AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Saturday, September 21, 2024
We be return'n to our daily update posts on AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity (The phone/tablet/computer re-build of AQWorlds).
Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of lore!
International Talk Like a Pirate Day is celebrated annually on September 19th. The day is marked by pirate-themed events, social media posts, and, of course, conversations filled with pirate talk. It's a day to let your creativity run wild and enjoy the silliness of speaking like a pirate.
I heard that snicker'n ye lilly livered land lubber!
Me crew 'ere at Artix Entertainment started celebratin' the day way back in 2003. It be the first time that old salt, Captain Rhubarb, raised his flag and set sail with players in the original AdventureQuest. To the best of our knowledge, we were the first game ever to celebrate the day.... and have been doing it every year since with Pirate-filled adventures across our games.
Fer several weeks now, me crew has been preparing for the next tech demo. We hit some chop. Are ye familiar with the old saying, "smooth sailing does not make a skilled sailor"? I reckon our crew is getting pretty skilled. To get to the next tech demo faster, we decided to lighten the load. So we gathered up all of the classes and had any not yet ready for testing walk the plank.... by the end o' the meeting... only the Mage Class remained.
If ye be hearing me right, matey... and I get that it is hard on account of me typing like a first time Ren Faire attendee... we are skinny-ing up the scope of the next tech demo to Mage class and the 1st Floor of Bludrut Keep. Now, don' be hanging the jib. If the next tech demo does not scuttle the game, the rest will be following smartly. Which brings us to.... Mage.
Mage is pretty fun to play on the dev server now. It is primarily a ranged class with one AOE (area of effect) pull skill.
Booom Shakalaka..... On Friday we were fixing size issues with the projectile. The fireball still feels a little small to me. There are two options. 1. Just scale it up. -or- 2. Have the fireball get bigger the higher your class rank.
Ghost resized it to fit the giant feet of heavily armored classes. Giant mount classes still have your legs sticking out the bottom. We might remove the button of the bubble to solve this. The skill feels pretty good to activate. I love actually seeing the buffs visibly on the characters-- a solid improvement.
Applies frozen blood to your target. However, the effect should be applying (visibly) when the projectile hits your opponent. The buffs and debuffs are going to pop up screen and raise up into the air in a similar way as the new damage bubbles. It will be more satisfying seeing the projectile hit and inflicting a status effect the same way you inflict damage. Another two issues I am seeing here... the monster's attack gets suddenly stopped when he reaches you. We probably need to set the priority of the attack to be higher than end movement. Second, the rings of the blast have an animation issue. The fire correctly, but after they dissapear they reappear again and move the wrong direction. I believe these were built into that particular animation so it is likely that something was accidentally changed, and is now causing thins. Another observation... the ice shard itself is long and narrow which makes it hard to see. I feel our projectiles need to be pretty chunky to make them easy to see.
Targets three random nearby enemies and detonates the mana in the air around them. There was some intense debate on whether we should keep this skill like it is in the original game or replace it. We chose to keep the skills close to the original game for a number of reasons. Once we go down the rabbit hole of changing things.... we are going to change EVERYTHING O_O. And the correct place to do that would be with the new Infinity Classes. that being said, I think it would look nicer if the Mage raised his weapon and had a blast come out from his feet that matched up with the explosions.
(This is why they do not let me draw monsters any more. - Artix)
We are experimenting with a new ranged (magic missile style) auto attack for mage. It would be a really nice improvement. Spider and Ghost are experimenting with stuff while I type this. It would be really neat if we could fire more than one projectile per attack.
In the GIF above, Ghost is manually dragging the mage particle effect. The smoke only moves when the mana missile is moving. There is always a trade off with things like this. The more smoke we add, the better it looks, but the harder it is for your device's GPU. One particle is no problem. But when you have dozens of these things (and other player's FX) filling the screen.... well, we want to keep that 60 FPS that we are rocking right now.
