well its da time again LOL

sorry i havent bin on i just got xbox live and bin playing it heres some news from the days i wasnt here

feb 20th
Shadowfall is Finally Here!
Every Story has two sides - ours has GOOD AND EVIL
Both the GOOD and EVIL factions have been thrown into chaos by the myserterious new threat. This week, discover the crash site of the Undead Flying Dragon Fortress and seek audience with Sepulchure's Daughter.


Long Unlive the Shadowscythe!

In This Release - The story continues!
We have just started a new chapter with a focus on the Evil side first. The city is available to all players and our first experimental "dungeon crawl" is available to Members for testing. In this test players will battle through a well guarded Swordhaven crypt to recover Sepulchure's armor -- but you would never believe what happens when you find it!

* The City of Shadowfall
* The Chaos Crypt - our first dungeon crawl!
* The "EVIL" Shop
* New Items and Armor

Chaos Corrupted!
Chaos vs Good & Evil!?

Choosing Good & Evil
We would like you to play your character however you feel fit. We liked that the shop is Evil only and the way Gravelyn initially reacts to you is dependant on your alignment. There will of course be a Good-only shop in the next Swordhaven release. We will need players to represent both sides and help make decisions for what should be added to their cities. While Good and Evil will need to work together to defeat Drakath.... it is likely not all NPCs and players will feel the same level of cooperative spirit. We expect secret battles to take place between the two sides. In the future, you ill be able to change sides by performing a great task for the leader of either side. With each release this system will keep getting better.
Secret: Pssst.. right now, you can switch between being good and evil right replaying the intro quest. (Whoops, this was not true when I first posted it, but we edited and re-rolled the file. It should be working now.)

Sepulchure's Armor
Yes, it is true... this is the start of a game-wide quest chain which will ultimately unlock Sepulchure's armor. This will be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the entire game and will not be completable for many releases. However, you will like knowing that the regular Doom Knight class will be available long before that!

chaos attack
This is going to get good!

Developer Notes
We are always trying new things and are not always sure how you will react. We listen on the forums so be sure to help us make the game even better! It seems that is takes us two weeks to put together the quality and size of releases that we want to make for you in AQWorlds. We were able to compromise and release the dungeon as a test while we finish it for everyone next week and continue building the other things to do. I wanted to release the Good and Evil cities at the same time, but we barely managed to release ShadowFall this week (note: I am sitting alone here at the lab at 9:31pm on a Friday night... the cleaning crew just showed up and gave me a funny look.. <coughs> again... ) Each week we are getting faster though. Do not forget that we are still building the engine as we go. For example, Reens, Llusien, and I had been animating all of those new NPC pop up boxes by hand. So this week Minimal put the functionality straight into the game engine. Now it is super fast to make NPCs talk! But then I spent an entire day making all of my button/interface assets compatable. You get the idea... but the more we do this the more momentum we will gain. The game is truely shaping up. One thing that has been giving me a lot of trouble is the Book of Lore. Both from a design and code issue it won the duel we were having this week... I will be working on it through the weekend. Also, I would like to get the code on the Valentines's pet. Zhoom rewrote my old adlib randomizer code in AS3.0 so have been dying to put it to use. Before wrapping up my second super long winded DN post in a row (still awake?) I would like to give a HUGE round of applause to Miltonious and J6 for their crazy artwork and characters. I will do a full Design Notes post on Gravelyn next week so you can see just how many versions of her armor and... lol, her hair we went through over the last month before finalizing her. (I really thought Miltonius was going to kill me.) Gravelyn's story is one of the strangest that has ever been in one of our games... she is a truly unique character. Thank you everyone, I hope you are enjoying the release. BATTLE ON!

Feb 24thWhat is a Lord of Chaos?
Not sure... but guessing it is not good!
All we know is that Drakath picked (or is in the middle of picking) 13 Lords of Chaos. What do you think they are? What can they do? Who are they? See you on the forums!

Character Pages
Round 1 just went live!
That is right, character pages are finally here! You can now click on another player's portrait and open their character page! Here is a link to mine. We are going to add background art, icons, and better design in the next version. This page is being developed by Ai No Miko (Her name means priestess of love in Japanese... we call her Miko). She is also the one who is building the Facebook and Myspace pages. We want to do a few new things with your characters pages. First, we want to link all of the items to encycolpedia pages that will tell you where the item comes from (Monster drop, Quest, etc.) Also we would like to make your page customizable. It should be easy to have a good or evil background for your character depending on your alignment. That is a good place to start.

Also Happening
New Game Engine Update
Yay! Being released as early as tomorrow... we have a new engine coming your way. We are replacing "Rep" with "Class Points". Not only does this make more sense, but it comes with a new balanced experience curve that will make it easier to level up your class all the way. This change is paving the path for us to add "Factions". The first two factions, obviously, will be Swordhaven and Shadowfall. See my example below:

Class: Paladin - Rank it up with class points to unlock skills
Faction: Swordhaven - Get rep to have the city like you more and access more special shops and quests.

