The year is starting!

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.

Oldies part 1: Magebane 1

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.

A new beginning

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?

Stop the rain!

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!

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.

And the winner is...

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.