Ready for this? Last week's April Fools gag was actually our most complicated game test yet.
Yes. What most people came to see was a website graffiti that looked like it was drawn by a toddler (Insider secret: It was actually Cysero. He based the art off of his real life children's drawings on his fridge. Originally we tried to get Dage to draw them. But.. LOL... and you cannot make this up. Dage's scribble art was TOO GOOD. After several rounds of him turning in scribble art that was way too good, we had to fire Dage off the prank project.)
AdventureQuest 3D players who logged into the game saw that the entire town of Battleon had been scribbled on too. Additionally, a new cave had opened up just outside of the town of Battleon with a GIANT Dricken Boss monster which dropped stable items which could be turned in to Gaz in town to construct the Dricken Head Helm.
We were all at our stations at 6am to begin the Friday operations. We did a simultaneous game engine update pushed to PC/MAC/Web which featured a major login change, new animations, a database merge and everything else listed in the patch notes. It was the first time we have ever done a simultaneous major game update across platforms. ... and it is way more complicated than most people would expect. We were offline for about 30 minutes, and there was only one major issue-- which we quickly resolved. We also did our first ever "seasonal/special event" type town update! That is, if we did scribbles... you better believe we can do snow, falling leaves, and spooky Mogloween nights. The cave and updates to Greenguard were a cakewalk compared to the previous tasks. The website update was automated. Although, that part failed. So I had to change all of the graphics by hand. Once we were verified live, I posted the news on AQ3D, Steam, Kickstarter, Facebook, Twitter and we also sent out a Press Release.
If you were there early in the AM while we were doing it, thank you for tweeting and messaging me to let me know what you saw. The info I got is going to help a lot!
Cross-platform roll outs are no small task.. and in future ones we will be doing it across Android and Apple too. Players were a confused about what was happening when the game went down because there were no screens informing them that there was maintenance/updates going on. So we are building those. We were pleased that Steam's auto update worked like a charm. The actual game content part went smoother than expected. There were no major bugs... and just between us, there was the potential for LOTS. Even though I posted the news literally everywhere, many people were still confused to what had happened-- this strongly indicates that we need news right in the game itself. So we are going to do that too. Ideally, we can just have the news posts put right into the game.
I am really proud of Zhoom, Warlic, and Kraken for accomplishment on April 1st... it was a major win for AdventureQuest 3D's development.
The April Fools cave is still in game... so you still have time to farm for the helm :D The cave itself will likely become a permanent fixture. One of our goals is to densly populate all of the zones with strange and unusual things to find and do.
Last week I hung out with American Ninja Warrior competitors Mack Roesch (who you might know from Stone Cold Steve Austin's Broken Skull Challenge TV show) and Reko Rivera (The red ninja who breaths fire). Both of them will be competing on the American Ninja Warrior TV show this year... it starts up June 1st. Be sure to join us watching and cheering them on in Atlanta episode-- that is where they will be running the course along with another friend of our gaming community, Drew Drechsel!
Why are these 3 ninjas important to our gaming community? Because they are OUR ninjas. Drew & Mack are both NPCs in AdventureQuest Worlds and Reko has been helping me with AE related videos for a long time. Although he is probably best known as the American Ninja Warrior Dino right now. They are long time friends of our community, and they are all indirectly representing us out there. If you are a fan of the show, join me in cheering them on. (Then we should get them to come share all their training secrets with us.)
The team is currently working on both the game's Intro and our NPC dialog system. We wanted to start the game out in the middle of a great battle... a light tutorial (that can be skipped) and enough action to get you into the game right away. We expect players to be level 3 by the time they reach the town BattleOn. Most importantly, once they get there, there should be clear direction and motivation on what to do next. This will effectively be the start of the over-arching world plot. Needless to say, cutscenes and the dialog system are vital for building this. My "inn-vasion" test has not been released yet because they are going to try to improve it with the features they are building. I think it will make it a lot better. Cross your fingers for us and keep checking back for regular design notes updates. BATTLE ON!
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Pun-slinging Paladin
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