Get an email when we release our next game! You know you'll forget it otherwise.
Alpha number 8 is now ready for our preorderers! If you haven't preordered yet, this is a great time to support the development of a unique indie roleplaying game! If you'd rather wait until Driftmoon is ready, you can sign up to be notified when the game is released.
We have a ton of fixes and improvements to various smaller things (but no new areas just yet!). My absolute favorite is Feagle, the Silver Phoenix! You can get her fairly early on, and she will come to your aid when you're in really tough situations. On apprentice level she will heal you, on advanced level she will also cure any poison effects, and on master level she will also aid you in combat. Best of all, I like the shimmering light effect she has, it's spectacular in dark dungeons.
To those who may be wondering, there will be at least one alpha version before the final game is released - after all we're still missing some major areas from the end of the game. Rest assured, we are working as hard as we can to bring you the rest of the adventure! 
Game Changelog
- Difficulty levels were backwards, fixed. Remember that you can change your difficulty level during the game by pressing esc and going to the options.
- Changed the very beginning of the game yet again (but only for the first few minutes this time)! Do tell us what you thought of it!
- The world map now shows which areas you have completed. It basically tells you how many quests you have completed, so there may still be smaller things you haven't completed that are not marked as quests.
- New talent: Phoenix! You gain the help of a silver phoenix, who can aid you when you are in trouble.
- Added status icons that show the currently active spells on you.
- The Stone Dwarf/Giant/Titan can now be unsummosed by clicking its icon.
- The inventory screen now has a new tab, crafting. This hosts all the ingredients, and the recipes.
- The stats screen and the new level screen now make a difference between your permanent stats and temporary stats.
- Changed font rendering engine. You can now expect text to behave well on all platforms.
- It used to be possible to break the Summon Stone Dwarf/Giant/Titan skill by cleverly leaving him behind on a map. Fixed.
- Buzz can no longer drift away on his own, and he is now blue.
- Fixed enemies sometimes getting stuck in rocks.
- Fixed crash when moving to another area while a companion was poisoned.
- Fixed player poisoned state not being restored from saved games.
- The Sanctuary talent now gives the Sanctuary skill. It is much more powerful than previously, but it uses mana.
- The sound elemental started pulsating after it was killed, and you left and returned to the area. Fixed.
- Sometimes after an explosion the screen might have shaked permanently near that location. This is likely to be fixed now.
- The Bottomless Quiver now shows the infinity sign.
- Intelligence now affects your maximum mana as well.
- The Murderer's Axe is now counted as a melee weapon in terms of weapon skills.
- Rollos are a bit more random now, and less likely to get out of their chains.
- On very slow frame rates walking toward water edges would sometimes make you go through adjacent walls. Fixed.
- No longer crashes if no sound driver was found.
- Added a help switch to the 4*4 puzzle in the monastery.
- The rotating puzzle in the monastery now runs better with low frame rates.
- The player is less likely to go through moving doors even on low frame rates.
- Already selected combat skills are no longer reset when moving between areas.
- Elithran can now use the door in case you lock him inside.
- Unwielding the Negative Lily with the Flaming sword effect no longer results in fiery hands. Which would be cool on their own.
- When coming out of the mine in Northrop, companions will no longer get stuck behind the door.
- Small flash to indicate when items go into tabs, the food counter, and the inventory.
- Poison attacks no longer cancel the Tower Shield skill.
- Monsters now prefer paths that don't have movable things on the way, but if they can't find an alternate path, they will try to clear their way.
Modding Changelog
- New cheat: SHIFT-5 speeds up time. Very useful for testing slow scripts. I might turn this into a scriptable action at some point, making it possible to speed up and slow down the game.
- Arrow keys can be used in the script condition selector. Enter selects.
- The object graphics tools now fit better when an object has multiple parts.
- New condition: objectIsOnPolygon
- New condition: currentMapIs
- Attach joints are actually usable now.
- Objects in the menu screen are now clickable, if they have use scripts. Maybe it can be used to make an interactive menu screen?
- You can now attach scripts to when the levelup screen changes stat points.
- Timed scripts starting times are now staggered over the first second. This improves performance when there are a large number of timed scripts with the same timings. It will only affect the timings for the first second, so the timers should be as reliable as usual.
- Rotating joint resume angles work much more reliably now.
- Script action: Disable/enable minimap autoreveal.
- Script action: Reveal part of minimap.
- Variable choises list now has tooltips.
- The pathfinder now correctly handles cases where the bot or the objects on the path have their collisions disabled with each other.
- You can now write the name of any variable in script fields that take a number - useful for passing parameters. This means the Driftmoon scripting language is now more like a real programming language.. If the field contains a letter, it is considered a variable name.
