Artix
When creating a new account, there is a particle burst that plays when you switch classes. Nulgath hand animated the first one in flash. Now he is using Unity's particle system to recreate it and... it looks awesome!
Ghost began creating the base animations for pet Moglins. Both the normal animations... and the Battle Pet animations :D Hit read more below to see more GIFs.
Artix
We were up late working on a game breaking movement bug. Testers found a number of ways to fling or scuttle their characters through solid objects and end up in the sky. We quickly found the issue... but then, to our horror, we uncovered the bugs went deeper... way deeper. A few Tech Demos ago, players reported scrolling maps suddenly got a little slow and janky. Hitting a wall would make you jitter. Now we know why. The code which creates that cool parallax effect on distant objects was also moving the front later, which was moving the camera, which was causing the other layers to be re-ordered, which was moving the camera... in a vicious and comical "who goes first" loop. It was a hard thing to discover. We are lucky that other bug happened that caused us to deep dive into it. At the stroke of midnight last night, we committed a code fix for it. The game "runs" sooooo smooth now!
We do have to go and fix the speed and parallax values on every map. 😒
Artix
When you defeat a monster, they now visibly drop gold coins. J# drew and animated the coins. Pixel Pete added the particle bounce and magnet like attraction that moves the coins towards your character.
Artix
Check out the latest massive Kickstarter Update post about rewards, survey, & game plan and more! Meanwhile, we have been continuing to answer messages and help backers with their issues. One of the weirdest support messages of the day was one very insistent players writing to recover their account.... and they were adamant that it was theirs... the name of the account they were trying to recover? It was... Artix. O_o. /facepalm
Artix
After writing that HUGE KICKSTARTER UPDATE post today, I have been working on the Intro. If you are reading this, then you are already a player and do not need any sort of tutorial. But for new players, some simple indicators might help. I have been using my ActionScripts (from Project Omni) to build map things. So I used a movement script to add the hand. Then I added a second one to test something... and realized it would be 100% do-able to turn anything inside of our game into an Idle Game like Cookie Clicker, LOL. Sharing in case you also thought it was funny. Also in case I hide one in the game somewhere. >_>
Artix
Diogon sent in mock-ups for guilds today! This looks great :D Especially love that new button for "Go to Guild Hall". Next, Tunik will take this design and implement it in game.
Guild creation mock up... with guild crest designer.
Artix
18,221 out of 28,917 backers have completed their Kickstarter surveys already. That is outstanding! Meanwhile, the support messages have been coming in fast and furious. I knew there would be a lot, but over the past 2 days on Kickstarter alone, I have gotten over 1,500 messages. My fingers have been on turbo like that meme from Bruce Almighty. Finally gave in and asked Despair to help me so we can help all of the backers having issues. That is nothing compared to the volume of incoming mail to our official Artix Entertainment's Player Support. Nythera and her team are buried under an avalanche of support tickets from players eager to recover old accounts or having issues. Please help spread the word that we are getting to everyone's tickets as fast as possible... but as of right now we are literally days behind. We will all be working through the weekend to help players and backers with their issues.
Artix
We are preparing the servers and game for the start of Alpha. When you first log into AQWorlds: Infinity, you will come to this screen where you can see your character. From here you can switch servers and redeem codes (like the codes we will be sending backers from the Kickstarter to unlock their rewards). Warlic posted this screenshot because he was surprised to see one of the class skills that Nulgath animated firing for no absolutely no reason. There is only one word to describe such hijinx: "Alpha!".
Artix
Each badge from the Kickstarter will unlock a different shop in AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity AND AQWorlds. You will find your reward items in the appropriate shops. This is better than just injecting the items into your accounts. It gives you permanent access to the items so you can get them at any time. The final location of this shop will be in the Founder's tribute area...which is also where the backers-only area, Statue Sculptor and massive Tower of Backer Statues will be located.
Artix
The Pledge Manager for the AQWorlds: Infinity Kickstarter is live and we see the surveys coming in. In honor of us temporarily breaking their site today, Snowvers made you a special badge to commemorate the experience :D
Artix
A few moments we launched the Kickstarter Pledge Manager. Our community's famous "server death-touch" skill was on point... everything broke catastrophically for about 10 minutes. Probably due to notifying 26,711 backers all at once. Getting reports that it is working now though! Wooohoo!!! I would like to thank Kickstarter for solving the issues from last week and helping us get this live today. Kudos to the rep who has been assisting us and keeping us informed. We are now officially moving onto the next phase...
You will have a few weeks to complete the Survey on the Pledge Manager and enter your information while we bring the Alpha servers up and get the first of your rewards in game for you.
Artix
We are still waiting for a fix for the bug preventing us from launching the Kickstarter Pledge Manager to go live. Meanwhile, Spider has improved pets. Now, the way we create pets makes it possible for any monster or NPC to become a pet... and visa versa. Here you can see the bear from the cave in the new (technically old) intro.
Artix
Maya is Lore Master. She loves ancient books and the wild stories of heroes like yourself. You will see her at the beginning of your adventures in Infinity. While working on her quest today, we realized her emotion needed to change as you completed the quest and recieved the book she is clinging onto. So Warlic & Ghost helped me build a system to handle changing NPC emotions & art. This will be pretty handy for bringing life to the game. In unrelated news... the 6 Kickstarter backers are still stuck. Our Kickstarter rep messaged me again today and said they were working on it.
Artix
Dear Kickstarter Backers... what did you do!? LOL. When backers voted for Despair to combine all of the suggestions into one monster, this was the result. It sneezes fire! Kudos to Snowvers on flashing and animating it. The animated blind on the shoes really walks the extra mile. Now... it needs a name. Suggestions?
Artix
The AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity Kickstarter plan is still on schedule. The next step is to launch the pledge manager, which is how backers will send us the survey information (like email, name for the credits, etc) which we will use to delivering their rewards (codes, steam keys, etc). We anticipated roughly 2 weeks for the Pledge Manager to go live. It was smart that we did. At the half way point we ran into a weird bug on Kickstarter blocking us from releasing the pledge manager. Specially, 6 backers with payment errors that are not timing out. Click read more below for the gnitty gritty details. We have been in touch with Kickstarter's support and they are working on it. As you can imagine, I have been refreshing the page like crazy the past few days.
Artix
Zhoom just pushed a skin color processing revamp. The darker colors look much nicer now. It is trying to match AQWorlds colors as closely as possible, but it is not going to be an exact match because of the way colors are handled and CC (color customization) is done. Here is the before and after that zhoom posted.
Artix
Backers voted to have Despair draw one of the backer-bonus pets. Actually, they voted to have her draw ALL of the player suggestions.. into a single pet. A cat-dog fusion, with Sneakers, wings, cute, cuddly, weird... well, she did her best. :D Click read more to see her drawing. Snowvers flashed the head which you can see below.
Artix
I just wrote a Kickstarter Update post about the Pledge Manager, Steam, Keys, and settings expectations for our imminent Alpha Test.
Artix
Wooohoo! Now that is the KEY to kicking off a great week. Full story? The first batch of keys we requested was actually denied. My fault. Turns out there is a rule that only allows 1,000 steam keys to "release override" a game that is not live yet. Even if the game is ultimately going to be free to play for all players like AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity will be. But that rule does not apply to a play test version of the game. So I resubmitted last week and happy to share it was approved today! Now, we just need the Kickstarter pledge manager (which is Kickstarter's feature that will help us get the information to deliver backer's rewards) to be approved so it can go live.
Artix
J# originally drew the key icon for the Kickstarter. The team thought, "What if we added a handle to it and made it into a weapon?"
