Patreon Devlog #13 - September 2022

Welcome to the August x September update!

We’re sorry for missing the update last month, but in its place, we had the demo test release.

And what a release it was.

We’ve gathered a lot of feedback and spotted a ton of issues related to controls, so we’ve spent time polishing up all we could.

Initially, we planned to release a new build this past weekend, but due to some issues with the engine and a surgery of the person responsible for producing engine builds, we had to push the test back.

We'll be working towards the next build as soon as possible though, hoping to show you all the improvements we've made the past few weeks.

This month’s winner for the Patron picture is:

Zenith51!

We’ll send you a message soon on Discord! We want to know what you’d like to have drawn. If you have no ideas, that is also fine, we got time and there’s no rush.

Controller Updates:

To start off, we swapped a few buggy animations out for new ones. The legs no longer bend in wild directions.

We had to remove the double jump and gliding functionality for the time being, but it will make a comeback sooner or later. It’s been a bit problematic to synchronize it between players and we decided to hold off on that for a while.

Jumps are lower but work a lot better and the animations feel a lot snappier now.

Wimbourne Bath House:

The pictures below, are those of a bath house being made for Wimbourne, the capital city of Floor One. Currently, it is still a bare-bones design as you will notice its very drab coloring which will later gain a renaissance style with more color from decorations and lighting.

The bathing room is underground while the entrance and halls you can see will all be on the ground level. The design is taken from a real-life roman bath house that uses a natural underground hot spring that also naturally cycles itself keeping the water clean and hot.

Weapon Trail Effects:

All weapons have now properly set up weapon trails.

Look at the blue trail left on the path where the katana gets swung.

Age of Aincrad: Weapon Trails Showcase - YouTube

Weather System (New Release):

Our weather system got a significant overhaul. Within, we got a lot of new visual effects, improved conditions for certain weather effects to spawn, as well as a neat system to separate between day sounds and night sounds. You won’t be hearing roosters at 3 AM anymore.

There are also sun flares! Everyone loves sun flares.

Additionally, we now finally tied SFX and weather to music sliders, so you can control how loud you'd like the game to be. The last client had them disconnected still and used placeholder sounds, while the next client is getting both official AOA sound and weather FX, as well as giving you the ability to control volume properly.

Dungeon: Howling Cave:

The layout for Howling Cave is finalized. We’re in the polishing stage and need to improve all colliders, then implement mobs and all quests related to the location.

Howling Cave is a massive, maze-like cave system with tons of branches and paths to explore. It will be home to fulfill a few quests and a rather big boss fight.

Take a look at an early exploration video below.

Age of Aincrad: Howling Cave Showcase - YouTube

Dungeon: Silirad Wolf Den:

For the upcoming demo, the Silirad Wolf Den will be explorable in full. We will most likely not have time to add detailing to it yet, but we’ll at least try to get the main storyline mobs in there so you can actually go and run quests through the maps.

Rift: Skywind Puzzle:

Skywind is back and accessible for a run-through.

The original Skywind layout remains, albeit it’s going to get a big rework once we’re done with one of the other dungeons that are planned. The visual side of the zone will change quite a bit once we get proper, custom assets in.

It's fun to jump around for now though!

Shadow Improvements:

Vegetation shadow flicker is no more! We got rid of it.

All that’s left is flickering on mobs - this is closely related to shaders we use for our characters and we’re working with the developers on a fix for this.

For the time being though, exploration is a lot less jarring than it was before.

Font Fixes:

We finally fixed the NPC fonts. Before, names were heavily transparent and visible only on solid backgrounds. Starting now, they’re nice and brightly visible no matter what’s in the background.

Right now the range of names is set to about 10 meters away from an NPC. We might increase the limit of names popping up, depending on what you all deem necessary.

New Grass System:

Inspired by vegetation systems from Genshin Impact and, more recently, Ghost of Tsushima, we’ve modified the grass system in AoA from the ground up to allow for more grass, more thickness, and less performance cost! Every grass blade is now a separate strand with its own life, and it is no longer a cutout from a “billboard”. Thanks to this we got rid of overdrawing grass on top of grass because each blade is now an object that occludes stuff behind it. This is a fairly new approach to vegetation creation and we’re very happy to be finally on track with using it.

Age of Aincrad: Grass System Showcase (September 2022) - YouTube

Customization Weather Controls:

Weather can now be controlled in the customization scene. It was possible with an old weather system we used last year, but since swapping to the current anime-stylized system, we had to get rid of it. Now, it's finally back.

While there is currently no weather selector, you can swap between 24 weather presets as well as control the time of day. We’ll expand the selection later down the line once we have time for lower-priority tasks like this.

It's quite good to have control over the weather, especially when customizing your player for the first time so you can see how the light and shadows will interact with your character during both day and night.

Age of Aincrad: Weather Controls / Customization (September 2022) - YouTube

Performance Tweaks:

We modified the grass rendering distance and thickness, which should improve framerate for some people. We still need to tweak the LODs, but for now, we’d like some feedback on what felt better - the prior or the new client’s performance, as well as visuals.

Server Power Up:

Our server has gotten a massive upgrade!

We tripled the amount of available memory on the server as well as increased server traffic from 1TB to 20TB. This should allow for faster connection speeds and fewer hiccups while playing.

