Interview With Adam Bohn Of Artix Entertainment, Developers Of AdventureQuest 3D

I recently had a chance to sit down with Adam Bohn of Artix Entertainment to discuss their current Kickstarter project, AdventureQuest 3D. We discussed why the series is moving to 3D, how the skill bar is going to work, and more.

What made you decide to make 3D AdventureQuest now?

Bohn: Ever since I was a little boy, I dreamed—I dreamed of inventing something that hadn’t been invented until 20 years after I was a little boy.

No, but seriously when I built the original AdventureQuest, I built it in my spare time. I wasn’t trying to build a company. I was just trying to make a game. The game I wanted to make was the game we’re making now, but I clearly was not capable. I could barely make a cheesy 2D Flash game—if you played the early versions. Thank goodness we had all these amazing people join us and help make the games as great as they are now. Everything that was wrong, that was me. Everything that was right, that was all the amazing people that joined our team and helped.

I think the right time to do this was three years ago, on our tenth anniversary, which is exactly what the plan was! We were going to make AdventureQuest 3D, but we were not going to do the current plan. We were going to make a Flash game because three years ago—just three years ago—Flash was still a thing. We all believed in Flash and Unity 3D—the tool that we’re using to create the client, it had a Flash exporter. We were like “this is totally going to work.” It hadn’t been released yet. We were purely building this on the belief that this exporter was going to go live, we would be able to figure out all the problems, and we were going to build this massively multiplayer 3D game in Flash, which would be perfect for us because we always did things people told us we couldn’t do.

When we built AdventureQuest Worlds—the 2D game—they were like, “you can’t make a 2D MMO in Flash!” And we did. We made probably one of the first and definitely one of the largest 2D Flash massively multiplayer Flash games of all time.

Unfortunately, that was when Flash started down this bad path of problems and Unity dropped the Flash exporter. When the Flash exporter was dropped we were crushed because we were really depending on that technology. We were like “well, look, we built a Flash game. We can’t release this on Steam because the graphics aren’t going to be good enough and we can’t release this as intended because not enough people have Unity installed for anyone to play this.” We had just wasted a year of our lives in development and the team was crushed.

At the time—talking about being crushed—mobile gaming like Candy Crush and all the big, popular games of that particular era were booming. We saw our players—in droves—moving to mobile devices and giving up their PCs altogether. We were like “guys, look. If we’re going to be relevant, if we’re going to stay on the cutting edge, we need to get off of Flash.” We didn’t have a clear vision at first, because there’s Apple devices, there’s Android devices, Windows devices are about to come out, and there’s all these other phones with the weird little micro things and the Ouya, you know, was just released. It was really hard to pick what the future was going to be. Not to mention there’s the PCs, the Macs, the tablets that were coming out.

So we were like “look. Let’s do this thing called Project Omni. Let’s come up with a plan. Let’s figure out how we can release a game for, if not every device, as many devices as possible.” But I don’t want to just play on a single device. I want to play on all of them. I want to have one account, I want to login, and I want to be able to play that same account no matter what device I’m on.

We went to work on solving this and we built our first game called Battle Gems. We realized that if we tried to do AdventureQuest 3D or any other major project of that scope first, we were going to fall on our faces because it doesn’t matter what size your company is, you have to learn. I think the secret to everything is that you have to be brave enough to accept the fact that yes, you could totally fail, but if you don’t try, you won’t ever do anything.

So we went and we picked a project that we felt pretty confident that we could do and succeed at, which was Battle Gems. It was a puzzle game. It was based on a game called Pony vs Pony that one of our coders made as a joke to terrorize me. We completed Battle Gems. It played on Android, Apple, and—for a very long time—it played through the Unity Player on the web. You logged on to the same account and you could play and track your progress. We did it. It made top Best New Game, if was featured on the Apple App Store. It ranked incredibly well. It’s had over a million installs across devices.

It was kind of funny because, back when we originally launched, we thought that it was a dismal failure. On the web, we were so used to: when we released AdventureQuest Worlds we had millions of sign-ups within the first month. Then we were getting a million new players a month or a year after that. Right now, I think we’re at 40 million users signed up for that game.

