AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Monday, December 16, 2024
Tech Demo #6 ran for well over a week non-stop before finally ending.... the future is looking bright for AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity.
That last tech demo was our first ever "playtest" on Steam. Sure, it was a very unconventional approach. Players could apply and instantly be accepted to the playtest... but only players who met the requirements were able to access the testing servers. It worked well enough that I think we should continue doing it like that in the future. It would also be nice if we built character creation and a character viewer into the app so any player could view their characters. In the future we will need to have a major stress test where EVERYONE can log in and play to test how much a single server can really hold.
One of the reasons for running the test so long was just to see if the servers would stay up. (It did!) Another reason... was because we knew a few mischievous players would poke and prod at the server. (They did.) We discovered some unexpected... and frankly, very clever things. Because the two games share the same login, there were some tricks a crafty player could do to. Like selling an item more than once or accessing a server that they should not be able to. We are re-coding the login logic so that this will no longer be possible. Full transparency... this was a bug in the original AQWorlds that took a long time to find and fix. It was sorta funny that adding a new version of the game brought the exploit back. There we a lot of other issues. For example we are adding "which version of the game are you logged into" checks to the server for things like shops and item loads. This test was a huge success for finding and fixing things like this. There will be more. There are... O_O ...always more. The big win here, is that despite all the poking and prodding... the servers stayed up 24/7 for over week!
After that test... our to-do list got pretty big :D Here are the highlights...
It is a full court press on building cinematic and dialog cut-scenes. Tunik & Ghost are leading the charge on that. At today's full team meeting I saw a demo cutscene by Ghost which was made using the new tools. A big goal is to have our cutscene creation process ready for production by the end of the year. <looks at sun dial> Which is in less than two weeks O_O. Then we will rebuild the Bludrut cutscenes and at long last.... complete that area!
If you played the tech demo you saw that we converted over all the items from AQWorlds. They are not animated. They are not color custom. They are flat (bitmap) images. Looked way better than any of us expected for a simple conversion. Each weapon, armor, cape, or other item worthy of being re-animated in Unity will need to go through a process. Our workflow starts with AQWorlds where the art is created in Adobe Animate (Formerly Flash). The artwork is added to AQWorlds were it is then exported to Infinity using a tool that Spider & Warlic have been collaborating on. Each item will go into a unique folder containing all of its pieces. From there, an artist skilled with Unity will be able to re-assemble and animate the item using the flat-converted one as a reference. All items will be prefixed with their ID #. This will keep the items unique. It will also allow to do things like... only exporting all of the new items built this week.
AQWorlds infamously releases over 100 new items a week sometimes X_X. I imagine there will be jobs in the future at Artix Entertainment for creative people who enjoy converting AQWorlds items to unity. I also imagine someone is going to come up with some clever processes of building things in Adobe Animate in a way that can automatically transfer to Unity. The next year is going to be an exciting time of discovery & opportunity.
Eht, Immortal Joe, and I met last week to work on your character's stats. That includes everything from experience, damage, health, to combat formulas. If you have ever worked on an RPG before, you already know that this can be an area of endless brainstorming and debate. There is no "one perfect answer". In fact, there are so many different right answers that it can be immobilizing. Following our philosophy of 80% the same and 20% better... the path forward is clearer. We are going to reintroduce stats like STR, DEX, WIS, INT, and LUK. But this game's formulas will make it way more clear what does what. We want items in the game to drop with stats already on them. If you are battling enemies anywhere near your level, you should be getting drops that are good for you. We are meeting with Yorumi this Thursday to start the process of implementing some starting stats. The next tech demo (or maybe it will be the start of Alpha?) will put this to the test. Slightly off topic... I am a REALLY huge fan of the idea of Weapon Fusion. That is, you take the art of one item and the power of another and merge them together. This was the plan for AQ3D but we went with cosmetic equip instead. Cosmetic equip is nice... but confusing. Another idea I really like is a player trade skill that allows you to power up other players weapons or craft upgrades/enhancements.
I have a lot more to write.... but I am late. So very late. O_O
Happy Frostvale!
Artix
EpicDuel 
AdventureQuest 
