Thanks for the replies everyone, I’m really glad to hear all of your thoughts! Before seeing any replies I was assuming that everyone would be asking for more action oriented combat, and I’m pleasantly surprised by the responses. I prototyped the Notrium combat style, and the melee really is the part where it fails. It should be slow enough for me to understand what’s happening, but if I make it slow enough, the rest of the game starts feeling too slow. And I couldn’t get over the fact that the keyboard movement controls are not suited to indoors, especially if any corridors are not perfectly angled.

I really did think a lot about having a good old turn based Fallout 1/2 combat system, but it’s probably not the kind of gameplay I’m looking for. I’m hoping for a more fluid gameplay where the combats are something that don’t stop you unless you want it to. I remember disliking easier opponents in Fallout precisely because it would take that halfa minute to move your character and get that single shot.

I’m inclined to move from the current system to strategic level fighting. I liked your thoughts ZeXLR8er, so I started off from there. My current thinking is something like this:

• During the game you could learn many combat skills. These would be different kinds of attacks, stat boosts, stuns, maybe defence skills, you name it.
• In combat you could choose to use any of these skills with your current weapon. Your weapon stats would be used as the base for damage, boosted by the skill.
• Using the skills would have some sort of a cost. ZeXLR8er proposed the attack points system whereby using a skill would cost you some attack points which would slowly replenish.
• The problem with this is now, why wouldn’t I always use the most powerful skill at my disposal? It could be balanced out by making it cost more, but it would still be the best skill and you’d always use it if you had the points. The best solution would be to make the skills equal in power, but each would bring new strategies to combat. And this is what I’m thinking now, what kinds of skills could there be, what skills would allow different strategies to be used?

By the way, CTRL+F12 takes a screenshot into the game save folder, which is under My Documents/Driftmoon.

I’ve had the flue for nearly a week now, so I’ve had an opportunity to think about the combat in Driftmoon. It’s pretty hard to think about swinging a sword when your body tells you to crawl under a blanket, so I’ve gotten nowhere. I think I need your help with this.

Should the combat be:

1. Similar to Notrium, only with much improved melee.
2. Like it is in the preview. A lot like Diablo.
3. More strategic, you command your characters to attack and they do the fighting. You don’t deal out individual punches.
4. Turn based. Action points. Like old Fallout games or XCom.
5. JRPG: Separate combat screen with turn based rock/paper/scissor combat.

I liked the current system initially, but since I’ve played it for quite a while I’ve been craving for the player skill to be involved. Plan 1, combat similar to Notrium, would give us that. But recently I’ve disliked the combat in Notrium because it’s so fast paced and difficult, and the melee combat is just ridiculous pounding with more luck than skill involved.  The melee would at least need a blocking button. And I don’t know whether I liked the fact that running away while shooting your enemies was a good strategy. Perhaps the aim should be penalized if you’re moving, and at least the enemies shouldn’t blindly run after you waiting for you to shoot them down.

Which combat system do you prefer?

I finally got my internet connection back! It’s been very peaceful without it, I wholeheartedly recommend changing your ISP every once in a while – gives you a chance to catch your breath.

• A site I sometimes visit called Indieflux did a short preview of Driftmoon.

• I wanted to mention a game developer friend, Mika Halttunen.  http://www.mhgames.org/
  His latest work is a Bejeweled clone named Jewels, which seems to be doing pretty well on the Android platform. And he’s done a lot of PC games as well, my favourite being I have No Tomatoes. If you visit Mika’s site, try to coax him into coming to work again.
• As for work on Driftmoon, I’ve been retooling the first portions of the demo to fit the new story. It’s pretty tedious work, since I want to put in as little text as possible, but still keep it interesting and meaningful, while communicating the story I want to tell. I’ve already finished the part where you are a smith in the past for five minutes. Plus I put in fadeouts and fadeins! Modders can now fade the screen out by scripts, and to any specified color. It could perhaps be used for showing a red screen if you get very badly hit, or pretending you’re walking in a mist.

The coming year marks the 12th year of my game development hobby/career, so I thought I’d have a look at some of my older games, maybe I’ll learn something.

In year 1998 I released my very first game Magebane 1. It was a mixture of comic book and turn based rpg. My absolute indie favourite from the time was a Finnish game called Areena, and I pretty much copied the combat from it. As I recall I used Visual Studio 3 for the programming, so the game worked in Windows 3.1 which still did exist at the time. I think I wanted to make the game because I wanted to show off my paintings. Magebane 1 took about half a year to make, and I was 15 years old for the best part of that.

Basically it works like this: You read a part of a dialogue explaining why you’re going to fight someone, then you arm your two warriors and one mage, and after that there’s a turn based combat sequence. There’s a ton of menus before you get to the good stuff. The combat is tediously slow and requires careful optimization even in the easiest levels. Arming your characters means going to the smith screen which is way too complex for me to understand anymore. But I still like the game for the story parts. They’re obviously written by someone with a very good sense of humor.

What did I learn from replaying Magebane 1?

• Make your games in English. That’s a given these days.
• Focus on the actual gameplay. Magebane 1 uses many complex menus and text screens that distract from the actual combat and story.
• I nearly didn’t finish Magebane 1 because it was pretty complex, and I had never programmed anything real before. If you’re working on your first game, make it a simple game. You don’t have to impress.

If you’re interested in history, you can try the game: Download Magebane 1. It works from Windows 3.1 up to at least XP. Microsoft dropped support for 16 bit applications after that, so I’ll just have to keep an old XP hanging around the house. And be warned, this is in Finnish only, so you probably won’t understand a thing.

