Adventure games, Fantasy games, PVP, Flash games, Browser games, MMO games with monsters and stuff!

Posted by Beleen
5/17/2013 2:20 PM

It’s Friday! And you know what that means: Artix Entertainment has just released new monsters, items, weapons, and adventures in your favorite browser games! Whoohoo! Check out all the fun in store and make our fantasy your reality!

AdventureQuest Worlds
Return to the Mirror Realm… to save yourself! Because you have no reflection in the Mirror Realm, the Universe has been thrown out of balance, and it’s up to you to restore it! But hurry—Xing and Xang are free to play their Chaotic games and are ready to erase you from existence! Gear up in Mido’s Featured Artist Showcase items, the Game Booster Bundle AC package add-on, Dragon to the Darkness Shop items, and more rares in Quibble’s shop before facing your fears in the Mirror Realm!

OverSoul
The new Shadow Card Series has just surfaced! Here is your chance to possess and harness the:

Master Drow Assassin: second Rank up choice of the Shadow Apprentice

Master Flesh Void: second Rank up choice from the male Void Incarnate

Legendary DreadFiend: purchasable directly in Malakai's Shop

Get your Shadow On in OverSoul!

EpicDuel
Davarril has been defeated and the Arborgeddon Event is ending. Claim your spoils at Cinderella or a defeated Davarril who has saved the best gear for last: The Botanical Nightmare set. We've also introduced a new player-to-player mail system to make staying in touch with your friends and fellow Faction members easier than ever.

HeroSmash
Are you a Hero of Good or a Villain of Evil? Two pet capes have just been released—an angel and a demon—that come with the purchase of HeroMart’s brand-new Xing and Xang Chaos Print.Over the weekend, enjoy more Cino de Mayo items as we prepare Memorial Day items and Birthday Rares.

AdventureQuest Classic
The 8 Elemental Fists have been updated with new tiers, new designs, and new animations! Special versions in the Martial Artist class shop receive a bonus when used with your class armor. Get your hands on the Phlazer, the little gun that packs a huge punch—but hurry, it’s only available in the Limited-Time Shop for 1 week!

DragonFable
Get ready to stage a daring rescue with Kara SuLema! You'll search the depths of a Rose prison to try and find Ogorek's wife, You;ll face more than Manahunters and guards... this time Z is ready for you!

MechQuest
The airship carrying a crucial drop has been shot down, and supplies are dangerouly low! Queenadent Odessa needs YOU to battle your way to the supply crate to bring backammo before Soluna City is overrun with Shadowscthe forces!

Battle ON!

"Taste the Painbow"

What is the reason heroes wield gigantic oversized weapons? Answer: To battle giant oversized man/woman-eating, vicious monsters of doom, death and destruction!!!! Unless of course, you can talk them into being your BFF... "Best Fiend Forever." The hulking red fellow in the back is know as "Red Bull." His item drop is Wings. Naturallly... *coughs* Red Bull gives you wings. We are going to spend a few posts talking about everyone's favorite monsterous monstery topic: MONSTERS. When looking at fantasy games today, I feel like the app store is a sea of uninspired, shallow, and overly serious games designed to make you click a buy button. To differentiate ourselves, our team is building a heavily inspired, deep, and over-the-top funny game... *coughs* but, um, please do still click any potential buy buttons. (We still need to eat.) Since the goal of this new game is to be played in very short bursts, so the games humor needs to be baked into the monsters. We only have two monsters colored so far. They look more evil than funny. Which is perfect. I asked Thyton to make the monsters as evil and menacing as possible. Yesterday, he drew a horrifying fuzzball wizard named "Harry Otter" and a beastious Hog-wart covered boar with a lightning shaped bacon tail called "Porkachu." I choose you Porkachu! Porkachu's bacon attack is supper effective!

Comment Question: Monster Puns! The gloves are off. Do you have an idea for an over the top parody monster? For example, we were thinking of a time traveling Minotaur area boss named Doctor Moo. He travels in blue outhouse... we would tell you its name but it is udderly innapropriate. What ideas do you have? Combine something you love, with something absurdly strange that makes you laugh. Give it a try :-)

Character Customization in Project: Omni

If Artix Entertainment was a Halmark-style Greetings Card company... we would definately be putting these adorable new characters on all of our cards. Their highly customizable face, eyes, hair, mouth and expression are perfect for "Happy Birthday", "Get Well Soon", "Happy Anniversary", and "Sorry you fell through a time Vortex and were eaten by a T-Rex." Maybe we should make that part of the game... "Dear player, we are not one of those lame games that tries to get you to post something to your Facebook wall every 10 seconds, but.... we were browsing your friends profiles and saw that your dear Aunt Sally is sick! Would you like to wear this silly hat and pose with a Necromancer's undead army to make her a get well soon or else picture? We recommend posting it to her wall every 10 seconds."

