Tech Demo 6: Skull Sword & Base Classes

The test is over... here is the story!

GET YOUR SKULL SWORD

AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity Tech Demo #6 features the new Warrior, Rogue, Mage, and Healer classes. The goal is to test these new classes as you quest to forge a SKULL SWORD. Fortunately there is an undead invasion happening in town which will give you the raw materials you need to create such a terrible thing.

Tech Demo #6

• WHEN - The test has ended.
• WHERE - On Steam and also from the Account Manager
• WHO - 15th & 16th Upholders of AQWorlds (and active Members)
• HOW - While the test is live, a button for a "Play Test" version of the game will appear on Steam.
  
  

Play By Play

Live updates of this test will be posted right here.

• 8:30am - It is Tech Demo Day!
• 8:30am - Zhoom, Alina, Artix, & Asherion (Who is shadowing his "Overlord Dad" for school today) are meeting for breakfast to discuss today's Tech Demo and the the steps for AQWorlds: Infinity.
• 8:30am - Yesterday, Jongaar's new soundFX went in. We re-balanced the monsters and adjusted drop rates for the Skullsword quest. If your Warrior, Rogue, Mage, or Healer classes are in your bank in worlds, you will need to take it out of the bank of you will not be able to use the class in Infinity. We are still investigating a problem with buying classes in infinity that makes them temp. Meanwhile, Infinity levels are being reset to 1 and monsters are being nerfed with furious vengeance so you can hit them and grow in power on them.
• 10:00am - Yorumi is trying to reproduce the class issue.
• 11:30am - The minimum game version has been set to 0.0.147. Older versions of the game break catastrophically XD (As we found out when a few people snuck in.)
• 11:45am - Playtest version now available on Steam!
• 11:46am - 100 heroes online. Be sure to use the Steam version, not the old broken version.
• 11:48am - 150 heroes online. Discovered that the quest drops were staff-flagged. We are fixing and restarting the Tech Demo Server.
• 11:56am -  235 heroes online. Getting lots of love.... thank you guys! "So smoooooooth" We appreciate the bugs and issues you are reporting.
• 12:00pm - 311 heroes online. Official start time of the Tech Demo is now. We are rolling out a new version of the game client.
• 12:08pm -  385 heroes online. Game version updated to 0.0148
• 12:11pm - 412 heroes online. Going to make the public announcement on social media that the test is happening now. 
• 12:30pm- 516 heroes online and test server holding strong. Announced that if the server hold up, we will keep this tech demo for as long as possible. Take your time getting the Skullsword-- we will keep it available through the testing phase, but it will eventually go rare.
• 12:31pm - 543 heroes online. Top issues include skill buttons stop working... that is a bad one. Restarting your game fixes it for now. The second issue, is that this quest has multiple objectives with drop chances. A super positive thing, is that Infinity keeps your quest progress even when you log out. (In AQWorlds, Temp items go away when you log.) The drops from quests are not communal... players have strongly been indicating that they would like the drops to drop for everyone. It was a little bit of an "AHA!" moment.  Because it was a quest, we had never even thought of that. But the quest objectives are sorta replacing item drops... so we want to add this feature.
• 12:40pm - 620 heroes online.  Server holding steady. We are going to do a force obsolete of the old game versions shortly.
• 1:00pm - 683 heroes online. My son ran into an issue where he relogged and his quest was completely missing. He logged back in again, and it came back. O_O Super spooky. There are also some issues with player movement skills sending them to places they should not be. We are not going to have any shortage of bugs to fix.
• 1:18pm 700 heroes online. Uh oh! We officially have an issue with the quest. Some players who are turning in the quest and not getting the reward. We are investigating why. (OH! The item is going into your loot inventory)
• 1:48 SERVER RESTART
  • Forced version 0.0.148 (Update on Steam!)
  • Quest Workaround! Get the Grim Sword..... if you completed the quest,  you can now talk to the Gray Bearded Skeleton next to Grimskull to get your weapon.
  • Had a snaffu where the version numbers did not match... we fixed it and you should be able to update and log in now.

