Beleen
HELLOOOOO heroes and hooligans! Welcome back to the Battleon Briefing, your weekly backstage pass to the wonderfully wacky world of Artix Entertainment development. This week we have spooky surprises for Mogoloween, an upcoming mega release, and some seriously impressive tech progress to talk about. Let’s brief this not-so-brief brief!
Mogloween is creeping closer, and the Infinity team is cooking up a deliciously creepy collection of monsters. Please note: no actual monsters were cooked during the making of this update. At least… not until Thanksgiving.
First up, we have Gourdthulu, an iconic boss drawn by Dage the Evil, created by Aranx, and animated by Nulgath! And I have just ONE word for you: this thing is GOURD-GEOUS!
LOL what am I saying!? I actually have several words. Gourdly, gourdacious, gourd help us all 🤣 This boss's animation is looking SO GOURD that I may need to start a pumpkin appreciation club. But Gourdthulu is only the beginning of Infinity’s fright-filled festivities!
Gourdthulu: this baddie is ready to SQUASH the competition. The other pumpkins never stood a chance. They are in a real jam… a pumpkin jam. I will see myself out.
Spooky Scarecrow: a new spooky surprise you have not seen yet! Heck, I haven’t even seen it either. Keep your eyes peeled... but preferably attached.
Mogloweenie Witches: small witches, maximum mischief. Their hats are pointy, their magic is spooky, and their candy-hoarding abilities are frankly concerning. Somebody check their cauldrons for contraband candy corn 👀
Ghost Moglin: this little boo is NOT a monster. He is my BOO.
Werewolf Reskins: our wolves went to the dog groomers, fur real!
Jason Chainsaw Sneevil Reskins: chainsaws + sneevils + 80s horror movie parodies? Whoever combined these ingredients deserves a raise and possibly a supervised crafting station.
8-Bit Corpse Paladin Artix: everyone’s favorite paladin is going RETRO! Pixel by pixel, bone by bone, this undead knight is bringing old-school energy to the afterlife.
Undead Monsters: skeletal warriors and other undead nasties are joining the fun. You could say they are bone-afide troublemakers! No skin off their backs, though, because, well... they do not have any.
The monster lineup is still taking shape, but one thing is for certain: Infinity Mogloween is going to be GOURD-tier!
Swordhaven is getting a makeover… just in time for the Undead to arrive! Figures you’d fix everything up right before it gets invaded 💀 The streets are creepy, Ghost’s cutscenes are looking INCREDIBLE, and the residents may or may not need help finding their missing lower jaws. The atmosphere is looking so good that even the ghosts are getting goosebumps.
Meanwhile, the team is working on a ✨new✨ version of the flying castle house, now featuring a statue bolted directly onto it. Because when you have a flying fortress, why stop at defying gravity? You might as well defy interior decorating conventions, too!
Spider has been working on the code for the house statue, and the Founders Sanctuary will soon become populated with monsters. J6 is working on the inside of the Founders Tower, and the team is developing the functionality needed to place statues where they belong. This is very important architectural business, heroes!
Once the tower, statues, and other pieces come together, the team wants to make another pass through Swordhaven before the giant mega-release.
Oh yes heroes. This one won’t just be big… it’ll be MASSIVE! There is just one tiny, teensy, itty-bitty complication: time. The team is evaluating what all can realistically make it into the BIG release, and if it is indeed too hefty as predicted, then we may need to split it into two releases and follow up the week after.
We want the goods and we want the glory, buuuuuut we also want to get these features out properly! Better to make sure everything works perfectly than rush everything through the gates at once. I’d love to share more, but… you’ll have to wait until the next Battleon Briefing, mwahaha!
The team has been tackling a big ol’ bug list, and the cleanup is nearly done! Most of the minor issues have already been squashed, flattened, bonked, and politely escorted off the premises. Just a few final fixes remain, with the goal of wrapping them up this week.
To all the bugs out there reading this: it has been a pleasure knowing you. Please collect your belongings and exit in an orderly fashion 👋
But the devs are more than just digital exterminators! The team has also completed the backend work for daily tasks, built the frontend for the in-app store, and started working on Spider’s item conversion.
OH BOY. The item conversions.
