AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Hey! Good to see you. Writing to you from the Secret Underground Lab today! (Yes, the same one) Spider is here too. He flew in this week to work on Infinity with us in person.
I found my old coffee mug...
In today's post, I will share with you the latest on AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity's combat, chat, cutscenes, and leveling. My sincerest apologies for not posting more frequent updates. Although, if we did, it would sound like we were working on the same things every single day. Which... would be pretty accurate.
Beware of box corpses...
There is no such thing as "The Cloud"... it is just someone else's computer.
We bought four 4 new computers for our in-house, AQWorlds Infinity Cloud Builder Farm! Sounds super fancy. It is like... 50% fancy. Let me show you. The cloud build farm is a custom setup that Warlic put together. We have a room full of computers here that has just one job... sit there and wait for Devs to upload new weapons, armors, maps, cutscenes, and monsters. Also in this room is my old Shonen Jump collection...
Each server in this cloud farm room is responsible for converting the files into a format that can be used on different devices. Specifically Android, iOS, Mac, & Windows. So, one of the machine's full time job is just converting monsters and weapons to Android for example.
We needed 4 more for AQWorlds Infinity...
These computers just need to have fast processors, a solid state drive, and lots and lots of RAM. I love buying computers. Even servers. I dunno, there is something about researching tech stuff that fills me with wonder and possibility. Do you get that too? We did not go overboard with these machines... but I did double the space & memory that Zhoom requested. But once we figure out how to fit the server hamsters inside them, these machines will handle their Infinity duties for a long time. (The old machines nearly died trying to import just Infinity's items.) Once we are up and working, it will be time to start exporting Infinity tests for Android again.
NOTE: These are not our game servers. We have a caged rack of real servers at a data-center in Texas.
If you do not think combat is an important part of the game... fight me!
Spider and Immortal Joe have been making improvements and changes to combat. There are now two versions of every class. A normal version (which will be the version you use if you are coming from AQWorlds) and an Infinity version of the class that you can unlock through game-play. For example, there is Warrior, and also Infinity Warrior. The 4 base classes have been created: Warrior, Mage, Rogue, Healer and also the Infinity version of each.
Two weeks ago or so massive changes were made to combat and the enhancement system. We are still eyeball deep in changing the rest of the game to match it.
The new classes use a lot of hitbox detection. But the hitboxes built into the monsters were designed for clicking on them with your mouse or finger. So if you swing a weapon you could hit a monster above or below or behind you by accident. (It was happening a lot in testing.) So we are experimenting with floor based shapes. As a player you would not actually see them. But when you swing your sword forward, you will hit the thing in front of you.
Meanwhile, testing continues in the Tower of Leveling...
Despite specifically saying "Tower of Leveling" it is actually a dungeon that goes down. Every floor is a level. It goes down for 100 levels. Erm. At least... it will. Right now I think only the first 10 are open. Each floor contains an assortment of monsters of that level. For example: In the scene above, the Sneevil is a trash mob, the frogzard is a normal mob, and the zardman is a mini-boss.
This allows us to quickly move between levels and test the classes. You know, see things like if we can manage to fight a monster that is a higher level than us. The old stats were pretty rough. We got destroyed by monsters just 5 levels above us. In some games that would be good thing. Not so much in AQWorlds. Our world needs a lot of freedom for exploration and also for seasonal events like Mogloween and Frostvale... and we are not using scaling in this game. So we need a sweet spot around level 30-ish where you can do a lot of things and fight monsters higher and lower than you. We will use the tower of leveling to figure that out.
"Hey, Sir Fainal, is it a little breezy here, or is it just me?"
Starting at level 1 over and over..... I do not want to tell you how many times the Frogzards in there have killed me.
There are still quite a lot of bugs in Infinity that we are fighting through. Not going to bore you with this... but, if I had a nickle for every time chat broke on me, I would have.... uh... a really big jar of nickles. And I had a really big jar of nickles, I would wait 100 years until they stopped making nickles out of nickle and sell the nickles for like two or three times what it is worth. So, we are talking like three jars worth of nickles. Follow me for more investing advice.
I hopped on AQWorlds the other night....
We have been stuck on combat and cutscenes for... ever X_X. The cutscene tools are working, it is just taking a while to make the actual cutscenes. This was a big miscalculation on my part. In AQWorlds we normally make one cinematic cutscene a week. Bludrut has quite a few and they are harder to make while we are still debugging the tools. I am not so much worried about Bludrut, but what this means for converting all of the cutscenes in the game. Maps and monsters are super smooth at this point. Quests & APOPS are easy. Combat is a fixed set of fixes and improvements and once done, it is just done. But cutscenes will be our chokepoint... the place where we get stuck. In all fairness, AQWorlds uses over a decade worth of assets that we created to speed up the process. We will have to rebuild those in Unity as we go.
In the next update post I would LOOOOOOVE to be posting something like "The Tech Demo is schedule for...."
Cross your fingers, talons, and tentacles for us.
And thank you for the encouragement and support you have been sending our way. It has helped a lot as we brave the quagmire we are fighting through to reach the next tech demo.
Battle on!
Artix
