AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Friday, June 21, 2024
If you want the game to run smoothly.... you gotta smoothly animate the run. Time to talk animation!
This week we have started expanding the team working on animation on AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity. The strategy is double good. We are bringing in team members from our other games. We certainly could use the help. Also, by training them on this new way of animating, we are also preparing them for converting our other games after Infinity launches.
During the last tech demo, there were a lot of comments about the run. So Ghost re-animated the run matching it exactly frame by frame.
The original AdventureQuest Worlds was animated at 24 frames per second. The new game, Infinity, runs at 60 FPS+... and so do the animations. From the perspective of an old school anime-fan, all those extra frames takes away from the art form instead of amplifying it. It will be... smoother. After seeing the frame-by-frame exactly matched version (as seen above), both Ghost & Nulgath felt the character needs a little more pop. The philosophy of this re-creation is to make everything the same, and a little bit better. So they added a little pop to the run.
Not bad! We will continue tweaking this based on feedback. It looks a lot better when your hero is actually running from one side of the screen to the other with scrolling and parallax.
Whoops! The second thing we missed in the last tech demo.... was Idle Animations! Nulgath had animated a new idle for the Red Dragon just before the release, but it was only applied to the classic art version, not the new one. It also shocked us to realize that the Draconians did not have their idle animations either. The crew has been working on that... and also added downward wings so the Dragon could fly when it moves.
The Groglurk of Bloodrut keep has been animated. The new animations looks great... but then Lodrian started experimenting with new shaders. O_O
We need to do some tests to make sure these will run smooth on Mobile.
On the topic of mobile, Warlic has been working on the Cloud Builder, which needs to be finished because we can do the next Android build.
It is going to be interesting to see where this goes.
Meanwhile, Ghost & Immortal Joe are working class adjustments & adding behaviors to monsters. We learned a lot from the last test. Now we are seeing how fast we can implement the changes that players want to see.
Completely un-related... here is an example spread for an AdventureQuest Adult Coloring book. We have never released an official AdventureQuest art & lore book. It started as a "this is a fun idea, how hard could it possibly be to take the color out of our 20+ years of art" Harder than expected. Regardless, I really like the idea of having a 100-ish page book of the characters, monsters, legendary weapons, and major villains that I can give to someone and say, "This is what we built with out players... also, you can color it." Originally I had art on both sides of the page, but even with #80 paper, when you color it, it bleeds through to the other side. So JX had the idea of writing stories on the opposing page with a darker background that would help prevent the bleed through.
Another side project which you might be interested in learning about is Project: Omni. The image above is NOT Dungeons & DoomKnights... I mean, it is using the art, but it is actually an example Unity scene using the new Project: Omni tools. What is it? Omni is a set of tools to help rapidly convert our older games from DragonFable to Robina's Hunt into modern, cross-platform games. It will also allow us to add mini-games to AQWorlds Infinity. Two former programmers returned to help build this system. This is something I have been talking about for a very long time-- but after Pizza Portals, by NES game jam entry won best game, it hit me hard how I had developed all of these re-usable 6502 Assembly Language scripts in my free time, but had never done that with Unity. So, at a place that I feel was very special, I created a clear vision for it-- and committed to making it happen fast. These tools make the game development of RPGs, Platformers, Top Down Games, IdleGames, Point and Click Adventures, and other mini-game experiments really fast. It is not good for multiplayer things. Unless we are talking about AQWorlds style Mini-games... it will be really good for that.
We have already made a large number of the improvements from the last test. Next week we need to do a number of mini-tests. But past that, we need a larger pool of testers and also to move testing onto Steam where the game will auto update-- so you do not need to download the game client every time we update it. Which means, it is probably time to do that Kickstarter. We will make the final decision on that based on next week's mini-tests.
Battle on!
Artix & the AQWorlds Infinity Team
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