Get an email when we release our next game! You know you'll forget it otherwise.
I've now added 35 tombstone quotes from players. The one that got me thinking was this from Marvolo323:
An ancient mage lies in this grave. You cannot find his Mystic Stave.Obviously I had to add magic staves into the game, so I can add this as a quest in the crypt! Staves work just the same as bows, but have endless ammo. But they must have some deficit, otherwise they're too powerful. Any ideas?
It's that time of the year again, I'm going to have a look at one of my old games. Previously in this series:
The year is 2002.
First a word on naming games. Wazzal was originally called Stars. I even had a great big logo for it, I campaign for it, spend a lot of time making the name. So, along comes a group saying they released a game called Stars! almost five years ago, change the name or we'll sue. Alright, I say no problem, it was impossible to find on search engines anyway, no wonder I didn't notice your existing game. So I changed it to Stars Supernova. That's a lot of work, you have to track down every version of the game from small download sites and get them to replace it. And change the names in reviews as well. Ask a lot of favours.
The next month the same group of developers comes and says they're making a game called Stars! Supernova Genesis. So rename your game or we'll sue. Being a small indie dev, I didn't want to pick a fight with big guys, so I changed it again. This time I made up a script that thought up names and searched the new hot search engine Google for them. It then listed me all the names that weren't found on the search engine. So in the end Wazzal was just a random name that nobody had used yet. And it wasn't a bad one. Sadly the developers of Stars! Supernova Genesis ran out of money before they could release their game, so the naming conflict wouldn't have hurt anyone.
And now onto the game. Looks like I had a different logo back then. It must have changed for every game I made. It seems to crash at keyboard selection, best to use the factory defaults then!
The intro. Got to love it, I named the space organization the Federation. What an original idea! Luckily it's only ever mentioned in the intro. The game seems to start just after a bunch of aliens have come to Earth claiming that the Sun would go supernova. The intro tells you that you've captured a ship, and become interplanetary pirates. In retrospect it might have been more interesting to start the game just as the aliens come, and you capture the ship. You know, play it instead of reading it. The plot seems to be that you have to plunder and loot enough money to pay the aliens for a ticket out of the supernova.
And then saving the game crashes it. Oh well, it only takes an hour to play the game through, so why save...
The game starts with your first mate Dusky Joe telling you a bit on what to do. And then he tells you the keyboard controls. A bit of an immersion breaker there, but then again Wazzal is more on the action/arcade side, so I guess it doesn't count.
There are three game modes, traveling in space, combat, and boarding a ship. Traveling mode uses your fuel whenever you use the thrusters, and you're bound to run out at some point. Apparently every new player finds themselves out of fuel very soon, and then only the sturdiest of players continue. Playtesting would have found that out, but who playtested indie games back then? Not me at least. In traveling mode your ship follows the gravitational pulls of planets, so theoretically you could travel through the solar system with very little fuel expended, just like real spacecraft do. But it didn't fit in an otherwise very arcade game. I should just have left fuel out of the game.
My favourite is the combat mode. Every ship has two weapons, and it runs pretty similar to my all time favourite Star Control II. The background for the combat depends on where you are when combat starts, there could be a planet, or hundreds of asteroids. You can also shoot the asteroids, and they become smaller chunks! Also, you can own many ships by capturing enemies. You control one ship, and the others are controlled by the computer. There's also a bit of strategy, you can choose to capture a ship, or to blow it in bits. But to capture it, you must not blow it up. The more damaged it is, the more you have to pay up later to fix it. That bit comes from Sid Meier's Pirates, another favourite of mine. Actually I still liked combat in both games more than the combat in Wazzal, I should have taken more pointers from there.
The ship capturing mode is a predecessor to Notrium. It was easily the weakest link of Wazzal, you just ran around and shot walking enemies on a single screen. A later version of me would have left it out, but I'm glad I didn't leave it out at the time, as it later evolved into a pretty good game on it's own.
There's also a plot for you to follow, it's a string of missions mostly involving combat. I won't get into that, as it would spoil the plot. But I will point out my favourite feature of the game, you can actually loot whole planets! Go on, go to Earth and attack! I know you've always wanted to try it...
Graphically Wazzal is very nice, even compared to today's indie games. I'm especially proud of the planet models and their shadows. Space games are easy to make pretty, just add a few photos of nebulae on a black background, sprinkle with shiny ships, and you have cheap and pretty graphics. People don't expect space to look interesting, so you can get away with less. And this is the last game to feature my own music. I think the music fits the game well, but lacks the kind of professionalism that for example the music in Driftmoon has in abundance.
After all it's shortcomings I still like Wazzal. It's a neat little package and doesn't pull any tricks. If the combat mode were enhanced, the fuel usage left out, game saving fixed, and maybe the ship capturing left out, it could be a decent game. That brings up a question. Is anybody interested in the source codes for Wazzal? It's still mostly in Finnish, but it sucks less than the sources for Bikez II did...
Wazzal took the least time to make of all my games. All in all, it took little over three months to finish. With Driftmoon being finished this year after 6.5 years, Driftmoon will take about 25 times longer to finish. But I'm quite certain it will be 25 times better as well!
Are you alive? Why not reserve a place in the Driftmoon Crypt? There are still plenty of caskets free!
The East Monastery of Driftmoon has progressed very well after the latest Alpha. The Crypt already hosts many interesting historical Driftmoonians, but we'd love to have more dead bodies in there. This is your chance to write your very own tombstone inscription!
A couple of examples:
- Here lies Kelvin Lone Monk. Fell down a secret passage, we heard the clonk.
- Rest in Peace, Inane Saint Irk. He wanted to be a singer, but became a clerk.
- Eek The Gram. Was run over by a cart in a traffic jam.
PS. You can now test drive the automated mod downloader with Pete's Scavenge! mod. Just fire up your Driftmoon, and it's one click away.
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?
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.