AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Friday, August 16, 2024
Thank you for the feedback on last week's daily AdventureQuest Worlds Infinity posts. The encore starts now!
Full team meeting day! It was... unexpectedly filled with all sorts of good news.
That is all for today.... check back for the next excisting episode of AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity Z! (Which you definitely wishlisted on Steam by now.)
Mortal .COM Bat
Had a bit of a late start on Infinity today, so not sure what all of the coders are up to. But got to see the combat stuff Immortal Joe and Spider have been working on! It is looking smoooooooooooth. Those damage text pop ups are looking good too. We did not finalize the colors and animation yet. Going to ask Ghost if he can join us tomorrow to lend his expertise on making it pop. We did find a number of edge-case combat bugs today. We made a list and are shaking the can of bug spray as you read this.
Die-all-logger
If you have been reading these posts, you already know that our dialog system (The Dialogger) has achieved the status of... "scope creep hell." What started as a simple visual-novel-style dialog system turned into "Hey, how about we make it do everything Flash can, and also translation, and also a visual novel engine, and maybe it should be able to run mini games, and how about we connect it to our fridge so it can tell us how many cans of caffeine are in there..... cause we are going to need ALL OF THEM. X_X. Tunik (coder) has held up well under the pressure-- and has been delivering. That being said, it is still in its infancy..... you know, pretty bare bones. But as of this morning he finished converting all of the text to the new system and added a file menu. One neat feature is the Dialogger can save cutscenes as plan text files locally... or connect to the database and add them straight to the game. I am not making any promises, but it is conceivable that we could release a version of this for players to make cutscenes in the distant future. It would need a lot of work to be more user friendly... but it is an interesting thing to think about. Can you imagine things like Beleen running a "Make your own cutscene contest!" Tunik walked me through the project and we are now starting to clean up the user interface. I will be working on that until ~midnight tonight. Tomorrow we are going to try to bring everything together to get a playable version of Bludrut up. Oh... and there is a bug where any class you log out of Infinity with will revert to rank 0 when you log into the normal AdventureQuest Worlds. We miiiiiiight need to fix that before the Tech Demo.
"Swing batter, batter!"
(Here is that GIF I promised you.)
Awwwwwwww yeah!
We were testing the damage popups and I asked Immortal Joe if he could make the cooldown of the normal attack to like 0.1 seconds. Mwahahaha. I like how the hits and crits are easy to distinguish, look fun... and fly out of the monsters like you are knocking their teeth out.
We created custom text effects for hit, crit, heal, heal crit, dodge, miss, damage over time, heal over time, and auras. I personally cannot wait for the auras to go in. Right now they are just simple yellow text. Now they will pop a bit and feel like you are casting a skill.
The death timing is just a hair off though.... you can see the Skeleton is dying when my attack starts, not when the hit connects. We are working on that tonight.
... I really wanted to talk about NES stuff this time. But there is too much to do. So, how about we talk about it next week? If I sent you a ROM of my "best game" from that game jam would you play it?
"Finding Doory"
It is nice seeing the map machines in action. These are the things that handle interactive objects... like the door to Bludrut Keep above. The creaking sound Jongaar implemented is perfect. The animation shown above, not so much. No worries. We already fixed it. We started a slow crawl run through of the first quests in Bludrut keep. There were a lot of problems. The new "auto quest turn-in" feature was not working as imagined. It was causing the NPC to popup on the screen unexpectedly, blocking everything. So we are re-coding how that works. The dialog system completely broke in the game. But just in the game, not the dialog editor. We lost over an hour just investigating why. We encountered a few weird UI problems. This included the text shifting around strangely when you can insta-travel to the map where a quest takes place. Also, a few quest flow issues. For example... how do you not spoil what is going to happen in the next room when you need to tell the player what to do next? In the existing AQWorlds you would just do a thing and then talk to the NPC. But talking to the NPC after every quest is not really needed most of the time. So when you quest in Infinity, some quests will just complete and automatically put you on the next one. (And it will do it better as of tomorrow.) Quests have a title and can have as many objectives as needed. The best solution for our "how do you have quests to go to new places without spoilers" is simply to add more quests. For the first time today Reens added a new quest into them middle of an existing quest chain... and it worked!
The real game runs a lot faster and smoother than these Animated GIFs
Do you see the quest (with the quest giver's face) in the upper right? That is your currently tracked quest. You can click on it from anywhere to bring up the NPC. Correct me if I am wrong, but the first time we did this in the original game was in the Living Dungeon release. AQWorlds map designers have been using things like this a lot because it is so much better for players than always having to run back to the NPCs. This version in Infinity is a polished version that all quests will use. Josh Strife Hayes is going to be dissapointed that are buttons are not as inconsistant as in previous games. Makes me sorta want to write a random button variant generator that changes and moves the buttons a bit :D
The Horrors of the Customizable Player Dummy
Animating the player in Infinity has become hard mode. Like... really, really, really hard mode. At some point in the last two months, the customizable player dummy got messed up. We are not entirely sure what issue caused it yet. Maybe it was that 2D bone system that we were using that got dropped, or maybe something happened when we switched to the female model. Not sure yet. But tomorrow, we are going to find out! Calling an emergency meeting with Nulgath & Ghost (the only two people who animate the player) and the coders. This issue impacts class skills, cutscenes, emotes, and specially designed monsters with customizable parts.
"Ultra Hats off to ya!"
Spider finished the work on the helm converter and sent it to Warlic. Warlic will do a could build to make all of the hats. It was exciting to hear that he finished it so quickly. I said, "Too bad there were not any embarrassing stories." He said, "Oh, there is one." I replied, "What happened?" Spider laughed and said, "The Ultra Hats were so big that they exceeded the maximum texture size and crashed the cloud builder."
#UltraHatTality!
Tomorrow we are going to try to get dialog cutscenes functioning in Bludrut keep, a cinematic cutscene control working, and a solution for the player dummy.
"Best day of the week!"
Breaking Blud
While writing this, Ghost, Reens, Tunik, Warlic, and I are (SORTA) doing a special type of BludRut Keep dungeon run.... all of the monsters are bugs. Code bugs. We are fighting through the release one door at a time. Actually, just one door. Full transparency, we are just trying to get through the quests to pass the first door. I have seen code horrors that were not meant for human eyes! It feels like eons have past since yesterday. I assume the things we are fixing were all mentioned in yesterdays post.
A little drama w/ Annie Maytion
We started the day addressing the player animation issue. The fix... turned out to be so simple that if it is true, everyone is going to immediately stop talking about it and quietly pretend it never happened. #CrossYouFingersThatThisIsTrueBecauseItReallyWouldBeTheBestOutcome.
How did we do this week?
7.5/10 - As my Father always said, "Still better than a sharp stick in the eye."
We did not finish the dungeon and run a surprise test, but we did make major progress on combat, cutscenes, and quests. So our goal will stay the same. We will finish Bludrut with quests, monsters, and cutscenes then run a tech demo to test it.
Have a fun and adventure filled weekend.
Check out the new releases that just went live in AdventureQuest Worlds, AdventureQuest 3D, DragonFable, and all of the games at www.Artix.com