"Hue" do you want to be?

When you are not playing the game, the our male hero character does a lots of situps. Just look at that 4-pack! Yesterday, we worked on making the skin tone color customizable. Back in Flash, we actually broke every color into it's own layer, then put some code on it to change the color. (It is a lot of work to make a color customizable armor in AQWorlds.) It got even trickier in Project Omni. We want players to be able to pick any skin color they want from tan to Homestuck Blue to Hulk green. After playing with some options we found we could change the Hue, Saturation and Brightness levels to do this pretty effectively. But a closer examination of the picture below and you will see that changing the brightness is causing the hair and shorts to change color too! (Ack! The evil wash fairy washed my shorts too many times and now they are all faded!!!!!)

So Minimal did something really cool. He created a custom Hue/Sat/Bright filter than only changes areas that are in color (no whites, grays or black are changed.) So now we can set your skin color, hair color, eye color, etc to any color we want without messing up the outlines or underpants. Your armor will be drawn on top of the character and then the weapon will be placed in your hand. Whether you are a future game maker, an established game maker, or just love seeing what we are doign behind the scenes I hope you have been finding these posts interesting.

Join us tomorrow for.... MONSTERS

A new character creation method for Project: Omni

Do you love to draw? Drawing characters concepts is probably the most fun part of any video game project. All you need to know is, "How big are they allowed to be?" Then you can go wild... drawing and experimenting with all sorts of different art styles. For the new <name not decided on yet> project we are building, we are building a hyper animated and highly addictive fantasy combat puzzle game.

(I took this photo off an artist's screen with my phone. You can see my hands!)

Our characters will be battling monsters in a pretty small area at the top of the screen. So we made them small, boxy, and the heads are a little bigger so you can see their expression. We are planning on changing the expression of the characters when they attack and are hit. Something we have always wanted to do! Surpsingly, these little character have more moving parts than our AdventureQuest Worlds characters. However, and this may shock you... this game prototype will have NO GRAPHICS LAG. If you are an AQWorlds player you are probably thinking, "IMPOSSIBRUUUUU!!!!!!" -- or something like that. To understand why our new games will probably not have any noticable graphics lag, it is important to understand how the characters are developed.

Slime Monster Animation (Video)

A Tale of Two Characters

In the past, we drew the entire video game character directly inside Flash. Each part of the body was drawn on a seperate layer. Then, we animated the parts to make the character move. If we needed to change the weapon, we simply changed the art in the weapon layer. Flash is pretty neat, because it let us put animations inside animations inside animations inside (repeat forever.) That is why there are swords with lightning that streak down them and pets with ears that wiggle. It comes as a high cost though. All flash art is made out of lines. (This is known as "Vector Art.") Your computer has to redraw those lines every time the object moves. It is like the worlds most sophisticated game of connect the dots. The more complicated a weapon or armor, the harder your computer has to work to draw and fill in all of the lines to create it. Most phones are not powerful enough to handle drawing the insane number of lines for just 5 fulled armored, crazy weapon carrying AQWorlds characters. Just think of all the animation happening on the screen! To solve this, we are ditching lines and are now using .PNG images. (This is known as "Raster Art.") The nice thing is that you can make these images work on literally every device. Which is a good move since not many mobile devices support Flash files. It is semi-easy to take our existing flash character pieces and convert/rebuild them to bitmap graphics. Although, our games have way over 150,000+ pieces of art between them at this point (Keep in mind, a single monster is made of 12 pieces.) But you are probably wondering how this applies to our original question, "Why will there not be any graphics lag?" The answer is pretty crazy. Our new games will be sending all of their graphics directly to your device's hardware accellerated GPU (Graphics Processing Unit.) Can you imagine AQWorlds running at 60 frames per second no matter how many characters are on the screen? (Well, within reason... even the almighty GPU has its limits.)

Join me tomorrow and we can talk about character animation & customization.

