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The Instant Kingdom team wishes you all a merry Christmas! May your holiday be blessed with a peaceful heart, and the possibility to relax and find time for the things you enjoy most!
Anne, Ville, and the two little elves.
Ps. Our elf workshop has two more levels to test and balance before our present is ready.
We are too busy balancing the game and getting alpha number 7 ready to write anything ourselves, so we decided to let Hogpuff write for us. The following is verbatim from his new book:
The Art of Arr!
by Hogpuff the BraveFollow in the glorious footsteps of Hogpuff the Brave, and your chances for success will multiply!
For strength and honor:
- Carefully select the armor and weaponry you wield. I once forgot I had looted the Blessed Sword of Drakine the Hero from a tomb, and was only using a common soldier's dagger against the Rolling Rollo Horde. Boy, was I surprised when I discovered I had a better sword in my backpack! (Though, as I soon learned, standing up against a rollo is not wise even if you're wielding the Blessed Sword of Drakine. You're better of using your two fast feet.)
- Develop your battle talents, and use them wisely! Don't forget to use any special moves you may have learned. Keeping a supply of mana potions in your backpack allows you to fill up your powers in a flash!
- Always try to talk your way out of a fight, you might even make a friend! I was once able to talk the Mad Mana Mine out of exploding, and it didn't even understand human language, only ticking!
- If you do end up fighting - and winning your fight - the battleground may occasionally contain useful weapons and other artifacts, which have not been damaged in the fight, and are still perfectly usable. We professionals call this "LOOT".
My strategies in tight spots:
- A wise warrior knows when to turn back and gather his strength. A dead warrior is not a good warrior. (Although that phrase obviously ignores some fairly skilled undead skeletons.)
- For a true champion like me, time seems to come to a halt when facing a life-threatening situation, giving me the possibility to carefully manouver my moves. In addition to going with the obvious health potion that restores your health, you can sometimes benefit from a mana potion, which brings you new defensive opportunities: The king of defensive moves is the Tower Shield, which allows you to completely block a number of attacks. A Shield Bash, which may stun your opponents, might also come in handy. And to top it all, I always keep with me a supply of Reverse Ooz powder. A pinch of that stuff, and you'll outrun anything!
- Pick your enemies from a safe distance with a bow, and let your friends take all the hits. Your friends will love when you fire the triple crossbow at their backs. And just when your enemies and friends are exhausted, go in to get all the glory!
- An intelligent adventurer always carries a good selection of food with him, and gathers more nutrition during his adventures. A storage of healthy food is essential for the natural healing process. It is also wise to carry with you some evil berry seeds. You can plant them in any location, and grow yourself food, when you've exhausted your own stash. Remember that the berries only grow when the person who planted them is near them - they won't grow if you leave the area completely.
I hope this has been useful to you. Remember that this information comes with absolutely NO WARRANTY!
Driftmoon is again at the height of fashion! I realized our hatmaker's house had only one hat, so this is what I came up with:
We've added explosives to our selection of recipes!
The first recipe is "My First Ticker Kit". I liked the Ticker monsters so much, that I made it possible for the player to build his/her own Tickers. Once dropped, the Ticker will seek out the nearest enemy and blow up, very useful when you're expecting a fistful of baddies around the next corner.
The second one is the "Mana Mine" recipe. It's a mine that you can deploy anywhere, and lure your enemies into it. Since it's a mine made out of a volatile mana potion, it will also fully recharge the mana of all who get caught in the explosion - including you. That means it's possible to whip up some pretty unorthodox strategies with the Mana Mine.
To refresh your memory, recipes are the way Driftmoon handles smithing and alchemy. The basic ingredients can readily be found in the forests of Driftmoon, and the few rarer ingredients only exist in dungeons or shops.
Last in the video is the new Spikey monster that blows a full volley of deadly pellets when someone hits it. After we thought up the words Spikey Chain Reaction, I simply had to add the creature to the game. 
It's a fairly easy monster that you can easily beat with archery. But if you get ambushed by a group of Spikeys in a tight corridor, hitting one of them can actually kill you at once.
From Hogpuff's Biggish Book of Monsters:
Spikey - This strange blind insect fires small calcite pellets from its mouth. When provoked, it will fire all of its pellets at once. The spikey population has lately seen a sharp decline, as the popular sport called Spikey Chain Reaction (also known as Spikey Dominoes) has caught on.
