"Enhance! Enhance! Enhance!"
Greetings and salutations friend,
Before we jump into AdventureQuest Worlds: Mobile progress (which you can now wishlist on Steam), here are some behind the scenes stuff! We are extremely excited to have Spider visiting the lab this week. He has been contributing to AQWorlds Unity, AdventureQuest 3D, EpicDuel, and others O_O. Pretty crazy. As I write this, Spider, Zhoom, & Warlic are working together in the next room. The energy level of the entire lab has jumped since his arrival. Also this week, the actor who played Chairman Platinum visited. Chairman Platinum was the villainous CEO of our archenemy.... EbilCorp. We are sure it was him..... because ever since he left we have been finding fake $50 EbilCorp bills all over the lab's floor X_X. I heard someone yelling "Hey, did anyone lose a $50 bill?" To which we instinctively replied, "Um... is there an EbilCorp Logo on it?"
In other interesting news, we were contacted by a player who said they made a tool in GoDot that can extract information from our existing Flash assets to help automate the process of converting monsters. After seeing a demo of a monster animation working on my phone we reached out to explore if this is actually something that would be able to work with the game. Even if does not turn out to be usable, I wanted to share this with you. Just so you know that we are seriously exploring any ways to speed up and improve how we convert the game. We love it when talented members of the community take crazy initiative like this.
AdventureQuest Worlds: Unity is 100% has been trudging through the icky part of game development. We are officially at the part of the normal game development cycle where everything you add breaks something you already created and you have to re-code it to make it work. The goal of these posts is to be ultra transparent in our progress as AdventureQuest Worlds: Unity is 100% happening. This recreation of the game client and server has been in heavy development for a few years now while simultaneously weekly-updating the existing game. At the very bottom of today's post I put a (very) tentative schedule since everyone has been asking when we think we will be doing the betas, kickstarter, and different phases of this release.
2022.08.17.Spider Visit
- Youmi
- Added Enhance button to items that shows current stats, total enhancements, how many you have remaining, and saves it all to the database.
- For current testing, every player has 20 stat points already baked into them.
- Tunik
- Settings
- Screen Resolutions
- Full Screen
- Added "Drop Downs" for some settings
- Dialogger
- Can now move things using exact coordinates (This was a rather large feature with the current system)
- Warlic
- Working on loading NPCs & Monsters Dynamically into the dialoger (cutscene editor)
- Ultimately had to rebuild the avatar....
- Once this is working Tunik can resume the dialog cutscene editor
- Other Team
- Spider has been working with game designers on combat
- Darkon -
- J6 -
- Existing game -
- Upcoming
- UI w/ Chat for Mobile
- "Skill Node" system - this is a massive improvement on the existing game that will allow us to build more interesting classes.
- Need animation help.
2022.08.10. Back From Canada
- Tunik
- Background in the character menu (would like to make this customizable)
- Three tabs to sort quest s(All/Story/Side)
- Fixed confirm window bug (yes/no)
- Quest detail screen no longer flickers if you choose the same quest more than once
- Black Bars added to cutscenes so you cannot see past them on large screens
- "Your Hero" Button fixed
- Left over scripts from old designs pain painstakingly removed
- Cutscene actors are no longer dependant on the map camera.... So their size is not longer changing randomly O_O
- Added window manager with all of the window prefabs loaded into it.
- Settings menu
- General settings now shows the server you are on.
- Friends button takes you to the friends page
- Switch for the tool tips now working
- Full screen mode button now working (CTRL-ENTER also still works of course)
- Clicking the player panel in the top left opens the character panel... but clicking it multiple times would open an infinite number of character pages. This has been fixed.
- Version # no longer overlaps the UI
- Quest detail subtitle no longer just repeats the quest name
- Quest tracker text was weirdly indented. This has been fixed
- Scientific notation has been fixed on the Rank
- Facebook button is not working yet... so we hid it for now O_o
- Janky visual bug where you opened a character screen has been fixed.
- Added new empty function that will allow some of your common settings to sync to the database (instead of having to set it on each device... i.e. Gotos on, Accept PvP, etc)
- Waiting on Avatar support for the dialog system
- Warlic
- Death is no longer pixelated
- Storyline Data
- Quests can now belong to a storyline (aka Saga)
- You can now see your total storyline progress
- Synced to Client and Server
- Added support for storyline progress check
- Added mobile compatibility flag on the items.... client & server now knows.
