Maegwyn

Friday, July 24, 2015

New Hovering Terrarium And More

Star Date: 24 July, 3015:

Engine Change: I fixed an issue in the Starship where the equip slot suggesting the placement of Hovering items in the back room of the Captains Quarters was actually not functioning. This required an engine change, so be sure to clear cache and refresh your browser if you are not seeing Omega Ver. 4.0.2

New Hovering Items! Lyris made a couple of terrariums (terraria?) and an aquarium and they are in Lisa's shops on the Starship. The Hovering Aquarium and Hovering Desert Terrarium sell for credits, and the Hovering Terrarium is in the Nova Gem shop. 

Here's a screenshot of a couple of them in MaegTest's CQ

http://cms.mechquest.com/mq/images/MQ-7-24-3015-Omega4.0.2-300w.jpg

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Maegwyn

Friday, December 19, 2014

It Is Flavescent Friday

Star Date: 19 December, 3014

Flavescent Friday!  The Flavescent Friday shops are open now in Soluna City Main. They will stay open for the weekend, and then will disappear for another year at 7 PM EST (server time) on Monday, 22 December, so grab your rares and discounted items now, while the sale is hot!

All-new Frostval missions on Planet Thoh! Gianna Glow's first script with some minor co-authoring by Ash, who built the missions. New art courtesy of Lyris. Very exciting never-before-seen all-new missions are live now, with more coming soon.

Follow @Lyris_AE on Twitter for exciting previews and storyline hints like this:

http://cms.mechquest.com/mq/images/Ice-Elf-Preview.jpg

Maegwyn

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Beard Blaster

Star Date: 13  August, 3014

Thanks for all the birthday wishes on the forums and twitter ... and I haven't even gotten over to Facebook yet. The birthday credits and xp bonus is still in effect through Friday, so please enjoy it!

In case you didn't know, Lyris and Ash conspired to build me a birthday mecha! You'll find it in the Soluna City Main shop.  From what I hear, Lyris had a concept for the specials design after she arted & animated the mecha, and Ash coded it. What a great surprise! Here's the rundown:

Iron Cook series 
(NSC/SC/NG) 
Each mecha scales 

FA 
CD 3 
1 hit 
100% chance to Crit 
Energy Regen halt for 1-3 turns. (Random each time) 
1.5/2/2.5x DoT for 3 turns. 

BA 
CD 4 
3 hits 
150% damage 
Boost nerf for 4 turns. 
-10/15/20 per successful hit 
Defense nerf for 4 turns. 
-10/12/15 per successful hit 

FS/BS 
CD 3 
2 hits 
Damage increases each use, either shoulder, up to 200%. 
+10/12/15 per use. 
Nerfs Immobility by -100 and attempts to stun. 

HD 
CD 3 
10 hits 
% damage per hit 
30%, 30%, 30%, 35%, 35%, 40%, 40%, 45%, 45%, 50% 

Extra BtH per hit. (Not cumulative, the number here is the amount added to that hit) 
+5, +10, +15, +20, +25, +25, +25, +25, +25, +25 

BD 
CD 4 
5 hits 
200% damage 
Increases your Bonus with each hit. 
+8/10/12 per successful hit. Lasts for 4 turns. 
Increases Boost with each hit. 
+3/4/5 per successful hit. Lasts for 4 turns.

You can also pick up the Otter head and the Pan E-Blades in the Birthday Shop. 

Ah, and here's Ash now!

Greetings! Just wanted to stop in and let you know about a couple of things that'll be happening this week.

First off, the Traveler will be leaving to parts unknown this Friday. No one really knows when he'll return so if you want any of his items make sure to get this before Friday evening!

Next, the Chaos Mecha and Items will be moving to the Event screen. You can get there by clicking the Shops button, it's next to the travel button on that bottom bar, and then clicking the "Event" button with the clock picture up at the top. This is also where the free Golden Mecha are, so you can pick one of those up as well. I didn't want anyone to think the Chaos stuff just dissappeared! 

For the release this week we'll have another quest in the Beard chain! The idea for the whole chain was thought up by Blade and ACW0, so if you like it make sure to let them know! Blade even made a beardy head weapon for this weeks release!

http://cms.mechquest.com/mq/images/BeardBlaster.jpg

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Maegwyn

Friday, April 18, 2014

The Spring Holidays Are Here

Star Date: 18 April, 3014

Happy birthday, Lyris! The Birthday Shop in Soluna City Main has been updated with a new E-Blade to honor Lyris on the occasion of the anniversary of her birth. Thank you for the art, Clarion! But that's not all the spring holiday news...

