Alpha Begins next Tuesday!

I just wrote an official Kickstarter Update announcing the start of Alpha. We are equal parts excited, and being careful to set expectations that the game will be very bare-bones at the start of Alpha. It will start for Steam (PC) only. Featured content includes the new intro, Bludrut Keep, and the Dragon's Lair. We will have a number of Founder rewards ready including the armor, weapons, pets, and items. (See the screenshot below) Higher tier rewards are still being imported into the game... this includes Epic armors, Spellstones, Statues, and Benevolent Founder rewards. Having them constantly be releasing will make it feel like a weekly birthday party. Most rewards will be available in both AQWorlds and Infinty.  Brace yourself... everything in Alpha from delivering your codes to stepping foot on the server is going to be a wild bumpy ride. #JediCalmRequired

The Pre-Alpha Check List

WOW! What an intense & great day.  Did you ever watch one of those TV shows where the people are making something... cakes, costumes, and such. And for the first 50 minutes of the show it looks like nothing is happening and out of no where in the last 10 minutes everything instantly comes together? I think we are in that phase. Hit read more for details. 

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Sunday

Whoops! Quest-turn-in is a terrible time to untrack the quest XD

Really happy with where we got the AQWorlds: Infinity's Intro to yesterday. Just finished Kickstarter messages this morning. Captain Rhubarb showed me the admin site he made for reviewing Backer data. It is soooooo nice seeing all of the data on our servers. Syncing it is going to be a pain, so we will probably need to turn off the Kickstarter soon. For the rest of today, I will be preparing the Town of Battleon. On Monday we can remove that untrack quest button :D

Replay Cutscenes

 Wooohoo! Feeling pretty good about the current version of the Infinity's intro. The music flows nice. I put in a joke that I has ALWAYS WANTED in the original version of the game. Also invented a fun and easily decipherable Draconic language for that giant dragon to speak in. So you can finally figure out what the dragon really was saying. At the start of the day...  was trying to solve how to properly make the cut-scene with Gravelyn and Zorbak play gracefully after you start the game. I had divine inspiration and created a new system called "Action Variables". It worked like a charm. Short version... good for making dungons, interactive content, and this is going to make creating mini-games sooooo easy and fun. As I was wrapping up, started adding quality of life features like the ability to re-watch cutscenes on Twilly. This should be the standard for all of our sagas. 

Hikari's Chaos Themed Axe

This one was not asked for, but Hikari felt bad that there was not a chaos weapon in your Founder's Armory. It is just past 1am on Friday night and getting ready to wrap up. Today, we did not get as far on the polish pass as I wanted (but we did fix a bunch of surprise bugs and issues) , Captain Rhubarb showed me the first preview of the working Infinity Rewards Page (where you will get your codes), cutscenes are now able to play the games build-in SoundFX, the coders made 33 commits today changing ~220 code files (that is actually scary), the player characters have been "de-bloated" (all special FX moved to an external system that is loaded on demand), Despair and I caught up on KS messages, and finished making a little Alpha intro cutscene w/ Gravelyn & Zorbak. Want to shine a spotlight on Warlic, Spider, and Tunik who all went crazy above and beyond today solving serious problems in real time. I love working with them so much. 

We will name him, "Cuddles"

In case your gas tank was getting low... here is some more Nightmare fuel. The pets will be animated in the original AQWorlds before they will be for Infinity. 

Undead Moglin Staff

Horrifying! Snow just posted this in the dev chat... this is the 3rd weapon from the live draw with Dage. Kudos to Snow for flashing this 100% pure nightmare fuel weapon. Was working on the "welcome to alpha" cutscene and ran into a pretty bad issue. My file changes are not publishing. I am able to upload them, but I do not see any difference. Which means either the game is aiming at a different file server, or someone was testing the caching and forgot to turn it off. Did not notice earlier because I was doing the text parts. It is already 12:38am, so going to wrap up for the night and fix this with the team when they log on in the morning. That is... if I can sleep after seeing this weapon. X_X. 

Music & SoundFX surprises...

The deadline is getting down to the wire... but we keep adding new features. :D Yesterday we added all those music files to the game. While adding them to the intro, I thought it would be a way better experience if the cut-scenes changes the music... and then that music continued playing. So Warlic & Tunik coded a way to make it do that. So when you begin in the intro, there will be beautiful enchanted forest music playing. But then, during a cutscene something happens... and a more intense soundtrack kicks in as you go to save the day. I think it feels really nice. Worth trying to play with music on.  In the cutscenes we can play custom added SoundFX. But we discovered that there is no way to play the game's already  build-in SoundFX!  O_O. No idea how we missed this until now. So Tunik is adding that feature to the cut-scene editor now too. Meanwhile the coders are in a frenzy... there are so many commits being added to the game's code it is hard to keep track. Zhoom said it was "pencils down" at the end of Friday for code changes. The content team and I are in for a long weekend. On that note, LOL... I went to get something from my car and saw my seat was moved. I asked my wife if she drove my car. She replied, "Umm, not since last week when I moved your car back in after the people fixing the roof fini.... wait, have you not left the house since LAST WEEK!?" Time flies when you are having dev-fun :D

Founder's Sanctuary sneak peek

J# just sent in this updated preview of the Founder's Sanctuary. The tower itself is a giant shrine to all Founders and will feature the book of credits, your rewards, Immortalized Founder Statues, and... inside, is a secret, exclusive area only for Founders. 

