Artix
Do you want a Q&A session too? Despair told me a lot of players want to have one. How about after (or during?) the next tech demo? Which we would like to do as soon as the current round of features are complete. The team is still working on everything we talked about in the previous posts. Today was an extra strange day for me... click read more if you are interested.
So... AQWorlds Infinity is not the only game getting a new intro
I love building games. I LOVE building games. It is easy to forget how much you love something when you are bogged down in the complicated techy bits. So when AdventureQuest 3D needed a hand with a new intro concept, I was legit excited to write and design for a weekly release again. So after my Infinity work, I stayed up late, burning the candle at both ends (and the middle). Speed writing one-shot adventures & weird item descriptions is so much fun. The release just went live today.
In this new intro concept, you are portal hopping with a girl named Onyxa... trying to find your way to the Town of Battleon. Classic AE hijinx ensue.
If you are a player of AQ3D, then you are probably thinking, "Hey, you guys just redid the intro like 2 months ago, right? Why are you making another?" The answer is pretty simple. The last one did not do what it was supposed to do. Do not get me wrong. The last intro looked beautiful and had great story telling. Most players have strong feelings about a games intro... especially one they love. But very few people think of an intro in terms of game dev math. If 100 players sign up for your game, but only 20 of them actually make it to town... well, that is a big problem. It can mean the intro is too hard, too long, or any other issue you can think of. So the last intro we tried, and the one that was in the game a long time before it.... ended up having numbers that were almost exactly the same. Except the story was so much better that the people who did complete it, tended to become more dedicated players of the game. My thought was, why not create a smaller more casual adventure that showed the off the games humor, combat, and... just skips all the annoying tutorial-style stuff. The quests are fast. The loot drops are high. And most importantly it solved a weird problem that all of the previous intros had.
The problem was "The Stopping Point." In each of the previous intros, there was a point where you did something awesome, but there was no clear or big motivation to do the next thing. So players would just stop. If you played the "Death's Lair" intro... then you may remember a scene when you encounter the Void King Vane and since you are immortal, and he cannot kill you, he tosses you. Far. The cutscene was pretty funny. But after that cutscene, during the loading screen that followed, there was this "Well, I beat the thing... good stopping point, time to get some lunch" vibe. It is also possible they just realized their tastes were not refined enough for our unique brand of humor. :D But even I felt it when I played the intro. Which I did at least a hundred times. There was no motivation to go to the Town of Battleon and see what was there.... to get involved with the things going on there. And that is what I set out to solve. Easiest way of doing that, was making going to the Town of Battleon the entire point of the intro. If you get a change to play it please do... and please tell us what you think. Beleen made a little Google Survey. We have been watching it closely.
Beleen sent this shortly after the release went live.
As more responses come in, that Android % will look more and more like Pac Man. Soooo many players play on Android. That means that will be true for AQWorlds too. What sort of phone do you play on?
Working on this release, one thing really jumped out at me. AdventureQuest 3D's game dev tools are sooooo hard to use. Building just 4 cutscenes took me more hours than I am willing to admit. We really took everything we learned from AQ3D and used that knowledge to build better tools for AQW Infinity. There we so many times I thought to myself "If I was building this in Infinity, it would be just one or two clicks." On that note, it did make me hungry to design some AQW Infinity adventures. Building new stuff is way more fun than re-building older stuff.
AQWorlds Infinity characters in a 2D Platformer? (Experiment)
I finally got to check in on Project Omni tonight. Last week, we were able to load an AQWorlds Infinity monster into it. So, when I saw that the 2D Platformer module was nearly done being updated and tossed in a Frogzard to see what would happen. Ending this post on a ridiculous GIF.... this is me controlling the Frogzard with WASD keys and the Spacebar to jump. Infinity monsters do not actually have a jump animation. That hop is actually the Frogzard's walk animation, lol. Not sure why the back foot is so floppy. It.... sorta works! LOL.
"Perfect. Ship it!"
Joking aside, that Frogzard is only a few tweaks away from being a viable 2D platformer character. Which means making a Metroidvania style AdventureQuest game at some point in the future is a viable possibility. Whether it is a mini-game like an Undead Assault, or a full blown recreation of a game like Dungeons & DoomKnights using AQWorlds art. Hmm, or maybe ArchKnight. #ToDream
OK... I need to get back to work. See you tomorrow.
Battle on!
Artix
