AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Wednesday, June 26, 2024
The next AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity Tech Demo is moved to next week to give us time to work out class and combat issues. It will include the new Banshee scream FX, Monster behaviors (prototype system), and an uncertain number of combat and class experiments.
Check out the Banshee's scream...
"I scream, you scream, we all scream for.... the banshee to stop making us dizzy with that new screen-warping effect"
Lodrian (from EpicDuel) is one of the devs from other games who has been joining to learn, help, and prepare for converting our other games in the future. What I love about the team is how everyone brings their skills to raise the bar. Lodrian, Ghost, & Nulgath have begun adding some interesting shaders to monsters. The first one we will be battling is the Siren. The crew is experimenting adding other FX to the monsters.... sticking to our core goal of "Keep the the same, but make it a little better."
Tunik (Infinity's UI Coder) has undertaken a pretty big task with our cinematic and dialog system. We are *gulps* merging them. After realizing that we had two very different systems that both needed the ability to support different languages, special animations, and quests... we decided to bite the bullet and merge the two systems together. Now, the dialog system (you may remember us talking about it in previous posts as "The Dialogger") will control everything. Telling stories through cutscenes is an important part of AQWorlds... and will continue to be in Infinity. The dialog system allows the devs to build "talkie" cutscenes as fast as they can type. Once merged, it will also allow the game to load bundles of animation, art, and special fx that seamlessly play... the same way AQWorlds players are used to. There is one significant improvement in this new system. We will be able to bundle a bunch of re-usable stuff into a single file. It is my hope that this will make it possible to load a single file which contains everything that is needed for the cutscenes in a saga. In the existing AQWorlds, every cutscene is a seperate file-- and if it uses the same backgrounds, art, and animation, then it is duplicated in every file. I really like the idea of a single, slightly larger file that once loaded-- will make the rest of your adventure super fast.
We have some very talented and passionate team members working on improving combat for AQWorlds: Infinity. Now, if we could just get them all to agree on which improvements XD. Our philosophy is "make everything the same, but a little better" but there is also "if we can do something REALLY cool... experiment and try it fast!" You saw this when we tried completely removing Auto Attack during the last test. It is tempting to do really ambitious things when we are in a situation like this. We also want to release as soon as possible. So there is not much time for too much experimentation. There are three major groups of players we must really focus on serving.
Let immortal combat... begin!
Some highlights from today's meeting include adding elements to the game (fire, ice, darkness, energy, posion, etc), adding special weapon animations for different types of weapons, making it so major skills (and ones that are aimed using actual position) never miss if they hit the monster's hit box, and demystifying stats by putting things like attack power, magic power, and crit % on the items instead of using STR, DEX, WIS, END and all the strange formulas that obfuscates how the game actually calculates damage. As of this post we are working on locking down a final list of the Infinity's stats.
The final thing I wanted to share with you today was Spider's work on the tool which will allow us to give monsters skills, special attacks, and special behaviors. He has the prototype version working now. From the outside, it looks like monsters are just attacking the same way they used to. But under the hood they are now ready to be wired up to do.... anything. In the talks with the crew there are so many things they wanted to do in AQWorlds that were just not possible. But we will now be able to do them in Infinity. If there is time before the next test, the crew will try to do a test with the Red Dragon to make it do something weird. We all agree that the animations, movement, and hit sounds need to be perfectly synced up first. Jongaar is currently working on a few different sound fxs for swings and hits to give this version of the game more variety.
That is all for now.
Battle on!
Artix & the AQW: Infinity Team
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