AQ2D
Despair
| Wednesday, January 21, 2026
I'm Despair. Not only is this the first AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity post of 2026, But it is my first post on the game EVER!
Who am i? Well if you are a fan of AQW then you know who Beleen is... she's happy, enthusiastic, and pink. Now imagine the mirror-verse version of her. I'm Despair, terrible to meet you. When i worked at Cracker Barrel everyone called me the "off-brand Wednesday Adams". Way back when i asked Artix if i could post some TikTok videos playing the game he said, "What is TikTok?" That was then. Now i have access to the design notes... (insert evil laugh).
See my beautiful frown? Worst photographer ever.
I'm not going to make a post about asking what you want to see. There is only one thing we want to see... this game released. So what I am going to do, is make sure somebody from the team updates this page every work day for you. They'll post the GIFs, photos, or twisted tales of whatever they are working on. I'll be pushing for video updates. If you need me to pass something on to the team tweet/X me (@DespairAE)
Ghost animated the new intro
Monday, January 5th, 2026 (Artix)
Happy New Years to you! Artix here.
Grateful that Despair will be on our case about getting you daily updates. (Just for the record, I DID know what Tik Tok was. >_< ) On Monday we had our first full team meeting of the year and it was a loooooooooooong one-- we laid out the plan to finish & release Infinity. The game is currently functional, as you saw in the last tech demo. But it needs a lot of things including Enchantments, Character Creation, Character Customization, Animated Armor Pieces, UI (Party, Guilds, Book of Lore, Character Panel) and more. My requirement has always been that in order to do the Kickstarter, the game needs to be in a stable state were we are ready to just focus on mass content creation & conversion. Here is the order of operations.
Tuesday January 6th, 2026 (Artix)
Diogon (UI/Artist) has been working on the new screens for the game. The image below is for the new Enchantment System. You can Enchant your weapons & armors to power them up in Infinity. As you read this, Diogon uploaded the assets and Spider is currently making this work in game.
Next up is character creation. Here is a super early draft that we have been tossing back and forth. I like how this simplifies the character creation process.
You can use the arrows to click between the options. Also, you can click on the colored circles to change the color. If you click the circle in class (which has a helm) we can make a menu of classes giving a preview of their skills. That is definitely going to be a phase 2 thing, but it is pretty straight forward.
Wednesday January 7th, 2026 (Artix)
Ghost (Animator) is working on adding sounds to the new cutscenes today. We ran into an issue and urgently need to code a better solution for how to play custom sounds on these cinematic timelines. Because the entire cinematic cutscenes happen on a single frame of our Dialog system, Ghost was manually setting timers on the sounds to fire when they should happen. O_O First, WOW. Way to think outside the box. Second, WOW... that is a crazy amount of work for something that should be very simple to do on the timeline of the actual animation. Going to see if I can help code something up tonight after I finish this post.
Meanwhile Zhoom & Warlic are moving all player special FX & particles out of the game engine. They are putting them in the characters/map project where we can load them as needed. Sorta a scary thing to do. I am sure nothing will break. Right?
This is an important part of the memory clean up that will help Infinity run on devices with less RAM. (Running on less RAM is more important than ever this year X_X) Hoping to see this and the Enchantment System working w/ the new screens by the end of this week.
Thursday January 8th, 2026 (By Artix)
Despair send me this tweet. It is a pretty good idea. Maybe it would be better to just get a bunch of questions asked and then she could send them to us to post the answers here in a post?
* Antidisestablishmentarianist is the longest word in the English dictionary. I aaaaaalways wanted to use it in a post. Thank you.
In development today...
Spider implemented the Enchantment UI and it is ready for a team review. We were supposed to do it this morning, but I got caught up with Ghost's cutscene sound issue. Warlic had already coded a solution to it. Tunik found and removed some old protective code which was intentionally stopping sounds from playing for a completely different reason. So Ghost's intro sounds are finally working. We did a pretty deep review into the Dialogger (Cutscene Editor) and I made these requests.
J6 has been working on the Kickstarter rewards, including a Flying Castle (house). Will post his latest art for you tomorrow.
Friday January 9th, 2026 (By Artix)
J6 has been working on a Sky Castle (player house) as a Kickstarter reward. The castle is built upon mana crystals which cause it to levitate. He is currently adding chains to prevent it from flying away.
When players arrive at this home, they will be on the ground and walk forward to get to a portal. We want to make it so the owner of the home can set where the portal leads to. So it could take you to the castle or one of the floating islands. Or.... perhaps teleport someone who is not their friend to their un-timely doom?
Player houses/castles is one of the features that is on our priority list for Alpha. Spider will be working on the code for it after the current tasks are done. On that note, I saw Warlic, Zhoom, Spider, and Immortal Joe in an intense meeting that lasted most of the day. Based on the spooky techy screenshots posted in chat, I assume they were working on the feature that makes loading class skills on demand possible. So the Enchantment review will be happening at Monday's meeting instead.
We had one of our Infinity team members in the hospital this week. While respecting their privacy, I am very relived to let you know they are back and all good.
In other news, in my Friday meeting with the AdventureQuest 3D team we reviewed the new app store images that I took. Also reviewed the in-game ads issues. ...and the new intro that is going into testing next week. This is relevant to Infinity because we are going to have all of the same problems/challenges with the app stores and their ever changing rules when we launch Infinity cross-platform.I feel like I had a pretty good idea. Instead of trying to make super flashy ads with tons of effects.... like every other game in existence.... why not just screen record real in-game interactions with players and edit into a very authentic trailer? Sorta like this...
