Statue Generation

Thanks to Spider & Captain Rhubarb's hard work, I was able to talk to an NPC in AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity and press a button to generate my first statue! Wish I had remembered to smile. :D The image below is not a screenshot, it is the actual image generated. It uses the Flash art so the lines are super smooth at any output size. I would like to work on the colors a bit, but boy this is looking good. The ability to re-generate your statue at will is going to be a way better experience. Especially since we add cool new stuff to the game every week. I flew my Grandfather up North this past weekend, and while visiting my Great-Uncle (is that a thing) had a brilliant suggestion. The bottom tower of the Founder's Santuary should randomly choose different statues to be displayed. This will give all Immortal Founders and above a change to be featured on the 1st floor. 

We have not published for Android in a while... so you can only imagine how hard we laughed when we published the game for Android and it booted up like this. >_> Eh.... good enough. Ship it! 

BOOOOOOM!

Immortal Joe & I were messing around with the upcoming Infinity Hero Class today. The AOE (area of effect) skills were pulling the entire room and kicking our plate-covered rears. But... OMG that Ultimate Attack is WICKED!!!!!!! Given that the level cap is currently 5, but our new scrolling maps can have an INSANE number of monsters... How many monsters should you be realistically tanking in the early game? 

Controller Support

Read the latest Kickstarter Update Post for details. 

Backer Name Plates

Read the latest Kickstarter Update Post for details. 

Available now on Mac!

"I am a Mac... and I am a PC!" AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity has officially officially available to Alpha Testers on our SECOND platform! (You are gonna need a newer model than the one in the image... sorry, when am I ever going to get a chance to make a silly nostalgic image like that again?) We just released a major new update of the game with controller support, name plates, combat improvements, the release of the Apple Mac version on Steam, and more. Writing up a Kickstarter update post for you with full details... should have it up for you tomorrow. :D In the mean time, let us know on Discord if you find any bugs or urgent issues. Mac on!

Playing with Fire

The 4th of July fireworks are not the only thing blazing with fiery explosiveness this weekend. Nulgath showed the process of how his mixes his hand drawn art with particle FX to create the evolving style of AQWorlds: Infinity new skills, spells, and special FX. 

Side by side, you can see the hand drawn sprite sheet of fire (right) and the particle system (left).

Here you can see the individually drawn frames that make up the fire animation. When you see the sheer amount of animation in both AQWorlds original & Infinity, it is easy to not realize how much effort goes into every single piece. Fun to look behind the scenes to see how the team is blending our traditional techniques with the new features that are now available to us to make the game even better. 

Lich Slap

Been under the weather the past two days. But I still look far healthier than Aranx's new undead fiend. Nulgath animated a killer attacks for it.. here is the first.  You will get your shot at battling this monster in the upcoming Graveyard expansion. 

Hero Class Testing

Over the past few days we have been testing the new class for Kickstarter backers. The animation FX look great. It features skills that change the other skills (Sorta like umbra). Which makes it interesting, but takes a little bit to figure out. You can spam the buttons but the AOE's are huuuuge. So you will likely pull the entire room of monsters on yourself... like I keep doing. :D As an end game farming class, this is pretty peak. For lower level players it can be a bit challenging because our level cap is 5 and the monsters you encounter are harder at that level. An accidental room pull can be deadly. The testers have made a lot of feedback in the chat. Will keep you updated as we go. 

"No pain, no game!"

Here is my view when play-testing AQWorlds: Infinity. Posting for Players who do not create inside Unity... it might be interesting to see. Today is going to be a fun day for me. Building some re-usable machines like this treasure chest. This chest will be located in a secret place in the Graveyard. It will give you a quest to find the key. Once you find the key you can open the chest, and the chest will stay open forever for you. This is an improvement over the way the chests work before that required you to have an item in your inventory taking up space. The tricky part, is figuring out how to make these machines work with our new controller support. Once we figure it out, all of the old machines need to be retro-fitted. This will let you play the entire game with a controller. 

Monday Quick Update

The AQWorlds: Infinity team is cutting through our to-do list like a Chainsaw through butter. The next release will include full controller support (Which is freaking amazing for StreamDeck, controllers, and even just your keyboard... mouse? Who needs that any more?) and backer name plates w/ options menu. We added Rolith to the content team to help with map coding. Warlic finished setting up the Mac version of the cloud builder and brought it online. So you know what is coming soon. He is working on the Android cloud builder now. The Kickstarter Hero class is now being tested by the team. Spider is working with Capt on an updated API for statue generation. Also, Tutulio is now starting on Steam Achievements. The only part dragging right now is the extended intro... the content team and I have been spending a crazy amount of time trying to create a proper, canonical, introduction to the characters... both for long time players, and for new players who are learning about our game for the first time. 

Talking to an NPC from a controller?

