Stir-Fry-Day

Every Friday has been an explosion of Alpha progress and new features. Probably because everyone gets their assignments on Monday and merges them into the game project by Friday. Parties were added, Warlic pushed an even better armor conversion toolset (it did take 5+ hours to republish the existing armors today), quest bugs that have been blocking Alpha have been fixed, the movement bugs are fixed, character panel got an upgrade, the statue generator is now on the live server, several memory leaks patched, and as a cherry on top URP & a bloom slider was added. We also have a design for the site we are creating to track and deliver backer codes, keys, and rewards.

It has been one heck of a good week. Our internal tests are still discovering a few urgent issues that need to be patched in order to start Alpha. Like, for some reason you can log into both AQWorlds and Infinity at the same time right now. (Very dangerous.) Also, half of our monster & NPC heads broke in the portraits. Meanwhile, AQWorlds adding their versions of the Kickstarter Reward shops and preparing a new page in the account management site for Benevolent Founders & above to do their thing. Players who play on the existing AQWorlds are probably going to be pretty happy.

The spooky part is, the stuff I wrote above does not even begin to show just how much is happening all at once right now. It is insane. It is also sorta refreshing to be this deep in the heat of battle again. After I wrap up my map work, will answer KS messages and then get some rest. It is going to be weekend full of AQWorlds preparation. :D

Work in Progress Pic.... Dark Epic Hero of Destiny (Variant)

Legendary Founders from the AQWorlds: Infinity Kickstarter get all three versions of the Epic Hero Armors. I love the way the armors came out. Take the Destiny themed armor below... amazing! 

 We had received requests from Legendary Founders for something on the armor that would show their tier. So we decided to add variants. Originally, the variants had a very subtle difference-- a badge-like attachment with a logo on it. But when Alina and the AQWorlds team saw it, they were adamant that backers would want us to go overboard for the variants. We always aim to please :D. So we came up with a plan for each of the epic armors. J# started on the art. For the Destiny armor's variant we decided to go with "DARK DESTINY". Here is a work-in-progress screenshot. 

I hit this Frogzard so hard that it exploded....

Nope. We just did a re-publish of ALL 362 of the converted monsters & NPCs for Alpha.  Some things broke. This is was a weird and spooky bug. Somehow the GPU Skinning was switched to CPU, and a bunch of other settings glitched. As of this post, it all appears to be fixed. #whew.It is 11pm, going to try to handle the Kickstarter messages. We turned on a thing that allowed people to edit their pledges, but for some reason it broke the pledge manager and everyone was getting 403 errors. We sent in tickets and are waiting to hear back. 

Badge Update

Alina posted these AQWorlds Infinity Kickstarter badges on social media... sharing them here for you too. 

Our games are lit!

Unfortunately, so is the data center. Woke up to discover that one of the data centers hosting our game servers is literally on fire. How hard have you guys been playing AQWorlds!? We were told this has no relation to the fire-themed Scion of Flames Class that just released in AQWorlds.

New Kickstarter Update Post

Read Alpha & Rewards Update plus "How Monsters are Made" on Kickstarter. 

My favorite month is OCTOBEAR

Beautifully wicked!  The Octobear is the first monster Nulgath animated since learning how particles FX and the URP stuff. 

Big Bug Fix Night

Spider & Immortal Joe just fixed the dreaded and hard to find "invisible other players in the same instance" bug! It has been a huge day for bug fixes, they have been on fire. They also added Unity's URP to the game client and map project! But as per my fear, we have to convert every shader in the game. It might do it automatically if we just republish the asset bundles, so trying that tomorrow. Tutulio is at the final boss fight part of the Character Creation process. Zhoom has been fixing lag and memory issues. Ghost finished up Moglin pets and is doing some final polish before we start sending it to other devs to begin converting the other moglins. Founder Dragons are next. I created re-usable prefabs for all of our common map machines and applied them to the Intro. Simplified a really complex quest flow down to one step... pretty excited. It is just past 10pm. So going to switch from game development to answering the urgent KS messages (less than a hundred... I should be able to finish my midnight.). Planning to write another big update post tomorrow. 

Golden Mogsterpiece! Eternal Thanks - Phase I

How to build Eternal Thanks? Step #1... concentrate gratitude into pure gold concentrate and forge it into the form of a Moglin. It radiates hearts of golden gratitude like a fusion reactor radiates radiation. Our lead scientists have determined that these are not toxic, but may still have a long lasting effect. Step #2 coming soon. 

Epic Founder Pet Dragons

1st peek at the 3 Epic Founder Dragons. Inspired by the original Platinum Founder Dragon, and themed to Chaos, Doom, and Destiny. Our jaws dropped when Aranx just posted them to the dev server moments ago. 

Moglocide

On Friday, Ghost finished animating the moglin pet and tried adding one to the game as an NPC. But when he added it, nothing happened. So he kept trying to add them. Nothing happened. During the Monday morning full team meeting, we all logged on and were brutally mauled by an angry mob of hostile yellow moglins. Turns out it DID work... the server just needed a restart. :D 

Shiny!

Nulgath showed everyone this at the full team meeting this morning. If we implement Unity's URP (Universal Rendering Pipeline) we can start using fancy shaders like these. I want this so bad. Not sure how much will be impacted by this. Might have to implement URP after Alpha goes live. 

Moglins & Particles

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. 

Read more

Midnight Stroll Bug

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. 😒

Bling! Gold Coin Particles

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. 

When does Alpha Start?

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

Moglin Clicker

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. >_>

Guilds Mockup

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. 

SUPPORT! ...send backup immediately.

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. 

Character Login Screen

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!".