This article is for the indie game developers in our readers. I'm going to share what I've learned over a period of approximately two years about hosting a website for a game. I would have loved to read this about a year ago, it would have saved me a lot of work. Maybe the past me can read it due to a strange time loop phenomenon.
Ever since I released the first alpha of Driftmoon, I had a nagging suspicion about the performance of our website. Will it hold under stress? What if Driftmoon is featured on the front page of a big website, and we get a hundred thousand users all at once? If the website doesn't cope with the load, the publicity would be useless! Thousands of dollars and euros would be lost! Not to mention all the countless individual minds deprived of refreshing themselves in the world of Driftmoon!
That's where I started. I had a virtual PHP server, with Wordpress running the website and phpBB running our forum. The server was barely coping with the current load, with slowdowns every now and then. My first thought was to buy a bigger hosting plan - and doing that would have saved me a lot of time. But the trick here is that I don't know if there will ever be a huge spike of traffic to my website, or even how big a spike! I could buy the costliest hosting plan there is, and still be under capacity when the the game is featured on a big site.
Another point is that since the website will usually run at a very low volume, only to spike out when someone notices us, there's no need to run an expensive service all the time. The costs would quickly outrun any of the money I get from selling the game!
So I started tuning my Wordpress installation. I used every caching trick and plugin I could think of. I spent weeks improving the efficiency, even putting together a simple content delivery network - I offloaded most of the static content like images and files to Amazon Cloudfront. But still I knew if enough users came at once, the main server simply couldn't cope with it.
At that point I was actually thinking of making the whole site out of static webpages. Those would be cheap to host on any server, and they would be extremely fast to server. But in the end I decided that updating the site would be too much work with a static site, besides I needed to have dynamic content like the forums and blog comments.
Then I decided to give cloud hosting a chance. I moved away from my cheap host to the Amazon EC2 cloud where you can get micro instances for cheap. In theory you could make a sort of autobalancing system that would add more virtual hosts as needed, dynamically increasing the power of the website, but also at the same time increasing costs. After trying for about half a year I was still no closer, because configuring all the Linux subsystems by hand was taking more and more time. I decided that I'm a game developer, not a sysadmin, and started looking elsewhere.
In the end I decided to use Google App Engine, because it promises to run a simple site for cheap, and automatically scale upwards when traffic spikes. No Linux administration needed! I wrote a little bit about that earlier, but I didn't want to get too much into the details in case there was still more to learn about it. The jump into App Engine seemed massive, not only was there no useful blog software like Wordpress available, there was no forum software either. But the lure of the cheap and scalable webhosting was too strong.
It actually took the better part of two weeks to rewrite the parts of Wordpress I needed to run on App Engine. And I'm still putting finishing touches to my new forum that I wrote based on phpBB.
And how is App Engine working for us? Extremely well. Right now I pay a flat minimum fee of $9 per month. App Engine has a generous quota of one free server instance, and my well oiled blog engine uses about 1% of that instance at normal (orange line). Sometimes bigger traffic spikes actually fire up more instances that run for a while to service the users - and that costs $0.04/ Hour / instance. But as you can see in the graph, the billed instances stays at about 1 instance, they're practically giving me extra capacity for free.
I won't say there aren't any downsides to using App Engine, such as the need to write your own software because there aren't enough existing ones, or some of the changes they're making to the platform all the time, but it seems to be well suited for our current usage. Whatever your choice is, just keep in mind that your game could be the next Minecraft, and you don't want to be caught with a lousy server when people start flocking to your site. So don't be afraid to spread the word about Driftmoon, this site should now be able to handle millions of users rushing in at once!
Ps. I've actually even given a little thought about possibly releasing our forum software some day, if there's demand for it.
I decided the first level needs to have a shield available, so I took D'Lokh's idea, and twisted it a bit.
"After losing all of his arrows in a campaign against the short-lived Spikey empire, Hogpuff the Brave ordered a shield that would magically repel all arrows back to their origin. Unfortunately the magic only works 3 times out of 10, but that didn't stop Hogpuff from carrying it around as a handy mirror, in case his hair ever needed adjusting."
Can you spot The Biggish Book of Monsters?
Just wanted to let you know that our friends at RPGWatch are giving away two copies of Driftmoon in celebration of the site's fifth birthday. Congratulations RPGWatch!
Have you ever gotten lost in a dark dungeon, and don't know which way you came in? Presenting the Light Boots! Now you can always see where you came from, and where you've been already.
