AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Sunday, September 8, 2024
This week's daily AdventureQuest Words: Infinity MMORPG update posts are brought to you by the letters O.M.G.
Holiday.... #NothingToSeeHereMoveOn
Per usual, we started the week off with a full AQWorlds Infinity team sync-up. We made some unexpected progress over our 3-day weekend. I am going to dump everything below in quick top skim bullet points.
Class Skill Icons
Combat
Dialog Cutscenes
Bludrut Map (Quests & Machines)
"Shaders... am I right?
RUH ROH....
We updated the shaders O_O
"Did you try turning it off and back on again?"
... this actually fixed it. 
...and I was all ears about it.
Hair
Monster Footprints
NPC Spawn Editor
Note: Several of the bugs mentioned above have already been fixed and are in testing.
See you tomorrow!
"Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble..."
The AQWorlds Infinity team was working on Mage spell FX, combat, and Bludrut today. But.... I will not have any details until tomorrow. That is because I was not there today. O_O. #ToBecontinued
"Third time's the charm"
Investigator: Hey, Artix! Where were you yesterday?
Artix: I went to an undisclosed location to plan out the next 3 months of Artix Entertainment games, projects, and releases with Alina.
Investigator: So, you took your laptop to that old book & record store.
Artix: Were you following me?
Investigator: ....and now everyone who was sitting within ear shot of you guys at the Book & Record store know exactly what your little indie game studio is doing for the next three months?
Artix: Erm. Possibly.
Investigator: And you probably said the part about Friday the 13th & Talk Like a Pirate day landing on the same release extra loud, huh?
Artix: You really get me. I like that about you.
Investigator: Alright. What is going on with AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity?
Artix: Game art, skulls, and particle system fixes!
Part-2...icle
We ran into some weird particle issues during today's Bludrut review. We fixed them so the particles now scale and flip properly with the monsters and NPCs in both the world and in the APOPs.
No... I am here for Bubbles!
The Mage class has a spell that casts a shield. In the web version, it was just a quick animation. But in AQWorlds: Infinity, we are going to display the shield with animated art that stays on during the buff. We wanted to do something like the shield that the droids from the Star Wars prequels used. J6 found some existing art from AQWorlds that made a good base. Ghost animated the bubble appearing -- it was off to a good start!
Then ghost added some effects inside the shield. He also flattened the part near the feet which makes it feel a little more natural.
So, we have officially started going down the rabbit hole of improving class skills and icons. On the topic of skills...
Ice, Ice, Baby
Here is Ghost's prototype for the Ice spell. While I think this looks really good, there is not much distance between the player and the target monster. So we will need these projectile's tails to be a little more squat. Especially when we cast the spell at point blank range. The visual effect of your hand which launches the blast will be equally important.
Fire, Fire, Fire...
Immortal Joe and Ghost really want to keep the AQWorlds 2D art style prominent in the particles. You can see it in this fire ball and ice above. They are not simply Unity Particle systems. They use our artist's art at their core and are augmented by what Unity's particle system can add to it. Personally, I love seeing the effort and love being put into this.
Oh.... nothing you see on these posts are ever "final". It is a very organic flow. I love working on games and sharing stuff with you. As you see and comment about stuff, the team shares interesting things they see on X, Reddit, Facebook, etc with the team and we talk about it. (It was a lot easier doing this back in the 2000's before social media when all we needed to do was look at the forums.) It is not a perfect flow. But we are all part of this story that is unfolding.
See you tomorrow!
The best day of the week!
Like most Friday's we will not know everything that was accomplished until the sync up on Monday. But I stole these animated gifs form the dev chat to show you some of the things I saw happening O_O.
Shield skill for warrior..... offensive. Animated by Nulgath.
Defensive shield.
#WhyAreYouSoDefensive?
Fireball go boom!
We might want to do something a little more particle system based than this animated set of images. This is because, currently, I am more worried about texture atlas space eating up memory than particle performance. The Umbra class from the 1st techdemo used a lot of REALLY BIG sprite sheets to do the animation. That was alright with only one functional class... but as we have tons of different classes we could get into the bad situation of exceeding our memory budget.
Love the way this looks. Ghost added soem bloom using post processing. He found a bloom shader that claims to only use 6 cpu cycles instead of 4,000. Everyone is in agreement that we do not want to overdo this effect.
A few players noted that large bulk armors and some of the mounted forms would have their feet stick out of the bottom of the bubble. Because of these extreme diversity in AQWorlds armors, can make it bigger and offset it a little to give room, but there is no way every possible outlier can be handled. The alternative would be to not to doing cool stuff like this at all... which sounds like a worse idea. My philosophy is to do fun and creative stuff. If it works, great, if it does not work for everything.... well, it sorta reminds me of that one pixel art Final Fantasy where one class could suplex a train. The absurdity of that made it a beloved and famous. On that note, can we make a class that suplex's monsters? Pleeeeease.
Have an awesome weekend!
