I give you the Driftmoon Release Candidate, version 0.99! With this version we've fixed about 200 typos, and otherwise improved the wording of our texts. Writing a roleplaying game is a huge effort, so small mistakes are bound to creep into the dialogues. I want to give special thanks to our testers for helping us find all the errors! Driftmoon couldn't be this great without you.

An important fix with this version is that we've finally had a chance to optimize our rendering code. While Driftmoon works on pretty much any old computer, even first generation netbooks, there are locations in the game that have been visibly slower. The biggest culprit, terrain rendering, is now much more optimized, and runs up to 30% faster in the previously slow locations.

If you haven't tried Driftmoon yet, try out the Driftmoon demo. Not only is there an excellent adventure in it, you can also play all of the Driftmoon mods and even make your own adventures and roleplaying games, completely free of charge!

Game Changelog

• Improved minimap accuracy.
• Fixed characters jumping around on low framerates.
• Improved performance by optimizing terrain rendering, increases framerate up to 30% in certain locations.
• Fixed error where items given to companions sometimes reduced the stats they were supposed to improve. This fixes the bug where companions with agility-affecting items started walking backwards when their agility became negative.
• Physics simulation is more stable on low framerates.
• Holding down shift while moving an item splits a stack of items.

Modding Changelog

• Item graphics can now be set from an object file. This makes it possible to use any type of graphics and even animations for an item.
• To use the new accurate minimaps in mods, go to map settings and activate the "Fit minimap to borders" setting. Remember to re-render and save the minimap.
• When painting terrain, the currently used terrain is now shown without the smoothing effect.
• Added possibility to show terrain layer count. The layer count can be reduced by using less textures per terrain block. Reducing the amount of layers per terrain block improves the framerate.
• Changed the callscript action to run only one script of type Startrandom, if it finds more than one.
• It's now possible to have a separate item image in the inventory and on the ground by using the pictureOnGround property.
• IsTagNear now works for terrain objects and items.

[Update] 0.991 fixes a small error with the new stun effect. Apparently it was possible to attack it.

[Update] 0.992 fixes the companion-repeating bug caused by the previous fix. If you have too many followers, the only way to fix it is to go back to a save where you didn't, and never go back to any areas where you visited before the update.

The minimaps in Driftmoon are very useful, but up until now they've been a bit on the blurry side. Since I wanted to re-render all of the game's minimaps before release, I decided that now is a good time to see what I can do about increasing map details.

At first I thought about using a bigger texture, going from size 1024 to 2048, but then I realized something. Most of our minimaps have quite a bit of black in them, because the available world size is much bigger than what is actually used by the map. So why not use that black space to improve precision? Here's a comparison. Quite a bit more detail in it, right?

Merry Christmas everyone! And oh boy, do we have a special present for you tonight!

I am proud to present the first official Driftmoon beta version, the Fortress of Loom! Download it right here. This is now the first version that contains the full story, from its humble beginning to the fiery end, which is certainly the best part of the whole game.

In addition to the huge fortress and endgame, we've fleshed out the talent tree with four more talents. My favourite is the Goldfish Scout talent, which lets you access a minigame of finding the hidden goldfish in each major area. Another major addition are inventories for party members, which finally enables your friends to wear the armor and weapons of your choosing. I just like to make them wear funny hats. That, and some other features will require you to restart your game, but don't worry, there have been plenty of small additions to the early maps as well, and this time you can finally play Driftmoon all the way to the end!

Finally, I want to extend my special thanks to our excellent beta testing team! There are still some bugs to fix in Driftmoon, but we're getting there. We haven't set a date yet, but the final release is probably only weeks off from now.

Naturally, if you haven't done it yet, now would be a pretty perfect time to buy that Driftmoon you've been dreaming of! But if you do that, you might want to pick up the discount code first.

If the fact that we ourselves had a blast test playing the new complete beta of Driftmoon is any indication, I'd say it's quite possible that you might be in for some good time. We're really hoping you'll find yourself whipped away on a fantastic adventure that'll put a smile on your lips.

Game Changelog

• New area: Fortress of Mors-Sarmeth!
• Follower inventories!
• Four more talents!
• You can now access the world map through the minimap.
• It's now possible to look through previous dialogues.
• The player's feet will now slip on ice.
• Torches last longer on the easy level.
• And many more...

If you are a modder, see the Modding changelog.

As always, we're eager to hear your thoughts. Just press the F-button while playing to open the feedback form. And even more importantly, have fun!

Our friends at Groupees have put together a Build a Greenlight Bundle, featuring games that definitely deserve getting Greenlit on Steam. Today's special will be an extra special extended edition of the Driftmoon demo, which pretty much doubles the length of the demo. Currently the Groupees special is also the only way to see the game's full ending, before we release the final beta to our preorderers. We don't get a penny from the deal, but it's always nice that new people hear about Driftmoon.

