A few words from me, Maegwyn...

I've been super-busy ever since we got back from Dragon*Con, writing things that aren't Design Notes along with planning & coordinating upcoming releases, so as this has been somewhat of a trend over the past few months I thought we'd spice up the MQ Design Notes by including more of the team! Here's Practel, who along with Plasma Charge has been helping us with testing and Gremlins!

Hiya Mech Questers!

You may have noticed that the last MQ Design Notes post was a little while ago... and I’m here to help fix that! This is my first design notes of MANY more to come, and I will hopefully be doing rundowns of what each release will have each week! There’s a good chance a lot of you may not know me, so let me introduce myself. My name is Practel, I started playing Artix games in 2007, starting with DragonFable and MechQuest, then I later joined EpicDuel, AQWorlds, and HeroSmash. I’m currently a tester for 3 games, EpicDuel, MechQuest, and AQW. Along with being a tester, I’m also an in-game moderator for EpicDuel, and forum ArchKnight for the EpicDuel and MechQuest bugs boards! I’m going to be giving you a little info about our fantastic Dragon*Con 2012 experience this year (which I went to, along with Maegwyn, Korin, Artix, and the rest of the AE gang who were able to attend!)

What is Dragon*Con?

I’ve already written a really awesome Dragon*Con recap for EpicDuel, so I’m grabbing a snippet of info that I think sums up the 'Con pretty well and using it here!

“Every year about 50 Artix Entertainment staff and assistant staff travel from their secret undisclosed battle locations to Atlanta Georgia (an 8 hour bus ride) to attend Dragon*Con! Dragon*Con is the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the universe! Each year the convention attracts about 60 to 70 thousand people, and an awesome group of Artix Entertainment players! To see everything that the con has to offer is almost impossible, but those who are courageous enough to fight the “4 days with no sleep” boss can do it! The con offers something for anyone. There are panels about everything from making your own functional steampunk R2-D2, to meet-and-greets with some of the biggest names in TVs, Movies, Gaming and Books. There are thousands of people dressed up as their favorite characters, movie marathons, a sea of tables for table top games like Dungeons and Dragons, card games like Pokémon, Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh, board games like Risk, Settlers of Catan and King of Tokyo.”

The Parade!?!

Have you ever seen a several-mile-long parade with thousands (and I mean it) of people dressed up in the craziest, wackiest, coolest, most epic costumes ever? Well, there may be only one place where that happens (at least in my experience) - and that’s Dragon*Con! Each year, over 60,000 people come to this convention, and at least half (at least it appears that way) dress up in all sorts of costumes. Talk about Halloween early! This year, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Maegwyn (a long time, real life friend of mine) and watch the parade IN THE FRONT ROW! Along with hanging out with my Artix Entertainment buddies, I set out on a mission: Record the ENTIRE parade and panel, then  upload it to YouTube so that the players can see it, and that’s exactly what I did! Think I was lying about the people dressing up? Go check out the video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNkNpVSQTfw&feature=plcp

MechQuest and moving forward

This year's AE panel was probably the most exciting panel we’ve had yet! There were well over 100 people attending, filling the enormous room - and everything ran so smoothly that we actually ran out of time even though this was also our longest timeslot and largest room to date! At the panel we announced something that I think many of you guys will be excited for: The Ending to MechQuest’s main storyline is going to be about the foretold “Reset”! Here you will experience what exactly happened on Planet Loreon, and why a world with Future-space-robot-killing-machines was 're-set' back to the medieval ages! 

Some of you may have been (understandably) confused by some of the recent news and may even think that MechQuest is ending; just as Maegwyn announced at the panel, and as Artix has reiterated, I can also tell you this: MechQuest is NOT ending, and it will continue to have weekly releases as usual!

I am SUPER excited to be able to write Design Notes along with possibly blues, Vivi, Plasma Charge, Minar, and the rest of the MechQuest team.

As always, stay classy, Hero!

BattleOn!

Thanks so much, Practel - that was epic! 

We're working on the revival of the Ghosthunter Mechas again this week, with a focus on the versions you can get by using the Doom Cell merge option - along with bringing you a Nova Gem version of the Sepulchure Mecha since the T-shirts have gone rare! We've got a very busy Fall schedule planned for you, jam-crammed with holidays and new content and an exciting new promo in the weeks to come! So stay tuned to the Design Notes for more info (to be updated more frequently, too), and thanks for playing MechQuest!

Dragon*Con 2012! We are going to be in Atlanta, Georgia this weekend for Dragon*Con. 

Artix Entertainment ALL GAMES Panel:  Saturday @ 5:30pm at the Hilton in Grand Salon E! 

We will also have a fan table (I haven't been updated with the location of it yet, so if you're going to be there, it will be an adventure of discovery... ) 

Special MQ-Themed Presents! Lyris designed some really cool nametag badges and I ordered badge holders & magnet backings and printed them out & put them together to give you! Each design is in very limited supply - who knew that printing at the maximum DPI would suck the ink out of cartridges so quickly? ... and also I ended up hand-cutting them because the template for printing on the special perforated paper I ordered refused to play nicely with the actual paper.  So it turned into quite the hands-on project, but luckily I started early enough to get everything ready for you in time!  We'll have some at the fan table while supplies last, and I'll save a few to give away at the panel on Saturday.