At the time, we did not know anything about mobile development or how to market for mobile. It was all part of learning. It’s a lot tougher out there because ad prices went through the roof. To buy advertising is expensive now. These big companies, when we see their ads, they’re paying top dollar for this stuff. We intimately know what they’re doing and it’s kind of like, if you’re not a big boy, it’s really hard to play right now. We also became grimly aware that to do what we did in the past is not going to be possible. We’re going to have to really go and get our community involved with what we’re doing now. All we have is our games, our team’s passion, our community, and maybe a lot of coffee.

So we did Battle Gems and then the team got together and we’re like, “look guys. We have such incredible egg on our face from our first attempt at AdventureQuest 3D that did not look in Flash. We want to build this thing again from scratch. Whole new server, whole new system.” We learned so much about 3D from that project and we never got to apply it. That was our first and only 3D project we had ever attempted at this point. And it did work. We did have it working, but we just knew that it wasn’t going to be the future and it was a wise decision not to continue something because we didn’t want to have the players really get involved in it and have it fail or change it so much that it wasn’t the thing they signed up for in the first place.

We really do care about our players. It’s been 13 years that we’ve been running these weekly updated games. I’m not sure anyone realizes how much incredible work actually goes into updating a game every single week, even on holidays, even when it’s raining, even when the office is robbed. We actually got robbed one time back in like 2007 and we still got the release out that week. Actually, we got updates out for AdventureQuest, MechQuest, and DragonFable out that week. We are incredibly resilient and I think that was what played into “hey look. We absolutely must make and finish AdventureQuest 3D.” The term that came up every time I asked the lead coder Zhoom “if we do this and we hit that release button, how are you going to feel?” He looked at me and he said “redeemed.”

We all got it. We’ve never had a failure like that before. We’ve never not finished a major project. We were all in. Battle Gems, it was a success.

We built Dragons and it was a small scope project. We only had two coders on it. We teamed up with the guys from Cookie Clicker to do something fun. It was probably one of the most fun projects I’ve ever worked on. Those guys are so funny.

But it was time to focus on the main event, which was doing AdventureQuest 3D. So we got the whole band back together and we got the original artists and concept makers and writers from AdventureQuest Classic, DragonFable, and AdventureQuest Worlds, and we just started putting this concept for this new game together. We had to think about it completely different because this is not a PC game. This thing has to be really fun and, if you play this thing on a mobile device, you shouldn’t feel like you’re the redheaded stepchild. You need to feel like you can be a keen gamer no matter what device you’re playing for. This means we had to reimagine the way games were being played.

At the same time, we had constantly been plagued by hackers and botters, and malicious people that wanted to ruin other people’s fun. It’s not like you can fix this thing once and it goes away. It’s a constant battle. We’re like, “how are we going to deal with that cross-device?” We really spent a lot of time thinking “how can we make it fun? How can we make it secure? How can we make it work so that it’s a consistent feel across these devices?” We came up with a plan and we started about 11, maybe 12, months ago now. We were completely funded. AdventureQuest 3D is being funded by the previous games, primarily AdventureQuest Worlds. We told players, if they upgraded, they could get early access to AdventureQuest 3D.

As we got towards the end of the year we had a couple of big, catastrophic problems hit our studio—mostly revolving around ad prices and the transition to mobile. We knew that we needed to move faster, but you can’t rush fun. I’m sure you’ve seen that in other games. So we were like, “we officially have a problem. We can’t hold the weight of AdventureQuest 3D’s development while we’re still doing all this other stuff.” Plus AdventureQuest Worlds—their team needs to get moving on switching that game over to mobile, as well.

So we’re like “okay, well, how long do we need?” It was like “well, you can release it now.” I’m like “you can’t release it now.” In fact, everyone on the team was like “you cannot release it now!” Our alpha testers were like, “you do not release this game now. It’s not ready.” And everyone was like “the potential’s here. You just need to take longer and get it done right.” Everybody sees the potential. We have our first testers who are not in the lab. We call the place where we work the Secret Underground Lab. It’s actually on the second floor, so it’s underground of something. Probably the sky.

Our testers are like “okay, this has such potential, but there are so many things that need done.” It’s barebones. Back in the past, way, way, back when we released the original AdventureQuest, the original DragonFable, and MechQuest, we were okay with releasing the game barebones. We just fixed the game and improved it every week. I think it was a very exciting thing to see. Players do not have that level of patience. Our players do. Our players know exactly how it’s going to go. But the rest of the world, they require things to be amazing right out of the gate or they’re gone in two seconds. Let’s face it. I have downloaded probably four games on my phone this week that I have not opened yet.