They're ridiculous enough that I don't actually use them for my character, but who knows, someone might find them useful. Of course, I don't really need them, since I mysteriously know most of our deep tunnels and dark caves by heart. 
The Halloween enhancement isn't actually the boots, it's the monster you get the boots from. But I don't want to spoil it, you'll have to wait and see...
We've finished creating the new monster types, and right now I'm adding them to the game. We wanted to give the Driftmoon combat a little more variety, so we've tried to think of monster types that would create interesting situations when combined with the game world or with other monsters. The Ticker is one of the new ones you'll get to meet, along with the crab colony at the end of the video.
From Hogpuff's Biggish Book of Monsters:
It's been a little while since we stopped to look back, and evaluated the current stage of Driftmoon, so I decided to ask myself a few difficult questions.
What is Driftmoon?
It's a roleplaying game that my lovely wife Anne and I are making. It's a game for people who love to explore and find things, and who like to meet interesting characters. See the Driftmoon page. I think that this screenshot tells you something about the nature of the game:
When will it be ready?
I'm terrible at estimates, so I'll just tell you what's left for us to do. We've completed 6 major areas out of 8 (the current Alpha includes 4 of them). We've got a lot of content ready for the last two areas, so I think we're at about 80 percent completion for the game. So there's still a few months left before we can release it.
What are you working on right now?
The new monsters! Although Driftmoon is not an action RPG, we still want our combat to be as fun as possible. So we've been working hard on improving the fighting side of the game, and part of that is adding interesting monster types. We want to make some monsters that require a bit of thinking from the player. Some monsters might be relatively easy on themselves, but together with others they start requiring pretty clever strategies to deal with. And you can sometimes even use the new monsters against each other.
What is the vision behind the game?
The vision is to make a fun game, with our own personal touch! We want to make a game with intriguing characters, where you can explore and find new things. Above all, we wanted a place for us to pour all the stories floating around in our heads. So there are a lot of optional mini-stories in Driftmoon.
How long is it?
I believe the main adventure in Driftmoon will be about 10-20+ hours of high quality playtime when completed. After that you can continue playing with our mods, which are just one click away. Obviously a lot depends on your playing style, as with all roleplaying games. There are a lot of optional quests, and dialogues including a lot of back story that you can read if you want to. We made the decision early on that each minute of the game should matter, so there's nothing repetitive, and no empty content just for the sake of prolonging gaming-time.
What other games is playing Driftmoon like?
Of course Driftmoon is not a retro game, or a clone of any game, but it's possible to make some comparisons. The combat system in Driftmoon has similarities with Dragon Age. In it's core it's really a turn based system, but it runs in real time, and you can pause it. Talking with other characters is similar to Baldur's Gate or Fallout. And controlling your character works a lot like in Diablo, except you don't need click so many times in combat.
Why is Driftmoon top-down?
It's top-down because I tend to get lost in games with a first person view. The perspective also makes it very easy and intuitive to control your character. We can also make all of our characters from cleverly placed sprite sheets, so it's very easy to make new characters and monsters in the game. That is a big time-saver for modders, and it's left us a lot more possibility to fine-tune other aspects of the game. If you haven't had the chance to play any top-down games before, the perspective might feel a bit weird at first, especially when looking at the screenshots. But when you actually play Driftmoon, I promise you will get used to the viewpoint in a matter of minutes - that's what I've been told by some of our preorderers.
Here's how peanut for example has put it: “This looks great. I actually quite like the top-down perspective – the graphics style is strong and clear, and I think the perspective will make interacting with mouse much easier. No need to rotate the camera to select obscured objects.”
How does modding in Driftmoon work?
Driftmoon comes with the full tools used to make the game, and they will also be available in the demo version. So basically you can fiddle around with Driftmoon, and make your favorite changes to it. Or, you can implement that great game idea that's been floating around your head, waiting to get out. When making your mod, you get to use all of the Driftmoon content (including images and sounds) in any way you choose, or create your own. It's a complete roleplaying game building set! What's more, there's an automated mod distribution and installing system built into the game, so you don't have to worry about hosting your mod. And if you choose to ask money for your mod, we can arrange that as well.
What have people been saying about the game?
There have been no actual reviews yet, but the feedback we've received has been very positive. And Driftmoon has been nominated for the MindTrek Indie Award!
We also want to heartily thank all our preordered, the users of our forum, and the commenters of our blog for hanging with us along the way. Your support, feedback and ideas mean a lot to us!
If you want to support us, you can still preorder Driftmoon on a 20% discount!