Finally... I was not a fan of last week's hap-hazard update posts. So this week, how about we go back to the daily format? Instead of a few giant posts, it is nicer to write smaller daily posts with some animated GIF progress screenshots. Please cross your fingers for us. If we can get everything up and working on Wednesday.... O_O #GULPS
Battle on!
Artix
Daily updates to be added below.....
I fell asleep at my keyboard before finishing the Tuesday post.
#NotTheFirstTime
Therefore...
Anything goes story time!
This morning I went to the gym solo. Zhoom (my usual workout partner) was out sick. We normally talk about the project during the workout. That was OK, because Dage was going to join me to fill in. But Dage was up all night cramming on AdventureQuest 3D's Talk Like a Pirate Day Collection which is releasing later this week. So I went alone, if you do not count my app where which features some sort of robot overlord that demands that you lift various heavy objects in specific ways.
At least I thought I was alone. First I ran into Faith. Then I ran into Sauce. Sauce was there wearing a streaw hat and a vintage dress coat with a camera. He was preparing to film something for someone. Then I ran into WWE's Baron Corbin. He lives nearby (a lot of wrestlers live in this area) so we run into each other a lot. It was weird running into so many people. I did my robot commanded workout and then returned home. Then I went home.... there was still an hour before the work day started. So I rode my bike for a few miles. The bike was new. My kids just learned to ride, so I bought a bike from Walmart to join them. Dage helped me bring it home with his truck last Sunday. The quality is a little questionable. The pedal fell off and the front brake squeeks and does not actually work. But OMG I have not had so much fun in years. I grew up riding my bike around Pennsylvania. I miss the hills. Florida is flat. Our biggest hill is still more level than that one scene from Rick & Morty (where Rick shows Morty what TRUE LEVEL is.)
After the ride, I showered met Beleen & Stryche to try to figure out how to make seasonal events on the Google Play store. This is something we are going to need to know how to do for Infinity too... but this time it was for the AdventureQuest 3D Talk Like a Pirate Day event. I created the promo graphic in all of the sizes needed and submitted it. Then I met up with Reens, Ghost, J6, and the crew. We started a quest run through to see if there were any problems....
Any problems....
>_>
Well, here is the leaked link to my testing doc.....
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18XFjnndBCgeTMbnBep_LQUCtUI5Mv75V2lmpoF-L700
There are a few things to fix.
On production days like today, everyone goes off in their groups and works on their tasks that were listed Monday. I created buff/debuff popups for Spider. Ghost was wrapping up some mage animations. Nulgath's computer went kabooom, so he is stuck until the replacement arrives. Reens, Warlic, and I investigated and worked on Infinity issues through the day. It was an appropriate marathon of chaos.
But then I felt this weird feeling in my stomach. Oh, right! I forgot to eat today. But no time for that, it was already evening and time to take the kids to Martial Arts. They do a sorta "double class". It is ~1 hour of normal training and then 30 minutes of leadership. Sometimes I help teach, sometimes I jump in and participate in the class. Tonight I did a little of both. Then we returned home and....
... OOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMGGGGGGGGGGGG food tastes soooooo good when it is deeply appreciate. I was like Goku, chomping my way through rice. Nom nom nom nom nom. Then, it was time to help the little ones with their homework and get them to bed. Bedtime is always like the boss fight at the end of a video game. You never know if they are going to challenge you to trial by combat or suddenly realize a dozen bonus things they have to do before they will sleep. I assume they got their resistance to sleeping from me. #SaystheGuyWhoFellAsleepAtHisKeyboardAtTheEndOfThisTale
After they were asleep I fired Unity back up and dove back into my C# training. I was scheduled to be working on Project Omni stuff for the night shift, but I have really been trying to get a handle on using "delagates". On my side monitor, I put on YouTube videos featuring 100 people playing Project Zomboid trapped in a mall-- which is both hilarious, and the most amazing social experiment. (Spoiler: It is exactly like watching the Walking Dead.) Normally I wrap up work around 1am. But it was only 11:30pm, and I could barely keep my eyes open. Then it hit me that I had not done the Infinity update yet. So I grabbed the days screenshots and started writing you an update..... and apparently just fell asleep.