 

• 2:00pm Added Mort to Town
  
  • Mort can send you to Grimskull
  • Mort will give you the sword if you have already completed the quest.

• 2:03pm That seemed to work! Zhoom & Yorumi are working on fixing the quest reward issue. The rest of us are trying to determine the cause of why skill buttons stop working.
  
• 2:17 Hot patch to fix quest released! SERVER RESTART
  • Zhoom & Yorumi updated the server with a patch that fixes quest rewards and drops.

• 2:45pm - Obrigado for the stream Camarguetss! Good seeing you.
• 2:53pm - Just got a call from the computer repair place. Zhoom's laptop has officially died and not even their techno necromancers can revive it. A moment of silence for that cool little computer..... on the bright side, Blade Friday is upon us and that is a good time to replace it.
• 3:30pm - NOTE ON DROPS,and how testing, feedback, and discovery is a beautiful process
  • Original, the items were actual item drops. But when I informed that players were really tight on inventory space, Reens and I changed it so it was a multi-step quest instead. The quest has several quest objectives. Last night, in pre-testing, some of the mods said, "Why are these drops not shared?". To which I was initially stunned... it hit me. These may be quest objectives, but they FEEL like item drops. they basically ARE item drops. So we need to add a feature to allow quest objectives to be dropped to everyone in the room at the same time just like items. We talked about this today and will be taking action on it.
• 6:50pm - Servers looking good!
• 8:20pm - Discovered players farming the red dragon in the Lair..... apparently it is dropping stuff? I have not reviewed the drops and quests in quite a while so I am really not sure.

• 9:30pm - Great job today everyone! The tech demo is still live and the test server is holding steady. With each test the game has been improving, and was probably our best yet. The warrior, rogue, mage, and healer class got a lot of love.... that pesky skill button bug, not so much. The sword was a lot harder to get than expected. We really did not know how fast it would go, or how it would feel when a full group of people were battling the boss. The goal is to continuously make the game better and more fun. This is what I love about the process. We try something, we listen to feedback, we make changes, then we try something and repeat. Thank you for being a part of making this game. We talked one on one with a lot of players in the test. I think spending time with players in game discovers things that never seem to show up in the bug reports. I like that the devs all farmed for their Skull Swords legit. My son and I are one drop away from completing the sword each. Most of us on the team are nightowls.... so we will be keeping watch of the server through the night. Tomorrow, we will attempt to hotfix anything that we can. Thank you again to everyone who hopped up to help test today. This was a major step forward for AQWorlds:Infinity.

Friday

• 11:00am - Servers still online!
• 11:15am - Preparing for Team Meeting. A lot of issues to discuss from items that players want to see drop in the tech demo, to balance issues, to the availability of the game for players in Germany. There is also a new memory leak we need to hunt down.
• 11:30am - Team meeting
  • Captain Rhubarb turned on CloudFlare caching which should help with load times of files (for those of you on Satellite... I talked to some of you last night)
  • Zhoom is preparing a build that we will upload to the account manager site for players in Germany.
  • We are investigating the memory leak issue.
• 12:45pm - Players who cannot access Steam can now download versoin 0.0.148 of the game from the AQWorlds Account Management Site.
• 2:30pm - Server list is malfunctioning. Likely a result of the Cloudflare caching. Working on an issue and will restore login ASAP.
• 2:31pm - We are back up!
• 3:00pm - Updated login screen message to indicate that active Members are able to login and test this weekend. We added a new field to the database to add "last played Infinity" as a separate field from "last played AQWorlds". We are discussing how to add badges for testers.... we are overdue for some badges. We can technically use that last played Infinity field to know if you had played, so we can award a badge based on that. Our biggest bugs currently include the skill button bug & the new memory leak. The leak is probably related to combat-- all those flashy (a bit too flashy in some cases XD... we will be toning them down) spell FX might have bits that are not properly being gobbled up by the garbage collection. This is another great example of why testing with lots of active players is better than just a few devs. Thank you for helping us in this test!
• 5:39pm - New game client released! Improved messaging about making sure your classes are not in your bank in AQWorlds. If the classes are in the bank you will not be able to buy or equip them. Classes must be taken out of the bank in order to be used.

