Get an email when we relase a new game!You know you'll forget it otherwise.
Version 5 of Driftmoon is now ready for download to all our valued preorderers! If you haven't preordered yet, you can still get your copy for 20% off, and at the same time show us your support! 
If you'd rather wait until Driftmoon is ready, you're bound to forget all about it, and that would mean denying yourself a great gaming experience: So why not sign up for the Driftmoon release notification?
Most notable with this version is the One Modding Screen. We've been hard at work providing players with easy access to mods, and at the same time ensuring your mods will get the visibility they deserve. Thus, you can now easily distribute your mods, and get feedback for them. To distribute a mod, simply upload it to the Driftmoon mods list, and it will be available to everyone playing Driftmoon!
I've also made it possible for mods to reuse all the resources inside the main game simply by referencing them. The game always looks for named resources first under the mod directory, then under the main game. This way you can save space in your mod, especially for sounds and music. From this version onwards, I won't remove any resources that come with the game, so you're safe using them.
We want to show our full support to modding Driftmoon, so if you have any problems at all, or any suggestions, contact us and we'll help! You can reach us via email, the forum, or the ingame feedback button.
Game changelog:
- The One Mod Screen: One click mod installation!
- Display settings screen.
- All petrified people are now grey.
- Quest Log, and quest progress dialog.
- Tripled day length and made torches last a lot longer.
- The inventory now shows how much of a torch has been used.
- Smoother minimap controls.
- You can now choose the distance at which Fizz follows you.
- Automatic Updates: The game will let you know when a new version of Driftmoon is available, and it can be installed with the click of a button.
- Improved tutorial messages, and the ability to close them.
- Fixed the crash, that happened when selling by dragging to shop inventory.
- Ceilings get out of the way when moving close to a building, making it easier to spot doors.
Modding changelog:
- Convenient mod distribution system: Upload your mod (instructions available in the game), and it's easy for others to start playing it (and comment to you)!
- Fixed bug: Comments to conditions no longer affect script results.
- All the textures and sounds currently in the mainmod folder will remain there from now on, so you can safely use all of them in your mods.
- Daylight cycle and day length can now be set in the mod settings.
Ps. There might be a modding competition at some point in the near future, so this would be a good time to get a head start! 
The Driftmoon soundtrack has just become available for $5! This is a great way to support our musician Gareth Meek, so get it straight away!
"I really hope that everyone enjoys both the game and the music." says Gareth Meek. "I highly appreciate the support of anyone who takes the time to purchase and listen to the soundtrack and would like to thank them in advance for allowing me to continue to write music. Finally I would like to say a HUGE thank you to both Ville and Anne for giving me the opportunity to work on Driftmoon, I have enjoyed every minute of it and the support they have given me is so much more than I could have expected. Many thanks and I hope that everyone enjoys Driftmoon!"
I got to thinking about the end of the game, and what would happen if there was a massive battle you took part in. Here's a short test:
The sounds are obviously ridiculous, the combatants shouldn't talk about the weather while they're fighting, and it all happened too fast. Technically it worked flawlessly for our 500 combatants (many of them are outside the screen), but this test made me glad I'm not making a realtime strategy.
Come to think of it, it might be an interesting mod, a realtime strategy using the Driftmoon engine. It would be easiest to make one where you control a single character, but if you wanted to have an all-seeing eye, you could make the player invisible and able to fly. You'd still need a way to tell other characters where to move, but I don't think that'd be too difficult to make...
Did you spot it? We've finally joined the facebook age, with our brand new Like-button! Better late than... even later! Since You are one of our valued readers - possibly also one of the clever commentors or even a higly respected Driftmoon-preorderer - I'm pretty confident we like You. Should you happen to return the sentiment, you are welcome to like us back!
Ps. Work on the Modding System is progressing very nicely. More on that a bit later.
In preparation for the Driftmoon mod system, we've moved our servers to Google App Engine. Why spend a week moving everything? Speed!
Our old server was a virtual server from Amazon. At first I enjoyed running my Ubuntu Linux that hosted the whole affair. But soon I realized I had to install security updates every week, and every now and then bang it with a screwdriver just to run Wordpress. And it wasn't powerful enough, oh no! The server was barely adequate to serve our small userbase, being sometimes sluggish, sometimes refusing to answer outright. And yes, I had to shout at it. It could never run with the additional traffic that our new modding system would generate.
My first instinct was to rent a bigger server, but they're prohibitively expensive. What I really wanted was to make sure our webpages load fast, and that we have room for expansion if we get a sudden surge of visitors. Had you linked to us from your own Facebook page, our server would probably have crashed! That is, assuming you have a lot of friends, of course.
