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April 04, 2012
Design Notes on the Go
Go East, Young Nightwraith

Nightwraith here, delivering you some delectable design notes on this week's EpicDuel release. The ED crew is short-staffed at the moment, as I will be attending PAX East, the premiere gaming convention on the East coast and hopefully having more fun than a barrel full of fun while absorbing secret learnings from the game industry's best and brightest. Expect incessant tweets from me about various awesome things throughout the weekend!


Upgrades

Titan is wading knee-deep through the game code, updating it to Flash CS5.5. We've mentioned this happening awhile back, I'm sure, but the game has finally reached the point where CS3 is simply too limited to allow us to make forward process in developing EpicDuel. Titan is quickly moving system by system to get the game to publish in Flashplayer 11, which will (hopefully) mean a smoother gameplay experience for everyone and allow us to gear up to building the new features you guys really care about.


Hunt for Mods

As the flow of mod applications has slowed, we've been able to catch up to just about all the potential mod candidates. The process has stalled a bit since I will be out of the lab with questionable internet connectivity until Monday. For those who have received interviews, congratulations on making it that far in the process, and sorry the process has been drawn out as long as it has.


Artist Livestream

Log in today at 4pm server time to AQW to see J6 draw a brand spanking new weapon in-game livestream art event! While you watch, send him suggestions by replying to Alina's Twitter account, @alina_ae! The item will be put into an AQW shop after the event so you can wield what J6 has crafted!

Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks to see even more livestream events from AQW artists! EpicDuel will also be streaming on our Epic Livestream Channel throughout the following weeks as we ramp up for a mysterious summer event! Oooooo!


Mission

To give you guys some time to complete the Bionic Battalion Missions and slake the thirst of those eager for more, Cinderella has added several more missions to various NPCs across Delta V. Their rewards are succulent, so seek them out, post-haste! (After the Friday update, that is!)


Hard Knocks

A few weeks ago we conducted a Livestream Q&A featuring the entire EpicDuel development staff, and the response was overwhelming. We talked, sung, drew, and answered questions for 3 hours and still didn't get to all of your questions! There was one question in particular that seems to strike a chord with some, and that question was concerning our college education and what recommendations we would make for aspiring game developers seeking to expand their minds.

Based on some e-mails we received from concerned players, I am afraid that we may have come off as unsupportive of higher education, but this could not be further from the truth. After all, without college, Titan and Nightwraith never would have met and there would be no EpicDuel. Nearly everyone at AE has some form of higher education, with several having attained or in the process of pursuing advanced degrees. Many of our Moderators are also pursuing degrees. Most positions at major game companies require at least a Bachelor's Degree.

What we were attempting to convey in our response to the questions about higher education was a reflection on our own experiences and the value we gleaned from our own respective degree programs. In our experience, college coursework was only a part of a much broader skill set we needed to compile in order to begin work on a project like EpicDuel. Hundreds of hours of outside training and cold experience were needed to get the game's art and code to what it is today. To use a gaming metaphor, if life is an RPG, you will need to do a lot of grinding in addition to the main storyline quests in order to defeat the final boss easily.

The fact remains that the video game industry is very competitive, and one cannot rely on coursework alone to secure a job in the field. There are also many for whom college is either inaccessible, or not the best learning environment. We would not want to close the door on game design for those without financial resources or lackluster academic records. While there are some universities that offer specific game design programs, many of these are either very expensive or so specific in their curriculum that switching majors if interests change is nearly impossible. A good college education can be the foundation of a great career, but it is not a guarantee.

Again, it was not our intention to steer people away from higher education, and we are sorry if you interpreted our answer as such. The Livestream event was meant to be unscripted and candid, so perhaps we could have measured our responses more carefully and made it more clear that we were speaking only from our own experiences, and not offering blanket advice for everyone in all circumstances. Only human, and all that. Education, like anything in life, will yield the most benefits to those who are actively engaged in its pursuit.

Tags: Nightwraith Missions pricing CS5 programming education

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Mission Feature Module

Missions have been really useful for my main, and an advantage for my alts thanks to the low lvl weapons given out when completing certain missions, battle tokens ( I play sometimes in arcade and got jackpots, too bad that only works with my alts and not my main lol). I was battling today and some guy said me to save up credits for my bh and not used them to buy weapons, I said him that my aux and gun were rewards from completing missions, he answered me back he didn't know they were missions in this game.

I had an idea ifthat the mission feature was handle at the beginning of when we start a new account or so, and that it was obligated to be completed so they can understand the feature at full.The mission to understand the feature will be to press missions option in any city guard, and beat him 4 times, to become lvl 2 (to lvl up to lvl 2 you need 40 exp, meaning that if you beat city guards four times, it will give you 12 exp each time meaning: 4x12: 48 exp, enough to level up).

An advice to complete some kind of mission, when you lvl up to lvl 5, an advice would pop out and say that now you are most probably to complete certain mission and so, this would give like a course to new players to follow and on. When they get a new weapon from a completed quest, an advice like: "Always have variety of weapons damage, be it energy or physical, different stat modifiers weapons and special effects, giving you more variety of builds and strategies" or "Sometimes it is preferable to have a type of weapon for the class you're using, each class uses different types of weapons: Staffs, Daggers, and Maces. Some skills are only available if you have the primary weapon which corresponds to the class being used.

Another improvement which would be good is that missions should give certain amount of experience that scales with the lvl of the mission being completed. This would make the missions more interesting and funny when being completed.

There should be a mix of all missions, remember the quest giving out 2k tokens, there should be one giving 2k credits, giving experience rewards , and other rewards just not quest items, weapons, achievements, and tokens. I had like that they did more credit rewards, they could help to the ones that really need it, make it long to complete but able to complete by any player, in other way farm the quest.

When completing an event, instead of awarding achievements, they could reward us with a high lvl weapon that has great stats and base damage, available to everyone, it will had a normal sell back, it will be a mutating weapon. Will have a limited time tag ( events can't stay forever in-game, it is not possible to leave missions alone yet, I read that from an answer of Cinderella) and maybe the damage type will be chosen by the mayority of votes ( a poll for voting the type of damage or maybe a random type.) That will help a lot to many players who need new weapons or want to try different builds.

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Still nothing bout the lbs gettin fixed ._.''