Weekly Update #5 on Adventure Quest 2D

Lets sync up about the server desyncs!

Greetings friend,

Hope your week has been going well.

I am still on cloud 9 after last week's 5-game wide April Fools event, double album launch (Apple Music/Spotify/Amazon/etc), and Dungeons & DoomKnights 100% project complete celebration on Friday! On Monday, we went back to the Lab to start setting it up. Finally! The team will be able to return and work from the lab starting next week. It will not be like the good old days with 40+ people there every day any more though. We are embracing a "work from wherever you want as long as the work gets done" policy. So instead of assigned rooms in the office, we we will just have big tables with spare monitors everywhere. Everyone works on laptops anyway. They will just come in, and plop their computer down wherever it makes sense to work that day. This is defiantly an experiment. Will let you know how it goes XD. Then, yesterday... I spent the day speaking to an Orange County Highschool. The students there grouped up into teams to build and market new product ideas. The winning idea will be made for real and sold at an upcoming school fair. I was invited to speak to the classes about my experience creating and marketing stuff. Most people just associate me with making video games, but the team and I have created action figures, a card game, books, posters, calendars, physical Nintendo carts, plush moglins, and sublimated armor t-shirts too. The students were amazing. And some of their project ideas could turn into real businesses if they choose to continue with them. Really hope they had a good time and had a few valuable takeaways from the talk.

On to the main event.....

In today in the AdventureQuest 2D Worlds project (Mobile/Steam) meeting we tested the latest build of the game.

A good amount of progress, and a few ongoing issues. Lets dig right in!

Weekly update

Keyboard Controls!
You can now officially walk around this version of AdventureQuest Worlds with your keyboards! Walking around using the WASD is the best!!! (Tech corner: Instead of sending the absolute position of where you were trying to go from clicking, movement is now being broadcast as vectors. If you hit up against the edge of something, you used to stop. Now you keep walking and sorta slide... making it far easier to move around complicated maps this way.)
Server Desyncronization
Fancy term that just means "What you see on the screen is now what everyone else is seeing." A lot of the issue reported about this last week have been fixed! Now Warlic is moving on to all of the edge case issues.... like joining a room when someone is in the middle of doing an emote or already moving.
Dialog Cutscenes
Just when we "thought" we were done. We realized we forgot to add you (the player) as an actor. The game would be a lot less interesting if you did not show up in the cutscenes, lol! So we are fixing that oversight. Also, our dialog editor is now a stand alone program. Which means in the distant future, it is possible that we will be able to put out a version for players to use to build their own dialog cutscenes. But the bad news, is that because this editor needs to be able to run "stand alone" outside of the game engine, we do not actually have access to the in-game characters. Which is OK. We are going to build a dummy character (Like "Mr. Guy" from DragonFable) which will be used as a placeholder for your character when creating dialogs. I am really looking forward to using this dialog editor to write new stories for you. In the past we would write scripts in a Google Doc, then painstakingly create frames and word bubbles in Flash. Now, with this, we can create finished scenes almost as fast as we can type. After seeing the Darkon saga, I got a few ideas on how we can expand this once the base-line functionality is finished.
Combat? Good. Leaving combat? Well..... there is a weird problem.
The combat is finally starting to feel like real AQWorlds combat. The first balancing pass was well done. However, that bug reported last week about deselecting your target is still a problem. The game REALLY seems to want you to keep fighting whatever monster you attack first. Even if you leave the room. Even if you switch maps O_O. This logic issue is next on the list to be fixed.
The Dragon's Lair
Our primary goal is still get to a fully functional version of this first area working with all the bells and whistles. Was hoping to be a little further along in today's report. Nevertheless, the important foundation work is making solid progress and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.