AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Saturday, August 31, 2024
This week's daily AdventureQuest Words: Infinity MMORPG update posts are made out of 100% unnatural, in-organic pixels.
Wooohooo! We started the week with our full team meeting. Boy, oh boy, do we have some good news from over the weekend.
Nugath animated a dragon as seen in the GIF above.
As stated in our previous update posts, the team is working on Bludrut Keep's map, quests, cutscenes, monsters, interactive machines, & music. Our goal is to finish and release a tech demo showing off the game.
Spider & Immortal Joe fixed the monster death bug and a bunch of the other stuff we reported last week! We are starting an internal test of Warrior, Rogue, Mage, and Healer tomorrow to get them ready for the next tech demo. We anticipate some creepy crawly bugs.... #ShakesBugSpray ...but we are ready.
Tunik also fixed a bunch of things! Actors in the cutscene were moved out of the UI layer and their particles now work properly. He also solved the Z-ordering bug. Furthermore, the cinematic cutscene feature has been added too! We need to test it all. But this is huge. Reens is going to start creating the new cutscenes for floor 1 of Bludrut keep. Side note: We need to go through every monster and npc that has been converted so far and set the particle systems to use "local space". This is required to make them scale properly. Not hard to do. But it is some busy work.
Jongaar sent us the 1st Bludrut song. He is working on floor #2 now. We met about how to handle multiple music tracks in a single map today. You will be relieved to know that AQWorlds Infinity has a proper music & soundFX system. You can toggle and change the volume of music and sounds. There is no weird button bolted into the top middle of every map like in the original game X_X. Songs are stored separately, (they were stored in the map files of the original game). This means music can be reused without increasing the filesize of the game.
The final good news for today involve those two new quest objective types that Warlic was working on. Both are now finished! This includes the objectives...
Oh man, I wish we had these in AdventureQuest 3D. Hindsight being 20/24 it seems so simple.... these two objective types fix so many quest flow issues. Reens is going to use these to smooth out the Bludrut quests today and tomorrow.
Right now (as I am writing this) I am sitting in voice chat with Reens and Warlic as they investigate a cutscene loading issue. We need cutscenes to be able to play when you enter a new map for the first time. This is common at the start of story sagas. An annoying issue that happens in a lot of games (even World of Warcraft) is sometimes you see a frame or two of the map you are loading into before the screen goes black and then loads the cutcene. No peeking allowed! We are fixing the flow so cutscenes smoothly play without this issue.
Yorumi's new feature allows devs to show or hide NPCs based on.... well, anything. Maybe an NPC only shows up if you are on a certain part of a quest. Or perhaps a Moglin with a shop will only appear if you are holding a specific weapon or equipped a certain hat. That was a pretty weird example. But it is extremely useful to be able to control when you do, and do not see an NPC during a story. It also allows us to move the NPC around with you as you go through a story. Yorumi says the new feature is working. We still need to test it. Then Yorumi wants to build a better interface.... sorta like the one we now have in AQ3D. Which is a super powerful tool for setting which monsters and NPCs spawn on a single pad.
Whew... now THAT was a good Monday update. The goal this week is to finish everything we started last week. Bludrut Keep, we are coming for you!
See you in each of our daily updates below.
Music to my Vulcan ears
At the bottom of today's entry is a sneak peek of Jongaar's music for floor #1 of Bludrut Keep.
But first...
Class Testing
To prep for the next Tech Demo, our internal testers are bug hunting the four starter classes today. The bug list is a weeeeee bit longer than anticipated. But there are very few game breaking things on there and that is good. Very good.
This next Tech Demo is taking so long that all the players are going bald!
Actually, the bald thing is a helm/hair loading issue. We will investigate and dispense the hair tonic remedy as needed.
The case of the dissapearing slime
This is perhaps one of the most puzzling bugs encountered in todays test. Our slime monster, which has been working since day one.... is suddenly vanishing after you hit it once. It is not dead. It still has HP. Other players can see it. Technically, it is still attacking you. The two strange clues are that after it plays its hit animation, it moves to a weird location. Second, is that it is not actually dead. This indicates some sort of animation problem. #Spooky
Music time
As promised, for #TunesDay here is a sneak peek of Jongaar's new song for floor #1 of Bludrut Keep! (Accidentally posted it on my personal account. Jongaar said it was fine. He is such an awesome person, and equally awesome musician.)
Enjoy!
Artix
Oooh.... Mage's Fireball is looking better and better!
Hey guys! Yesterday's internal testing ended up being pretty great. We have a lot of stuff to fix. But the team has already been on fire today knocking out the issues that were discovered. This test was centered I had considered writing up a summary for you... and then thought, eh, what if I just shared the feedback doc? So here you go!
LEAKED! Internal Testing Feedback
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14pFEzijs9ivhu57Wa7ruhZHevb8qB4XdOgN3wdz0mAU
O_O
What is good about this list, is it contains a very concise list of things that will make Infinity's core combat "Alpha Ready". Our plan is still to do a tech demo when combat & Bludrut keep is ready for showtime.
