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

Posted by Artix
5/22/2013 3:12 PM

Fan art of the classic super robot by Diozz

Are Giant Robots making a comeback?

Most of us here at the lab are excited about the movie, Pacific Rim, which is coming out this summer. Giant robots fighting giant monsters!!!! It is the next best thing to someone creating a live action Neon Genesis Evangelion movie. *dreams* I grew up watching TV shows like Robotech, Voltron, Transformers and Tranzor Z (originally known as Mazinger Z.) Needless to say, MechQuest was highly inspired by my love of those shows. Not to mention all of the anime series that I got into: Gundam, Eva, Code Geass, Gurren Lagann, Full Metal Panic, Eureka Seven, Big O, Escaflowne (OMG I LOVED ESCAFLOWNE.... Giant Robots with Swords and Capes!) and a lot of obscure ones like Nadesco, Rahxephon, Fafner and for some reason my most favorite spoof series, "Dual! Parallel." I really do hope giant robots are making a comeback... if so, the end of MechQuest's main storyline is coming at a perfect time. An upsurge in robofatuation would let us build MechQuest 2 as an Omni game! *dreams more*

Comment Question: What are your favorite robot shows & movies?

"Would a SwordGem of any other name not slice as sweet?"

For the past week we have been talking about our first Omni-Game. It is a fun and addictive fantasy puzzle game which will play on your phone, tablet, web browser, toaster, and more. It does not have a name yet... but it does have shiny gems including the Sword Gem pictured above. What would surprise you, is the insane history of how that gem came to be. It started as a hastefully drawn circle I made when showing the team the game board. But it needed an icon to be more easily itentifiable as a sword attack gem. So Samba drew the sword icon. Then she penciled some various shapes around it. Meanwhile, Jemini created a bunch of shiny orbs. She was out of the lab, so based on a screenshot of her orbs, Cysero re-created them. Yergen then took the shiny orbs and started modifying them to match the colors of the game board. He thought making each playing piece in a different shape would really help players with color blindness. So he crafted a dozen different shape concepts until we all finally agreed on this hexagon crystal shape for the sword gem. He gave the other gems their own shapes. This was important, because until this moment they were all orbs... now the game pieces are gems. Possibly changing the name of the game. (If we had one. Which we do not.) Finally, Draven took Yergen's gems (which were created in Flash) and recreated them in Photoshop as you can see in the image above. So when you finally get to play this game... run your finger along the Sword Gems to launch your devastating attack, you will be one of the few who knows all the love and effort that went into creating it. We love you little Sword Gem. Now... ATTACK!

Creatures, Crypts & Chaos

The picture above is the Necromancer armor for our new mobile game Project: Omni.I am looking forward to posting more about the game and its monsters, but first... we need to update you on all the things happening here at the lab! DEPLOY THE BULLET POINTS! To find out about Grimskull, The Summer of Evil, AdventureQuest3D: Legend of Lore, and Nuglath's upcoming AQWorlds shop... hit the shiny READ MORE button!

Is your's cooler than "Dark Clown?"

Within all of us lurks a Monster. Some of them have cooler names than others... (Way to Go "Death Ninja!" and... sorry "Invisible Eater") Take the first letter of your first name, and the first letter of your last name and figure out your Monster Name. Then, comment your monster name on this post, or on the Facebook Post. You also have my permission to download this and post it anywhere you would like. I really love making things like this... a really fun way to start off a Monday.

"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

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