AQW Design Notes: March 12th, 2009

Tomorrow's Un-Live Event
ONLY ONE DAY LEFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We have attemped some ambitious projects in the past, but attempting to create a game-wide live event adventure with music.... in less than two weeks... well, this is one train wreck you will not want to miss. All you need to do is be in game on Friday... it starts at 8pm EST (5pm PST) but you should log in a little early. We will tell you how to get to the event from there!

If you are not able to make the event we are going to make it replayable -- but trust me, you will not want to miss our FIRST ever live adventure! Sure, we may pull a "Titanic" with our entire server cluster... <Kaaaaaaaaa-rash!>... hmm, wait.. was I really about to use watching us crash down in flames as a selling point for coming to the event?

How this all came to be... STORY TIME!
I promised that I would tell you the story behind this... it started two weeks ago when I was in New York on a SOOUS* mission. During my trip I saw many wonderous things (including a ball room full of Verizon executives doing the Macarana and the Electric Slide**) At the end of the quest Safiria had arranged a not-work-related-in-any-way dinner with Voltaire and myself***. We were telling stories and I told him about some of the things we were doing in the game. Specifically about how I wanted to try doing live events with guest stars. He asked me, "So when would you be ready to do something like this?". I looked him dead in the eyes and said, "There is another Friday the 13th in two weeks." And there you have it... LOL, that is EXACTLY how I keep getting myself in trouble like this. So Cysero and I wrote up an adventure based on Voltaire's lastest CD, To the Bottom of the Sea. Miltonius and J6 went to work on the art while Zhoom and Minimal attempted programming huge new features in the game to make this possible. Voltaire went to a recording studio on Monday and recorded sound bytes, dialog and... yes.. Voltaire will be our FIRST talking NPC in the game. We are just one day away and we are still waiting on a lot of the pieces to come in (like the boss fight mini-cutscene) so we can finishing putting them together. Do not worry.. I am sure we will be ready to test at um... <checks wrist sun dial> 7:50pm tomorrow! It is going to be close -- check back for more -- this is going to be interesting!

* The only organization that has a worse acronym than the Secret Order of Undead Slayers is the Sincerely Ubiquitous Champion Knights.
** As scary as this is, it is 100% true.
*** Safiria was sooooooooooo jealous that she was not there.