Loot & Boot on Adventure Quest 2D

"In the perilous world of Game Development there is only one thing you have to do.... whatever it takes. "

Greetings friend,

Welcome to another exciting episode of AdventureQuest Worlds: Unity. On today's show we will be smiling and pretending everything is 100% A-OK as the game server catches on fire and things explode in the background. Because.... Yes, oh yes.... this week we revamped the Quest system. Nothing breaks every single system in the game quite like "Ooops, we forgot to add real items as quest turn-ins." Oh sure, it seems easy enough. Until you go to do it and realize the systems were created so carefully isolated and vastly different that you have to grab a sledge a hammer and start knocking a giant hole in the wall to let them pass info back and forth. Of course, I am blowing this out of proportion. It is not actually that bad. I mean, sure, when you read the logs you will see that every system related to combat and loot is temporarily broken. But it should be fixed by next week.

Whenever I encounter a problem of any size, I ask myself a strange question, "What is good about this?". In this case, what is good-- is that Reens and I have been trying to build quests and these feature requests and fixes are the result of actual progress. There is an old saying, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy." And that is my experience with game development too. Until you actually start using the stuff, you never really know what is missing. Like.... take for example, a "create new map" button. It seems like one of those pretty important things. We have been editing a small number of test maps for a really long time. It was not until we actually went to create a new map that we realized that the button did not exist. XD

Reminds me of the old days when Zhoom and I were building DragonFable. It was exactly the same. Chaos is the part of this process that I absolutely love. Or, solving chaos.... to be more precise. Without big problems and challenges, we do not get a chance to show off our power in solving them. It would be like having a video game without a tough boss monster. Fortunately, converting a game like AdventureQuest Worlds to Unity is FULL of metaphorical Boss Fights XD.

On a super optimistic note-- working on the maps project with Reens was pretty eye-opening. The maps are SO MUCH easier to work with than in AdventureQuest 3D. (Not as easy as using Flash... but still WAAAAAY easier then AQ3D.)

For brave souls like you who are still reading, here is some bonus news. I officially signed on the host of our 20th Anniversary this past week! Whether you are an existing fan of this iconic mystery host, or will be seeing this individual for the first time... I hope you enjoy the light-hearted and creepy October-themed fun we have in store. Beleen and I wrote an outline for the AQWorlds event. Hope you enjoy it!

2022.98.31.Last Week of August

Tunik

Loot button moved to left on mini-menu (no longer covering quest tracker)

Cleaned up window to match UI
Blue notification will light up when you get loot
Needs a unique icon

NPC in dialog editor - custom npcs no longer get stuck when you move them around
Animations no longer pulling from wrong list for some characters in dialoger
Spawning custom NPCs were not npcs, but actors... so needed to change their structure to make them work
Scrolling through animations fixed
When opening quest menu it did not always appear where it should. The hotspot for this was fixed.
Formatting on the setup screen in the dialog editor was cleared up.
Map card prefabs
The test APOP would soft-lock the game under edge case conditions. This has been fixed.
General settings menu re-adjusted (buttons moved)
Mobile Users: Chat will now automatically send when you hit enter on the keyboard.

Warlic

Command Pad Toggle! (Now with Labels for Devs)

Working on editor, not steam

NPC loader now waits for the map to load first
Support for visibility of parts form the options screen (Hide Helm, Helm Cloak, hide Pet)

Adding a hide weapon too.
Only works locally
Need to add broadcasts so everyone will see it.

Fixed issue where clicking on a Monster will not let you click his chat bubble (or the monster himself)
Been helping Tunik with the Diologger manager working with Custom NPCs
Zardman Atlas "floaters" now fixed. It was an issue with the rectangular regions in the texture atlas overlapping with each other (easy fix)

Yorumi

Quests & Item Drops
Huge amount of work going into this to get REAL items to also work as quest turn-ins. One of those cases of once you get one thing working, it breaks something else.

Kill count is working (quantity and rates need fixed)
Items are close (item id is using wrong field)
Turn In - currently broken due to adding new features

Artix / Reens / Captain Rhubarb

Met and did a review of the story building system.
Added "Create New Map" to the Admin
Add spawn button is now fixed
Bug where monster would not load if the map loaded to fast was fixed (Thank you Warlic)
Sent Warlic an icon for the app XD
High priority request for /reloadmap

Needs a message to let you know who restarted the server and why
Server restarted by Artix
"Added new maps!"

Created new art for the dev Monster and Player Spawn pads (so we can tell them apart)

To Do

Asset loading issue - high priority bug
Quest issue - high priority bug
Diogon

New Login screen
Icons

Loot (Treasure chest)
Character, Rest, World Map, Inventory, Settings

UI polish pass

Deleting item bug

"Test Note" being deleted on the client, but not on the server.

Monster Loot Issue

Items not dropping
Quest objectives not working

The small NPC "speeach apop bubble" popping through background of APOPs
Player Animation

Shadow bounces when you run
There is a slight jitter at the end of the run animation

Movement arrows are super pixilated in the Forest Map (investigating)
Slaying a monster abruptly sends you to idle-- we need to improve this experience so it looks cool when you finish a monster (a finisher?)
Prepared strike skill makes you turn right for a second?
Skill & Chat collapse arrows need to point the opposite way once used. (They currently point away regardless of the menu being collapsed or not)
Very that map clamps to the XP bar, not the bottom of the screen.
We were approved on Steam for our playtest version a few weeks ago. Need to check the status of our codes.

2022.08.24.Week After Spider

Tunik

Mobile Chat

Now centered on Mobile
Dedicated Chat window

Dialog Cutscene System

Working on an ID issue with custom NPCs

Mobile Joystick - need to get with Diogon to redo it.
Fixed error with the Loot UI (Caused by the code shared between Inventory and Loot)

Warlic

Avatar Spawns in the Dialog editor and game!

This was the focus of the week, quite a bit of work.
Now uses the same flow to load the parts in-game as it does in the dialog editor.

Bug Fixes

Apop buttons appearing over monsters where they were not defined
If a button container does not exist, the game will now spawn one
Monster direction (right/left) is now working properly
Monsters now face the correct direction in combat
Walking between cells no longer flips monster direction

Those ! circles are now being pulled from the database. There is a attach spot defined on the monster. But if the spot does not exist, the game will now try to guess and put it above the head.
Need to make the click behavior of NPCs also apply to monsters. (Lil' bit of investigation to find out how we originally set this up to make sure it is super consistent.) Goal is to make everything "A single flow"

Yorumi

Old Quest Turn-ins have been switched to a new table in the database. Required a refactor of the code.
Enhancement window fixed and can enhance any item that... can be enhanced. This is currently a dev only panel. (Ok, while testing this, the enhancement count was not being updated in the client, lol... this panel is cursed. Breaks every time we have a team test XD. Oh wait, it worked the second time. O_O Maybe something in the quantity size is breaking it?)
Enhancements can potentially allow each stat on your weapon to go up to 1,023.
Dev Commands

Need commands to kill and reload map.
Prioritizing anything Reens need for storytelling first

Reens

Worked on Forest Map last night and ran into a lot of dev bugs. All bugs except for the quest turn in for quests with real items have been fixed so far. There will likely be more issues as we continue doing actual production quality maps.
Captain Rhubarb made a bunch of admin fixes

That is all for this episode. Join us next time for.... *** EXPLOSIONS AND STUFF!!!!! ****