What would a roleplaying game be without those little shop and their curious, possibly useful merchandise? I'm speaking metaphorically of course, the plain truth is that removing the shops from most games means you'd have no place to sell your loot, and no place to get a refill of health potions. Sound familiar?

From a typical game design perspective shops are money sinks. The player gets money and items for killing monsters, and they need a way to spend that money, otherwise the money is worthless. And nearly always, the only way to spend the money is to get better gear and more health potions. As far as game designers go, health and mana potions, and other single use items, are the best invention of all time. The player spends their money and they don't get anything more than a bit of health for it. I don't want to do it like that.

You see, the point of a game designer is to make sure the player has an incentive to keep playing. You have to take away his money, so that he feels the need to find more money and play more! This is especially relevant in massive multiplayer games, where you really have to force the player to give up their money, otherwise you get problems with inflation. But the constant deprivation of value from my character always feels like daytime robbery me. In any game I play, I never use single use items. I don't use health potions, I don't use single use wands, I don't even use arrows! I'm the kind of guy who likes to amass a fortune, and never use it before the game ends. Driftmoon must do better than that!

In recent games I've also found an increasing trend in game economies towards more expensive items. Normal items that are prohibitively expensive, or luxury items as some call them. The idea is that once you get it, you can show it to a friend and see their envious looks. I don't really see the point of this in single player games, but they seem to be creeping down from multiplayer games. Well at least you have some place to put your money in. Obviously the items cannot be very useful, just expensive and pretty, otherwise it'd throw off the game balance. But where's the fun in all this? Showing off your fancy character sounds, well, pretty unfun to me. There won't be any useless but expensive items in Driftmoon.

So how are the shops in Driftmoon better? First of all, some types of items can only be found in shops, such as powerful magic armor. Sure, you can eventually find an equally good item on your travels. But it might not be a bad idea to buy that Murdered Man's Helmet the shop owner is showing you. You get a long lasting benefit from buying it, since it'll take a while for you to find a better one, not just a few minutes like it does in many games.

Secondly, some items like ingredients can always be found from the nature, you just have to collect them. But you can also buy them from shops for a pretty cheap price, you're not getting swindled by a merchant selling health potions for a million gold per piece. But if you're like me, and could never think of buying something you only use once, you might still want to do the extra work of collecting the ingredients yourself - it's even a lot of fun since you never know what you're gonna get.

For those of the Modding persuasion: You can open up the shop interface with a simple script in our Incredible Level Editor. Also, you can change the shop prices easily with just + and - when a shop is started through the editor.

I finally got fed up with walking between areas that I've already seen (I've seen everything about a 1000 times!), so here's another one of our recent additions: quick travel! Simply put, you can use quick travel waypoints to travel to a location you've already been to. The only requirement is that no enemies are near you when you want to travel. These are incredibly easy to add in the editor, just create an object with a script to set a waypoint, you only need to think up a name for the location. There's also the added flexibility that since a script can create the waypoint, you can open up new waypoints anywhere you want, even if the player hasn't been there. PS. I optimized the minimap creation in the editor, it's now about a 100 times faster for bigger maps.

Since I've always loved exploration and finding things in games, I wanted to find a way to encourage exploration in Driftmoon. There are a few open spaces here and there with nothing in them except trees, and I decided they needed spicing up. That's why I invented ingredients! Roots, twigs, mushrooms, spices... When you find or buy a recipe, you can use it to combine the ingredients into a new item. I already made recipes for torches and health potions. I'm planning on expanding the system to include arrows and more, if you have any ideas for combined items, just tell me! Of course I couldn't just have my ingredients lying out in the open. Well I tried, but it felt silly somehow. So I invented ingredient mines! You can find a pearl in an inland oyster, you can find green salt on the surface of a green rock. Once you mine the ingredient, it slowly replenishes. Then I needed to find a good way to balance the amount of the ingredient mines available. I decided to make their locations random. All I have to do is place location markers on the map where interesting stuff should be found, and the game handles the rest, according to the probabilities I've set. Ingredients wasn't enough of course, I wanted to add more things to find. So I used the same random location system. Now the location markers I've placed can be bushes, rocks, plants, chests, barrels, seashells, old boots, Snatcher nests, Deathcap mushrooms (which act as dim portable light sources!) or skeletons. I can add any number or strange and rare things, and they exist in random locations in the game. Next I'm going to make some shopkeepers...

(before and after close-ups of some terrain textures in Driftmoon) Forum member TheSlider wanted to know if I could make the terrain graphics less blurry. That was the last straw! That broke the camel's back! That... Well, it wasn't so simple as changing a number, because the terrain graphics were dynamically baked into one texture to speed up rendering, along with all the plants. I had to make all the plants into actual sprites that now have a height and can appear over rocks. In the end it took just a couple of days to do it, and I don't think it's much slower, in fact there are less skipping frames when moving. It looks a bit better, but I'm noticing some scaling artifacts, so I still have to work those out.  

I've remade the talent system in Driftmoon to allow greater flexibility in character customization. There are three main lines of talents, combat, defense, and passive. Each talent has two levels, apprentice and master. Combat and defense talents are usable as skills, a few even outside combat. Passive talents are always active. In effect we have 24 talents - that's a lot of work for me to balance, but it greatly enriches the combat mechanics. Of course now there's the question of what to do if you want to change some talent you haven't used much. I know it happens to me a lot in different games, especially if I change my combat strategy mid-game. Maybe a trainer in the game could allow you to free talent points for reuse? [Update] Amarth asked about moddability, so here's the word on that. It's completely moddable, except for the slot placements. You can have as many levels for each talent as you want, I liked two. And any talent can be a requirement for any talent, so prerequisite lines don't have to be straight like these. At the moment a talent can only require one other talent. And as before, the effects are scriptable. There are two kinds of talent scripts, one that is executed when the talent is acquired, the other option is to run a script each time the player character is loaded and unloaded - the talent is sort of wielded like an item. Each talent level is actually a separate talent entry, so different levels of a talent can have very different effects if you like.