Get an email when we release our next game! You know you'll forget it otherwise.
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?It's been slow replacing the whole graphics engine, but I'm nearly finished now. I've found dozens of additional bugs in the process, so everything will be running even more smoothly in the future. Plus the rendering speed is now a bit faster in several key areas, particle rendering and floor rendering in particular. Sadly I couldn't find a good alternative for the text box used in Irrlicht. I resorted to using the default DirectX text box, which doesn't have multi-lining - I'm going to have to come up with some ideas for the conversation editor which was the only place where multi-line editing is a requirement. Oh, and I don't remember showing you this fancy automatic shadow system I implemented! It's an on/off toggle button in each object's graphics edit screen, it renders the same sprites in transparent black.
Since working on the low level code is so boring I've been thinking about the actual world and the framework for the gameplay. Anne says I've got to sleep today, so I'll talk about that next time.
For the past couple of weeks I've been removing our graphics engine Irrlicht and replacing it with DirectX 9. Well actually for the past week I've been too sick to really code, but nevermind that, I'm back in the wheel!
Here's a shot of the menu, it's the part I've been working on most and it looks pretty much the same as before. The difficult part is coming next, replacing the text edit box. These are a notorious bane of all programmers who cannot use the default operating system edit boxes. A simple multiline box where you can write can be suprisingly complex to program. Most users have already used some windows text editor, so they're expecting the same functionality. If any of you know of a good edit box I can drop into Driftmoon, do tell.
So this Pharaoh from Egypt comes to me and says: "Love your Bikez 2 game, but I have a kinda stupid question - was there any Bikez 1 game? It bugs me and my friends " Well, Ramzes and friends, you're in luck, because it's time for part 2 of our oldies list.
Bikez 1 was a GTA 1/2 style top-down deathmatch for two players split screen style. There was a level editor, a shop for choosing from a dozen or so weapons, and more importantly, you could shoot the civilians.
Sadly time has not been so kind on Bikez 1, as the transparency function doesn't work on any modern hardware. You can download it, but be warned, it's in Finnish! And if you see the pink borders on everything, it's not playable. 
I somehow managed to make Magebane 1 without ever learning to use things like arrays, for loops, while loops, or even any kind of structures. This time I had used actual DirectX, and most of the code that actually worked came from DirectDraw example code. I still have no idea how the whole thing took 7000 lines of code, whereas the simplistic game I do at work goes well into 200 000 and counting.
Bikez 1 was probably my least downloaded game. At first I released it as shareware, but sadly I really didn't know how to use the internet to sell it. Later on in 2004 I released it as freeware, but I could never really get it working with modern hardware. Surprisingly it seems to work fine on my Windows 7 right now.
I'm still hoping to do another split screen game someday. Now that I have a wife I can force to play with me, it should be much easier than in 1999, when I had to wait for my brother to come and play with me.
I'm really hoping someone asks of The Forge next, so we can do this chronologically.