Maegwyn

Friday, February 10, 2012

Planet Romero Launch

Planet Romero! For now, everyone can use the "Planet Romero Newest Release" button in the News Screen to access this NEW planet - you will need to complete the jobs at Specific Hospital and have flight clearance as prerequisites.

This planet, which is originally Lyris' concept, has been in the works for a couple of years now and has undergone an extensive process of revisions along the way. She and Jemini did much of the early brainstorming regarding various plotpoints, and what with one thing and another, as they say, it ended up sitting on the shelf waiting for its time.  It originally had a completely different name.  Artix made a lot of tweaks and conferred with Korin, and Korin conferred with me, and I made some edits and conferred with Lyris and went back to Korin, who went to Artix, and so on - in the end it all came together as the new planet you can finally now visit! Lyris put together a resource of a lot of medical-themed elements and broke down NPCs for her animated cutscenes you'll see in this intro to the planet. Minar created the backgrounds and the - (is it a shop? is it an NPC? You'll have to explore Romero to find it, and decide for yourself).  

Then, there is also a special NPC you will encounter - his design was originally started by Oishii and then got a revamp by AQW's own Cerberoz! Arklen (and Korin?) animated the new swordfighting enemies that Lyris put together which you'll encounter this week, and we've got some more new opponents on the way thanks to Thyton's arting & Arklen's animating. Korin has been animating as well, and built the quests & the town interface along with adding to the animated intro cutscenes.  He did a TON of work this week and brought everything together into a coherent whole.  The entire MQ team is brainstorming rewards which will open up as the planet progresses.  Minar & I are talking about some ideas as I write this. I put together the stats for the (spoiler ... er, the what-you'll-find-this-week) - Icy, who among other things is the Head Moderator of the MQ Encyclopedia, helped me decide some of the details. (Can you guess what is being parodied in the description?)  

Lyris is in crunch time at the day job and will be taking a bit of a hiatus, so with her detailed documents and asset files in hand we are striding forward but we will definitely miss her cutscene work. With Korin and Arklen on cutscene duty and Minar's art and animation skills I am not worried at all; however, we're all looking forward to her being able to volunteer time to MQ again!

Vivi is working on the swordfighting revamp along with coding rewards and fixing bugs and working behind the scenes. I think I forgot to mention his recent work on the engine that fixed some big bugs with Assault Mecha! blues has a list of to-dos that we are working on knocking out, along with his usual specials design which you'll see more of in the upcoming weeks, and balance work of course. I've been doing coordinating and editing and testing and bugfixing along with working on some non-Romero content while my laptop is on the fritz (and while I have some "real life" duties to deal with that are encroaching on the insane amount of time I usually spend on MQ).

I hope I didn't leave out anyone's contributions or forget to note something important! Have a fantastic weekend -thanks for playing MQ and don't forget to tell your friends!