By popular request I’m moving forward on my oldies goldies list to the year 2000, when the budding game developer Ville had acquired his first version of Visual Studio C++. Oh boy, I was really in wonder of that thing. You could do programming magic I never thought possible before, like arrays and floats and struct types. Turns out they were equally possible in both Visual Basic and Pascal I had used previously, but this time I actually read some short tutorial into the language before starting on a new game.

And looking at the code now, it seems I didn’t know you could write multiple source files. Then again the whole game has about 8000 lines of code, so it didn’t matter that much. This was the first time I tried my hands at 3D programming, and I loved it! I quickly whipped up my own 3D file format, and an exporter for 3DS MAX. Later on I enhanced the same engine for Bikez II, Wazzal and Magebane 2. I’m still using the same sound code for Driftmoon, because after trying several sound libraries I settled for the only working solution I found.

So onto the review! At first I couldn’t find the executable because I seemingly didn’t know how to put things into subfolders. The game seems to start fine and runs even on my new Windows 7 machine with sounds, so technically it seems solid enough. The user interface feels complicated and unnatural, but nothing worse than any console game I’ve ever played.

I remembered the fighting mechanics, so I didn’t have a problem fighting the enemies. But back in 2000 the sheer amount of people who didn’t know how to fight with the mouse was overwhelming. I must have mailed a dozen people a week requesting help. The combat still felt rather random, the best strategy was apparently  to make runs straight to the enemy with your sword pointed and hope it hits. As you win more battles you get more money to buy more gear to fight more battles, until one day you win the last baddie.

I still didn’t have the patience to finish the game, and neither did I have the patience to finish it in 2000, so I still don’t know if the ending works. As I recall the ending was simply a banner congratulating you.

You can download The Forge here. I honestly think you should rather play something like Notrium or the Driftmoon demo instead, but those interested in gaming history are welcome to give it a shot.

After releasing the game I got several offers from startup gaming companies, at the time game companies must have been desperate to staff themselves if a 17 year old kid from Finland would have been a good choise. Another tidbit of history, can anybody guess the original name for The Forge? I changed it before releasing the game because the original title was a common word. As if The Forge isn’t!

You’re still in the right place! We’ve changed our name!

It’s been seven years now since I started the monkkonen.net website, and since that we’ve grown quite a bit. Well actually not, I’ve only gained about 10 kg. But I have big plans. For the website I mean, not for my stomach. So I finally started a company, and here we are, at Instant Kingdom! I’m still not doing this full time, and it’s just the same old me (Ville) and Anne. But we’ve got a brand spanking new logo, so we’re down with the big guys!

So what’s the story behind the name you ask? I’ve always loved how a good game is like a world in a box. Once you start up the game, you go to a far away land. A land of your own imagination as well as the game designer’s. I’ve always loved to think that game developers are in the business of making Instant Kingdoms.

I’ve still got tons of links to rename, but I’ll leave all that for tomorrow. In the meantime, what do you think of the new name and logo?

The nice folks at Brothersoft wanted to give the Driftmoon preview their Editor’s Pick rating. They must see great potential in Driftmoon – after all we’ve only released a primitive preview version, and the actual release is still quite a few months away. So thanks!

I started adding a new map into the game, and since I hadn’t added too many landmarks yet, I finally got lost in it. Being the programmer type I am, I didn’t need another excuse to implement a minimap!

This won’t be the final gui for it, I just quickly whipped up the edges to test it. I don’t know yet what kind of a map to use, will I draw the maps by hand, or will I just use a rendered image of the map.

Do you have any ideas for the map? Some minimap buttons you desperately always need in a game? Some map icons you always look for?

Another feature I quickly implemented was heightmap loading. The editor tools are great especially if you’ve got a powerful computer, but it lacks many of the features present in real image editing software, and can be a bit tiresome if you’re working on a large map from scratch. That’s why I put in a button to load a BMP file as a heightmap. This does not prevent manual fine tuning, but is a nice way to start a new map.

Now modders can use their favourite heightmap generating tool, I’m probably going to use Terragen to create outdoor maps, and any old image editing program to create my dungeons. I guess I’ll still need to add a heightmap exporting button so I can continue editing the heightmap if I’ve already started working on the map.

I started working on a new map, and I decided it was too boring to texture a large map by hand. Since this was a forest map, all I wanted was to adjust the terrain for riverbanks, riverbeds and mountains. Since I am a programmer I get easily bored with repetitious tasks, and I decided to make the editor do the automated part.

