Design Notes : Feb 20th, 2009

Shadow-adin

Feb 20th, 2009
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 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!


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 hiope you are enjoying the release. BATTLE ON!