Interview with a Vampi...*cough* Game Developer

A tour of the secret underground lab.

On Wednesday, a reporter from the local FOX News channel came for an interview. He found out about us because last Friday we were on the cover of the Tampa Bay Business Journal. This is not a visit he will forget any time soon. When he pressed the button and the doors opened, he did not know if the metallic suit of armor in the elevator was just for decoration or not. When it spoke, "WELCOME TO ARTIX ENTERTAINMENT. ALLOW ME TO ESCORT YOU TO THE LAB." and pressed the button, he was caught off guard. But not nearly as much when the elevator reached its destination and the doors opened and he saw another fully armored knight, two machine-gun-weilding ninjas and the lovely Kiara -- who, in stark contrast, was wearing jeans, a black t-shirt and holding some sort of official looking clipboard. The Knight in blue offered him a fresh bottle of water. 

We conducted the standard tour of the lab... which is a fun and cheery place full of creative energy. (That is, if you overlook all the chains, prop skulls & bones in the development server room) Another group of guests, including some very young children, were also touring... everything went well. Mostly thanks to the last minute encouragement from my friends on Twitter. Thank you... and I love you guys! We do not normally post pictures from the lab, but it is Friday and you deserve a special glimpse behind the scenes.

This is "The War Room" where I work. You can only guess at who the two girls are on the far side of the table. The guy in armor and the girl in pink do not have "game names" yet... so, I guess you could call them "Phantoms of the Lab."  Anyway, this is the War Room, a super long room that features a large table that seats up to 10 people. Different people work in there with me every day depending on the project. For example, the other day we were working on the 3D game so Zhoom, Yergen and Xero were in here with me. There is a giant TV on the opposite end of the room that we plug our laptops into so we can share what we are doing. Also, notice everyone is working on a laptop. This allows us to play musical chairs between the various rooms in the lab as projects require us to work together.  A truly high speed collaborative work environment! Oooooh.... You can just barely see my computer on the right of the screen with the little red glowing light. That is where I am sitting now. The wall that you cannot see is made of glass. Not very effective defense against ninjas or zombies. But that is why we have swords mounted on the wall.

AQ3D: Legend of LORE testing

Even with the current "not so stable" version of the game live, we were suprised at how many people found it, downgraded their their flash player and logged in. Again, I would not reccomend downgrading your player because Adobe has a new version coming soon. Because a few people have asked, I would like to remind everyone that you are not missing out on anything. We will not be doing the cool stuff, or giving out AlphaPoints until the game version is not crashing/failing. Also, you will be able to become an AlphaKnight at any time during testing... and testing will last a long time! While we wait, I am working with Yergen & Korin to build you a monster model viewer.... then we can post some 3D models of the monsters and animations right here on the design notes! (I think.)

UPDATE: I just got a message on Twitter telling me that if you log into portal.battleon.com you can see your AQ3D account and the number of AlphaPoints you have. Max is currently 450. If you are not at 450, wait unti lthe stable version comes out then you can get your points.

THANK YOU ADOBE!!!!!

The folks over at Adobe just sent us a pre-release of the new version of the Flash player which fixes the Memory leak. We are super excited!!! Now we are just waiting for our friends over at Unity to send us the Beta invite to Unity 4.0 *crosses fingers*