Hi all you active users of monkkonen.net!
I (the wife) wanted to give you some feedback. I think it is only fair, since You have an extremely important role in getting Driftmoon done. And I'm not just talking about beta-testing or such. You all playing the games /writing at the forum /sending e-mail, etc. are a big reason for Ville to persistantly work on his games, and try to make them as good as possible! Without players, and such an active gaming community, I think it would be rather pointless to make games - and I know for a fact Ville agrees. It's also great that you bring forth your ideas & question, etc - not all of those can of course be followed/answered, but they are good food for thought, nevertheless.
Before meeting Ville I hadn't quite realized what a huge project making a computer game is (small-time tetris-copies excluded): The support of one loving wife (or even a harem, if Ville happened to be polygamous 
- to any girls out there wondering, sorry, he's not.) would just not have been sufficient to ever get Driftmoon this far, let alone done. Anyway, as of now, Driftmoon is at a promising stage and progressing nicely. But do still keep edging Ville on, commenting and writing on the forum - it gives Ville motivation to work on the game, and get it done (and I believe it will be Ville's best game by far!).
Hmm. This leaves me with a question: How do independent game makers, especially the ones working alone, ever get their first "big-time" game finished, without a community to support them? Any of you starting game developers out there?
If you're eagerly waiting to see Driftmoon, then here's a question from Crazy that you're probably thinking of as well:
Not to want to be the one to start with the nagging, but when might we mortals get to catch a glimpse of an alpha/beta/demo?Seeing as I am a mortal as well, I'm waiting to know the same thing. See, I don't know yet. I'm working on Driftmoon all of my evenings, but I do have a day job to keep my baby fed. My first priority is to finish the demo part of the game before I go on to making the stuff you get when you buy the game, just because I want to show it to you as soon as possible.
Having said that, there's still a lot to do with the demo before we mortals get to see it. I'm mostly finished with the graphical side of things, as you can see from the screenshots. But there's still work to do with sounds, music, gameplay, you name it. So no, I have no idea when it's going to be done. But you're going to be the first to know by subscribing to the newsletter! 
There will be a closed beta phase, so some of you will get to play it before others. I'll be posting more info of that in the coming months.
Not to want to be the one to start with the nagging, but when might we mortals get to catch a glimpse of an alpha/beta/demo?
The news of Driftmoon and the monkkonen.net website update have been well received, although Ahrenjb demanded to see robots and lasers. We'll see what we can do. Most have compared Driftmoon to my previous game Notrium, and rightfully so. They do appear to be similar in screenshots, although they play a bit differently. The key difference here is that while Notrium was a very fast paced action game, focusing on survival, Driftmoon will be much more about adventure, exploring and story. In short, except for the similar viewpoint, these games are quite different. Most of you have played Notrium, so I'm still probably going to use it as a reference when talking about Driftmoon. I will be posting regular updates of our progress here, so subscribe to the feed if you're using RSS. You can even get them to your email by using Feed My Inbox.
After the website update all of the download links for monkkonen.net were broken for a couple of days. They should be fixed now, so please report any problems here in the blog comments. Commenting the blog doesn't require registration, so feel free to just pop in.
The new game we're working on (with Anne) is now officially named Driftmoon. To celebrate this I've put together a selection of screenshots for your viewing pleasure. You can see the rest of the screenshots on the Driftmoon page. You can tell me your impressions in the Comments section. I've got a really good feeling about this game, so please tell me what you think.
I will be posting more information here as we go on, so stay tuned!
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