AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Saturday, August 10, 2024
Kicking off our full 1st week of daily updates as we make progress on AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity - a rebuild of the game that will allow you to log your existing character on phones, tablets, and computers.
Be sure to Wishlist it on Steam.
Monday is the big "Full AQWorlds Team" meeting. We do it every week. We cover what we accomplished during the last week and what we are working to accomplish this week. In the early days I had a suuuuper baaad reputation for talking so much that meetings went hours overtime. (OK, I still have that reputation.) But I have been getting better! (Sorta...)
So here is what is cooking...
Smart NPCs
Yorumi (coder) is currently adding requirements to the NPCs. This will allow us to determine when NPCs appear or not. It is super useful for storytelling because it will let an NPC move around the map with you as you progress.
Combat Resumes
Spider (coder) is back and working with Immortal Joe on the four base classes. Nulgath (animator) is animating some of the Mage's FX.
Dialog Cutscenes
Tunik (coder) continues working on the dialog system. He got the color customizable speech bubbles working. We are aiming to start putting Bludrut cutscenes into it on Wednesday. This will be "battle testing" it. So we expect to break a lot of stuff... then fix it and make it awesome.
Cloud Builder & Helmets
Warlic (coder) is getting ready to try another Android publish using our cloud builder. Also he is going to work with Spider on converting all of the helmets. Like the hairs, helmets are super complicated. This is because they have color customizable ears and hair and also other art in them. #WishThemLuck
Ruffle
Captain Rhubarb (database admin, coder) joined us to talk about a new flow for exporting assets. After we finish all of the mass conversions... we are going to want a new way of staying up to date with AQWorld's weekly releases. Especially the items.
BludrutKeep
Reens (content lead), Ghost (animator), J6 (artist), Jongaar (sound) and I are working on the 4 separate maps that make up the horror filled Bludrut Keep. We reviewed the script for the first floor and are about to start adding the quests with placeholders for the cutscenes.
The next tech demo will take place as soon as the classes and dungeon are ready for testing.
Battle on!
Artix
"Bludrut Keep-on Truck'n!"
Yoshino (AQWorld's "Stoof Do'er") joined us at our morning sync to talk about the future of running releases at the same time. As you may know, Yoshino semi-recently became AQWorld's assistant game lead. This means Yoshino works with Alina to build the releases including maps, items, armors, monsters... and everything else that is required to make the weekly releases live. Yoshino took over for Reens when she shifted onto Infinity. They are two of the most responsible, hard working, and dependable people I have had the honor of working with. We talked about ways to simultaneously release items, armors, and weapons in both the games once we launch. It is going to be challenging. So tomorrow I am going to take all the things we talked about to Warlic and see what sort of magic he can whip up.
We ran into some weird issues today... (actually, every day.) Spawn commands have been breaking the map, monsters stopped being clickable if they are behind the text (like the image above), and monsters started teleporting randomly (probably because of the combat changes in progress.) Ghost, Reens, J6 and I are making the 1st floor of Bludrut Keep work. We also found a few monsters that were not yet redrawn or animated for the other floors... but we think we will swap some of those monsters out for more recreationally horror-inducing ones.
The Groglurk is looking very... grogly and lurky!
Bludrut Keep first appeared in the original AdventureQuest. The original.... original.... AdventureQuest. It was one of our first multiple path dungeons. It featured a monster called the Groglurk at the bottom.
Want to see what the original looked like?
Flash art at its peak.
There was not a lot of lore about the dungeon nor the Groglurk (I think) when recreated it in AQWorlds. A few years later, we wrote a mid-week release featuring the SpiritHunter Veddrian. Then, a few years later when writing the Throne of Darkness Saga we added a big twist about the history of this Keep.
No spoilers other than this picture from Throne of Darkness. #IfYouKnowYouKnow
We merged all three of these things together like the ingredients of a delicious cake. Bludrut will not ruin anything for those of you who have not played through Throne of Darkness in AQWorlds yet (you should-- we are doing the 13 Lords of Chaos first, so it will be a long time before we convert this saga in Infinity). But there will now be a few hints that tie the history of this place together.
Today, Tunik and I (after working with Reens on some particle issues in the cutscene system) spent a lot of time working on how we will synchronize animations and dialogs in the cutscenes. I am not sure I am overstate the amount of complexity going into this to make it "simple".
Beach Day!
...just kidding.
It is work on the map uploader bug with Captain Rhubarb in the rain day. No sunscreen required. As I type this we are trying to "unbreak" some new feature that we put in to solve other problems. It is like a waterfall of misfortune.
No worries. We activated the Warlic symbol.
Also... there was ghost stuff.
Aranx did a "glow up" of some older Bludrut Keep art including this girl.
The original is on the left, and the new is on the right.
Some of the armor shading work is subtle... but those highlights on the edges of the armor really pop now.
This follows our guiding light... our rule... of 80% the same and 20% better.
