sorta makes it look like you are knocking your opponent’s teeth out), and different text bounce effects.
Warlic now has the cloud builder working. He published a dev version of Infinity on Android. It runs really smooth! We found a few weird-isms. But that is expected and fixable. This is a major breakthrough for the game! We did have Apple and Android versions of the game working waaaaay back when we ran a booth with the game at the PAX East convention. But that was a much simpler version of the game... and frankly, it was held together with duct tape and super glue. This one will be heading to the app stores when it is ready.
(Pictured above... the sort of weird bugs that pop up when we build stuff that has nothing to do with this XD.)
On that note we got the filesize of the game down from 1.3 Gigabytes to 180 megabytes. We still need to get it under 150 megabytes to not require wifi when downloading the app store on your phone.
We have been pinging Warlic for help so much that we just made this to post in chat....
Yorumi finished merge shops (crafting) this week. Diogon did the interface. It looks great and is intuitive.
With inventory space always being a concern, we have been talking about the possibility of adding a resource tab... which would be for crafting materials. We did this in AdventureQuest 3D. These crafting resources would not take up space in your inventory. No promises yet – but it seems very feasible if we can just figure out where in the inventory to stick a tab for it. Might be worth widening the inventory window.
"This is Z best!"
The other week we solved the biggest pain in the backside of our armor that has been plaguing development. Hindsight being 20/24 we should have figured this out earlier. When work on this started, Unity did not have a built-in feature to group 2D objects in the same way Flash does. So Warlic coded his own solution. But as we kept making things more complicated, adding particles, and mix/matching monsters, characters, and special fx, things started clipping weird. Anyway, there was a relatively easy solution built right into Unity and we started using it. It fixes the biggest issues we have been having with maps, cutscenes, and particle systems. Now we are going back through everything and removing all the ultra weird trickery we used to use to get around the issue. (To any Unity devs reading this who knows the simple thing we started using... feel free to laugh when you find out we created 30 sorting layers and placed actors, monsters in props in those layers... and animated the layers they were placed on at runtime to have them properly Z-order in cutscenes. If I could only go back a year with the knowledge I have now… /facepalm)
On one hand, I feel terrible about the horrific amount of scope creep taking place in the cutscene system. What started as "How about we make our own version of RenPy" turned into "Nope, how about we make our own version of Flash with RenPy bolted on top of it!" #NoRegrets It was the right call. What we are building is exactly what AQWorlds Infinity needs to tell stories at the same level of emotion and quality as its namesake. Also, we need this in order to finally translate the games into multiple languages for our friends around the world. It is partially working. But it is currently in a really messy state. How do we finish it and put it into production? First step is to clean up the broken bits. We already merged the Dialog and Cutscene systems together. Ghost built a bunch of text cinematics that we can load inside of it. We need to perfect how it works... smooth out all the awkward stuff. My design philosophy is "If it is easy to use, it will be used. If it is hard to use, people will avoid it." This is especially true of tools. I could write for hours about all of the complicated issues that we need to solve inside of the dialog system. It is basically a custom visual novel engine built around a player's AQWorlds character. If we can get the core stuff working and make it fun to use.... then Infinity will have tons and tons of killer cutscenes.
"Wait... you are still building this in Flash?"
AQWorlds Infinity has a super weird design process. First, an artist builds a weapon in Flash (now called Adobe Animate). Then, the item is added to the existing AdventureQuest Worlds and tested. Next, Warlic runs the cloud builder which discovers all new items added to AQWorlds and it attempts to auto convert them into a format that Unity can read. Then the cloud builder takes that file and publishes it for PC, Mac, Android, and Apple. Theeeeeennnn..... if you want to add animation or particle effects to an item, you import it and do your work inside Unity, and re-publish. Pretty crazy, right? To the players wondering "What will happen to AQWorlds when Infinity launches?", they can now breathe a big sigh of relief. We are designing AQWorlds first, then converting to Infinity. This is true for maps, monsters, weapons, and well... everything. This makes a lot of sense for a gazillion reasons. It is going to be a long time until Infinity catches up to the existing game. We will be re-making maps, classes, and monsters, and sagas in Infinity starting at the beginning. It will be fun. Sorta like the releases of WoW Classic or Old School Runescape. Infinity will release remastered maps waaaaaay faster than they released in the original game. We will not know exactly how much faster until we are actually doing it. But you can see why tools, like the dialog system, really matter. The better the tools, the better and faster we can remaster the stories. We have been championing the 80/20 rule. The game should be 80% the same, and 20% better. The important thing is you will finally be able to login and play AdventureQuest Worlds on your phone and tablet... and have your stuff. It has been taking a crazy long time to build, but the tech demos have looked great and been extremely promising.
On the topic of Tech Demos, we will be doing the next one as soon as combat is solid. The updated plan for Tech Demo 5 includes testing the base classes, an adventuring area (Maybe Bludrut), the loot system, new character animations, the crafting/merge system, and we made a bunch of core changes... so we need to see what all we can break XD.