Creating Omni-Games

This is the year that game studios across the world are taking their games "Cross Platform." If you have not seen this happening, you certainly will soon. It is a critical move for game studios who are continuing to grow during these crazy times. Thanks to you, we have been building and growing our games over the past 10 years. Many of our competitors, despite having larger teams and being better funded than us, did not survive. The ones that are left are all making the same wise move we now must make. We must make all of our games playable on iPhones, iPads, Androids, iPods, Tablets, Windows Phones and other mobile devices. Because it is not possible to do this using our tool of choice, Flash, we are now learning new technology and tools. The name we have assigned to this overwhelming task is "Project: Omni." It is not one game, it is actually the future of all of our games. From the original AdventureQuest to the new AdventureQuest3D, all games must be re-created from the ground up to play on all devices. Now, you must be thinking, "OMG!!!! Do you have any idea how much work that is?" The answer is, yes. So before we commit to trying to do the impossible, we have the entire team building a fresh new game project to see how far we can push the devices with our graphics and animation. It is off to an amazing start! If you are interested in learning how we are making this new game run on every device, then join me here each day for a behind the scenes post of our progress. Future posts will be a lot more funny than this post... probably not on purpose :-P

Amazing week of Video Game Development

This is one of those stories that very much defines Artix Entertainment as a video game studio. Just last week, Unity3D announced that is was dropping it's exporter for Flash. This is a terrible blow to the AdventureQuest 3D team... and, for that matter, to the Adobe Flash Platform itself. As you know our ultimate goal was to create a 3D MMO that was playable in Flash. We have been working on the 3D game project using our best coders and artists non-stop for over a year. We have overcome so many 'show stopping obstacles' that it is unbelievable that, on the eve of the game's main content production starting, we were kicked in the unmentionables with this news.

Furthermore, we see that more and more of you are moving from the web to to playing games on your phones and tablets. We could have just thrown up our arms, given up, and given into the endless abyss of hopelessness.... *smirks* NEVER! We took a drastic new course of action. As of this week, nearly our entire team of programmers and artists are learning how to make "Omni-Games." That is, games that run on ALL devices. The web, Facebook, iPhones, Androids, tablets, dumptrucks, toasters, bricks, burritos and more. Our first project was carefully selected to be feature-complete in 3 months to teach our programmers and artists this new technology. It will give us the foundation to move our older games to all devices, which has already begun. It has not just begun, it is moving faster than anything we have seen in a LOOONG TIME! Lean in close and hear the unfolding story of Project: Omni (working title).

Bringing a Chainsaw to a Spork Fight

What would happen if Artix Entertainment put 6 of its top programmers and 7 of its top artists on a single, bite-sized, video game project? That is exactly what happened this week. It is the first time in the history of our indie game studio that we have ever had this many people working on the same project. The results are beyond amazing. To design the art for the game we put Thyton, Dage, Samba, Diozz, Yergen, Jemini, and Cysero in a room filled with pencils and paper. For our previous games like DragonFable and MechQuest it took literally 2 months to finalize the character and art concepts. For this game, we did it in 48 hours! The programmers had simliar success tackling gameplay, customization, database design, and more. The combined forces of Minimal, Zhoom, Rolith, Warlic, Kraken, and Swolicus on a project of this scope is like bringing a laser chainsaw to a spork fight. The game is an addictive puzzle game with RPG mechanics. We are planning 256 stages and hordes of crazy, over-the-top monsters and weapons.

What is an "Omni-Game"

Omni pretty much means "all." So an Omni-Game must be a game that runs on ALL devices. The real name for this game has not been chosen yet (if you have good ideas please post them as a comment here or on Twitter)! So for now, we are calling this Project: Omni. We are building this game for web, FaceBook, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Android, Tablets and other devices. You will be able to play on one device, and effortlessly switch to another. For example: play on your phone on the bus, then switch to your laptop when you get home. Or maybe even play on your XBox or Wii.

Samba & Jemini's version of Twilly and Zorbak pets for this project.

The Facts

We plan on building a major mobile game within the next 3 months. It is our first "Omni-Game."
This is the first time we have ever had 6 programmers and 7 artists on the creation of a single game project.
AdventureQuest 3D is still in production and the Alpha Tests will continue. However it will be short on programmers for the next month. (Xero, Llussion, and Tamarran are currently building out the new zones.)
All side-projects including DoomCauldron have been halted.
The specific technology on which we are learning to create this project can probably be used to re-create AdventureQuest Worlds as an Omni-Game which will run on all devices (The same goes for EpicDuel, DragonFable, MechQuest, the original AdventureQuest and any of our other games.)
Project: Omni started on Wednesday... it is the best move for the future of our games. Since the project started and everyone started learning the new tech, morale has been soaring!

Comment Qustion: This is a pretty risky and dangerous move for AE, but anyone can see how vital this move it is to get onto mobile. What do you think? Are Omni-Games the future?

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