I just want this to be absolutely clear, the Driftmoon demo in the bundle is an extended special demo version, you'll still need to get a Driftmoon license key to activate the full game. And if you're still waiting for the full game to be released, you might want to get thenewsletter to be notified of that jubilous event, hopefully in a few weeks time. We promise not to spam you.

And if you're a Steam user, vote for Driftmoon. Of course, when Driftmoon gets on Valve's Steam, all the valves and steam in Driftmoon might create an endless loop that might end the universe! But I'm pretty sure that won't happen today, as some have speculated.

I just had a quick look at the Driftmoon reviews on Desura, and it gave me a permanent grin, which I expect to last until Saturday at the least.

There are already 8 reviews available, and these are from people who really have preordered the game, and played it through. That counts a lot in my book, though I expect Driftmoon to do a lot better soon when we release our final version with 10 to 30 hours of quality playtime.

To end a long day of testing and feature-fixing, I decided to implement a much-requested feature, scrollable dialogue history! Hurray! You can now finally go back in time to reread all the witty replies that you so dearly love. I hope it will prove useful for you.

Ps. Our beta testing crew is already testing the new version!

There are now only 99 posts in my feedback folder left! That's right, we've finished all the content, and it's now down to polishing and balancing everything, before the release candidate ships to our excellent playtesters!

What's all this feedback he's talking about, you ask? I've talked about it before, but it's such an excellent tool that I want to brag about it some more! But first, a little background.

You see, in the olden times we received most of the feedback through email, and we were thankful. There weren't many, because it really is an effort to go to your email program and tell someone about an error they've made. And even when somebody took the trouble of messaging us, sometimes it was very hard to make out what the person means by "There's something wonky in the area where the trees form a sort of a triangle." I usually just asked everyone to send me a screenshot, so I'd know where in the game it actually was. But then we realized, why not let the game do that! So the feedback button was born.

Our feedback button simply takes a screenshot of where you are in the game, and sends it to us, along with any message the player wants to send. And let me tell you, it has been used, dozens of times more than the email feedback would ever have been used! I have been through several thousand feedback messages, and most of them have been useful in one way or another. Sometimes they point to a clear flaw, sometimes to an area of improvement, and sometimes the people just want to tell us how much they've loved Driftmoon (Thanks, we've had a huge number of those, and they've all left us smiling!) But thanks to all the feedback we've received, we understand much more about how our players play the game, where they've had problems, or what they've enjoyed.

Before inventing the feedback button, our internal playtesting primarily consisted of one person playing the game, and the other being a scribe, writing down notes on where all the bugs were. That was tedious work, you had to quickly write down something like: "Tomb: Sherry, error in conversation, wrong name for Snap." And when you had just written that down, the person playing the game had already found ten other errors. It got even more tedious when we had to fix the error, finding the correct dialogue line, finding where in it the actual comma is missing. The exact same problem that we had with our players testing the game!

That's when we realized that there's no reason why we couldn't use the feedback button too! So now, every time we see an error, we just click on the button, write a short description, and off it goes into our fancy bug tracker system, which is actually a folder in my email. It's easy to see where the error is by just looking at the screenshot, and when we're complete, we can mark it fixed by moving the post to the handled feedback folder. What is more, either one of us can usually work on fixing the feedback, because the error's location is not written in some cryptic shortcode, like we previously had to do.

And that's where we're at now, we have 99 items left to fix from our own playtesting, ranging from dialogue errors to graphical glitches. And I'm sure there will be many more coming in soon when our testers get their hands on the new version. One item at a time, Driftmoon is getting ready...

Starting this October we've been happy to work with Lauri Heikkinen, who has been doing his game design internship at Instant Kingdom, and will be with us for a couple of months more. Lauri's creative genius is directed toward making a heavily adventure-focused mod, called... What do you mean it doesn't have a name yet? I can't call it the Unnamed Blood Elf Mod, can I?

Tell us a bit about yourself!

Well, good day. My name is Lauri Heikkinen (22) from Northern Finland. I mostly waste my time by playing games on PC.

How did you end up doing your internship at Instant Kingdom?

Right at the beginning when the world was born... Nah. Actually when I started my second and last year in my vocational school we were suddenly informed that we have to get the internship for October. It was bit confusing that it was so soon since I already spent two months doing an internship in another place. Well this time I planned to go in game development since I've always dreamed about studying it (I have tried to get in Kajak for 4 times already). After snooping the Northern Finland by using Neogames' and IGDA's lists, I went to the south. I didn't want to go way too south even though there is most of the game industry in Finland (maybe since I want to be in the wilderness, not in a metropolis). When you guys sent me the answer, where you told me what I can do my eyes were caught by the "creating mod/mods with Driftmoon's editor" line. That line flourished my mind with my old game ideas. Even though I tried to check other possible internship places I finally ended up in here. =)

How has it gone so far?

Nicely. I have done and learned much with this game's editor. But the mod is not ready yet. ;D

What are you doing for Driftmoon?

If someone didn't get through my Engrish or had ADHD and didn't manage to read all that text up there: I'm making a mod. =)

What is your mod going to be like?

