Patreon Devlog #6 - January 2022

Hello Patrons!

Welcome to the first Patreon update of the new year.

This year will be kicked off with a quick update on our plans for the next few months, some info on the next test we’re planning, and the content planned for it.

We sent a private message a while ago to everyone regarding Patron rewards for this year, and we’ll be expanding the ranks with it this month. We’ll take a deeper dive into what you can expect.

We’re going to be re-launching all social media we have, top to bottom this month. The website is already done, just formatting left. We’ll also be starting up our Sketchfab again to showcase up-close models, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. This will hopefully drive interest from the public into the game, especially considering we’ve been going incognito for the past 3 years at this point.

This month’s winner for the Patron picture is:

Balumi!

We’ll send you a message soon on Discord! We want to know what you’d like to have drawn. If you have no ideas, that is also fine, we got time and there’s no rush.

Reminder: Patrons can skip their turn or push it off for a different month if they like as well - we can push you down the ladder whenever you’d like and someone else can take your place for that month.

Extended Patron Benefits:

We’ll be extending the benefits our Patrons get. Wohooo!

Here are the benefits you’ll be getting over lifetime support. This does not encompass only Patreon itself, but also lifetime donations across all our sites as well, like donation campaigns or VIP ranks! We keep track of your donations on our forums (eg. buying VIPs or donation drives) and Patreon on top.

Short list:

1. In-game title;
2. Gravestone;
3. Permanent access to all testing and early access to all AoA products we’ll ever release;
4. Custom picture;
5. Custom NPC;
6. Custom Quest;
7. Become a God!

Long list:

1. At 100€ lifetime donations: You will receive an exclusive in-game title.
2. At 350€ lifetime donations: You will receive a custom grave-stone in-game. It will come with a description of your choice as well. You can pick the location yourself :)
3. At 500€ lifetime donations: Permanent access to all forms of testing for AoA. You can take part in all builds we’ll ever release from pre-alpha all the way to release. This will include both the game itself, as well as features and companion apps for AoA (if we end up developing them);
4. At 700€ lifetime donations: You will receive a custom picture in-game. Any picture of your choice (that we’ll custom redraw into a stylized version after you request it) will be used as a prop in the game. It can be your portrait, your cat, whatever you’d like. It’ll hang in Wimbourne’s (Floor One, our main city) art gallery.
5. At 1000€ lifetime donations: Design a custom NPC in the game. You can have it look however you wish and fill any job/occupation you’d like. We’ll also have nothing against attaching dialogue into it, we’ll just tweak it to fit the world/lore if necessary.
6. At 2000€ lifetime donations: Design a custom Quest in the game. We’ll try not to limit you and will make it as free-flow as you’d like. You’ll get full creative control over it, but of course, we’ll have to make it fit the lore and world. This can get very big quickly, is also not that simple to implement, so hence the higher tier. The quest can be about anything, you can also relate it to NPCs (like the one you created before). This will also come with its own custom suite of NPCs you’ll be in need of to create the quest.
7. At 6000€ lifetime donations: You can create (or become) a Deity. You can turn yourself into a literal, almighty God. You’ll receive your own religion, believers and can design your own rules and values. It can be anything, for example, a jungle tribe believing in a Coconut Deity. It’s up to you. You’ll also get a custom statue modeled for your deity if you so desire.

Time-based rewards, disregarding your total donation amount:

1. 6 months of patronage: Exclusive in-game title;
2. 12 months of patronage: Access to the entirety of the beta phase in the future;

Meanwhile here are the benefits you’ll be getting with your standard ranks as Patrons:

1. All Patrons get a place in the game’s credits. Rank doesn’t matter. Can be your real name or nickname of choice. We’ll be messaging everyone about it when the time for credits comes.
2. All Elite Patrons will get a role-specific pet, mount equipment, and costume set in the game.
3. All Master Patrons will get a role-specific pet, mount equipment, and costume set in the game.
4. All Legend Patrons will get a role-specific pet, mount equipment, and costume set in the game.
5. All Legend Patrons: your name will be engraved on a stone wall on Floor One in the city of Wimbourne, inside of the Hall of Fame.