We were trying to figure out how to get the funding for AdventureQuest 3D and we had talked about doing a Kickstarter a lot of times, but we were like “established companies shouldn’t do Kickstarters. It’s morally not right.” And then we were like “yeah, but we don’t have any money. Maybe we should do a Kickstarter because we don’t have any money! That’s a good reason to do a Kickstarter!” So we said“okay, how can we do this?” So if we get $200,000, our team’s pretty big on this project and we have a lot of costs. Just the cost of upgrading everyone to new version of Unity.

One of the things we knew we had to do to get onto PC and Mac was we needed to get onto Unity 5.  All of the lighting systems are different so we had to redo every map that we’d done so far. This is one of those things that the earlier we could do it, the better, but because we were initially rushing for an October release we had stuck with the previous version of Unity, which was the correct move at the time, but it means that we can’t publish for Windows 10 App. We can’t publish for a lot of things that we really want to publish for.

So we decided to do the Kickstarter. It was scary because, until literally a week before we had decided to do it, I probably debated over it for like a month and a half. Every day we were like “should we do a Kickstarter?” “I don’t know.” “What happens if we don’t do a Kickstarter?” “Well you’re going to have to release it early.” “I don’t want to release it early.” “What if we don’t want to do this?” “You’re going to have to release early.” “We don’t want to release early!” So ultimately, we gaveled down and we were like “okay, how do we do this?!” Ultimately, we figured it out and we started making the video.

Something really unexpected happened. The Kickstarter kind of changed the focus of the game. As we were asking ourselves the questions of what we wanted to highlight and what we wanted to show, we had always intended for the game to be something that you played together but we realized how important it really was for us. We had these images of a guy and a girl who are sitting in their houses away from each other, and they’re sitting on their computers and they’re playing on their PCs. They’re playing AdventureQuest 3D and they’re in a dungeon—a little two-person dungeon. They’re having fun and they say, “maybe we should go get coffee. Yeah okay.” They go to a coffee shop and they’re like “what do you want to do now?” They pull out their phone or their tablet and now they’re playing AdventureQuest 3D at a coffee shop together. Or we had this image of this family gathered around a table and you could all just pull out your device and play. You don’t have to play a high-pressure dungeon. You can just go to a little farming zone. A place where there’s a little bit of adventuring and you can kill stuff and help each other out and just hang out. Or you could go on lunch break. We take lunch breaks here. Everyone kind of goes into one room and they kind of eat and talk about stuff they’re working on. They could go in and test the game during their lunch break. The game that they’re working on. I was like “that’s kind of amazing.”

Then we realized that we were actually making a game that we wanted to play. That was true for the original AdventureQuest because my girlfriend at the time, she wouldn’t let me play games. So unless I made one, I couldn’t play anything. I was really making a game I wanted to play at that point. I was like tapping my vein like “give me the game!” DragonFable, I wanted to make something that was a little more like Final Fantasy X, but 2D.

Here, I really want to create a super-accessible World of Warcraft that doesn’t at all feel like World of Warcraft. There were so many things that I loved from World of Warcraft, but I just can’t bring myself to play it anymore because it feels like too big of a time investment. So the second thing we all agreed on was that this game needs to be super-accessible and no fluff. No random traveling for no reason.

When I say “instantly accessible,” I mean if you log into the game and you’ve been playing for a really long time, you’ve explored and unlocked all these places. They just show up on your map. Let’s say you walk to the dragon’s lair.You’re level 5 and you’re just like “I’m going to sneak into this high level area and just walk into the dragon’s lair.” When I get to the door, it gives me that big like [makes a duh-duh-duh-dun noise]. A new exploration place has been added to your map. When you go into the dungeon, you’re like 15 levels too low to actually be in there and you’re like “let’s try this anyways and I’m going to invite some friends because we’re all going to be stupid. What could possibly go wrong?” Then you’re going to hit the button and you’re going to open up the panel and choose “invite friends.” You should be able to send a text message. You should be able to invite friends that are already in the game. Let’s say we’re all sitting around at the table together, I should have a three or four digit code that’s created at the moment I open it up. The reason it’s so short is that it’s created at the moment I open it up. I should be able to tell them “hey guys, RED3.” And you type in RED3 and bam! You’re teleported right next to me in the dragon’s lair and we can all go and get horribly killed because we’re all way too low level.