I have no idea why I wrote all of this. It is actually Wednesday and Warlic is in voice chat with me coding the solution to the cutscene bug in WedNESDay's post. We should go talk about that.
Coming the day before Thursday.
#QRESET is short for "Quest Reset"
We are working on this list of issues...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18XFjnndBCgeTMbnBep_LQUCtUI5Mv75V2lmpoF-L700
Tunik and Ghost fixed the issue with the opening cutscene already. Warlic is working on a nasty game-breaking issue where there is 1 or 2 frames when you can click that (!) button above the NPCs head when you are not supposed to be able to. It breaks the game. (Actually, as I type this Warlic might have just fixed it.)
Ghost is experimenting with a left handed fireball cast. The part where the hand thrusts out is timed to where the projectile version of the fireball will be attached. So it will seamlessly appear to throw the fireball the mage is holding. He wanted to have a hand replace the shadow, but because we have so many weird (non human, stick figure, monster, unusual shaped) armors it was not going to fail gracefully. Ghost wants to start working on Rogue next.
For the rest of the day we are going through the bugs in the order they are encountered in the game. This kills my secret plan to spring a tech demo tomorrow. I was really gunning for it this week. The next tech demo will go a lot better without the bugs. See you tomorrow.
Mage Update
The mage is getting really fun to play. Disregard the weird bouncing text... it is being replaced in the next update.
In the GIF above we use shield and see the mage in its new custom combat stance (With some glowy blue mage energy on your back hand.) Then we use explosion, ice, then fire. Ghost is still working on the fireball skill & FX. But each round of these changes looks better and is more fun to play.
Most of the FX in Infinity come straight out of Flash (now called Adobe Animate.) Here, Ghost is using Unity's particle system along with the exported Flash sprites to create the mage "magic missile".
Spider posted some freaking awesome previews of what he is building for the Mage auto attack. Looking forward to showing you that when it is working in the next build of the game.
Meanwhile, Lodrian was working on a new monster template and ran into some sizing weirdness.
So we built a new Monster & NPC builder scene. It will help us size monsters and animate the attacks more accurately.
Well, the third time was the charm.
OK, I know what you are thinking. Just to set the record straight, at least the base AQWorlds base NPC templates are wearing swimwear. The DragonFable & AdventureQuest 3D base NPCs are still in their birthday suits. (Actually, it has been a while, so I might be wrong and the DragonFable team might call me out on this.) Artists draw armor, hair, and accessories on top of the base templates when creating new items. The buff Goku looking male NPC is an old template. The new one they use is more modern-- less ripped, more stylized. Personally, I am a fan of the classic DragonBall Z look. In our game world, there is definitely room for all types of characters.
Reens, Warlic, and Tunik were busy working on the quests & maps. Did not actually sync with them today... the way I am 100% certain that they were doing this is because tons of things were breaking today and the server was being restarted a lot-- that is a symptom of systems being rewritten. XD They have been working really hard on this. The the constant changes and feature requests resulting from testing are so stressful. What is good about this, is it will be worth it when players log in and have a fun & smooth experience.
See you for tomorrow's update. - Artix
You cannot have a Fry-day with out some frying.....
Kameeeehameeeeha!!!!!!!
Ghost's casting windup is fast and explosive. Because you have a blue glow in your hand, it feels good to see the yellow-orange-red fireball form in your hands before you launch it. The fireball hit needs the smoke added on top of it. Possibly scaled down just a wee bit. The distracting text and timing of the debuff/aura will be fixed when Spider's new combat code gets merged in. There is another glaring issue you can see in this animated GIF. After the cast animation completes, it is jittering and then going to the "start combat stance" instead of resuming the combat stance. Having custom combat stances for classes was not something we had planned for. But we have them now! O_O. We need to add some code in the skill editor that will let us tell the player which animation to blend to after an attack animation completes.
We have Talk Like a Pirate Day Weekend events happening in multiple games....
Check all of the events out at www.Artix.com
...and there is new stuff at www.HeroMart.com too.
