Weekly Update #6 on Adventure Quest 2D

"Walk the walk... talk the talk...."

In this week's AdventureQuest 2D Worlds (Mobile/Steam) news update, we have had some... MOVEMENT.

Movement controller movement to be precise.

Joystick

The game now features 3 days to walk....

Click/Tap to Walk there
Joystick
Keyboard (WASD)

Last week Warlic refactored all of the movement code. It is hands down (or would that be... "fingers down") the best movement system.

This was at the center of today's full team progress meeting. Which was held here at the lab! Half of us were sitting around a big table talking to the rest of the team which is still off site.

Healthy Eating

The students from the High School that I presented to last week sent a really nice card and.... O_O Mmmmmmm. See's Chocolate. I do not think I have had See's Candies since back when I lived in California. <3

Music to our ears...

Also off topic, last weekly I uploaded the Dungoens & DoomKnights albums to YouTube. So if you do not have Spotify, Apple music, Amazon, etc, you can listen now listen to Jongar & Broomtool's masterpiece on Youtube. Note: Broomtool will be working on the sound engine here in AQ2D.
Get links on the Artix Music page

Weekly Update

Ok.... time to dive in. **grabs snorkle**

Ghost created "Mr Guy"!
This is our placeholder for you inside of the games cutscenes. Tunik and Warlic still need to rig the dialog cutscenes to use your character.
Movement refactor
Warlic fixed all remaining movement issues... for example, pets are running again. Which is way more humane than dragging them across the screen like they were doing that week. Please ask Peta to stop calling us about.
The Mana Blunder
While testing skills in combat... they suddenly stopped working. The team could not figure out why. Yorumi discovered that we were just running out of mana XD. The interface is being updated to reflect that better.
Spell Range & Cast FX
Yorumi has been working on combat. There is a lot of places we can improve the gameplay. Going to be tricky to stay focused on getting the core stuff done first without spiraling down the never end of "What if we did this....?" features.
Virtual Joystick
When using the mobile UI, the joystick will automatically load and appear on the screen. We need real art for it. The joystick in the screenshot is just a placeholder. Diogon, help!!!!
Dialoger (The dialog editor)
The end goal of this app, is so that a writer (any writer, perhaps even you one day) can open it up and effortlessly create an AQWorlds Cutscene. the current version works, but is cumbersome and not very pretty. Tunik added move, hide, and change direction buttons to the screen. You can also click dialog buttons to change their test and mouth pointers. The biggest improvement was making cutscenes properly reset when loading a new one. I considered showing you a screenshot of it... but oh man is it ugly. So when we make it cleaner and prettier I will post a side-by-side of the interfaces for you to see.
Ideas
At the meeting Alina asked if it would be possible to do day/night cycles in this version of the game. This and a lot of other questions have been presented by players recently. We talked about various ways of implementing it. Zhoom, as always, had at least two solid solutions. I did make a strong point that we needed the core game features 100% stable before we started making it even more complex, LOL.

Next Big Goals

Our focus is still getting everything in the Dragon's Lair (including the stuff up above) 100%. I am going to do a full walk through of the game features tomorrow. Sometimes when working on new things, old things magically break. So I anticipate a little of that. We are starting to think how we will be opening the game up for testers and all players to help hunt bugs in the game after the Dragon's Lair is complete. It will probably be a short series of tests to stabilize the game. You know the old saying, "No game code survives first contact with the player base." Then after the game is stable, we need to convert ALL the content in the game. We have talked about this a few times before, but once the core game is stable, we will have a mountain of manual work to convert all of the monsters, items, pets, weapons, etc. We will do a Kickstarter to raise funds that will enable to hire a temporary army of artists to help convert the enormous amount of content.

Battle on!
Artix