"Rain" of Terror on Adventure Quest 2D

Progress Update #22 & #23 (I think?)

"Weather" your are ready or not, you will need an umbrella for this week's downpour insider progress update about AdventureQuest Worlds: Unity. I am "particle-arly" excited about it.

Rain

"When it rains, it por-favors!"

I had a legit amazing day today. Got to hang out with Warlic working on the game. Your full meeting notes can be found below. Keep reading here for a storytime of what happened after the meeting. Starting with that animated GIF above of a super simple particle system making it rain in town. It is a proof of concept with placeholder art... and it works. Adding subtle falling leaves and a little light bokeh to the Town of Battleon has been on my wishlist since the very start of this project. It is not a very hard thing to do at all... but the surprising part, is I was the one that did it. We have a lot of coders on the team and they are all maxed. As you may already know I have been spending my nights learning Unity/C#. Today it actually paid off.

At the end of our Wednesday AQW:Unity team meeting the crew set me up with access to I could start working on the maps. Warlic spent the entire day with me going over how the maps, client, and character projects work. It is crazy how much stuff is under the hood. The project is pretty intimidating. The focus of today was on maps. Now, a good number of maps have already been converted and added to the game by artist/animator J6. The art is there, but the spawn pads, colliders, scrolling, and other map specific things all need a fine-tuning pass. It is really exciting to work on this part of the project. We found a ton of issues and Warlic fixed them on the spot.

The purple guy holding the axe in the GIF above is the current "Mr. Guy".(There is also a "Ms. Girl") He is an NPC. But, he is a very different from the NPCs in the web version of the game. He is equipped the exact same way your character is. We can customize and equip NPCs the same way we do it for our own characters. In the existing version of the game every NPC had to be exported separately and included into the map. Now we can spawn them in like highly customizable monsters.

While Warlic was dealing with a NPC sizing bug, I said, "Hey... I, uh, did a thing. Uploading a new asset to the server to see if it works!" Warlic seemed VERY concerned. Probably because he had not finished fixing that bug and based on previous experiences when I "try things" it was likely the whole map was going to explode with bugs. But it did not. It started to snow in town. Granted, it was some BAD looking snow. It was cool that it actually worked! I spent a few minutes turning it into rain. Of all the things we did today, that was the most exciting and fulfilling for me. It was that feeling of completing a goal set a long time ago. We just need the artists to make some prettier particles for the maps now.

Also today we worked with Captain Rhubarb on the admin tools for the database. He his playing with some new tech. It is crazy how fast he makes things work. This part of game development is my favorite-- learning new stuff and making things happen.

On the bottom you can see a suuuuuper tiny 4:3 aspect ratio screen tracking the player's movement. The background has a few layers of parallax.

Meeting Notes

These are the meeting notes from the past two weeks. As usual, I am literally copy/pasta'ing the ones I wrote down during the Wednesday meetings. Seeing these two back-to-back is sorta interesting because so many issues found in the first entry are fixed in the second one.

2023.01.11

Warlic

Hard crash in lair when starting cutscene. Caused by the NPC button. This is because the NPC's button. Fixed.
If you equip an incompatible item... it will not longer break the game. Even if you log in with it. It will replace the incompatible item with a working one.
The default fall back for incompatible armors will be your class armor.
The Level check on equipping items was failing on the game client. The server was working properly. This caused bad things to happen. It has been fixed.
If you do not have tester access the game will now let you know by popping up a message on the loading screen and giving you a back arrow. The back button is now working.
Rest button is now working with proper HP regeneration.(There was a bug that HP was not increasing if your mana was full.

Yorumi

Server is now reporting errors on login. This allows messages like "Player does not have tester access" to be displayed to the game client.
Fall back equip. If you login with an unsupported class, it will now force equip Warrior Class. If you do not have Warrior class, it will now give it to you.
Leveling up will now allow you to add additional enhancements to your items.
New items will be pre-enhanced with neutral enhancements up to your level.

Would like to pop up a message to encourage players to better enhance their items

Current system is not balanced. Need Class testers and balance to start taking a look at the system. For example: Right now, you need 4 pieces of enhanced armor to take on a level 1 monster.

