I finally got fed up with walking between areas that I've already seen (I've seen everything about a 1000 times!), so here's another one of our recent additions: quick travel! Simply put, you can use quick travel waypoints to travel to a location you've already been to. The only requirement is that no enemies are near you when you want to travel.
These are incredibly easy to add in the editor, just create an object with a script to set a waypoint, you only need to think up a name for the location. There's also the added flexibility that since a script can create the waypoint, you can open up new waypoints anywhere you want, even if the player hasn't been there.
PS. I optimized the minimap creation in the editor, it's now about a 100 times faster for bigger maps.
Since I've always loved exploration and finding things in games, I wanted to find a way to encourage exploration in Driftmoon. There are a few open spaces here and there with nothing in them except trees, and I decided they needed spicing up. That's why I invented ingredients! Roots, twigs, mushrooms, spices... When you find or buy a recipe, you can use it to combine the ingredients into a new item. I already made recipes for torches and health potions. I'm planning on expanding the system to include arrows and more, if you have any ideas for combined items, just tell me!
Of course I couldn't just have my ingredients lying out in the open. Well I tried, but it felt silly somehow. So I invented ingredient mines! You can find a pearl in an inland oyster, you can find green salt on the surface of a green rock. Once you mine the ingredient, it slowly replenishes.
Then I needed to find a good way to balance the amount of the ingredient mines available. I decided to make their locations random. All I have to do is place location markers on the map where interesting stuff should be found, and the game handles the rest, according to the probabilities I've set.
Ingredients wasn't enough of course, I wanted to add more things to find. So I used the same random location system. Now the location markers I've placed can be bushes, rocks, plants, chests, barrels, seashells, old boots, Snatcher nests, Deathcap mushrooms (which act as dim portable light sources!) or skeletons. I can add any number or strange and rare things, and they exist in random locations in the game.
Next I'm going to make some shopkeepers... 
(before and after close-ups of some terrain textures in Driftmoon)
Forum member TheSlider wanted to know if I could make the terrain graphics less blurry. That was the last straw! That broke the camel's back! That... Well, it wasn't so simple as changing a number, because the terrain graphics were dynamically baked into one texture to speed up rendering, along with all the plants. I had to make all the plants into actual sprites that now have a height and can appear over rocks.In the end it took just a couple of days to do it, and I don't think it's much slower, in fact there are less skipping frames when moving. It looks a bit better, but I'm noticing some scaling artifacts, so I still have to work those out.
I've remade the talent system in Driftmoon to allow greater flexibility in character customization. There are three main lines of talents, combat, defense, and passive. Each talent has two levels, apprentice and master. Combat and defense talents are usable as skills, a few even outside combat. Passive talents are always active. In effect we have 24 talents - that's a lot of work for me to balance, but it greatly enriches the combat mechanics.
Of course now there's the question of what to do if you want to change some talent you haven't used much. I know it happens to me a lot in different games, especially if I change my combat strategy mid-game. Maybe a trainer in the game could allow you to free talent points for reuse?
[Update] Amarth asked about moddability, so here's the word on that. It's completely moddable, except for the slot placements. You can have as many levels for each talent as you want, I liked two. And any talent can be a requirement for any talent, so prerequisite lines don't have to be straight like these. At the moment a talent can only require one other talent.
And as before, the effects are scriptable. There are two kinds of talent scripts, one that is executed when the talent is acquired, the other option is to run a script each time the player character is loaded and unloaded - the talent is sort of wielded like an item. Each talent level is actually a separate talent entry, so different levels of a talent can have very different effects if you like.
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