July 2024: Public Devlog & Progress Update!

Hello Everyone!

Welcome to a very overdue progress update! We were planning on making one of these for a long time since we have many people visiting the website daily for updates, but we could never find the time. Today is the day though, so buckle up!


An alternate version of this is available on our Patreon if you’d rather read it there and are interested in a bit of a Q&A:
Patreon Public Devlog - July 2024


Additionally, the full version of our classic big monthly update post can be found here for our Patrons:
Patreon Devlog #32 - July 2024


This will be a condensed version of bits and pieces of our last 3 monthly Patreon updates, including parts of this month’s July update. That said, these will be infrequent and if you like what you see, we’d appreciate you signing up for our Patreon - every bit helps us cover external assistance, licensing, and server costs. We would also like to make this a spontaneous Q&A - if you have any questions, feel free to ask under the Patreon post in the comments and we will do our best to answer.


That said, let’s get into the update.

Game Status:

We get a few questions asked frequently, so let’s get them out of the way first.

• The development has been completely restarted and built from scratch since April 2019.
• All created content before that has been removed and the project went through a complete restructure. There were many reasons for that, but it was necessary and for the better.
• We are still in internal testing which you could call pre-alpha, though we feel like it’s the ending phases of that. We have base features implemented, tons of quests and things to do, all base mechanics we planned for alpha, and combat in a bit buggy form still, but working. Anything you can expect from the basics of an MMORPG is here. We’re almost done kicking out placeholder content fully, and most of our work in the game is hand-crafted and custom-made. Placeholders only exist for feature development or white-boxing at this point.
• We have a strong image of how we want the game to look and feel, and it’s almost where we want it to be for the alpha stage.

- Our social media has been inactive since the restart for multiple reasons, one of them being we do not agree with marketing a product that did not exist and it still is our primary reason to this day. That is thankfully slowly changing! - Legally speaking, the project has, so far, always been in the green in terms of copyright. All the legalities are taken care of, and trademarks registered, thus we are not worried on that front - but we are prepared just in case something comes up in the future. - Despite being inspired by SAO, we do not take any content from the story, anime, or game series - so do keep in mind that this is a love letter to the world of SAO and not an adaptation. - We are a completely voluntary and small team, so the pace is naturally not that fast. Only two people on the team can afford enough time to work full-time on the game, and all money we receive from Patreon and occasional donations goes toward improving servers or various licensing. We are unpaid and plan to stay this way for the foreseeable future. - The game exists and is playable. We have regular private tests for staff and patrons, but due to the nature of how our registration system worked, we kept a low profile with them. Just in the last few days, we jumped from a private account database to connecting a website for it - meaning everyone will be able to set up an account and later become a tester (through various means). It’s also much more secure and protects us from leaks, which was a major concern. More on that will come once the system is fully up and running. We’ll announce it on our website and Patreon once the time comes.
With all the above answered, let’s get into the actual game updates.
### April - Combat & Animations: In April we reworked our entire animation system from the ground up. The original system we had in place was a bit limiting and not very good for future expansion - the new one let us customize every single state in the animator, meaning we have custom animations per weapon type, all the way from walking to jumping. Imagine walking forward with a light rapier equipped to your belt versus walking forward with something massive and heavy. You’d expect the animation to be different in each case, which is what this essentially allows us to do. We also added an optimization system that saves performance when you’re farther away from enemies and made improvements to the combat itself. Other than tons of combat changes across the months like adding mobs with ranged attacks and evasions, we finally added stun states which you can see an example of in our Patreon posts. We occasionally post recordings there - down the line once the combat is ironed out, we will post high-quality recordings on the website as well.
### May - Frucco: We added a new mount to the game - the Frucco. It is essentially an XL version of our gremlins. It was a highlight for us because it needed a custom animation system drafted from the ground up, which we can now reuse across all our mounts. We had prior mounts in the form of wolves and elks, but this one is quite special in every aspect.
### June - New Locations: We did a world expansion push in May & June, creating some new locations along the way. One of them is the Weeping Grove, pictured below.
Aside from the above location, which is only one of many new areas, we also created a new pass of 3D models for our environment and dozens of props. We expanded our world map considerably and are making heavy use of our stylized cliffs and rocks to build a nice feel of verticality wherever possible.
### June - Character Selection Rework: We reworked our character selection and creation system, improved the scene itself visually, and implemented a system time sync. Time in the character selection is now synchronized with your local PC time. If you log in at 3 AM, you will no longer be hit with the blinding power of a thousand suns.
### July - Golems: We have some new elite enemies - golems. In the beginning hours of the game, you will encounter two kinds - the Ancient Golem and Corrupted Golem. Both can be encountered in the overworld, as well as in dungeons. Pictured below are the corrupted golems.
### July - Custom Vegetation: We created our very own trees - highly performant and incredible looking, as they are not classic textures on a plane. They are made with solid leaves that can let sun and moon rays shine through the gaps. Looks incredible at night, especially in thick forests.
### Latest Screenshots: Here are a few of the screenshots we posted to our website gallery and Discord lately, showing off the new visuals we achieved and our environment. We hope you enjoy them.
### Thank you for reading thus far! We apologize for the long silence, but as previously stated, there are only two of us capable of working full-time on the game alongside a handful of amazing volunteers with busy lives. Writing updates is difficult for us since we push changes to the game every day. Stopping to write updates like these takes a while and slows development progress, but we know it is necessary.
We are currently looking for help on a few fronts. If you’d like to join a voluntary team working on a game, there is a lot to experience here and many of our staff learn new things on the job and later land industry jobs. Since we work with a lot of interesting tech, you can get experience with tools and software used across many studios.
### Apply here: [Age of Aincrad - Apply!](https://age-of-aincrad.com/apply)
We are looking for 3D artists, Unity developers (programmers, level designers), narrative designers, and someone to help us write update posts such as these - albeit we expect at least a bit of experience from you in whatever position you apply for. We wish we could teach everyone the ropes and help them grow with us, but in our experience, the game development pace suffers. If you are interested and have the time to spare, please apply!
If you have questions, please visit our homepage or the Discord server. Additionally, if you'd like support us or take part in the Patreon Q&A, feel free to ask whatever you’d like in the comments under the free Patreon post. We’ll make sure to reply.
### With that said, thank you again for reading this far, and see you next time!