Going to try it next week (probably Friday) if you want to help Despair, Sir Fainal, and I. Because if it comes out cool, we can do it for Infinity too. (Maybe make the Kickstarter trailer that way inside one of the upcoming tech demo's?)
A Note about the Design Notes
The daily design notes posts are working. And again, I really want to thank Despair for pinging me every day when she sees I have not updated it yet XD. It is pretty do-able to write posts this size every day. But jamming them inside a big news article post like we are currently doing is silly. So, I was thinking... what if we changed the AQWorlds Infinity homepage so we could put small posts like this on it? It would make it a little bit like X/Bluesky/Facebook/Instagram/etc.... which, is exactly how www.AQ.com looks already. (Feels like I am re-inventing the wheel... again)
It would make it easy to read the latest posts like this one. We could edit the homepage have the big header and play button at the top. Then feature three news posts. Then, have a list of these daily posts. If the posts are long, I could use some sort of divider to cut it off and you could just click through to see the rest of the post. What do you think? I will ask Miko and Captain Rhubarb to find out how long this would take. (Betting 10g that they say we have to update something before we can make this change.)
Thank you for an awesome week, and have an adventure filled weekend.
Battle on!
Artix
P.S. Just as I posted this, J6 sent me a message saying the Sky Castle was done and uploaded to the drive! Now that is an awesome way to end the week.
Monday, January 12th, 2026 (By Artix)
OK... at today's full team meeting, we learned that our team member is back at the hospital. #GetWellSoon.
P)layer Character Moved
Warlic & Zhoom successfully moved the player, all the player animations & FX out of the core game. It is now in the maps project. This allows Ghost, Nulgath, or any animator to give player classes new skill animations without needing to roll out a new version of the game. #LiveUpdateFriendly.
Enchantments? This feature is a real GEM
OK... the top priority this morning was reviewing "Enchantments". Wrote that with some Rick Sanchez air quotes because as of the time you are reading this... we renamed the thing you power your gear up with to something different. Frankly, better. Not just because the word is super short. That will make it fit on long item names better. It is also easier to say. But also the icons can be way cooler looking. And the idea of "socketing items" or turning this mysterious upgrade item to dust makes more logical sense. The new name is a #RealGem.
Hmmmmm...... Where have I seen this idea before in AE games?
Oh... yeah!
Putting the item icon inside the gem should make it super clear as to what it is. Changing the color of the gem to match the power/rarity will make it super clear how good of a gem it is. So a power gem for a Rare Helm would be blue with a helm icon inside of it.
But since the concept of socketing your items with Weapon Gems, Armor Gems, Helm Gems, and other types of item Power Gems does not appear in the screenshots below yet... I invite you to use your game dev imagination with me as we talk about how this enchantment power gem system works.
Power Gems (formerly enchantments)
Monsters can drop these gems. There are other gameplay ways to get them too. As a long time AQWorlds player you are already familiar with this concept... it is just like Enhancements. Except gems will not take up any of your main inventory slots. Gems get their own inventory. #HeckYeah. use a Gem to give an item power. In fact, all of the power of your item comes from these Gems.
In the screenshot above, the enchantment Gem's name is "Healer Cape". Bad name. It should be "Healer's Gem" with a common gem prominently featuring a cape icon.
You can click on the gem to see the details of its power. Then, if you want to use it, you can choose an item to apply its power to. We had a lot of changes to the UI above in today's meeting. It needs to be simple to apply a gem. You should be able to apply it starting from the gem... or starting from the item.
Furthermore, the experience needs an immersive animation. Socketing a gem should be a great experience.
When you loot any item from a monster, it does not instantly clutter and fill of your inventory... new loot goes into your loot inventory. That way you can choose what to do with it. It is like having 20 extra spaces available just for new loot.
When you loot a Gem, it goes into your loot inventory.
Then you will have 3 options.
Spider and Immortal Joe spent a lot of time thinking about AQWorld's enchancement system and how to improve upon it. We feel this is a really good direction. But no plan is finished until you tested it out. So this will be the focus of our next tech demo.
Infinity monsters loaded into Project Omni?
Over the weekend, I worked on making Infinity's monsters compatible with Project Omni. Well, technically the other way around. It was complicated. But as of Sunday I successfully loaded an AQWorlds Infinity monster from the game server straight into Project Omni..... O_O. CRAZY! So Infinity can use Project Omni's ActionScripts and Project Omni can now load Infinity's monsters. This opens up a lot of fun possibilities for us. Mini games existing both outside and inside the game being my first thought. But also, we can now build an external "monster" checker to do the ol' 21-point inspection of Infinity Monsters. You know, checking them for errors.
Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 (By Artix)
Last last night I met with Captian Rhubarb (Database & Server dev) and Ai no Miko (Web dev). I pitched them the idea we talked about last week. And yes.... I actually won that 5g. They wanted to upgrade the site before doing any major changes. But I rolled a 20 on my charisma check and convinced them to add a new type of post now and take their time on the website upgrade. Within an hour Miko already had the new post type working! I love it so much. So tomorrow.... join me on the homepage for the next daily update post.
Battle on!
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