Well... At first: it's going to be dialogue based. BUT, many of the lines have conditions to player's stats like, strength has aggression and imperative lines, agility is politeness (you need agility to bow down infront of your superiors) etc. But there will be some fights, so bloodthirsty players, do not worry. And for the second and the last, the plot: The apprentice of the royal advisor has a nightmare about his master, and after he wakes up, his master is nowhere to be found. Soon he hears that several princes were attempted to be poisoned. The Apprentice has to find his master to inform him what has happened so the master can in turn inform the king, since no one is allowed to see the king other than the advisor himself.

Your mod takes place in a world inhabited by ”blood elves”. Can you tell us something about them?

This mod is going to be my first blood elf story. I have developed these "WoW-copies" since I was about 12 or 13. Actually at first they were copies of Vampire the Masquerade -vampires so my blood elves are more like "vampiric elves", they drink blood and they've got fangs, but they have no vampiric powers or weaknesses. Also for making them more gruesome (and faaaar away from WoW and Tolkien elfs), they have blood colored eyes (jellyed blood), they can't cut their hair since all of their magic goes there, they shorten their ears and for the last, they don't live forever and they have diseases. Oh yeah. They are that bad. The name is actually the only thing that is taken from WoW. So that "blood elf" is only used by humans. Normally these guys call themselves as "Viark" which is from their ancient language, meaning "a slave".

How have you liked playing Driftmoon?

I played beta/alpha-Driftmoon in 7 hours having all side quest done also. The demo got nice cliffhanger so I had to buy it to see how this will end and to support you guys :3 I've tried but I can't say anything bad about it since I can't find any and if I do i'd probably get spammed by the other gamers =D (Editor's note: We would have given the game to Lauri anyway, after it was confirmed that he'd do his internship at Instant Kingdom, but as it happened, he already went and bought the game!)

How about gaming?

I use most of my freetime in gaming. Even though I've got quite a bad ass computer, I like to play old games more than new ones. I am one of those guys who prefers quality gameplay to fancy graphics. The most fun in games is when it changes it's normal gameplay from it's norms, like Lungfishopolis in Psychonauts (that was pure awesome!). Also I have found myself back again to boardgames. I have also made a game variant to Red November, called Perks!.

Favourite game of all time?

This is a pretty hard question to me since I have played lot's of good and excellent games. But since my favourites are adventure games, it will be the last of the golden age of adventure games. Yes, it is Grim Fandango.

Any other interests?

History is my main interest. It is really interesting to see how our world has being built from our ancestors' decicions. I also like to watch reviews from ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, SpoonyOne and Cinemassacre.

Inspiration and main influences?

I seem to repeat myself by talking about games once again. Well it is same if someone always talks about movies or comics. Well yeah, games are the main inspirations and influences in my life. Heh... even my blood elfs got their kick starter from the game called Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption.

What do you want to do in the future?

To get in game development school and from there to the game industry. Obviously...

Anything you'd want to add?

I have FURY! Nah... just to see how many will get that line. Well let's just say that I'll try to release this mod's alpha in December. I should get back to work then!

Thanks Lauri! It's certainly shaping up to be a great mod, and we'll be eager to see how it turns out.

When reporters threaten to drop you in a pool of lava, it's time to lift the curtain of secrecy, at least a tiny bit.

Hands up, who guessed that we've been busy making Driftmoon? Come on people, I can't see those hands! ...That's more like it. You will be pleased to hear that we only have a few pieces of Ixal's fortress left to do! It's true! And that's why I've locked Anne inside the dungeons of Mors-Sarmeth! (Don't worry, she's got plenty of food and water.) And I won't let her out until she's finished designing the whole castle! I think she's secretly enjoying it.

Of course, there's still some work left to do after we finish implementing the level design and the bookfuls of dialogue that go into the ending. Some parts of the fortress still have to be filled with finishing touches (and more monsters and loot), and then we'll get to the fun part of fully playtesting the whole game. We're nearly done now, and it's great to finally see our long dream coming true! Still, I think we're even more happy to be able to finally present the whole finished Driftmoon to everyone who's been anxiously awaiting to continue the adventure!

Man, it's difficult telling you about the game's wonderful ending(s) without giving too much away. Did I already tell you it's going to be great?

In other news, we've started working with a new talented game design intern Lauri Heikkinen, who's designing and implementing a mod that features a rather intriguing story in a world inhabited by something called "blood elves". I've yet to find out if they're related to their namesakes in World of Warcraft, but they certainly sound interesting. Expect to see more in January.

Ps. We'll tell you more about our release date soon!

Oh, oh! I nearly forgot! There's still time to get the preorder discount, 20% off! It'll be valid on our website until the end of time, guaranteed. And if you've already got Driftmoon, well... Christmas is coming.

The interview I talked about a while back is now up in English as well on Rampant Coyote: part 1 and part 2. And be sure to play Frayed Knights while you're at it, it's definitely a game worth checking out, and one that doesn't take itself too seriously.