I have been sitting here writing this post at the used book store smelling rows of bookshelves and vinyl LPs. It is one of my favorite places to visit for inspiration... and delicious coffee. Also, it is right next to a video game store. The team and I work on AQWorlds every single day. It is crazy how much effort goes into it daily... but how could anyone know? Back in the days of DragonFable, MechQuest, and AdventureQuest 3D's development, I would start every day by writing a post. But writing full posts w/ a promo image daily has just not proven to be feasible on my current schedule. So, I would like to try something new... Instead of making individual daily posts, how about I make a post at the start of the week and update that post every day... sorta like how I updated the "Play by Plays" that we do during tech demos & launches. Then I can report to you near-daily with the crazy stories and updates instead of writing a novel length post like this one. This would result in one post per week, filled with daily updates. The search engines will probably think I am spamming the same page over and over. Oh well, we can try it and find out.
In fact... we can start by trying it right here at the end of this post.
Check back tomorrow for the latest.
Battle on!
Artix
I like how the fog seeps under the doors in Bludrut keep.
I am in voice chat with Reens and Ghost this morning working on the Bludrut Keep's maps. There are 4 maps in total. One for each floor. They are themed after the elemental spirits which live in them. Of course.... first, you will have to get inside.
JX widened the first frame so it scrolls and there is more room for monsters. Once you find the key, you will use it to unlock the door. An opening animation will play along with a gloriously creaky door sound.
We have also been choosing Bludru's music. We will be using existing tracks.... but would like to have two different tracks, alternated on each floor. Perhaps something different for boss rooms. Also, we are asking Aranx if they can do a glow up on the Spirit Slayer NPC. Ghost changed the dummy character to make it easier to see how weapons animate.
I see the coders down in the other chat with their screens shared working on something furiously... *gulps* waiting until they break to see what they are building or fixing.
Now, it is time to review the new Bludrut Keep script. Reens merged the original story and the Guardian story together. The dungeon used to be split in half vertically.... which meant free players could only go down the first two floors. This was a very old map... built way back before we had better design for all players. This redesign will allow everyone to descend through the story and encounter the Groglurk.
Happy Friday! After the morning run with Zhoom (he is so fast... lives up to his name). During these runs we talk about the things we are working on and sometimes have a breakthrough. Went home and immediately wrote a new animation controller to solve our "how do we go both forwards and backwards" in dialog cutscenes with all the weird loaded animations. I think this is going to work. Super excited to share it with Tunik. the main event today is working on Bludrut keep... but first....
Character fixes!
Ghost, Reens, and I are still working out the subtle differences between your character in Infinity, and the one in the existing game. It is so important that we get them as close as possible. Ghost made some super subtle tweaks to the idle pose... tilting the chin slightly, moving the leg and arms a hair... it is looking really good.
The player character in the existing game has changed a few times over the past 15 years.... so there are bound to be some weirdisms. One issue we are experimenting on fixing is the outline problem. You can see it if you look at the elbot in both characters above. See that little line above the fore arm on is that little line above the elbow on the left? That line is not in the original. It is caused when the armor is exported from Flash to become pixel data. turns out the mask we use leaves this little fine line of black. Warlic & Ghost are experimenting with a few things-- with them luck. It is one of those bugs that we could live with-- but you know me. I get really caught up & obsessed on these sort of things.
Ms. Girl & the Dialogger
Mr. Guy has officially been replaced with Ms Girl. Not sure if we talked about this in a previous post, but when comparing the AQWorlds vs Infinity animations we kept noticing things just were not lining up right. Then we discovered that the AQWorlds animations were all done using a female base model instead of a male. So Ghost switched them and reanimated a large amount of the character. Nulgath had a bunch of ideas to improve the model for animation too. Including altering the belt and bottom cloth so we could better see how it lined up. All of that work is now complete.
The dialog cutscene system is heavily under construction. Posting these two pics above for posterity. Seeing what it looks like now vs. what it is going to look like when it is done should be a jaw dropper. Here you can see the text boxes are re-sizable (9-sliced) and color customizable w/ dialog bubble skins.
Meanwhile, Yorumi is coding chat improvements. We would like to have tabs for the different types of chat.... world, private messages, guild, etc. Also, I would like an option to make the chat window huge for when we are just hanging out and chatting.
JX is working on a secret sliding fireplace and other things for the remastered Bludrut keep. Despite being an older adventure, the plot is pretty dark. Yesterday we spent a lot of time debugging the map machines that makes things like the door work. You never know if the tools we make are really ready until they have been tested in the heat of battle.
(Recycling yesterday's picture because it fits)
For example, when unlocking the door to Bludrut Keep, you get the key and click on the door. But... the thing that lets you click on the door was blocking movement clicks. Whoops! The state machine that runs the door had to be re-coded to allow the devs to define when it could be clicked through or not. This is the sort of "battle testing" that I was talking about. Each thing that is battle tested becomes a reliable tool that we can use to improve every map in the game. I really do love this process.
Have a good weekend!
See you on Monday for the start of the next update post. Until then, be sure to check out this weekends new releases in AQWorlds, AdventureQuest 3D, DragonFable, EpicDuel, and more at www.Artix.com.
Wishlist AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity on Steam