<bzzzincoming transmissionzzt> It's Ash

Greetings! As you may have noticed if you follow me on Twitter or visit the forums (you should visit them!) I asked what planet you all wanted a revamp of. The answer was a resounding, "LAGOS!"* So, being the nice guy that I am, I went to work revamping some of the stuff from there.
The planet has a bunch of stuff so I had to split the work up between adding stuff for the Easter re-release and getting the Earth Day items ready. Right now if you visit the Hideout you'll find some new levels of the mechs in the Anchorman and Wolf shops as well as more levels of items in the weapons shop. I haven't forgotten about the Build A Mech models or the Pirate weapons and all that good stuff. That will all come next week!**
I'll be doing other planets and other places in the future as well so be on the lookout for my next poll of what people want!
Enjoy these and the Easter Release! Have fun!

http://cms.mechquest.com/mq/images/LanceBunny.jpg

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Maegwyn

Friday, April 19, 2013

Soluna City Spring

Star Date 19 April, 3013:

The new springtime look of Soluna City is here! Practel did the decorations (I made the blooms) and he melted all the snow. And did you find who it is that has a flower tucked perkily behind one ear? (Could there be more than one?)

Please join the MQ team in wishing Lyris a happy birthday (almost missed it... I really need to change my calendar settings to alert me in advance...) Happy Birthday, Lyris! 

Last chance for the O.ops: The 5000000 credit O.ops Clover Shot will be available in the shop button in Soluna City for the duration of the weekend. It is available for all players to purchase (as long as you have enough credits) and has received a buff - if you are a Star Captain, it now does the Star-Captain- powered specials. 

Small bugfixes: the Arthuria vs. Pirate (AvP) war quests should now give all the credits you earn.

Working on a very exciting quest that you'll unlock at the Queenadent's War Camp - most likely we'll have it ready for next Friday (the 26th). 

Have a great weekend, and Battle On!

=Mae

Maegwyn

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Friday the 13th Design Notes Part 2

Let's try this again... yesterday I wrote you some lovely, long Design Notes but I wrote them directly into the Content Management System... and did not save early and often... so CMS logged me out when I went to post them and they were eaten.  I'm writing these in Notepad...

Friday the 13th was a fun and kinda scary release... because Korin turned me loose on planning & managing it.  I've been helping him do this kind of thing for a little while now, but it's different when you're actually in charge of it.  We have this amazing team, though, so it really wasn't all that scary.  At first, I thought that I would mainly be filling a managerial role because I had already planned to be working with blues on the next installment of the Star Captain Xtreme Challenge during this timeframe - but as it turned out it is his vacation time!  So I was able to focus on Friday the 13th & be more involved in the creative process as well as the behind-the-scenes mechanics.  

One of the first things that happened in preparation for the Friday 13th release was that I asked blues before he went away for recommendations for the Uber Jameson buff.

Uber Jameson buff: Applies to the Nova Gem models of 3010 and 3009 plus the new L45 Primo Jameson. Added a general damage boost, and the head now has a Damage BoT (Buff over Time) of +10 per turn over 5 turns.  
(I actually did some of the coding for the buff, with the help of Korin and Vivi, along with my update to the levels-with-you code -  I was a little worried that it was too strong but I'm not hearing any complaints on the forums.)

The Pipe weapons idea grew spontaneously from the release plan.  Since we are in different locations, we communicate online - so I pulled Vivi and Lyris into an MSN group chat and we brainstormed. Lyris made us a Gdoc and put together the dialogue.  She also put together the art assets that turned into the sewer components - and Minar turned the pipe art into weapons.

The new sounds are kind of an interesting story.  The hand-to-hand combat pipe was ready first, and I gave it to Lyris to test.  She said it worked but it seemed weird for a pipe to make a laser noise and that it would be cool if it would "clang."  So the next morning I wandered around the house banging on metal.  The faucets and pipes don't make the right sound - the thing that ended up with good resonance was my stainless steel soup ladle on the vegetable steamer.  I recorded that as an mp3 and sent it to Korin, who figured out how to attach it to the swordfighting combat stuff.  

So yes, the pipe does the same damage as the Evil Jim Replica Axe (rare) and with the merge with the Polish, also buffs up to the same as the EJ Axe.  The difference is that this has the new sound.  As has been mentioned on the forums, it really would have been cool to have a swordfight-style encounter for this weapon, but we had already planned the quests to be mecha combat so the weapon was really more of a 'teaser' and a souvenir.  I thought it would engender more speculation on the forums than it actually did, and I figured you guys would guess that it was going to have a merged version just like the EJ Axe did.  