Vinchi - Statue Scultor

Just added Vinchi to town. He is the sculptor who will be creating the statues for the Immortal (and above) Founders. He is currently waiting on his shipment of stone so that he can begin. I get this sneaking suspicion that stone will arrive at the exact same time the statue feature is ready to go live. Vinchi will move to the Founder's sanctuary... which will become his permanent home once it is complete. 

Dage's 2nd Live Draw Weapon

Interesting! This caught me by surprise. Hikari (artist) flashed Dage's second weapon sketch... in "Destiny" style!  It works perfectly as a stand alone axe-sword. Also pairs flawlessly with the Destiny variant of the Epic Founder's armor. 

+282 Songs added to Infinity

Thanks to Jongaar, we just added 282 songs to AQWorlds: Infinity. We build the bundles and database entries. We put extra fields in Infinity for things like "Stream Safe" and author, sound track, etc. In addition to the music created by Ghost & Warlic, we also added music from AdventureQuest 3D, Dungeons & DoomKnights, and our other games. Just in case. 

Dage's Live Stream Mace

Thank you to Hikari (artist) for finishing the the mace that Dage start during that live stream. This weapon will be added to the Founder's Armory for all backers at the Founder tier and above. 

Here is Dage's original concept sketch for reference. Crazy how you do not really appreciate the work that went into the skull pommel until you really look at the sketch and then go back to look at the vectorized (flashed) version. Even those little spikes on the skull received detailed shading. 

Racing to the Finish Line

...and while we are running, be sure to check out the beautiful (and fixed) parallax effect in the background. We were able to stitch together the Kickstarter data from multiple downloads last night. Captain Rhubarb (database & server) is merging the data, and as promised we are hand-fixing the pledges by backers who paid without choosing a pledge tier. The code team fixed the vast majority of the remaining memory leak issues. Between that, the quest system changes, and other bug fixes they clocked in 30 commits altering over 100 files today. Most grueling task of the day goes to Ghost (animator) who is stripping all of the bload from the old FX system out of the player character (will make the game run and load faster for you.) The content team and I are the furthest behind. The intro is functional, but some bug sneak attacks ate up most of the day. We still need to fix the dialog and add music & soundFX. Jongaar (music) will be joining us to help on that tomorrow. I started writing a Kickstarter update post but will need to finish it tomorrow. It is already 12:30am, so going to answer the KS messages before the Grim Sleeper realizes that it is not me in bed... I just stuck some pillows under my bed sheets and put a tape recorder on with snoring noises :D

Wooohoooo! Intro is

...alright, staying up until 4am to fix the intro flow was not my best life decision. But thanks to Spider and an abundant quantity of coffee, the whole thing is finally functional (and duct tape & shoe string hack free). Furthermore, the new scripts (Project Omni "ActionScripts") that we made to solve the problems will be invaluable...used to make every complex quest & saga we build moving forward. Tomorrow (In a few hours?) will begin a polish pass to add SoundFX, clean up the dialog, add XP/Gold values, and add some extras.  It is really important to me to have the intro working for the start of Alpha. It is not perfect, but it will bring back some good memories, while showing a glimpse of what we are working on rebuilding together. Would you believe that Kickstarter download is STILL at 90%!? Wait. Did you hear that? ...oh no! The Grim Sleeper is behind me.... he is raising his pillow-scythe to strike.... it is coming right at.... Zzzzz... zzzz....

Monday Morning Me... *erm* Beatings!

Happy Monday! (for about 3 more minutes.). Today was AMAAAZING! On Mondays the full team meets and reviews what we accomplished and what is next. I have never checked off so many major features and things in a single meeting before.Then we all dove into work. I was focused on the early game quests, and was shocked to look a moment ago and see there were 50-ish code commits to the main game project.  Going to switch over to answering KS messages and then go back to trying to get the final quest of the intro to flow right before I give into the Grim Sleeper (Zzzz). 

FIXED Edit Survey/Pledge Manager

Kickstarter sent me an email saying they fixed the issue and backers can now edit their AQWorlds: Infinity Kickstarter survey responses. This is pretty great news, and just in time. 

Meanwhile, we stumbled onto a different issue. We have been struggling to pull the survey results & backer info. Out of 10 attempts we have managed to pull the data... 0 times. It runs for hours, then just sorta stalls at a random %. It is possible that ~30K backers just takes too long and it times out. Wrote Kickstarter's support for help. Meanwhile, we are attempting to download it in chunks... but know that this would be a very bad/frustration solution for synchronizing it to the rewards website that Captain Rhubarb and I are currently building for you. This is because we will need to pull the data regularly and merge it with our database to keep your changes, freshly filled out surveys, and new backers' stuff up to date. Three hours before making this post I tried pulling just the Founder tier.  I really thought this last time was the charm... but for the last hour it has been sitting there, stuck at 90%, taunting me. I am not complaining. In fact, I am grateful. If I am going to solve a problem, I am happy to be solving one caused by having "too many" supportive backers.

A few things to get off my CHEST(s)...

The Epic Founder chests (Chaos, Doom, & Destiny) just came in. I want to open them. Hope they are not secretly mimics. 

Summon

Well, that is a nice feature that I discovered during testing tonight. Normally I /goto players. But here,  you can send a summon request to bring them to you. Like the original game these can be toggled on/off. 

We found a few urgent bugs today... if you have a class equipped, but not an armor, it can mess up the game. That is a priority patch. The screenshot below is when I discovered if you looted a monster right before a cutscene started,  your inventory stays on top of the cutscene, but you cannot interact with anything. /facepalm. LOL, I love how Twilly's dialog just happened to perfectly match with the bug as it happened. 

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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