Dungeon: Temple of the East:

Now, for what we all have waited for - the Temple of the East.

Now that the assets of our eastern temple have been finalized, we have done a lot of work to push the dungeon aesthetics. Up till this point, we mainly focused on pouring all our love into the surface, the beautiful open world we all know.

Now with attention on zones cut off from the light outside, we have faced a new challenge of making sure things look good.

Many of you have seen this dungeon in the previous test: the temple, as it was, looked terrible - mostly because it was added to the client by accident! However, our dedicated artists sat down, tweaked things, and optimized the location to the fullest.

The work bore fruit. Do take a look at the video below. 

Age of Aincrad: September 2022 PV - YouTube

Does the music you hear sound familiar? "Secret Pond" by Pavlos Kyriakou, has been our treasure for years now, and we have finally arrived at its location. This version will play at the climax of the first chapter of the story.

For the temple, we’ll be playing a calmer version that blends with the environment you see in the above video.

For now, we're only offering you a sneak peek till the next test- no more than this, as we’ll be awaiting your feedback on the level design and puzzle difficulty.

Until then, there will be a few more updates to the textures, to really get things to pop nicely. The dungeon at the end will be the pretty little surprise we have kept mostly secret. Better to not spoil anything, right?

Nevertheless, there are a couple of things we can talk about concerning the Temple of the East. If you paid attention, the floor carries the cardinal direction symbol. The very same symbol can be found in the other three temples representing the cardinal directions - each of them inhabited by a guardian. They are blessed by Vulnere, who gives them a great amount of power. At the same time, their role comes at a cost, carrying the burden of purifying the leylines, the world’s lifeblood. There is a force that corrupts it, working like poison to the guardians, who are then driven to insanity. The first chapter of the story will be addressing this issue, which is last to extend to the peaceful Silirad, a village once known to be void of any dangers, contrary to the rest of Floor One. It’s the start of a journey, away from the player’s hometown.

New Characters Introduction:

Now that we talked a bit about the temple and introduced a few characters in previous posts, we would like to show off a bit of scribbled character work that was done on the side!

(On the left: Fiammetta, on the right: Flannery)

You will encounter both of these characters in Dyarios, a place further in the north of Artuax. Take a look at the map concept below if you want to have a better image of the world in your head. Dyarios will be the next place our journey leads us to, while Wimbourne, the capital, is like our new home base.

Our story is finally evolving - while it has been in our heads for a long time, we never had time to sit down and write it out properly.

While you may think MMORPGs have bad stories, since they are known for such, we will make sure that ours is worth a read. The RPG part is horribly lacking in MMORPGs nowadays, and we want to avoid carrying on that trend for AoA.

About Flannery :

With the spirit of a warrior, as her name indicates, Flannery was destined to carry the burden of the northern temple. She was taken in as an orphan at the age of five, her former village annihilated the day the northern guardian mysteriously vanished. The sole survivor had clung to life at the cost of her left eye, and ultimately everyone she once held dear. Due to her miraculous survival and high resistance to corruption, she was deemed worthy to carry on the legacy of the guardian that was soon after declared deceased, diligently training to meet Dyarios' expectations. Flannery grew up taking the warrior's path, until six years later, she met a fellow unfortunate soul, going by the name of Fiammetta. 

That was the day she truly decided for herself to carry the burden of being a guardian - finally having a reason to take on this upcoming challenge, other than considering it as something she was unable to escape from. 

Yet, as if fate did not want her to have a will of her own, her position as the next guardian was stripped from her, after a disastrous event that would bring a turning point to the kindred spirits, separating them in the end. She stood up to rebel against the temple, for but one sole reason: To free Fiammetta, who was now officially declared the new guardian.

About Fiammetta :

While Fiammetta might not look like it, she has an unbending will and elegance that does not only stem from her noble heritage. Her family closely branches off of royalty, and as done by tradition, it was time for her to receive her middle name from the northern temple - of which her father was a loyal follower in his youth, living in Dyarios. 

The carriage she was on got attacked by bandits, however, leaving her as the last of her family. Her survival was intended, as the bandits planned on delivering her to the temple for a high ransom. 

Something a recently made orphan at the tender age of ten would not question was the fact that the temple alone would not need to pay a ransom to have her freed, thanks to their overwhelming strength. 

Fiammetta is not naive and soon finds out the truth of that day's tragedy, which was to purposely orphan her. She hid this knowledge from Flannery, knowing her destiny was unavoidable - to be the next guardian, and another sacrifice to keep the north’s peace.

Next Patreon Test & Endword:

Due to an engine bug introduced by Unity last month, we’re unable to create builds - a simple build can take upwards of 10 hours of nonstop CPU boiling, and it could fail right at the end, so we’re waiting for a fix on that front. A full build with all scenes and dungeons, we're looking at possibly 3 days of compiling the game files (with a high chance of failure at that!).

With that in mind, we have to apologize for being unable of publishing a second test this month and have to push it most likely onwards for a week or two!

We’ll make use of the time to polish up all the content mentioned in today’s post though, and deliver it to you in the best condition we can by the time the build error is taken care of. 

The current build is sadly going to be turned off starting today so that we can prepare on migrating existing data to the new server infrastructure.

With all that said, thank you very much for reading, for your support, and we hope to see you next month with a build, and a new update!