Now the paint tool can also use a set of terrain to paint. For example if I paint the map with Jungle-set, the game automatically draws all slopes with the specified slope texture, adjusts the texture accordingly when we get to higher ground, and makes the sea blue and adds the beach texture to shorelines. I can of course force a texture like previously, so this new tool is just meant to help a modder get started.

I also wanted to add these fancy red squares! The game will now automatically block walking too steep slopes, and the red squares show where the terrain is blocked by the water or a slope. (Edit) And I forgot to mention the squares are only visible in the editor. In the game itself the slopes will be marked with rocky textures.

We’ve had some good discussion at the forum about the possibility of combining items in Driftmoon. I am of course talking about putting together two items to create a new item, such as combining a sword and a magical gem to create the Magical Sword of Doom!

As some of you may know, Notrium used the item combinations mechanic extensively – for some races the game was nearly unplayable until you learned the required combinations to survive. When thinking about the mechanic for Driftmoon I originally dismissed item combinations as too hard core. Even I had a hard time replaying Notrium just now since I didn’t read all the hints about the combinations.

What actually convinced me to think otherwise is that combining items is a great way for you to use all the loot you gather. There are only a few ways in any game you can use the items you get. You can use/wear them, sell them, drop them, or combine them with something. Driftmoon is not going to be a Diablo clone where all you do is sell loot to get money to go get more loot to sell, so I’m welcoming this newfound way to use up your hardfound loot.

I think the best kind of combinations are those that you can only do once, like unique weapons or armor, or unique magical items. To me it gets boring if you need to combine some basic resources to get something you need frequently, like healing kits or poison arrows. I like the wait of having one part of the unique weapon, and waiting to see when the final part comes along.

Since I disliked remembering the combinations in Notrium I’ve been looking at ways to ease the combining process. In Baldur’s Gate another character did the combinations and told you which items you needed. Getting to him was always a chore, so I dont’ want that. In Diablo you guessed the combination, and placed the required items in a container to combine them. But I disliked the fact that you needed to experiment with it to get the results. Such a system couldn’t be used for any really important item combinations, since many players would never try to guess the combination. My favourite combinations system must have been in Arcanum where you found ancient schematics. The schematic showed what you needed and what you got out of it, you just clicked the schematic to combine. Notrium had a similar system with the blueprint for the hover vehicle, and I think it worked well.

This is an important question related to the game at large, what will be the size of a normal map in the game?

Large

If all of the game world was placed in one map, with perhaps additional dungeon maps, we would have a large open ended world. Many modern western RPG’s are like this. Oblivion and Fallout most notably. It’s a good choise for real 3D worlds as you need to see farther than you can walk anyway. But to me there’s usually always too much walking around, too much nothing in between things. I’m envisioning Driftmoon a little more tight packed. Technically it would require a lot of changes to get everything to play smoothly on one map, so I’ll have to rule this one out by lack of development time.

Medium

A medium sized map could have one town and various open areas- a lot of quests to play with a reasonable amount of enemies. Something you could spend an hour or two playing. This was my original plan for Driftmoon, and each map would have been an island. You would have played the islands sequentially, and within the island would have been an open area for you to play as you like.

But the more I think about it, the more I would like to play in even smaller areas. Even on a medium sized map there would be a lot of boring walking around, fighting filler enemies. Basically all RPG’s tell you at some point that here’s somewhere you need to go, look it up on your map and get there. That forces you to leave areas unexplored, or if you decide to explore everything in your current location before going to the new place, you’ll likely forget the plot, why you were even going there. That happenens to me often, I decide to explore the current area completely before going on, and then I drop out of the main plot and quit.

Small

What I’ve been hatching is bite sized maps. They have one main quest, maybe one optional quest, and a couple of enemies to kill. Each area can be as unique as I like, they don’t have to be connected to each other by filler terrain or filler enemies. When you’re done playing the area you really know that you’ve played it through, you don’t have to spend 10 minutes looking for important people you’ve missed, main quests you’re missed. You can play it in one go so you’re less likely get interrupted and forget what you were doing. And even if you do get interrupted, the map is small enough for you to find out what’s going on.

And if you’re anything like the people who’ve test played Driftmoon when I’ve been looking, you’ll be very glad that a smaller map is easier to navigate. All my testers got lost at some point in the preview maps. And those maps were pretty small to begin with!

What do you say? Which map size do you prefer?