Deaths Dev Dairy! on Adventure Quest 2D

"You reap what you code."

DEATH: OH, HELLO THERE!

Player: Are... are.... are you... Death!?

DEATH: SURE AM, CHAMP! ...AND THIS IS THE LATEST ADVENTUREQUEST WORLDS: INFINITY UPDATE!

Player: Do you always write in all caps?

DEATH: CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!*

Player: It's been a while since our last round of dev notes. Is everyone over there, OK?

DEATH: <Staring intently at Hourglass... taps it twice with bony finger> HMMM. YEAH, THEY'RE GOOD... FOR NOW.

Player: So what's that latest on AQWI... er, do I pronounce that Ackwee? Or should we just call it Infinity?

DEATH: Sure. Infinity has a nice ring to it.

Player: Haha, yeah. Cause' that's how long I've been waiting for it....

DEATH: ...

Player: ...

DEATH: Points finger in a sorta "power word die-ish" way

Player: <falls over gurgling in a comically deadly way>

Player 2: Yowza! Are... are.... are you... Death!?

DEATH: SURE AM, CHAMP! ...AND THIS IS THE LATEST ADVENTUREQUEST WORLDS: INFINITY UPDATE!

* No, it's really not. But who's gonna argue with.... <falls over gurgling>

2023.04.05.Back From Pax

Back from PAX & Midwest Gaming Classic
All good news and issues reported to the team. They are taking action on the new list.

Tunik

Prioritizing requests from PAX Demo (going through backlog)
Mobile Chat now checks the keyboard height so that it moves to the correct location on your screen (needs testing on mobile)
Hovering over NPC buttons will cause it to change color (These are in game space, not UI space... so required extra work)
Added button on the Loading Screen that will allow you to go back to the login screen.
Borders fixed in the settings menu
Map reverted to what it will be in the final game (special version was created for PAX)
Hide/Show buttons on the HUD now point the direction they will move things

Warlic

Cloud Builder

Builds asset bundles and puts them into the correct directories
Builds for all devices
Now pulls NPCs from version directories
Need to do the same for weapons and items

Yorumi

Spawn buttons - Devs can now spawn monsters by name (not just ID).
Monsters will face the direction that the player is facing
Need to add the same feature to "movetome"
Deadlocking issue on database for items with default enhancements. This issue was due to the inventory table. Captain Rhubarb helped to speed up the queries which fixed the deadlocking issue.
Web calls from the client now uses a single class which has error checking and clean up built into the class. This will make sure all errors are properly logged.

Spider

Working on implementation of NODE system

Feature Requests & Known Issues

Combat

Sometimes projecties do not visibly cast
Sometimes skills do not fire
Range needs implemented (currently attacking grabs a random monster)
Spider and Artix wants to make combat extremely fast, action packed, and more anime-like. It needs to be backwards compatible with the existing system.

2023.04.12.Action Time!

Tunik

UI settings standardized
Stylized Drop Down Boxes - now they look like AdventureQuest drop downs!
Mobile Chat (keyboard height) fixes.
Cinematic Cutscenes - took Ghost's sample cutscene and wrapped it in the client
Issue - All sprites have a Z-order and they all need a different one. Wanted to give cutscenes the ability to use all of them. To prevent issues when you return to the game, using a special camera and added a sorting layer just for cutscenes (layer 22). Primary objective is to avoid z-order clipping errors. To see the cutcene, you need to be in the project, click on the camera and click on "run elements". There is no click blocker yet. So be careful.
Need to add Mr. Guy to the test cinematic cutscene.