App Engine promises to upscale our website gracefully by adding more servers when needed, and they provide the first instance for free (at least for the moment). My language of choice was Java coupled with Eclipse, and I have plenty of experience with both. I rewrote most parts of Wordpress in Java over the past couple of days, and now I'm turning my attention to the server side of the Driftmoon modding system.
The website can now scale up to thousands of visitors per second, so feel free to tell all your friends about Driftmoon!
PS: Did you know Driftmoon probably exists?
A common problem with any roleplaying game is forgetting what you should be doing. I bet it's happened to a lot of new Driftmoon players. But now you can leave your worries behind: Behold, our brand new Quest Log!
It's quite simply a way of showing you the currently open quests, and the tasks you need to do to complete them. You can mark a single quest as active, and the game can show you the current status of that quest. In addition to just acting as a reminder of what you should be doing, the quest log seems to be very useful in spotting new quests. Previously you had no way of knowing whether something interesting you found was part of a quest, but now you see a message that a new quest has been started.
From a modders standpoint the new system is very easy to use. The quest description and the status messages are all written to a single file. There are three script commands to change the quest status: advance quest status, force quest status, and close quest.
Using the advance command means that the status cannot go backwards. It's useful when it's possible to complete part 1 of the quest after already completing part 2, in that case you wouldn't want the quest to go backwards to state 1. The force quest status command has no such restriction. I literally spent half an hour to script in all of the current quests, so it should be very simple to use.
And yes, this handy new questlog was the most requested new feature I had you guessing at previously.
We are proud to present the Grand Mod Plan. The above is a mockup of what The Mod Screen will look like.
As some of you know, Driftmoon comes with the full editor tools used to create the game, and they can be used to make Driftmoon mods. Total conversions, plain old improvement mods, the grand adventure from that fantastic game plan you've been designing for years - whatever your fancy! Our plan has all along been to make One Mod Screen to rule them all, One Mod Screen to find them, One Mod Screen to bring them all and in the darkness install them.
Got carried away for a second there. The One Mod Screen, as it shall henceforth be called, will be the first thing you see when you start Driftmoon. You will be able to see all the mods ever created (for Driftmoon, obviously). Just click to install and play. And for modders, it's just click and upload. The first mod in the mockup would be a mod I've installed already, the second is one that I've yet to install, and the last shows how a mod under construction would look like. There might also be a way to sell the mods you're making through Driftmoon, so you might want to think about that if you're putting a lot of hard work into your mod.
Now I'm asking you for help! Tell us how the One Mod Screen really ought to be. There are about a hundred things left to decide. For example, to prevent people from overwriting mods on the server, we probably need a way to identify the mod maker. That means registering as a modder, and the mods you make would be tied to your modding profile, so you could edit them from any computer, and not just that one borrowed computer you happened to start it on. I really hope to hear your ideas, whether you are a modder, or whether you just like playing mods.
Did you know that when Notrium was released back in 2003 I continued working on the game for nearly two years? Most people played the first released version. That wasn't because they wanted to (I bet they would have wanted the latest version), but because the new versions didn't get as far and wide as the first version. I simply didn't have time to track down every site offering the first version, and every compilation CD with an old Notrium version. It was very frustrating, because I knew that the hard work I put into the later versions simply didn't get seen by people trying the game out. Notrium modders had the same problem, people trying out a mod might have had an old version of the game that wasn't supported by the mod. I wish I had thought of automated updates back then!
I just spent two whole days making a working update system. Simply put, it notifies you when a new version of the game comes, and updates it if you allow it to. It will ask you for admin permission (only if you have them), so it's compatible with installing the game to the Program Files folder on Windows 7. The updater even restarts the game once you're done, so an update is only one click away! This means we'll handle your updates from the next version onwards! From then on the lucky Driftmoon players (yes, the game is available here!) will be sure to get the latest version automatically when it is released!
I'm planning on reusing parts of the code I've created for a fanciful mod distribution system. My idea is that all Driftmoon mods could be distributed through the game, all you'd need to do to install a new mod would be to click one button.
We've received so much feedback through the ingame feedback button that I've lost count. Amazingly most of it has been unique, there have only been a couple of people reporting the same error, positive comment or idea.
We've been putting all that feedback to good use! For example I've drastically changed the day/night cycle, and changed how long the torches work. The image above shows that I've turned all the petrified people grey, just as they should be. Another important addition is that all roofs and ceilings now get out of your way when you get anywhere near a building, allowing you to see where the doors are. I've also tuned the minimap controls, and made it possible to see how much of a torch has been used. There have been dozens of bigger and smaller fixes, making the game easier to use than before. So if you've given us feedback, Thank you!
PS. I'm working on a very important feature that's been indirectly requested by many players. Can you guess what it is?
I decided that I liked the fact that you could get Fizz to light your way, but what if I got fed up with him/her buzzing at my face all the time? That's why I added controls for follower distances. You can now tell Fizz your preferred distance.