But maybe I invite you and you are high enough leveled. Maybe you’re level 30 and you’re like super overkill for this level. It’s level 30 in this level 15 dungeon so you can sidekick us up to the maximum level of the dungeon just by being there. You hit a button and you’re like “eh, let’s help my buddies out.” Now we’re all high enough to take on this dungeon. We’re all going to explore. Nobody’s ever seen this before. The one guy feels really good because he found it. The high level guy feels really good because he’s helping his buddies be able to actually beat the stuff in there. We rip through this dungeon. It feels really awesome. We beat the dragon. We get some random loot. Somebody realizes “but hey, we don’t get to go on the quest unless we beat the area outside and unlock the story mode.”

Oh right, this game has a story. Then you’re interested and you go on your own, maybe with your friends, and you go play the story. I think that’s going to be really successful. I think that’s going to change the way we play games together.

When you release AdventureQuest 3D, is it going to be a downloadable client on PC or in-browser?

Unity is going to be dropped from the export list in March. Everything that has ever happened to me seems to happen twice. So just like the Flash exporter was dropped, the Unity exporter is being dropped in March, almost to the date of the same day three years ago.

That’s okay, though, because we’re totally prepared for it this time. We’re going to do a PC and Mac download. We’re going to be on the Windows 10 Store. We’re going to try and get on the Mac App Store. We’ve submitted to Steam on Greenlight. We are #6 out of 1,844 games on Steam Greenlight. We have 5,621 Yes votes, which looks really good.

Obviously, Steam was our best one because with Steam and the PC version, we can go ahead and add Oculus Rift and other VR support to the game. Enough players have asked about controller support so that yesterday we actually got a mobile controller and started thinking about how this game would function. It would be possible to put it on a console but step one is just to make the game controller friendly. Let’s face it. Not a lot of MMOs are. If you think about games like Fallout and Skyrim, they’re two button games.

Probably the number one thing people are concerned about, or voicing about AdventureQuest 3D, is it only has four skill buttons that are visible. We did this because it’s going to be on mobile. You really can’t have 20 buttons easily accessible and actually touchable on your mobile device. You kind of want to sit back and chill when you’re playing. I don’t know about you, but, when I play a mobile game, I’m normally on my couch. I’m normally in my ‘sup-ish position—you know, what’s up? You don’t have to move your thumbs too far because, if you do, it’s effort. You kind of want as little effort as possible.

When you’re really engaged in the game, you’re going to be hunched over. You’ll be sitting up. You’ll do anything. But when you’re farming, you just want to be able to sit back and barely move your thumbs and still get that outcome that you’re looking for, that good gameplay, without doing too much. One of my rules for our previous games was “if I can’t watch TV while I’m playing it, I’m not playing this game.” I’m going to put on Netflix, I’m going to put my feet up, and I’m going to play my mobile game. I love idle games because they let me do that. With AdventureQuest 3D, I probably shouldn’t say this out loud but, if you’re the kind of person that likes doing this, you hit the target button, you hit the auto-attack button, and just make sure you’re not in a place where you’re going to get whomped if you don’t do massive damage. You can kind of chill and farm and Netflix. Netflix, chill, and farm!

What influenced the smaller skill bar? It reminds me a bit of a MOBA.

We want it to be deeper than that so here is our solution. We have this fly-out bar that has additional skills on it. It’s going to be how you transform into shadow wolf form. It’s going to be how you use potions. It’s going to be how you use your resurrect ability. It’s going to be how you do strange things that are tied to interaction.

You’re going to have your skills change in context. Nothing is done yet. We’re still in alpha. We can radically improve the game at this point and we intend to. One option that was told to us is that we can have the skill bar rotate so that you may only have four skills visible at a time, but you can flick them to get more. Maybe we can change the skills depending on the situation that you’re in.

Next question is, “well how do you know what those buttons actually do?” If you tap a button, you’ll use it. If you hold the button, you’re going to bring up a display that shows you what that skill actually does. This doesn’t require the fancy iPhone 6 pressure sensitivity. You just hold it down and it’ll show you what it is.