- The black transition screen when you walk between rooms has been fixed (no longer gets stuck)
- NPC's name centered over their names better
- Warrior's Prepared Strike Skill bug has been fixed
- Customizable avatars loading into the cutscene editor (90%)
- Armor, Class, Hair, and Color Customization now working on NPCs (just need Weapon and back item)
- Need to add body type field to npc/monsters for hair and body loads
- Yorumi
- Support for Enhancements in the UI
- Can see the enhancements
- Can change/test their values
- Pre-populating them with data
- Goal is to finish this by the end of the week
- Quest Reset - Will now clear ALL of the quests in a storyline and also wipe any temp items associated with the quest.
- /Cell now allows dev to transfer between cells for testing maps
- Zhoom/Spider/etc
- Combat Meeting for spell implementation and sockets/enhancements
- Goal is to build a modular system that allows a node-based tool for devs that will allow more customized spells. O_O
- Spider will be working spells after he finished up the AQ3D team feature he has been building
- Reens & Spider both liked the multi-quest tracking from (going to add that in)
- Artix's todo list
- Was out-- so this is my to do list.
- Meet with Reens on Storytelling Tools
- Add Steam page to AQ2D.com
- Make Double Week Post
- Fix Playtest images on Steam
- Review Story Telling with Reens
- Review Interface (Apops and buttons)
- Talk to Diagon about new title screen
- Begin Steam Playtest
2022.07.20.One Week after we released the Steam Store Page
- Artix
- Make Playtest Version of Game
- Meet with Reens after meeting
- Research how to make tools like downloadable tools on Steam for testers
- Tester Protocol
- Choose Bug Master General
- Create AQW:U Discord
- Create new bug tracker
- Artix & Reens
- Content process review (Next Monday)
- Dialog flows
- Dialog Triggers
- For testing --> (/qreset 2 [resets story 2] and enter the lair... will trigger a cutscene, next quest, when ready to complete, go to Galanoth and it will trigger a cutscene)
- Story ID (these are used to group collections of quests)
- Talked about a dev panel to show all the quests in a story with buttons next to them to quick set steps for testing/goto
- Database tools (All story telling)
- Quest UI review
- Warlic
- Customizable monsters working and merged into develop branch
- Monsters now have an inventory of items to equip from
- If a monster has multiple items (i.e. Weapons) then the monster COULD randomly choose which item to load on spawn creating more randomly generated monsters. (This is a REALLY COOL idea!)
- Monsters have same properties as players (hair color, skin color, eye color, etc)
- /Join GreenGuardWest there is a monster there "Mr Dude" who is a purple version.
- Need to add Galanoth as a new customizable NPC
- Flow review with Zhoom
- Interested in Cthulian Mythos // Read these
- Read Mountain of Madness
- Shadow over Ismuth (Movie Dagon)
- Case of Charles Ward
- Dun Witch Horror
- Dream Quest of the Unknown Cadath
- Yorumi
- Bug: Spawn Entity is likely returning a NULL value in some cases. Tracing this to investigate
- /Adminyell is working... but comes up as a normal say (but will show for everyone on the server)
- Need Enhancement Interface (at any time for testers)
- Need Node builder to build out the node system to create the database system to make the nodes work
- Sync up with Zhoom
- Spider (Get well soon!)
- Tunik
- Other needs
- Diogon - new icons for top right menu
Timeline Overview
This new version of AdventureQuest Worlds is extremely important to both the team and our community if players. So I want to make it VERY CLEAR... we will not be releasing things until they are actually ready. These dates are not set in stone. I would rather see 10 million "I will be 100 years old when this game comes out" posts than see a flood of posts like "Why did they release this too early with all these bugs & problems?"
- STAGES (Note: Dates are likely to change)
- Finish current tasks
- Closed Alpha Play Test Starts (Rapid Bug Fixes)
- Kickstarter (Est. Oct, but we will not launch unless we have a rock solid core game engine first.)
- Early Access Begins (Nov)
- Closed Betsa
- Beta
- Steam (PC/Mac/Linux[experimental]) 64-bit
- Apple
- Android
- Full Release
- Conversion process for
- Armors (difficult)
- Weapons (not too bad)
- Pets (very manual)
- Head Items (Nightmare)
- List of Blockers
- Facebook Login
- Character Creation
- Apple Login / Character Deletion
- Enhancement System
- Dynamic loading of avatars in cutscenes
- Playable working Alpha that we can invite testers into
- Need a news UI that lets us communicate with testers
- A news caster NPC?
20th Anniversary Event
Beleen, Alina, and I met today met to write the outline for the 20th anniversary event that will take place in our games this October. Oh man, I forgot how funny Beleen's writing style is. Really glad she is going to be be a big part of creating this celebration.
Follow us before it's too late!
AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Wednesday, August 17, 2022
