So I had a colonoscopy last week. The procedure was a real pain in the rear.
The team sent me pictures of AQWorld's brown slime monsters from our games all day... among other comically relevant art >_>
The anesthesia they knocked me out sure worked. My wife said that when they were waking me up from it... I was trying to punch the air and recite computer numbers (you know, powers of two).
The doc said to not work or make any important decisions that day. So of course I was trying to redesign the database and admin tools with Captain Rhubarb an hour later.
The anesthesia made me so tired! Like some sort of slowing debuff, I just could not seem to shake it. So the next morning I ran 5.2 miles. Because... maybe you can sweat it out of your body? Zhoom ran the full 6.2 miles in exact same time frame. He is so much faster than me. Apparently his name holds up!
Zhoom is our head game programmer. He was one of the earliest members of the team. Together we built DragonFable, MechQuest, AQWorlds, BattleGems, AdventureQuest 3D and a ton of other projects. His role at Artix Entertainment is to help, mentor, and oversee game programmers who are working on the games -- like AQWorlds & AQ3D.
Zhoom and I go to the gym 5 days a week to run and lift heavy objects. Dage joined us this week as well! As you probably imagined, we also talk about the games and stuff too. These days it is mostly AQWorlds Infinity.
We have a timeline of when we want to have the core features complete and when we want to do the Kickstarter, Alpha, Beta, and Live releases of the game. Between you and I... it is scary stuff. We created the original AdventureQuest Worlds in 8 months from scratch. When it released it was pretty bare bones. But that would not fly today. Players (like you) expect that when they log onto this new version of the game, you will have your stuff, the features you regularly use will be working, and that there will already be lots of things to do. So not only do we need to finish building all of the systems you have seen us working on, but we need to go into hyper-drive creating and converting tons of areas, monsters, stories, and epic loot. You will probably agree that it would be a wise move would be to wait a little bit... to make sure we are on schedule.... before announcing the official dates. But it is this year. Do or die.
Monday meetings?
We changed our AQW Infinity meeting days to Monday! Actually, I changed ALL of my meetings to Mondays... this way the other 4 days of the week are pure production days. I really like this change. Like eating all of my vegetables first and then the rest of the week is the delicious, tasty, main course of pure game development.
More... Coffee!!!
When you read the progress updates below, you will see exactly what we have been working on. This includes Spider's amazing new tools, Tunik's massive progress on cutscenes and UI, and Yorumi getting friends and guilds working. There are a few things so new that they are not in the list. These things all involve horrifyingly game-breaking big changes to our questing system. But it is all good news for you.
Quest System
Correct me if I am wrong, but way back in the Living Dungeon adventure that I wrote, we stuck a head in the corner of the screen for the first time. You could just click on the head to get your quests. Which was great because it was a long dungeon and you were supposed to keep moving forward. This way you did not need to run all the way back to the quest giver to turn in or get your next quest. Many new maps in the existing version of the game have been using this. But the heads can be really inconsistent. For example: Some open apops and some open quests. Also, if you have a quest, it is sometimes hard to tell where you got the quest or where you are supposed to go to complete it. We spent a lot of time thinking about to improve this.
Quests in AdventureQuest Worlds Infinity will soon show you the head of the NPC who gave you the quest. If you are not in the right place to do that quest, the quest will feature a helpful button to teleport you to that quest giver. Each individual quest will have the ability to do this -- which adds some data entry work, but will be super helpful if you open your quest log and have no idea what the quest you are staring at is.
There will now be three major quest turn in types...
- Turn in at a specific NPC - Requires you to walk to a certain NPC
- Turn in anywhere - Can be turned in at any time by clicking on the quest tracker in the upper right of your screen, or by walking to NPC
- Auto Turn in - Will automatically turn itself in and give you the next quest (useful for exploration quests, wars, interactive objects)
Quests will also have icons to show you what type of quest they are. For example:
- Main Story Quests
- Side Quests
- Daily Quest
- Repeatable Quest
One of the biggest improvements will be how you talk to NPCs. If you have a quest to go talk to Dage, then clicking on Dage will instantly play the dialog/cutscene and then the quest will complete at the end. If you get disconnected or the cutscene breaks... no problem. The next time you join the game and talk to the NPC it will play it again so you do not miss anything. So, the quest will only complete after you have completed the cutscene or intentionally clicked the "skip cutscene" button. This new flow solves a major issue where a bug causes you to miss an important cutscene. Have you ever had that happen? I am a fan of always having "replay cutscene" buttons somewhere. Our new system makes it super easy to do this for every quest too.
One of my favorite things to see if when YouTuber's make videos about these posts on their channels. Sometimes they read the whole post and comment on it like Korey does. If you are reading this, Hi Korey! (Check out the interview Beleen did with Korey here...) Also, apologies for making you say colonoscopy on your video. Twice. Now you are probably going to get medical ads at the start of your video. "Brought to you by Dr. Voltabolt!"
With that... here is your TRIPLE meeting notes copy/pasta!
AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Thursday, June 29, 2023
