Although Driftmoon will not be a purely action oriented RPG, there will be many battles in it. This is an area I've given a lot of time, by prototyping and play testing. In many roleplaying games the combat is purely cosmetic, it's actually there just to fill your time in between dialogue or looting. You click an enemy and the combat begins, and you can either continue with combat or flee.
Combat in Driftmoon will be real time, with a very simple interface. You can click on any enemy to hit them. If you have a melee weapon your character goes on to hit them, and if you have a bow, your character fires from where you are. The part where things get interesting are the various enemy types that have different attack patterns. This is true especially in the later stages of the game. I'm also hoping to have various combat usable terrain, such that you could for example hinder your enemies by moving a rock in front of them, or by placing traps.
Any wild ideas for combat? Explosive powder kegs or paralyzing darts?
DRL, one of monkkonen.net's industrious modders has released a modding guide to Wazzal. See here for more info. Apparently he has found out that you can edit the textures, as well as edit the saved games to create more interesting ship configurations. Modders truly never cease to amaze me. 
Driftmoon will be a roleplaying game with a story. Many modern RPG games don't have this luxury, as action oriented RPG's have become more commonplace in the latter years. Action orientation effectively means that the story is some sort of a ruse to get you to fighting. There's always some excuse to fight, no matter how idiotic. And there's never a choise to not fight. Some years back I played Diablo 2 through about 4 times, and I still cannot seem to recall what the story was.
Then there are the sandbox RPG's, where you can do anything in the vast game world. You can become a smith, or you can carry mail between places. And obviously mostly you'll be going to all of the dungeons and ruins you can find and kill everybody there. A sandbox RPG is pretty limited in what the story can be. Bethesda's famous Oblivion didn't have much of a story because you could essentially skip it. When I played it I really ended up doing some sort of tedious work doing some little thing here and another there. I do that for a living, I don't want to do that in a game!
In my opinion a vast improvement, Bethesda's Fallout 3 did have a large sandbox play world, and it had a story. Though it suffered from the same problem, many of the quests in the world were tedious work, most of them related somehow to the main story, and deepened the world as a whole. That is not to say I didn't get sidetracked so badly that I never found the main plot again.
And finally there are the games where the story limits where you can go to, and more areas open as the story progresses. A good example is Baldur's Gate. This is the kind of story driven gameplay I'm going for with Driftmoon. You will have a chance to explore the areas that are open to you, and more areas will open as the story goes on. There's obviously the chance you'll get stuck, as opposed to fully open world games you don't know that you're stuck. But it will also be a lot less railroaded than for example Half-Life.
While I officially started work on Driftmoon this spring, the engine it uses has already been in development from June 2005. That's when I had the idea to create a multiplayer platformer game, with the moddability of Notrium and a medieval theme. As I recall the original idea was to have a large world massive multiplayer world with playable levels as arenas, and it would have had a story mode where you could have completed quests by yourself or with anybody else playing the same level at the same time. I soon teamed up with Quanrian, some of you may remember him as the co-author of later Notrium versions. And the game was renamed Cormoon.
By that time we had a nice multiplayer platformer game going on, we had a level editor, and all that was missing was the actual story based game. So we set out to do that, we made huge plans for various worlds there would be, as I recall we had up to a dozen playable races. At first we envisioned to implement the most combat based race, and around the beginning of 2007 we had our combat code ready. We had attack and defend moves. The animations of your enemies would give you a hint when to defend and when to attack, and it would have a nice rhytmic feeling of swordfighting, attacking your enemy and parrying his attacks. We even had an automatic system where you could just start a game, and it would connect you to anyone playing the level already.
At this point we realized the massive multiplayer vision was way too complex for two people to handle. We didn't have the server resources for it, and try as we might, we never could have run the whole thing had the game actually been a success. So we cut down the multiplayer part, and what we had was a nice single player Cormoon. Obviously we had to change the combat mechanics, redesign the races so that they would work in single player, we even redesigned our controls from time to time. We grew our team by a couple of awesome artists, Mika and Catherine. Here's special thanks to you both!
Somewhere around January 2008 we had a version where you could platform around in our little world. We had physics puzzles, we had lighting effects, sprite based animations you could tweak on the fly, easy to use 2.5D object editor within the game. We even had a couple of playable races. We were just missing the game. We knew what the world was like, we even knew what sort of languages the people there spoke and what religious systems they had -- we just didn't know what levels to start with, what would the player do when it comes down to actually sitting there and playing. Why was the player there and what was he supposed to do?
Real life was taking it's share of our time to communicate, and with Quanrian and me living in totally different time zones, we were hard pressed to find time to talk about where to start actual content development. By start of 2009 we were talking about completely different games. As it is often with independent games, the ambitious goals and the lack of communication made it impossible to finish the game in any available timeframe. In case some indie game developers ever read this, the lessons I learned are:
- You should have a very good idea what the game is that you're making. Getting the game idea down first before doing anything is key. Prototype if you need to, but don't start on the actual game if you just have a vague idea of a theme or a single gameplay mechanic that you want to implement.
- Don't do your own engine, unless you're working on a very simple game, or your game absolutely needs some cutting edge features that no other engine will provide. Spending years making an engine before pinning down your game idea is a bad idea. If making engines is what you're good at, perhaps you're not a game maker but a game engine maker?
- Work on something you are capable of. Lofty dreams are fine, but if you dream of making a huge MMORPG, then your work will not be making the game. It will be full time work getting money to run your huge studio. If you are just one or a couple of people, and don't want to make paying people's salaries your day job, then you should focus on simple, attainable.
I often have game ideas in my dreams, and so it was that morning that I woke up with this memory of a dream. In my dream I was on an island, visiting a small tavern. I had just looted a huge castle in the woods, and I was just about ready to pay a visit to the castle waiting at the bottom of the ocean. But just the island is not what I wanted to capture in the game, it was the feeling I had in my dream of having found so many cool places, of finding clues of where to go next, of exploration and new items.
That's the history of Driftmoon. That's not four years wasted, as the engine looks and plays well, and I've learned a few good lessons from working with Cormoon. I'm still hard at work putting the whole game down on paper, as making an RPG is pretty complex, but I'm confident that it will not fall into the same failings that stopped Cormoon.
So, do you have anything to add from those four years? I'm sure many of you remember some bits of information better.
This week I've mostly been working on item management, since a lot of the gameplay will deal with finding and collecting items such as weapons and armor, and magic items. I want the main inventory to be always visible, since the player will constantly be using it. But I don't want it to be too big as to distract playing. This poses a problem, because the player should likely have more inventory space than the 27 slots you see on the main inventory.
Should I implement containers, such as bags that the player could carry in their main inventory? Or should I make the main inventory scrollable? Or make the item slots smaller so more could fit at one time? Any better ideas?
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