Now as for the issues related to the more expensive, custom rewards:

1. All this is written assuming we won’t have 100’s upon 100’s of Patrons.
2. If we do end up with thousands of patrons, we’ll have to say “stop” at some point, meaning those rewards won’t be up for all eternity. If we ever reach a point where we have too much to do to handle custom mobs or create full religious tribes for you, we’ll have to stop/cancel these rewards. Those are big tasks and could go on for weeks to set up, which might hurt development time.
3. We know it’s a crazy amount to some, but there are equally crazy people out there who would probably overload us with work to get custom things done for them. Getting your pet dog displayed in a video game is quite a flex to some. To get those rewards poofed into existence, we have to keep it to a small group - otherwise, we’d be unable to pump out content for the game outside of these. Not to mention, there are people who already qualify for some of these in the community!

Additionally! Those are not all rewards we’re planning. The list might get expanded in the future as we develop new features and things like premium currency in the game (if we end up going with one). Thus, you can expect more rewards down the line. One coming to mind would be custom torches (the floating light orbs/crystals we showcased in a past Patron update), just to name one.

NEW ANIME SHADER:

THANKS TO YOUR WONDERFUL SUPPORT (!!!) WE FINALLY MANAGED TO AFFORD OUR LONG SOUGHT-AFTER ANIME SHADER!

We finally licensed what we’ve eyed for over a year and it elevated the game to a new visual height. It’s not an understatement to say this is possibly the best-looking shading available to the public on the market - it’s inspired by Genshin, quite obviously, but comes with a lot of features like improved performance, better shadows, custom seamless dissolving on death, activation, and revival and many more. Below is a big compilation of the new (left) and the old demo version of it (right).

New visual effects:

Our new shader wasn’t just a shader, it was also a visual framework to boot. We’ve got a lot of “anime” effects that improve our visuals. This primarily includes stuff like custom bloom, outlining, and cinematic darkening depending on light conditions. Pretty incredible things and we can’t wait for you to jump in and take a look at the next client.

New character model:

The female model got yet another complete rework and this one will be final. We considered community feedback + we made it quite a bit more “anime” than before. We got our hands on some Genshin Impact models and learned from them - even fixing some of the mistakes they made while creating their models. With the female done, we’re currently focusing on a few hairstyles and starter equipment. Afterward, we’ll quickly pump out the male variation! Below are some concepts of clothing. The character we’ll showcase once it’s done with full clothing and hairstyles!

Wimbourne City:

We’ve slowly started working toward creating the biggest city on Floor One. The color will be a soft white later down the line, however, this is our general art direction for it shape-wise.

Weather System Improvements:

The weather is finally synchronized with the server. Time and effects are now properly synced between all clients, so you no longer have a case where it’s fog on one machine and a blizzard on another.

Not just that, but we now have over 20 different weather types just on Floor One and we can add many more. We’re also going to swap out the clouds soon - right now they’re a bit too “flaky” and low polygon, but we’ll be swapping to beautiful and fluffy anime clouds.

Website and Recruitment:

We’ve finally published our website at http://age-of-aincrad.com/ (!)

With this, we also opened up recruitment again. We’re looking into expanding our team in the coming months to pump out more content before we go for crowdfunding.

We’ve had the pleasure of a new moderator and artist joining us this month to jump into the fray again and the team will get (hopefully) still a bit bigger and beefier before Kickstarter.

Plans for Q1 2022:

For now, we’re aiming to produce another demo ready to be played around March this year with a bunch of improvements, the new visuals, and some more direction compared to the last test. It was easy to get lost and feel aimless, though mainly due to some programming errors on our code side. We hope to get those ironed out by then. We also hope to have more testers in for that one and handle registration more automatically, so less effort for everyone to jump in.

We also changed the combat system a bit (currently resembles Final Fantasy 14 a bit more than before) and will tweak values to make it at least a bit more challenging when battling enemies. We wish to end up with a real-time battle system, but this will cost us insane amounts of time, skilled developers, and resources, so for the time being it’s on the back burner till we can attract/hire industry professionals to help out on that front.

A new UI system is still planned, alongside updates to the quest system and mob behavior. We’d like to get into improving the AI, as right now, it’s fairly dumb. Other than all the above, we’ll be dropping a financial report around March for anyone interested!

Endword:

We hope you enjoyed this month’s update. There are no videos as we usually record them, but we’ve been focusing on static content quite a bit and expanding social media again. We didn’t want to delay the update any longer to make recordings. We hope you understand!

Thank you for reading and till next time!