Some people ask, "Why do you always say '...what is good about this, is'" -- and honestly, it is an extremely good question to ask yourself. It works for any situation, especially the sludgy tough ones. It is really easy to focus on the negative. Really easy. One glance at social media about any topic will prove this. But those who want to achieve their goals, passions, and life's ambitions must aim their focus on there they are going. Focusing only the negative leads to getting stuck or quitting. If you are going somewhere, you must know where you are going and be 100% committed to getting there no matter what. Do not misunderstand my words. I am not suggesting to detach from reality. A friend once wisely said "See things as bad as they are, but not worse." By simply asking yourself "what is good about this?" or "what COULD be good about this?" changes your focus. Instead of staring at a mountain sized heap of work and feeling overwhelmed... you look at the same thing with eyes that are looking for the answer to "what good will come out of completing this?" I use this a lot. It is how I made it through the challenges that sprang up building AdventureQuest, DragonFable, MechQuest, AdventureQuest 3D, and every other game, toy, print, or other crazy project I have had the opportunity to lead. I like the saying, "You may see me struggle, but you will never see me quit." Not sure who might benefit from this story, but I hope some part of this serves you.
As for the bug list posted above... it is really not that bad. High in quantity, but the difficulty is low compared to the things we have to solve to get to this point. The doc posted will not have real-time fixes posted. If someone would be so kind as to remind me in a few days, I can copy over the live version of the doc periodically to update you on the progress.
P.S. Oh, since it is #WedNESDay
Thank you to Goldraven for making and posting this video playing Pizza Portals.... super cool! You can download the game from the link in last Wednesday's AQWorlds Infinity post. If you found a good NES emulator for your phone or computer and are into this, I suggest to check out the game I made for a game jam a few years ago called...
The Secret of NecroNancy - An undead summoning puzzle platformer about a girl trying to bring her family back together-- with the pages of the Necronomicon.
"AvengeDevelopers assemble!"
Hey guys! I have a great idea. What do you say we emergency restructure every single monster that we have already converted into Infinity....?
*crickets*
Awesome! Time to get started.
In the picture above you can see the anatomy of an AQWorlds Infinity monster. It has those 2D bones and various hit and attach points. It also has a bunch of colliders that are not visible in this pic. After reviewing combat & animation with Spider, Warlic, and Immortal Joe we realized that animators like Ghost, Nulgath, and Lodrian really do need to animate the shadows. So we created a new gameobject called a "FootprintRing". These FootprintRings define the shape a monster takes up on the floor. We used to use the shadows for this. But because the shadows are sometimes animated (like you see in flying monsters where they bob up and down) or move to the right or left like when the drow attacks... this new FootprintRing is a far better solution.
While we are updating the monsters we are also taking the time to fix a bunch of things that may not be correct on old monsters and templates. To show you what we are doing and checking, here is the Google Doc I sent the team. This one does not have any names, so I am not accidentally outing any of the guest testers! #SorryAboutThat
Infinity Monsters & NPCs Update CheckList
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bIizQBYS2uTjL4OLNAj20bUxjlwjvF0ImAlae77c8OY
We took the list of monsters.... Reens started at the top, Ghost started at the bottom, and I did the NPCs. Send us haste potions.
Hair today.... gone tomorrow
Do you see that little white edge on Ghosts hair in the screenshot above? We took a closer look at it today and discovered that one of the more fancy ways AQWorlds artists have been making hair seems to be leading to this situation. Warlic is now spiraling down the rabbit hole to figure it out why. The shader that Xero (from AdventureQuest 3D) helped us make might hold clue.
Other news off the top of my head
On the topic of helms-- Warlic is wearing the only working helm in Infinity... currently. He is getting ready to get helms working the moment we stop mercilessly hurling bugs at him.
"Your fireball is smol!"
I saw a player comment that said, and I incorrectly quote, "Was bragging about Mage's Fireball in Infinity when it was smaller than the one in AQWorlds." There are two things I would like to share about this.
#1. "Oooh.... Mage's Fireball is looking better and better!" is not a brag. That is just encouraging enthusiasm. THIS would be a brag....
"HEYOOO! INFINITY'S FIREBALL IS LIKE BETTER THAN THE SUN! NO CAP. Other game's fireballs cry and extinguish themselves when they see how lit our huge flaming balls of justice are! If other games cannot take the heat, stay out of the Hell Mage's Kitchen!"
#2. Fixed it.
#FireThrowBackThursdays
See you tomorrow!
Best Day of the week!
Woah! Ghost & Reens finished adding the FootprintRings to all of the monsters before the 11:30am sync up today. O_O Amazing job guys!
Spider knocked out some of the combat issues already!
Warlic (With Xero and Spider's help I assume) fixed the hair issue!
Pretty good to end the week on a few major wins. We will not know everything that was accomplished until the Monday sync up. Er, wait... Monday is a holiday here in the United States. So make that a Tuesday sync. Our next update post will start on Tuesday too, then.
Miss the previous AQWorlds Infinity update postes? Read them here.
Have an awesome weekend!
Be sure to check out all of the Artix Entertainment Weekly Game Releases on www.Artix.com
BATTLE ON!
Artix
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