Saturday

• 1:00pm - Server Hotfix released to remove "Power Word Die"... whoops!

Monday (11/25/2024)

• Full Team Meeting
• Decision made to keep the Tech Demo up and attempt to live edit it this week.
• Beleen sent a survey asking players for feedback on the test.
• Made a list of all issues and distributed to the team.
• Everyone is working on the issues in order of priority.

Tuesday (11/26/2024)

• Reviewed the responses from Beleen's survey as a team. A lot of very useful insights!
• The entire team is continuing work on the list of issues, bugs, and needs from yesterday.

Wednesday (11/27/2024)

• 1:00pm - Server patch incoming! Shortly, we will be releasing a new client with fixes for the skills and memory leak along with a new quest to make a dual wield version of your Skull Sword. The quest uses all 100%+ drops. There are 206 bones in the human body, so each time you defeat a skeleton you should be getting between 180 to 206 bones.
• 2:30pm - Server offline while we apply the patches and finishing investigating a bug related to quest requirements.
• 3:05pm - Server back online!
  
  • NEW QUEST! Only for heroes who got the Skullsword from the first quest. Now you can get Dual Skull Swords! The only thing better than one Skull Sword... is wielding two!
    • Bug found - If you took the quest a second time,  and then abandoned the quest, it cleared the entire quest. X_X. So the game thinks you never completed the quest.
  • GAME FIXES!
    It is probably not 100%... but we worked on the skill button bug, memory leak, and a bunch of other things. Let us know if  you find anything that is still not working O_O.
    • Possible skill getting stuck fix
    • Helm load disabled - found a few hair assets not working or missing
    • Memory issue fix (there is still a little leak, but muuuuch better in this fix)
    • added version backwards compatibility.

 

What we need help testing

• Monster combat & stability
• Warrior Class
• Rogue Class
• Healer Class
• Mage Class
• Our first "Infinity 1st" weapon with animations & particles (The Grim Skull Sword of Vengeance)
  • Yes,  you will be able to take it back to AQWorlds
  • Yes, it will go rare... eventually. But we will need it for the next several tests at least.
• Improved character animations and art placement
• Alllll of those bugs fixed from the last test

Things we know will be broken

• Our changes to the cutscene system broke ALLLL of our cutscenes. We need to rebuilt all of them.
• We updated every NPC & Monster in the game with the new "foot print" since the last release. Be on the look out for strangely acting monsters.
• Helms. We are fixing the paint masks and add a bunch of stuff to make head replacements work properly (curse you unpredictable color customization layers!)

Tech Demo Playtest to be on... STEAM!

Finally! We will be running the next Tech Demo on Steam. This means no more downloading & unzipping files from the account site. Steam offers the ability to run a special "Playtest" version of the game. We can turn this version on and off at will. 7 of you somehow managed to spot and add it while I was testing it the other day. (How are you so fast!?) Because we are doing this without giving out Steam Keys, it does create some interesting problems. Here is everything you need to know....

Steam Playtest

• A button will appear on our Steam Page when the play test is available.
• That button will let you get and play this special version of Infinity like any other game on steam.
• Yes, you will need a steam account. (You already have one for AdventureQuest 3D, right?)
• Literally anyone in the world will be able to see and download it.... (this is not great, but with proper explanation it is acceptable)
• But you need an existing AQWorlds account to login (Character creation is disabled in Infinity currently)
• ...and only Upholders from 2023, 2024, and Members will be able to see or log into active Tech Demo servers.
• One the Tech Demo ends, the playtest version will dissapear from Steam and your library. (Until the next one)
• That is how it works.

The biggest advantage of using Steam, is that it will automatically update you to the latest version of the game. We will be making a lot of changes. This will let us to continue running the test without asking you to re-download a gazzillion zip files like in previous tests.

Thank you

Battle on!
Artix

• #aq2d
• #aqw
• #infinity
• #steam

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