You know how you sometimes open a closet to find a shirt, and suddenly 7 or 8 or 900 other shirts fall on your head? Imagine that, except the shirts are ancient game assets, some with tiny animated movie clips, and one of them has been hiding a technical problem since approximately the dawn of time (which everyone knows was 2008, btw).
Last week Spider showcased a custom tool he made that could automatically convert AQW’s Flash assets to Unity thingies to use inside of Infinity. The original plan was to get the conversion process running and catch a few problematic items along the way, because the first batch of 18,000 items came back with a 95% success rate. So we innocently thought that converting ALL 250,000+ items would go as smoothly as the test batch.
Well, congratulations, everyone! A quarter million items have kindly volunteered to demonstrate that they are 🎉ALL PROBLEMATIC.🎉
Okay, maybe not literally all. But definitely enough of them to make the dev team stare off into the distance while a tiny violin plays.
Some items, aka our well-behaved besties, have about 4 draw calls. Others, aka our frenemies, have about 30 - 40 draw calls. For the uninitiated like me, a draw call is basically the game telling your computer, “YO, DRAW THIS THING ON THE SCREEN!" Every time it asks, that is another draw call. The more draw calls an item needs, the more work your computer has to do to show it off.
That is the difference between the CPU handing the GPU 4 little assignments versus 40! One 30-draw-call item might not cause a fuss… but pile on a full armor set, 20 other players on the screen, and a heated monster battle, and suddenly the CPU and GPU are, technically speaking, 🤯 🤯 🤯
Fewer draw calls means smoother performance, so we want to make sure our gear still looks fabulous WITHOUT making your computer break into a sweat.
Warlic has some understandable reservations about the number of draw calls these converted items could require, so the team is fine-tuning the item conversion tool rather than simply unleashing it upon the world while shrugging, “Well, GOOD LUCK, I guess!"
So yes, the process is still being refined, but progress is happening. And every successful conversion brings us closer to getting these classic assets ready for their next adventure! In the meantime, please send the dev team donuts, coffee, and maybe a cake. Perhaps a tiny cake for every draw call? Actually… that could become 30 cakes per sword, times 50000 weapons, so maybe let’s rethink this. Or not. I’d honestly LOVE to be surrounded by a million cupcakes. Who wouldn’t?!? 🧁
HOLD THE PHONE. So long as it’s an Android. Because we are about to get technical, and I do not want anyone dropping their device into a bowl of cereal. Or soup. Or is cereal essentially cold soup?
Last week Artix stealth released an official new (experimental) version of the Artix Game Launcher that allows you to play all of our Flash games FASTER than ever before on your Android mobile device, and a Windows, Mac, or Linux Computer. Updates are going to be fast and furious as we prepare to take all our games to Steam and the mobile app stores, too!!
Wait wait wait. When we say “all our Flash games”… do we actually mean ALL our Flash games?!
Yes.
Beleen.exe has stopped responding.
Beleen.exe is rebooting.
Beleen.exe has crashed again.
While I try to compose myself and contain my excitement over the possibility of playing ALL our Flash games again, you can find and download the experimental version right now at Artix.com/experiments. The experimental launcher is making it possible to run more of the Artix Entertainment gaming universe through Spider's custom Ruffle setup. That is a pretty exciting milestone for our classic games!
But please remember that this Artix experiment is experimental. There is more work ahead, and the team is continuing to refine things, buuuut seeing these games running through the custom setup is a BIG deal — and next step is getting it up on the mobile play stores… including the iPhone App Store 🤩
Spider, we salute you. Please accept this imaginary trophy, shaped like an imaginary computer, held by an imaginary Moglin, who’s piloting an imaginary mecha. It is a very prestigious award.
WHEW 😅 We covered so much ground that my legs need to rest (even though I’m literally sitting down as I write this). The team still has plenty of work ahead, and some features are not quite ready to leap out of the bushes yet and yell SURPRISE!, but good things are happening across the board and the dev team hasn’t screamed ONCE into the void today!! Progress 👌
Thank you for following along with the Infinity development news ~and~ my excessive use of punctuation! Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get ready for a date with my Ghost Moglin. He is my boo. He is also terrible at returning my texts, because every time I message him, he leaves me on read and just ghosts me...because he is a ghost. And no, I will NEVER apologize for this joke 👻
Battle on!
Beleen and the Artix Entertainment team