- Actor variable "this" now contains the ID number of the current object.
- A bot's base object startup scripts are now run when the bot is spawned from a script.
- The player no longer attacks himself if he damaged himself as a result of a script.
- The action useObject now works better on different size bots, and when the target is a physics object, or when the target is a bot.
- Script editor no longer crashes if dragging a script action to conditions list, or vice versa.
- The attacker for meleeDamageArea and reduceHealthSweep was erraneously marked as the script target, while it should have been the script caller.
- Setting a race's masterAttackOffset can make it prefer/not prefer a bot's master in combat. For instance this can be used to make the player more attractive to enemies than the player's followers.
- Fixed an infinite loop where an onDamage script could damage the bot, which would in turn initiate the same onDamage script.
- Fixed bug where bots with no deathImage would stop all sounds.
- Fixed crash if the player had reached the last experience level, or there were no levels available.
That should be it! Have fun, and keep using the feedback button (lower right corner of the game), please! 
Upcoming in the next bugfix update are the status icons. This was requested by at least three people, so here you are!
The icons show the various spell effects that are active on you. It also lists summoned creatures, and you can unsummon them by clicking on the icon.
The icons are completely scriptable as well. They can even be used to create scripted buttons to the interface.
If you've got a dislike of spiders, why not play Driftmoon with the Cuter Spiders mod? It's exactly like normal Driftmoon, except the spiders are a bit nicer looking. Just fire up Driftmoon, and click the mod to play.
Inspired by Eric Johnson of DIYGamer.
Just a quick notice, I got the difficulty level slider backwards when it counts towards the combat difficulty. Thanks for all who sent this in! So the current hardest level (Guardian) is supposed to be the normal (Champion) setting. So if you're finding the combat a little bit difficult, you might want to select the Guardian level.
I'm fixing this along with a lot of more minor things soon, so don't forget to change the difficulty setting back when the game is updated.
Here comes the new official trailer for Driftmoon, fresh off the drawing board! Be sure to watch it in 1080p mode.
I want to thank you all for the feedback you've given us, when playing the new alpha! Great to hear that you've had fun with it! AND you've spotted some really interesting and strange errors, so I'm going to have my hands full for many days. I probably won't have enough time to answer all of you back unless you've actually asked for something or I desperately need more information because the problem is so interesting. Rest assured that if the feedback form said it was sent, I definitely got and carefully read your feedback - and if it said there was an error sending it, I probably got it even so.
Once we get all the little things fixed, we'll naturally make an automatic update, that'll be offered for download, when you start Driftmoon. We hope you enjoy the adventure, and keep the feedback coming!
Get ready for Driftmoon Alpha 7! Half a year in the making, it's now ready for our 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, why not sign up to be notified when the game is released?
We nearly completed all of the new areas last August. But when testing the whole game through back then, we discovered some areas of the game-play and the content, that we wanted to tune a bit further to make them just right. It was a relatively large and time-consuming task, but now that we've spent the last two weeks playing and replaying, we're really happy we decided to do it. Why? Simply because we ourselves have now had so much fun with our own beta-testing play-throughs. And if we've really enjoyed adventuring in Driftmoon ourselves (even though we know beforehand pretty much everything that'll happen), we have high hopes that you will too!
Next on our plate is to release a new trailer with some of the new features and areas, and a demo! After that we'll retreat to our secret chambers to make the final areas of the game. We'll release one more alpha version before the final release, so Driftmoon is not far from being completed!
PS. If you've got the previous alpha version, you should be able to update to the new alpha just by starting the game. We hope you can still give us plenty of feedback on where to improve the game, so don't hesitate to use the feedback button in the lower right corner of the game!
Among the hundreds of new things in this version, we have two new large areas (and another smaller area), a murder mystery, new enemy types, boss fights, tons of new quests, and as a whole a much more polished experience. To put it plain, there's a lot more to play, and the bits we already had, we've made better. See the changelog for more details.
New areas:
Monastery and Crypt, along with a mystery of treason, murder and theft! The quests and the many characters you can meet and chat with are the part we've spent most of our time with, but unfortunately we cannot tell you much about them without giving away too much.
New companions:
Velvet the Queen Panther, Stone Dwarf, Stone Giant and Stone Titan. The stone-faced guy is a summon you gain early on, and it keeps getting more powerful (and bigger) as you progress.
Combat enhancements:
We worked on making new enemy types and enhancing our existing ones for weeks. We made sure each enemy type adds to the combat in unique ways, making each fight different depending on what kinds of monsters are involved. You can even use the enemies against each other! We also have critical hits, new combat skills, a system for mana, the list goes on. Here's only a small portion of the creatures we've created. I'll tell you more about them in another post.