Warlic

Still mostly working in the Cloud Builder and Item Respositoes for the last week.
Working on getting Cloud Builder to put all asset bundles in appropriate folders. Also getting it to handle items as well as characters and monsters.
Maps, Characters, and Items now have versions. Versions create new folders to help with caching issues. Next up is Classes, Armors, and Hairs.
Item publishing projects being merged into a single project-- which will allow all equippable items to be worked on in one place. (Currently we have 4 different projects.)
Re-organized Characters/Monsters project with Artix
Pets

Decided pets will be in the characters/monsters project so that they can be used as monsters, companions, or things that the player can potentially turn into.
We will need to add additional animations to pets when re-animating them
Color customization for pets is possible... but has not been implemented.
We do not currently have a system for creating a pet-- need to standardized the creation process

Yorumi

SQL Server - removing all of the new parts that are breaking version control. We are going back to the old way of doing things
Almost done modifying all of the queries. (Should be wrapped up today.. .doing player quest data now.)
Captain Rhubarb is changing database permissions to isolate all of the logins into their own realms to make security super tight.

Spider

Computer blew up
Ordered replacement parts and got a replacement which is being setting up now
Once back up - returning to Combat

Objectives (From Zhoom)

Switch to Universal Render Pipeline in Unity

Mainly to future proof the game

Database refactor
Code Review on "Area Join" flow. Might need refactor.
Game State reset (making sure everything is properly cleaned up when you exit and return to the game before tackling new features.)
The next phase is the big one.... Creating live-ready content for the game. The next sprint will be about 10X of what we did getting ready for PAX.

Big 3

Try to build a weekly release (and see what breaks... fix that stuff and systems)
Zhoom's Objectives
Combat Design meeting (Friday)

2023.04.19.WhyDoesArtixWriteTheDatesBackwards?*

Tunik

The player can no longer click to walk and switch maps while a cutscene is active
The player can no longer click on apop buttons when a cutscene is active
Created a check that disables all input & map interaction when cutscenes are active incase click blockers fail. This can also be used in apops and dialogue events.
Fixed a layering bug where entities could show up in front of cutscenes
The "next" button in cutscenes follows the game's aspect ratio like the rest of the HUD now.
The “next” button is now part of the HUD instead of being stored in the cutscene asset.

Warlic

Wrapping up Cloudbuilder

Refactor: Path definitions require too many conditionals depending on the project-type. Wrapping the asset data into a separate class with getters for the folders/files will make the code easier to manage.

Unifying Armor, items, hairs into a single project called aqwinfinity-items. Content creators will need to pull this repo and then pull any of the content-only repos to work on new assets.

Yorumi

Removed all Linq to Sql.
Converted all database calls to sprocs.
Created helper classes to make db calls easier and clean up resources.

Spider

Focusing on solidifying new combat feel for AQ2D
Starting out with completely reimagining one of the starter classes

* There are a lot of ways to write dates. Sure, you can write the month first or the day first... but while in the shower, it dawned on me that the very best way to write dates is completely backwards! I can tell you are skeptical. It is OK. I was at first too. But let me share the secret with you. See, my computer's desktop used to be a MESS! Mostly because I just saved everything straight to my desktop and then never cleaned it up. Eventually, I would take all of the files and dump then in some folder called SORT_ME. Then... SORT_ME2. Then I would put sort me folders inside of the sort me folders and thing just got out of hand. O_O Then I had an idea. What if.... every month, I just dumped ALL of the files on my desktop into a folder with a date on it. The idea worked great. Except.... the folders did not sort alphabetically. Also, as you probably guessed, I regularly spelled the months wrong. But then... I started writing the dates backwards. YEAR-MONTH-DAY....... perfect! Sorts alphabetically. You do need to remember that if you are writing a single digit number like 9 that you need to stick a zero in front of it like this "09". Anyway, I started using this for everything. Then it sorta bled into these posts. And now you know why.

I have every "desktop mess" by month all the way back to 2015. It is also super handy for things like design notes posts for game releases.... so I posted AdventureQuest 3D's promo graphics folder for you to see. It is really easy to find things. Sure, you can search. But what is something is named weird? Using this you could just go to any year's October and look in the folder with the release name to find the source files for the art. #ArtixHacks