AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Tuesday, October 29, 2024
We are back with horrifyingly spooky daily progress updates for AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity. Do you like ghost stories? Imagine we are sitting around a campfire in the pitch black of night. I lean forward.... the light of the flame under-light's my face as I begin whispering this dark and sordid tale.
Once every 100 years* under a full moon.... our team assembles on this very Monday. Shrouded in the anonymity of the Internet's shroud, our Discord-ian voices spoke a forbidden ancient language**. Their insidious goal? To summon AQWorlds forth onto new devices... and with this ritual, to bring forth the next Tech Demo. Avert your eyes, less you be driven mad*** at the C'thulian visages of the new Warrior, Rogue, Healer, and Mage classes. Legend says that only the most heroic Upholders (from this year and last) would be granted access to this new Tech Demo. Only one question remained.... when? Let us check out the meeting notes and make a guess.
* Not a release date. (Unless you ask Reddit)
** Microsoft C#
*** Already too late for the team, we lost it on this last refactor O_O.
Art Glow Up by Aranx
Meeting Notes
See you tomorrow!
"Tales from the Die-alogger"
Today's big objective was testing the Dialogger. This is our dialog cutscene editor. Tunik showed up for the meeting early and was forced to sit through the icon, rogue meeting, and healer meetings. All which went way over time XD. When we finally got to test the refactored Dialogger.... it worked pretty good! (And trust me, I was purposefully trying to break the living heck out of it.) I found a few edge case bugs, but nothing that will survive until tomorrow-- when we retest it.
I spent today AFK'ing in AQWorlds. While discussing Healer with Immortal Joe & Nulgath, I hopped on to see what the current skill animations were. Then, like every other time.... I stayed there for hours...
Healer Class Skill brainstorming
As far as the existing AQWorld's Healer class animations... there are no original animations. Other than the heal spell, the Healer class does not have anything that looks special. We were brainstorming some fun things we could do for Infinity. First thought is that all of the Healer skills are ranged. So we want to give it a ranged auto attack like Mage has. Something bright and illuminated that distinguishes itself from the mage's magic missile. Perhaps a single slower, beefier, holier, moving ball of light? We are going to need Ghost's help on the particles.For the Healer's big attack, we thought it would be fun if the healer lifted their weapon and hurled a bolt into the sky which would then strike back down on the target foe delivering furious retribution! Would be pretty comical if there was a map where your character was so small that you could see where the beams going up end XD. One thing is for certain. We want to replicate and maintain that classic AQWorlds heal effect when you cast heal. A spreading beam of yellow light with starbursts. (Disclaimer: I should not have said that out loud. Now there is going to be a 99% chance it is somehow different.)
See you tomorrow!
Gooooodevening! When you see these update posts dropping at 11:00pm, you get a pretty good sense of how the day has been going.
There was an important meeting with the coders over restructuring the code that managed our Asset Bundles & repositories. But instead of putting you to sleep with the details of that.... how about we talk about Rogue class skills? Ghost showed off the new animations he made... and then we discussed what sort of skill we should use for the Stiletto attack.
Then J6 said, "Wait, I have an icon you can use for the Stilleto." Then he posted this in chat....
Stille-TOE
/facepalm
...which caused me to open up Photoshop.
TOE-nado
....
The Day after TOE-morrow
But then the thumb comment got me thinking... it does sorta look like a thumb.
Thumb Drive
Thumbelina
The game is hitting the point where all of the devs are loosing their sanity. The design notes are a window into that descent into maddness. Admit it, this is secretly the real reason you read them.
There was an eerie silence today. There was very little chatter while everyone is working on their Infinity game dev projects. J (Formerly J6, and JX... apparently the real story is he just wanted to be J but the game did not allow single letter names for Characters. So, now he is just... J?) and I did a walk through of the dialogger. This is the tool we use to make cutscenes. Now that it is functional, we have a short window to improve the UI and make it more user friendly. It really makes me appreciate how Macromedia, the company that originally made Flash (before Adobe bought them) built their tool. It was an extremely complex program, but they did it really intuitively. Unity on the other hand... I have no idea what they were thinking when they built the animator. Animating in Unity is, in my opinion, a terrible experience. I could write a novel on how infuriating the interface is.... especially the drop down menus not having scroll bar handles. So if you have 60+ animations in a list, you have to sit there and scroll down the list with your mouse wheel.... which is does excruciatingly slowly... it takes forever. I digress. In other news, it appears Warlic already restructured the asset bundle code. Remember, that thing we did not talk about yesterday. Well, it is done. So, going to call today a win.
HEY! WHERE.... IS.... MY.... DAILY.... UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Proceed to here. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 gold.