Dragon*Con Front Arm Weapon! Practel asked if we were doing a weapon for the occasion, and presented us with the basic idea for the dragon-themed front arm energy blade for your mecha. Minar took the concept and brought it into its amazing final arted/animated form for you! blues came up with specials and Vivi coded them in.  Here is what Vivi had to say about it on the forums:

For those of you that make it to the convention, a unique prize lies in store. It's called the DragonConquest Blade. This was once the weapon of choice for an elite commando squad in the war between the Dragons and the Shadowscythe. In her exploration of the universe, Val has uncovered a small cache of them in some ancient ruins, and one of them can be yours! 

Read More

So this week's release is(was) (it has already rolled Live) tonight - Wednesday!  We heard you like a lot of experience and credits when you play, so there is a new permanent quest for you to have the chance to gain a LOT of both!  

Susie is standing to the left of Tek's Mechs in Soluna City.  It used to be that all she wanted to do was to duel you - but now she has a mission!  If you talk with her, she'll tell you about her Senior Project.  If you will go on patrol looking for the ultra-rare Berserker Shadowscythe Hound that sometimes attacks in an area of Loreon known as Sector Sixty-Seven - and if you find the rare Amanita Warp Disc* that powers this unstable monster, Susie will give you a massive reward - an astounding amount of experience and credits!  There is a Skip button so you don't have to click through a ton of dialogue - the common Shadowscythe enemies give normal rewards, and the quest brings you back to a point where you can replay it over and over in quick succession, hoping to encounter that Berserker.  

Why a Wednesday release and nothing on Friday?? Because we** are going to DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia (USA)!  Come hang out with Korin, me (Maegwyn), and more members of the AE team including Artix himself, in the Artix Entertainment Suite at the top of the Marriott (Room 4724) on Thursday night from 8 - 10 PM for a super-casual all-ages pizza party!  Then come to the AE Panel on Friday at 2:30 pm at the Sheraton, Savannah room.  (If you have a costume, this is a good time to wear it.)  MechQuest is creating a special mod for your mecha as a souvenir if you are able to attend!***  

And ... wait for it .... there's MORE!  We also have a Fan Table in the Hyatt this year!  Stop by each day for a visit with different members of the AE team, and to get a special ribbon to hang on your DragonCon Badge, specially made by Jemini - a different dragon for each day!  (Come early - supplies are limited.) Bring your artwork for the drop-box, too!  Char, Korin, and I will be "manning" the table on Sunday, September 4th from 10 am to 12 noon!  

We're really excited and hope to see as many of you as possible!  Can't make it this year?  It's an annual event, so start planning for the future!  See ya!

*Can you guess why the component has that name?

** "We" includes more than just MechQuest's Korin and Maegwyn  - some but not all past and present members of the MQ team such as Char, Jemini, Thyton, Lyris, and even J6 - and lots of AE staff members representing all of our games!

***If all goes as planned, the MechQuest team just might have a special few-of-a-kind unique hand-painted t-shirts to give away - I made a prototype and got a couple more done in between working on releases and fixing bugs, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the fabric paint performance so we'll see what happens.  If nothing else, I can give someone the shirt off my back****... 

**** I will of course be wearing layers if it comes to that :]

Korin & I wanted to say hi really quickly since we realized that we haven't posted any DNs since the last ones I posted... partly because we didn't have internet in our rooms.  We're having a great time - the panel was amazing and we got to meet a bunch of you for the first time and see others of you again this year.  So right now Vivi & Korin & I are sitting at this table with half-eaten pies and pretzels on it. And Char just walked up 47 flights of stairs to join us.

The Star Captain Monthly Mecha was a little tricky this week because the file was corrupt.  Korin actually did the shading & coloring, and Vivi helped test while I was getting ready to fly to Atlanta for the second part of my vacation.  So Korin went to the forums and asked you to name this one - and you came up with "Steve Skysplitter," which was the one that cracked him up the most!  (There will be a description on this model in a couple of days, by the way.)

Anyway, about the panel!  We met an awesome player known as Azorra who knows more about MQ than we do (we think) - we're going to stay in touch with him about fixing a few things with the early lower-level game experience, too!  We also got to meet neo_manni from the forums, whom I've seen around the forums since before MQ even existed & we used to talk on the forums about Adventure Quest - I didn't realize at the panel that he was neo_manni so I got really excited at the Voltaire concert when I figured that out.  Aeonarial from the forums was also at the panel - and he won the Guitar Hero giveaway via the best Twilly Punter! Aeonarial & I ran into each other waiting to see the George Lowe panel this morning - which was AMAZING - and we got front row seats - which was also amazing!  I could go on for hours writing about all the people we've gotten to see - players you might remember hearing about from last year's DragonCon who cosplayed as AE characters J6, Tek, Valencia, and Ash (and this year Tek had the most amazing little Korin with her - we'll get some photos up when we get back from Con) - and others who traveled from as far away as the UK and New Zealand!  I could go on for even more hours & I'm sure I forgot to talk about things I was meaning to write about but we are all half-delirious from tons of walking & lack of sleep so we'll stop here for now. So, bye from Thyton who just walked in like the ninja he is, and from the rest of us - see you on the forums!