Tunik

Aspect Ratio Issues fixed in APOPs, Cutscenes, and HUD.
Added an extra button which caused combat panels to overlap with in 4:3 aspect ratio
Preview text is now in correct place on Login screens
Server screen is not final, but it has been fixed now too
Inventory preview slightly overlapping inventory is now fixed
If you try equipping an unselectable it gives you a message.
Some buttons were missing when switching aspect ratio.
Screenshake bug at end of quests fixed
Tabbing now works for the login screen
Shift-tab will allow you to go back to the previous field
The game allows free resizing - as long as the aspect ratio is 4:3 or above it should work properly. Background of game should be black.

Artix Notes

Combat targeting needs a single flow. Hitting a skill and attacking amonster does not put the circle around the monster
Loot flies up to your box at a variable speed (needs DeltaTime added)
Opening Inventory hides Chat Box
Class icon should come before equipment, and needs new icon from Diagon
Clicking on Inventory-- clicks through and clicks on monsters under the inventory window
Loot not saving from loot bag to inventory
Combat stance synchronization issues
/goto not working when you are in the same map but a different cell
Loot bag inventory does not allow you to inspect loot yet
Loot not incrementing when acquiring items -- might be a server response issue.
Dialog load on map join -- Wartlic and Zhoom are redesigning the flow. Looks like quests will need to be included in map loads.
Questions on

Quest Bits - Understanding the flow for sagas using quest bits

Need Saga created/edit/delete admin tool

Enhancement System - Understanding the enhancement process

2023.01.18

Tunik

Item Preview was broken on loot. This has been fixed and works properly
Window scaling has been entirely fixed

Tons of testing on this....
At the point where the only remaining bug is the target panel overlapping the mini-menu if you go under 4:3 aspect ratio which is fine.
All new UI elements that we create will need to be tested in all resolutions

Chat no longer disappears when UI elements are open.
Loot Drop was too fast. It is now a little slower.
Added an "Up Vote" button instead of Equip for items that have not been converted yet. This does not do anything yet, but is more clear that this item is not ready for use yet.
Cutscenes have black borders on the top and bottom

Warlic

Quest Story Flow improved! The flow of entering a story area.,
1st quest you have not finished is now automatically sent to the map when you first load it. This means the map does not need to be loaded in order to know if you have a cutscene. This is important because you can immediately load the cutscene instead of seeing the map blimp on screen.
The /goto command will now send you to map & cell of where the target player is. This will allow you to /goto a player in the same map
There was an error that when you went to a cell it would spawn the wrong cells monsters. This has been fixed. However, there is a new bug where the correct monsters are not spawning properly.

Yorumi

Internet was out at Yorumi's place. Called in via phone.
If there is no enhancement on your items when you log in, the game will auto enhance all your items to give them power.
However, this process is creating a dead-lock in our database. This is being investigated.
Working on cleaning up the bug which prevents looting items. Items are not being transferred from your loot bag to your real inventory. An attempt at fixing this will be posted as soon as internet is restored.

Spider

Zhoom and Spider were working the animation export tool. There was a big problem. The exported file was way too big. (i.e. 25 megabytes for one animation)
Head exporter tool was completed and sent to Warlic. Warlic has not had a chance to test it and request any changes yet.
Zhoom and Spider were working with some tools that allowed them to do the conversion straight from the Flash .SWF files, not needing the .FLA source files.

Captain Rhubarb

Added Saga Edit to the Database/Admin Tools.
Added ability to create new saga (Using new form tool)
Added ability to add "new quest to saga"
Working on new admin tool to see the progress of player quests (this is trickier because we switched to a bits system instead of using QuestStrings like the existing AdventureQuest Worlds.)

Notes

Learned about the "Unity Simulator" which allows us to see what the game will look on different devices without needing to actually export to every device. This is really cool and will save a ton of time doing 1st pass of new UI work.
Quest Description Bug - when leaving and returning to a map it places the wrong field in the story tracker. Also, it is not properly truncating.
Dialog issue - the second time a dialog players there are a cascading number of issues. Something is probably not being cleaned up properly.
Reens, Artix, and Captain Rhubarb need to get together to review the new admin tools
Combat Spell Targeting issues
Other /commands are being worked on
Combat re-implementation has not started yet (this is the biggest and most important feature to complete before the 1st convention)