Artix
Exciting things happening in both AQWorlds (Ruffle), & AQworlds Infinity
A new, experimental version of the original AQWorlds is launching soon... and it is GREAT news for BOTH AQWorlds & Infinity.
Ruffle is an open source replacement for the Flash Player. We became a Diamond Tier supporter of Ruffle last year with the intention of supporting them in their work to fix the memory leak issues our games were having with the original AQWorlds. When I said that we had no plans to stop building the original version of the AQWorlds, we were not kidding. This will make it possible for us to release AQWorlds on Steam and Android with only compliance-based changes needed. I think this is a really good thing for the long term future of the game. We are also actively building our own development tools which will remove our dependency from Adobe in maintaining AQWords. This is all great for the community & original game... but the game itself is still deeply anchored in 2008 tech and will not perform well on modern devices unless we disable animations (which one super fan did implement.... debatable if disabling animations kills the whole point of the game or not.) Regardless, we will make an option for that too. For existing players, this will remain an important way to play AQWorlds and its insane amount of obscure content. We intend to support it.
AQWorlds Infinity is a new game completely rebuilt from the ground up on modern tech... runs 60+ FPS with GPU support, supports WASD, game pads, mobile & mobile joysticks, SteamDeck, and even has server-based combat detection. Items are not made directly for Infinity... they are made for AQWorlds and then converted to Infinity... where they can get Particle FX and code-feature additions. The early parts of the game are being remastered with better art, less grindy quests, more quest types, and a lot of new features that will set it apart. (Guild Halls, Spellstones, and cross-platform game play to start.) New players who have never heard of our games will likely encounter AQWorlds Infinity first on their phones and devices. It will be our best foot forward to bring those players into our world so they can play with us.
AQWorlds:Infinity now has the largest team at Artix Entertainment. We have been spending that Kickstarter money like crazy to ramp up our coding and pipeline. We are still being careful and mindful of the budget, but we would not have had anywhere near the level of progress we have had otherwise.
The only place I feel Infinity is lacking right now... is in the speed of Cutscene and full Item conversion. The manual nature of it, and the complexity of Flash-to-Unity conversion, is an understandably big burden. We are prepared to muscle through it whatever it takes. HOWEVER.... there was a break through 2 weeks ago which might change change that dramatically. Today I am setting up a new server for Spider for just that reason. We have an announcement about it coming soon.