The Book Of Lore
The Lore Grimoire is 85% finished. The code is finally working, it just needs the text added which I will try to finish and have ready for tomorrow's push.

On TV!... at Target?
I was asked today if I could supply 3-5 Minutes of High Definition game footage by Friday. This would be be chopped down to... <chuckles> 3 to 5 seconds of video that will air on those TV screens at Target during a Game Card commercial. I am going to record it from my desktop on a few different characters tonight. So if you see me running around in game tonight, be sure to give a hearty "Battle on!" and do something interesting :-) Keep in mind that only 3-5 seconds of footage is going to be used... that is probably a few swings of combat and a a few frames from a cutscene. But still... how cool!

Martial Arts
In completely unrelated news... just in the off event you were interesting in hearing -- Thyton, Zhoom and I have started taking Muay Thai Kickboxing. It is sooo much fun! (Thyton and I have been seen battling through the hallways here at the lab) It is at the same martial arts school we are taking Krav Maga at, so we can continue our training there too. I think martial arts is a great way to improve yourself both mentally and physically. If you are not actively involved in any sports, I highly suggest looking up a local martials arts school and scheduling a demo lesson.

Note: If you are an adult, Krav Maga is, in my opinion, the best self defense system for both men and women. If you have never taken a martial art before, or are under 18, I strongly recommend Tae Kwon Do. It is the art I trained in first and earned my 3rd degree black belt. For the record (and if you need help talking your parents into letting you train) my training there is the reason I do not smoke, nor drink, no use drugs to this very day. Of course, <smiles> Martial Arts did nothing to help my spelling or grammar... (and neither will Zhoom punching me in the head at class tonight with his shiny new gloves.)

This Week's Release
J6 just built a very interesting new dungeon! As Swordhaven and Shadowfall are recovering from the way, a mysterious enemy gains power in the distance... and good guys will finally get their shop!

and finaly the 25th
The Royal Family
The Good King Alteon, Princesses, and the Court
Fortune smiled upon our lands the day King Alteon took up his sword and freed the people from the evil tyrant who terrorized the countryside. In fact, Castle Swordhaven was built right on top of his old wicked castle*. The King has three loving daughters... the Princesses:

* In all honesty, they should have looked underneath it first. (Good stuff coming!)

Britany, who is the eldest daughter, has the largest shoe collection in the world. She only wears armor with a Gucci or Prada tag on it! In between shopping and talking through the magical communcation pool, she enjoys staring in reality TV-orb shows.

Victoria is the middle daughter. Sickly and unable to get out of bed often, she spends most of her time reading fantasy books wishing she was the great hero in the story. Once night, she was visited by a fairy who offered to grant her ONE wish. Then, Victoria accidentally caught the fairy on fire with a candle, dropped a base case on 'em, and then when the guards came to see what all of the trouble was about she was forced to hide the fairy in her mouth. To her credit she only chewed twice... by accident! The rest of this story is yet unknown.

Tara is the youngest Princess. She loves ponies, and bunnies, and flowers and... giant man eating dragons. Hailed as "Tara the Terrible" by the guards, she often kidnaps dangerous monsters and forces them to play with her at a team party filled with dangerous magical stuffed dollies.

Also in the King's court you will find the Bersker General, the corrupt Tax Collector** and the Jester***. Finally, Castle Swordhaven is now home to the Pactaganal Knights including the respected and loved Sir Render, Sir Junn, Sir Pent, Sir Loin, Sir Kull, Sir Chandestroy, Sir Up and their shortest and hardest working members, Sir Ver!

In this week's exciting release, we are releasing the next step in the Shadowscythe chain: "Undeath Insurance Policy!" which will take you back to Castle Swordhaven where the King and his court will be eager to speak with you. As you may have already been thinking, Swordhaven is the good town, Shadowfall is the evil town, and Battleon is the great gathering place for all heros of the world. AQWorlds will not have one hub town, it will have three! I am not sure how much of Swordhaven will be ready on round one, but I wanted to write you and let you know a little bit about the people who will eventually be in castle. Both the good and the evil sides have very interesting stories -- I would like you to be able to experience both before you make your true choice which will be very hard to change. Talking about choice, this MMO is set up to break all of the rules. Because of our fluid development style, we can do anything... and this means any one of the Chaos Lords could potentially win. In most games you just plod through the storyline and the world never changes. Ours does. You have already seen this in our other games. But after 7 years of game making, we are ready to make this REALLY interesting. Anything can happen... and it will all depend on you. Battle on!

** Surprise, surprise!
*** Many people believe the Jester is actually an assassin sent to take out the king. They say his jokes kill!