Then the mecha-equippable arm - I figured that Vivi would be coding it and since he was working on quests, one of which was the quite-complicated maze, I didn't want it to be too complex with new specials, so I asked Minar to set it up as a one-hit stunning melee style.  Things were getting hectic and I decided to try my hand at adding the code to make it function in combat, and once I got started with that I started playing with figuring out how to make it perform the stun.  In an email I had also put out the idea to the brain trust of doing some kind of BtH nerf to the opponent - as it turned out, that part was the easiest to figure out.  I sent it off to Vivi because I didn't think I had the stun-resist-lowering right & thought I was trying to get too fancy... and I'm actually not sure how much needed changing - so judging from your reactions on the forums it looks like it came out pretty well.  

Anyway, back to the sounds.  So Lyris had noted on the gdoc that a flushing noise could be embedded.  We were talking via email and she mentioned it again, and it occurred to me - just so happens that my downstairs bathroom has the original fixtures from like 1908 or something, including an old-style pull-chain overhead tank toilet - that goes WHOOSH when you flush it.  So I sent over an mp3 of Maegwyn's Toilet, and Lyris enhanced it with more water to make it more dramatic.  She did such a great job with the animated cutscenes - so many great little touches that add dimension. (There actually were more places where she would have liked the music clip to play but it had gotten to a point where other functions had to take priority) - (like making the reward shop button unlock) (haha).

So Vivi was busily setting up the quests, which he's impressively good at doing - and then also we had new enemies - he & Lyris put together the art for the new enemies you meet, using existing art.  (I believe this is what Lyris calls "kitbashing" - which isn't quite the same as what Urban Dictionary tells me it means. Basically it's a matter of dissecting and disassembling existing assets and recombining them to make something new.)  Anyway they did an amazing job - Lyris did The Screamer and the Sewer Gator, and Vivi did Freddy Cougar  (I did the unglamorous but necessary database work for that bit).  

Then everything needs some kind of a hub, so I put together the town file and set up the shops and the buttons that send you to the quests, and came up with some dialogue for those areas.  Then of course as always I set stuff up in the database & managed the testing & the usual.  Korin was around - answered a few questions and was always there if needed - mainly he worked on the Gameshow planet and took some time to fix a bug with the coloration on the Punky uniform - and he made the Cursed Tape in game and starship item.

This was a great team collaboration and I'm thrilled that Korin put it in my hands.  We all work so well together - it was definitely a lot of work and long hours. I did get out of town for an overnight trip (was in a canoe looking for river otters, taking photos of birds and turtles and flooded areas) so I got up extra-early and stayed up extra-late to make up for taking off ... while Vivi was going through finals at the same time as wrapping up quest work and Lyris was animating scenes in her evenings after having large projects for the day job.  I am so impressed with the work Vivi and Lyris did! (That either sounds like I'm complaining about long hours, or like I'm saying that I went out of town to have fun and left Vivi and Lyris to do all the work.  Hm... )

So I'm sure I'm leaving something out - rewriting this has taken longer than writing it the first time... anyway I should wrap this up by saying this was such a fun release to put together!  I can't praise our team enough for the fantastic work - and from the feedback on the forums I'm seeing, it sounds like you guys really enjoyed the release.  Thank you so much for playing - I love MechQuest and I love our team, but most of all I have to say that I love the passion you all bring to the game!  You guys totally rock!  

Have a great rest-of-the-weekend!  

Maegwyn

Friday, May 13, 2011

Friday the 13th Design Notes Part 1

The weather report is ominous!  It's definitely time for a Murky Lake Reunion.  

I hardly know what to say tonight, I'm so exhilarated & exhausted!  Huge fun working with Vivi and Lyris putting together this event.  I like to try to say who did what - this was such a collaborative effort that it's hard to remember and sort out.  It was a bit scary managing the whole thing & while I could go to Korin with questions I actually didn't have too many.  I'm really proud of our team and I hope you like everything!

We originally had a tough Rusty Rat in by mistake (from the Advanced Combat Theory Class if I'm not mistaken) but now it's a normal one.  Now that that's fixed and I buffed the rest of the Uber Jamesons (at first it was only the 3010 ones) I really need to meet up with my husband & cousins.  I will write more later though!  I'm too hungry to write...