This is so awesome! If you were wondering... "How will I be able to talk to an NPC when using a controller?" Then check this out. the game will automatically target the closest NPC to you. You can see their message bubbles highlighting as I walk past them. Then press E on your keyboard, or the interact button on your gamepad to talk to the NPC. We have been overhauling the entire UI for better controller support. This will make the game better on mobile, SteamDeck, and... possibly in the future... consoles O_O.

83 Custom Backer Designer Forms!

Exciting! A lot of work went into the designer docs for our Kickatarter's custom backers. These are the forms that will allow custom backers to build their items alongside the team. Each designer doc is tailored to each individual backer. We went through quite a few revisions to get the docs approved by the game team and player support. Happy to share that just a moments ago, I just sent each of the 83 current custom backers a private message through Kickstarter with a link to their personal designer doc (Do not share!).  This should also be very good news for Benevolent Founders who are eager to claim a custom item of their own. Once the current backers have their items, we will begin opening up additional slots to Benevolent tier players (they are all considered on the waiting list and will have the opportunity to upgrade to a custom backer tier if they wish.) In the continuation of open and transparent expectation setting, this first phase is going to be long. There is going to be a lot of "hurry up and wait" as the backers begin working with the team and artists begin to be assigned. I do look forward to seeing the amazing items that are created. 

Son of a Lich...

Scratch that... the story says this Lich is a brother. Of corpse he is!  Or maybe this is the monster the Lich brother summoned? Undead family trees are such a hassle... mostly because they move and grab your with their little-grabby-branches.

Our 244th build is dropping

"OK... we might be getting a little out of control with these particle FX. On second thought. Maybe we should add more?"

Newest update Version 0.244 includes

• In-game Character Customization
• FPS Selection In Options (Vsync must be off)
• Your name can now properly appears in quest text
• Apops now support Music/SFX
• Gem Bug fixed
• 0HP Bug Fixed
• Save Maya Quest no longer glitches on Frogzard count
• New account creation bug fixed
• Grotto progression fixed
• Merge shops no longer ask for ALLLLL your money the second time you use them. XD

Mmmmmm.... tastes like Poison Slash!

This is promising. 

Character Customization (Progress Peek)

Alpha had a great start... but there were two HUGE features from AQWorlds that it did not have yet. The bank and barber shop (character customization).  If you did not know the bank was already released, that happy to share with you that it is live in Infinity! Next up is character is the ability to customize your character in game. We needed a little extra time on it, but here is a look at the clean interface. It will let you change both your armor and character colors.... and hair styles. 

Founder Name Plates

Just like the past week of insane releases, there are a lot of things happening all at once... one of them is the Founder name plates (A Kickstarter Stretch goal that you unlocked.)  Thought you might like a sneak peek of the progress. Diogon's art looks amazing. With this feature it is possible for us to add more name-plate styles in the future. We are adding an option to toggle (and choose your nameplate) in game. The same will be true for titles. 

NEW! Kickstarter Update Post

I just finished posting a HUUUUGE new AQWorlds:Infinity Kickstarter Update Post for you. 

It was super effective...

I responded to a player by sending the link to their codes... and then after, they sent me another "Send codes, please!". O_o Were they testing to see if I was some sort of automated bot? Despair and I actually read and respond to all of the messages. Full transparency, I made a handy stream deck button that scrapes the Kickstarter page for your backer ID and then uses a javascript to call a powershell script which looks your id up in our database and then generates the link your reward page and pastes it back into the browser. (Suuuper proud of this.) But we still manually read all of the emails. 

New Client Live! Unity Version Upgraded

Also... did J# add 5 layers of parallax to town and the intro (Yes. Yes he did.)

If you walk through town or the intro and really look at the leaves and trees in the foreground and background... you will notice there are an insane number of layers being parallaxed. This gives it much more of a pro animation 3D feel. A new version just went live 30 minutes ago with a ton of bug fixes. Last week, we upgraded the Unity version to 6000.3.17f1 LTS. The LTS stands for "long term support". With this, we are also switching everything to Unity's new input system to re-implement controller support using Unity's new input system. It is going to make it reaaaaally nice to play on the Stream Deck. Also, it will make the possibility of publishing for consoles like the Switch at some point in the future after we finished releasing on the promised platforms. 

Remastered Zardmen

The zardmen that were in Infinity were animated before we developed our current techniques. So they were completely rebuilt using our newest methods... and got an art glow up and some additional personality at the same time. This week, we are fixing a lot of reported content bugs... especially with maps, monsters, and quests. (Darn...  I could have said "missions" to get the trifecta of M's.) We also are building new tools to automatically detect issues and missing things in maps and monsters which will help the game stay (more) bug free as we expand to more platforms. It is VERY wise for us to take a moment to do clean up now... we are just a few weeks into Alpha, and the content conversion is only going to accelerate from here.