If you’re looking to make it change contextually, are you still going to have the same switching of skills on your skill bar?

One of the big features of AdventureQuest 3D is multi-class. What that meant in our previous games was—I think DragonFable is probably the best example of this—you swapped out your look, skills, and everything completely. You were a cleric. Now you’re a paladin. Now you’re a ninja.

We were talking about there being two paths we can go down—and the community is really going to influence this. One is to make deep skill trees for classes, like paladin, so that you can shape how your paladin plays. Something that’s probably going to be less popular, but I think is a better idea, is to have entire classes on the skill tree. As you rank up your paladin, eventually you have three tiers of paladin underneath, like an undead-slayer paladin or a defender paladin or a paladin highlord or a dark paladin. These other classes play completely different with maybe one or two skills that overlap. So you customize your play style not by changing your hotbar, but by changing your class.

It becomes very situational. If you guys are going into a fire dungeon, make sure you equip your ice weapons and high fire resist stuff and classes that don’t use fire skills. That way you can really customize. Or, "oh gosh, we need a healer." Someone can put on their healer class and we’re off to the races.

To answer your next question, we made the stats a little bit simpler than our previous games so that items would be useful no matter which class you were. We found it very frustrating to have to switch out our weapons when we switched classes.

To kind of solve the next problem in the chain, we decided we were going to do item fusion. I would say that item fusion is the second most important feature of AdventureQuest 3D because my most painful memory in gaming was having worked 3 months to get a weapon and then an expansion to this particular game was released and that weapon was replaced by a weapon that I bought with four gold. The most painful moment of my gaming history. I was like “why do I bother?!”

I never wanted that to happen in this game. We decided “okay, what if we separated the art and the power of the weapon?” You could take any weapon of the same type. Say I have two axes. This is a fire axe and it looks this way. I have another fire axe and it looks this way. I can take these two weapons and combine them together and get the look of one and the power of another. That power includes the special abilities and stuff. This means that you can have a level one stick—this is my favorite example—and you just decide “I’m going to use this level one stick my entire life. I am now raiding level 100 dungeons with my friends and I have the most powerful level one stick anyone has ever seen.

What made you decide to add automatically-assigned area quests?

In traditional MMOs, you walked up to an NPC and you clicked and you got the quest. Then you would go and do them and you would have to come back to the NPC and turn them in. If we’re going to do this like Neflix, chill, and farm game, I wanted to not have to work that hard. I know that sounds terrible.

Here’s what I’d like the experience to be. You walk into a new zone for the first time. You get this really cool cinematic cutscene and it’s narrated by the major NPC of the zone. You get the problem that’s going on in this area. Then you immediately look up to the top of the screen where you’re going to get your quest objective. Ideally, we’d like to have a little compass that’s underneath, on your shadow, so that you know which way to go to solve your current quest. Any hardcore MMO player knows that we just get add-ons and they show us where to go anyways, right? I like exploring. There will be exploration points that are undocumented that you’re going to have to find. But for the core storyline, we want to make sure you know what to do next. It shouldn’t be confusing.

You can go and do the next thing. The main story is linear in that contained area. I think that, for the main story, having each zone have a singular purpose makes it really clean and uncluttered. You’re not going to have like 10 million things in your quest log and trying to figure out what to do next. You will, on the other hand, be able to click on your map and see all of these areas and if you have or haven’t completed them and how far into them you have completed. If you’re a completionist, you’ll be able to look at your map and go “oo, I haven’t done this yet. I want to go in there and do that and get the reward.”

Are you concerned with the stigma of a game designed for mobile on PC?

Yeah, I am concerned about that. I’ve been reading it. I haven’t seen venomous hatred for it, but I’ve seen concern. I think that we’re going to see a lot more of it. There were a lot of things that came out during the past 13 years that we never thought were going to work. People were like “it’s too simple.” But it always starts out this way. We hit the ground running with this kind of new, simplistic version of how this works and then it’s like “oh! I got an idea!” The ideas stack and eventually become this amazing thing and then it becomes the status quo.

I’m really glad that we’re a part of this first generation of these “omni games.” I think that’s what’s really happening, right. We’re building the first generation of these omni games. I think this is what the future of gaming is going to be like. “The stepdad of cross-platform!”

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AdventureQuest 3D is currently on Kickstarter. It has passed its $200,000 goal and has 15 days left.