You are undead? The 0 HP Combat Bug on Adventure Quest 2D

This bug is killing me.... or... not killing me?

Whoops. The 0 HP combat bug has turned our testers into an army of unkillable zombies. Or... is it a feature? Unrelated, how much do you like brains?

Mage Attack

Rule #1 of Game Design

"Never trust a unity animation"

OK, not sure if that is actually rule number one... maybe something like "make the game fun" would be better. But with all the troubles with animations, we are temporarily elevating it to #1. What happens? Well, AQWorlds Infinity has really nice timing for attacks, damage numbers, explosions, and soundFX (See the animated GIF above.) Also, like any MMORPG, it needs to be synchronized across all of the players. Things do not have to happen at the exact same time. For example, if you someone is lagging a little, they can just sorta catch up when they finally get the data. But things need to flow in an order to make everything appear that it is happening at the right time. The original AQWorlds does not worry about this much. We did a better job in AdventureQuest 3D. We are doing an even better job in this game. But if an animation fails, or if any skill has a little glitch in it, it can throw off the entire dance of data. What resulted was an intense bug hunt to find the culprit that was causing the game to desync, leaving the player as an undying 0 hp zombie. We checked everywhere for the bug....

Meanwhile...

Ghost finished the final Bludrut cutscene and sword (animated GIF below.).
Nulgath has been working ahead on monsters for the Dwarfhold Mountains.
Diogon has been building our missing interfaces.
Yorumi has been working on the new enhancement system
Warlic has been fixing quest machines and started preparing game APIs
Tunik has been fixing all of the UI bugs... and he reduced the draw calls (things that slow down the game on lower end devices) by a lot.
Reens has been polishing Bludrut with Sir Fainal & Despair testing it.
Spider has been working on combat & housing
Immortal Joe has been balancing Bludrut keep & adding drops for the upcoming test
Jongaar is ready to add new music and soundfx but no one has been sending him requests-- so he has been keeping busy with the other game projects until then.
Artix (Hey, that is me) has been crazy busy but not making design notes post (shame!)... but will now that the next test is imminent.

Adding Fallbacks

Remember that animation thing we were talking about before? No animation should ever break the game. So the game will automatically do what it needs to do if an animation fails or is missing. It will also sent an error (to any of you that have errors turned on) so you can say, "Hey Dev! You are missing the Attack 2 animation on monster 1325.

Related: We found an issue with the Mage "Explosion" skill which was corrupting some data. That is being fixed as you read this.

Oh... and the sword....

bludrut Blade of Glass

?????

A mysterious blade made of enchanted glass. As you gaze into it's sheed-filled blaze you see a flicker of something so horrible that words cannot describe. It was probably just all in your mind.

The particle-fx glass sword was designed & animated by Ghost in Unity. J6 polished up the art a bit.

Nice Hat

Ghost was last seen somewhere in the depths of Bludrut Keep. If you find him, please escort him back to the surfaace. We need to get this Tech Demo live ASAP.