Recently I talked about choosing a better plot for the beginning of the game. If you want to keep the beginning a surprise, don’t read any further.

So far my idea is this:

• The player and his brother Robert are smiths working on an indestructible blackrock golem by the order of some unknown client.
• This unknown person knocks on the door, inspects the work and leaves.
• The Necromancer comes to the smithy. He zaps Robert dead and freezes the player. He makes Robert a skeleton in his army.
• The Necromancer removes the player’s soul, and makes him into his mindless right hand.
• The Necromancer tells the player to divide the golem into 7 parts and hide them so nobody can gather them.
• Fade out. Fast forward some decades.
• Fade in, the Healer Samuel is asking how you feel.
• Samuel tells that you came in terribly wounded, and he has tended to you for months.
• He has found a letter in your belongings ordering you to destroy the town of Asrald.
• You have no memory of anything he tells you, except of the encounter with the Necromancer.
• Samuel suggests to find Paul who has researched the Necromancer’s magics.
• Paul suggests that you have lost parts of yourself by wronging others in the service of the Necromancer, and that you may get these parts back by righting the wrongs.
• Throughout the game you will meet many people who have known you while you were serving the Necromancer. You have an option to set things right with them to gain back parts of your soul. Doing this may gain you skills and experience.
• Paul says that nothing can destroy the Necromancer, but that it was once tried by building a golem out of blackrock.
• What dark deeds have you done in the Necromancer’s service? How can you gather the golem pieces to destroy the Necromancer?

This is just the first part. I have plenty of plot twists thought up but I won’t be revealing those just yet. I’m open to suggestions if you have any. Any obvious cliches? A good plot is arguably one of the most important parts of any good RPG, so I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts.

Get yourself the new Driftmoon Roof from Ville Corp! A couple of days ago I found myself building a house, and soon I thought that something was missing. At first I spent a couple of hours building a dungeon with fiery lava underneath our house, but fortunately Anne pointed out that it was the roof that was missing. And here it is now!

Here’s the roof.

And now we’re under it!

We’ve added a couple of nice features for modders. First of all the sun adds shadows behind walls now. You know the shadows are not the sharpest out there, but creating your own sun dial is now technically possible.

Another addition is the roof setting for all terrain objects. Setting that means that it will create a permanent sun shadow under it, it will be lighted by the sun only (your torch won’t light the ceiling), and the terrain will activate the see through effect. Going under any terrain set as roof will trigger all roofs to fade out, so we can create our roofs from different pieces. I used three objects to create the sample. Roofs can be anything, so adding see through pergolas and glass panes should be possible.

Additionally I’ve added the height setting for vertices. Now we can change the height of any vertex in a polygon. Basically it means your tables or floors don’t have to be level anymore. I’m pretty sure someone will think of some ingenious use for this, but so far I’ve only used it for the slope in the roof.

The winner of the free Driftmoon copy is Esa K. Congratulations! The free copy will be sent when the game is released.

If you didn’t know of the competition, you might want to join the Driftmoon mailing list. There may be some other competitions in the future.

First of all I want to kick off by saying thank you for voting! We got 30% of all votes in the 2BeeGames competition (a nice second place, in a competition that started out with 120 games!), and while we didn’t win the poll, it goes to show that there’s definite interest in roleplaying games. We’re especially happy to have done so well with this preview version of Driftmoon, as the development of the game is still very much in progress. We also got featured in a lot of places, and are very thankful for all the support we received! We also want to congratulate all the other 2BeeGames-finalists for their success in the competition!

And on to the show. It’s technical, but I’ll keep it short (just kidding!). As most of you know, I spent a couple of very nice weeks redeveloping our sound engine. Why? Because I chose a poorly supported library earlier, and it crashed the game at random now that the preview was being tested on more machines. The library was Audiere, a very easy and clean library. You could very nearly play a sound by calling play(filename). I chose it back in 2005, when it was still in active development. Since then, more and more computers have got at least two CPU cores, which seems to induce a threading bug in the library. Unfortunately Audiere hasn’t been updated in years, so I had to look for a new library.

I went with Microsoft’s new XAct3. It looks easy enough, it has a really nice tool to set up all the sounds, supports both XBox 360 and Windows, and it’s the newest from one of the most largest software companies out there. Also, Microsoft clearly states that their older DirectSound technology is deprecated, which usually means they’re not supporting it, and that developers should use the newer libraries XAct3 or Xaudio2. I completely overhauled our sound engine to XAct3, now happy with this new technology. But as it turns out, new technologies often have bugs, and so did XAct3. It crashed at random when releasing finished sounds, and at random it would reuse a sound, resulting in the previous sound being played instead of the new sound. Since XAct3 was built as an easy to use wrapper around XAudio2, and the bugs were in the wrapper layer, I moved on to using XAudio2.

Now I completely overhauled our sound engine to XAudio2. To its credit I can say that it worked, and didn’t have any bugs that I could see. But it had one little flaw – it required the absolutely newest DirectX version. That’s not going to be a problem in a few years time, and it’s not a problem for any larger games where your average user is willing to upgrade his whole computer to play the game. But I couldn’t just put in a message saying you need a new DirectX pronto, chop chop to Microsoft and install it, hope it runs on your outdated hardware, then if you still remember, try our game.

So I completely overhauled our sound engine to DirectSound. I’ve been using it in all of my previous games, starting from the year 1999. It works just as perfectly as it ever did, and even though Microsoft says it’s deprecated, I’m sure they don’t really mean that. So that’s what I was doing for the past two or three weeks. I’m really glad I can get to working on the actual game now…