"Everything is perfectly fine here... "
Reens has been using the new art to try to build cutscenes in the Dialogger. I did mention we were battle testing that dialog cutscene system, right? We are battle testing it so good that it is back down for repairs. The particle systems are breaking catastrophically. This is because cutscenes move game objects into the user interface layer... where positions and scales are twilight zone weird. Also, in the pic above you can see our new Z-ordering method working.... perfectly backwards. We are one bug away from this game becoming a full-on M.C. Escher Drawing.
It may look pretty rough... but this is the fun part of making games.
Things always breaks the worst... when you are gutting out all the duct taped, gum, and strung together hacks to make the real system.
(You have heard me say this a few times before... so I know you already know this. But there are some folks who might be joining us for the first time. Thought we should share that with them too.)
Meanwhile, one of our Cloud builder hard drives failed at the lab. That is why this week's AdventureQuest 3D release was delayed a day. We rigged up a reaaallly old machine to carry the load of the missing machine until the new one arrives.
What is IT?
We had completely removed IT out of the script. But looking at IT after IT was redrawn, I am sorta thinking we need IT. What do you think? Keep IT or drop IT? Should IT go in the Bludrut release? Let me know.
I did end up taking the kids to the beach.... we left after work and ran on the sand along the edge of the water at sundown. Then we made sand castles and practiced martial arts kickboxing sets. There is no such thing as work/life balance. The secret is to always be strategically out of balance. Take the opportunities that present themselves.... even if it was a joke at the start of your update post that turned out to be a good idea... so you never regret the journey.
Happy Friday!
We did it! 5/5. Our first solid week of daily update posts since the "good ol' days"... back when I did it nearly ever week day for about a decade. Those were fun times. Those were also a little bit different times. Back then... the world seemed to be a little less obsessed with recreational rage. Our news and social media accounts are now mostly angertainment. Everyone is trying to get us to watch their videos by baiting us with something that makes us mad. In all fairness, we click on it and comment on it. It works. So it is hard to blame them.Growth has caused me to change a lot too. I am not the same person I was 5 years ago. (None of us should be.) Sure, I still make puns, video games, and embarrassing typos. But I have evolved through my mistakes, becoming more transparent, grounded, and accountable. These Infinity posts are fun, but they primarily focus is on the facts of our game's development process. There is not a lot of hype and minimal exaggeration-- replacing realism with overenthusiastic optimism. If you appreciate this way of communicating with you, I would love it if you let me know. In today's online world, everyone is quick to point out anything that is wrong, but very few people point out something that is right.
Because after reading the posts, it sounds like you definitely want IT to be in the Bludrut release. So be it.
And what IT is not.... is a...
Giant Twilly?
Is that Moglin life sized?
This was a surprise. Here is the story. The person who packs and ships HeroMart goodies is out for a while due to a scheduled medical procedure. So Stryche drove down the East coast (thought what was left of that tropical storm) to come cover for her until she heals. We asked him to join us for dinner tonight and he showed up with this-- a cuddly prototype for a life sized Twilly. My daughter asked "Who gets to keep the prototype?" I gave her a stern look for asking such a silly thing... "You have to earn it through trial by combat."
Response to player question
A player on Discord asked if Bludrut Keep was going to be half free and half member-only like the current one. We are happy to let them (and you) know that the entire Bludrut story which spans all 4 levels will be available for ALL players. Bonus member-only content will not block the main story. Bludrut Keep was released early days of the existing AQWorlds.... back before our level design philosophy improved. Glad we have this opportunity to fix it now.
Cutscene chaos
Reens has been adding the colored mist to the floors (each floor has a distinct color) and rigging up the monsters and quests. Each time something breaks, we call in the coders to help fix it. The dialog cutscene system ran into a super bad one. No matter what Reens did, she could not save her new cutscene to the database. Captain Rhubarb and I discovered that our security settings prevented any special characters from being posted to the server. This included blocking simple things like the <b>BOLD</b> tags. Once we knew the problem, it was quick to fix. We ran into an issue where someone uploaded a new cutscene animation... but we had no way of knowing what the original file was. (The animation was named something different than the source file.) So we added new fields to the database to track where the source files of our maps and cutscenes are located. We need to do this for monsters, items, and other things too.
Combat progress
This week has been all about porting the base classes (warrior, rogue, mage, healer) to Infinity. Spider is experimenting with Joe on a skill queuing system... and getting animations to to cancel each other. If a more important combat animation can cancel and take over... it will feel more like the existing AQWorlds. Nulgath has been working on animations and animation improvements. They are in the middle of a bunch of changes and I have not seen the latest. I did see the new damage pop ups in action and it looks great. They made distinct styles for hits, crits, dodges, and other attacks. Next week we will do an art pass w/ Ghoat & J6. I am going to wait until we get something semi-final before posting a GIF.
We have been working on these core features for a few weeks now. The plan remains the same. As soon as the classes are ready and Bludrut is up, we will start the next Tech Demo to test it.
Have an incredible weekend!
Be sure to check out all the new weekly releases that just went live at...
Battle on!
Artix
P.S. The cat onsies in AdventureQuest 3D are... adorable.
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