First of all, thank you for all the feedback! This post is for the game and software developers among you, and for those who are interested in Driftmoon internals. Today's topic is lessons learned from the feedback form in Driftmoon.
To those of you not familiar with Driftmoon, the current alpha versions have a small feedback button in the lower right corner of each screen. When you click it, the game shows a text field, along with an optional field for the player's email. And best of all, it allows you to attach an automatic screenshot of the screen you were in when you pressed the button!
This tool has been invaluable to us during our beta testing. When people have a button they can press when any big or small problem arises, they can send their feedback without interrupting their game for more than a couple of seconds! This greatly improves the quality and quantity of feedback. Another game I'm working on called Ekapeli has an option to send feedback when you shut down the game, and by that time people have mostly forgotten what they wanted to tell us.
The screenshot feature is a must-have. When somebody writes to us that there's a spelling error in some NPC's conversations, it's a hundred times easier to actually see a screenshot of the actual problem, than it would be to read through all the texts of that particular character. Often the problem is also visual, simply that something looks particularly wonky, and a screenshot would be the only way to communicate that. And other times the problem may not be visual at all, for example it's a sound related bug. But getting a screenshot along with the problem description allows you to roughly know where in the game world the error occurred - something you don't often get with descriptions of sound errors.
Techinally the feedback form is nothing special. It saves a screenshot right at the moment the feedback button is pressed, as a highly compressed jpg. Using high compression saves both the player's bandwidth, as well as ours. The game does a simple HTTP POST to a predefined URL. I've written a java servlet to handle the incoming request - it actually just sends the feedback and the screenshot to my email. If you're using a bug tracker, it might be a good idea to send it there as well.
Since the button takes up valuable screen space, we might want to remove it once we release the game. But we still want to keep the feedback system, possibly activated by a keyboard key. The hard part is to remind the players that such a key exists.
We've found this feedback tool so useful, that we use it in our internal testing. When I'm playtesting the game myself, I continually click the feedback button and send myself feedback. Why would I do that? I could just type the errors in a text document. I do it simply because I also get the screenshot along with the error description. Often it takes a couple of days for me to go from testing the game into fixing the errors, and seeing a screenshot with the text helps me recall what happened at that particular time.
How about you, have you found useful ways of getting great feedback from your users? Or if you've used the feedback form in Driftmoon, how would you improve it?
PS. Check back in a day or two or three.
Whether you want to wear the Ring of Megalomania is your decision, but once it's got a hold of you, it's harder and harder to take it off!
The currently completed areas on the world map. I decided to add little (well they are smaller in bigger resolutions) icons to each area, making it easier to remember which area is which.
Anne's been bugging me very persistently to give you a screenshot of our newest monster. Welcome the Stone Titan! Currently he comes in four different sizes, this being the second largest.
Another piece of news that I'm always reluctant to discuss, but Anne is eager to tell it: We'll have to up the play time estimate for Driftmoon. Personally I dislike play time estimates, because they don't really tell much about a game, and they are often exaggerated to sound like you're getting a lot of game for your money. There's no standard to how game times should be calculated.
Here's how our game time is calculated: I play the game on Warlord difficulty, going straight from quest to quest with my omnipotent memory of the game, reading the dialogue (I'm always on the lookout for spelling errors and plot inconsistencies), and picking up everything that happens on my path. So it's more like a quick walkthrough, with no time allotted for wondering what to do next, and no time looking at maps and journals and thinking about strategy, or retrying difficult battles to get a more optimal ending - things you do the first few times you play a game. When I reach the end of the alpha, the ingame clock tells the wall time of how many minutes it took. Simple as that. A real player might take triple the amount of time I take. Actually I could probably add a button to the end of the game where you could click to send us your play time...
Did you read the above? Good. The upcoming alpha takes me about 6 to 8 hours to complete. The areas after the monastery are not included in that. Roughly speaking they should be about one third of the total game time, but we'll just have to see.
If you're the kind of person who doesn't play anything with less that 30+ hours on the sticker, you can easily spend that in Driftmoon by looking for all the hidden little things like the Silver Feathers, and solving the Easter Eggs - not to mention harvesting ingredients to build your own army of walking Ticker bombs. I know I've spent hundreds of hours actually playing and replaying the game. And don't forget that there will be user made mods, which will add to the game time.
And if you're the kind of person who can only spare a few minutes per day for gaming, Driftmoon is just the right length for you - you can save and load at any time, you can alter the game difficulty level at will, and you have a journal and a map to help you remember what you were doing. But what's more important is that this is a game that's 100% filled with real human made content. So whether you have a half an hour or six uninterrupted hours to spend with the game, you won't spend that time grinding to get to the next level - you'll spend it having grand adventures in Driftmoon!