I finally got my internet connection back! It's been very peaceful without it, I wholeheartedly recommend changing your ISP every once in a while - gives you a chance to catch your breath.

• A site I sometimes visit called Indieflux did a short preview of Driftmoon.

• I wanted to mention a game developer friend, Mika Halttunen.  http://www.mhgames.org/ His latest work is a Bejeweled clone named Jewels, which seems to be doing pretty well on the Android platform. And he's done a lot of PC games as well, my favourite being I have No Tomatoes. If you visit Mika's site, try to coax him into coming to work again.
• As for work on Driftmoon, I've been retooling the first portions of the demo to fit the new story. It's pretty tedious work, since I want to put in as little text as possible, but still keep it interesting and meaningful, while communicating the story I want to tell. I've already finished the part where you are a smith in the past for five minutes. Plus I put in fadeouts and fadeins! Modders can now fade the screen out by scripts, and to any specified color. It could perhaps be used for showing a red screen if you get very badly hit, or pretending you're walking in a mist.

The coming year marks the 12th year of my game development hobby/career, so I thought I'd have a look at some of my older games, maybe I'll learn something.

In the year 1998 I released my very first game Magebane 1. It was a mixture of comic book and turn based rpg. My absolute indie favourite from the time was a Finnish game called Areena 4, and I pretty much copied the combat from it. As I recall I used Visual Studio 3 for the programming, so the game worked in Windows 3.1 which still did exist at the time. I think I wanted to make the game because I wanted to show off my paintings. Magebane 1 took about half a year to make, and I was 15 years old for the best part of that.

Basically it works like this: You read a part of a dialogue explaining why you're going to fight someone, then you arm your two warriors and one mage, and after that there's a turn based combat sequence. There's a ton of menus before you get to the good stuff. The combat is tediously slow and requires careful optimization even in the easiest levels. Arming your characters means going to the smith screen which is way too complex for me to understand anymore. But I still like the game for the story parts. They're obviously written by someone with a very good sense of humor.

What did I learn from replaying Magebane 1?

• Make your games in English. That's a given these days.
• Focus on the actual gameplay. Magebane 1 uses many complex menus and text screens that distract from the actual combat and story.
• I nearly didn't finish Magebane 1 because it was pretty complex, and I had never programmed anything real before. If you're working on your first game, make it a simple game. You don't have to impress.

If you're interested in history, you can try the game: Download Magebane 1. It works from Windows 3.1 up to at least XP. Microsoft dropped support for 16 bit applications after that, so I'll just have to keep an old XP hanging around the house. And be warned, this is in Finnish only, so you probably won't understand a thing.

Recently I talked about choosing a better plot for the beginning of the game. If you want to keep the beginning a surprise, don't read any further. So far my idea is this:

• The player and his brother Robert are smiths working on an indestructible blackrock golem by the order of some unknown client.
• This unknown person knocks on the door, inspects the work and leaves.
• The Necromancer comes to the smithy. He zaps Robert dead and freezes the player. He makes Robert a skeleton in his army.
• The Necromancer removes the player's soul, and makes him into his mindless right hand.
• The Necromancer tells the player to divide the golem into 7 parts and hide them so nobody can gather them.
• Fade out. Fast forward some decades.
• Fade in, the Healer Samuel is asking how you feel.
• Samuel tells that you came in terribly wounded, and he has tended to you for months.
• He has found a letter in your belongings ordering you to destroy the town of Asrald.
• You have no memory of anything he tells you, except of the encounter with the Necromancer.
• Samuel suggests to find Paul who has researched the Necromancer's magics.
• Paul suggests that you have lost parts of yourself by wronging others in the service of the Necromancer, and that you may get these parts back by righting the wrongs.
• Throughout the game you will meet many people who have known you while you were serving the Necromancer. You have an option to set things right with them to gain back parts of your soul. Doing this may gain you skills and experience.
• Paul says that nothing can destroy the Necromancer, but that it was once tried by building a golem out of blackrock.
• What dark deeds have you done in the Necromancer's service? How can you gather the golem pieces to destroy the Necromancer?

Get yourself the new Driftmoon Roof from Ville Corp! A couple of days ago I found myself building a house, and soon I thought that something was missing. At first I spent a couple of hours building a dungeon with fiery lava underneath our house, but fortunately Anne pointed out that it was the roof that was missing. And here it is now!

We've added a couple of nice features for modders. First of all the sun adds shadows behind walls now. You know the shadows are not the sharpest out there, but creating your own sun dial is now technically possible.

Another addition is the roof setting for all terrain objects. Setting that means that it will create a permanent sun shadow under it, it will be lighted by the sun only (your torch won't light the ceiling), and the terrain will activate the see through effect. Going under any terrain set as roof will trigger all roofs to fade out, so we can create our roofs from different pieces. I used three objects to create the sample. Roofs can be anything, so adding see through pergolas and glass panes should be possible.

Additionally I've added the height setting for vertices. Now we can change the height of any vertex in a polygon. Basically it means your tables or floors don't have to be level anymore. I'm pretty sure someone will think of some ingenious use for this, but so far I've only used it for the slope in the roof.

The winner of the free Driftmoon copy is Esa K. Congratulations! The free copy will be sent when the game is released. If you didn't know of the competition, you might want to join the Driftmoon mailing list. There may be some other competitions in the future.

First of all I want to kick off by saying thank you for voting! We got 30% of all votes in the 2BeeGames competition (a nice second place, in a competition that started out with 120 games!), and while we didn't win the poll, it goes to show that there's definite interest in roleplaying games. We're especially happy to have done so well with this preview version of Driftmoon, as the development of the game is still very much in progress. We also got featured in a lot of places, and are very thankful for all the support we received! We also want to congratulate all the other 2BeeGames-finalists for their success in the competition! And on to the show. It's technical, but I'll keep it short (just kidding!). As most of you know, I spent a couple of very nice weeks redeveloping our sound engine. Why? Because I chose a poorly supported library earlier, and it crashed the game at random now that the preview was being tested on more machines. The library was Audiere, a very easy and clean library. You could very nearly play a sound by calling play(filename). I chose it back in 2005, when it was still in active development. Since then, more and more computers have got at least two CPU cores, which seems to induce a threading bug in the library. Unfortunately Audiere hasn't been updated in years, so I had to look for a new library. I went with Microsoft's new XAct3. It looks easy enough, it has a really nice tool to set up all the sounds, supports both XBox 360 and Windows, and it's the newest from one of the most largest software companies out there. Also, Microsoft clearly states that their older DirectSound technology is deprecated, which usually means they're not supporting it, and that developers should use the newer libraries XAct3 or Xaudio2. I completely overhauled our sound engine to XAct3, now happy with this new technology. But as it turns out, new technologies often have bugs, and so did XAct3. It crashed at random when releasing finished sounds, and at random it would reuse a sound, resulting in the previous sound being played instead of the new sound. Since XAct3 was built as an easy to use wrapper around XAudio2, and the bugs were in the wrapper layer, I moved on to using XAudio2. Now I completely overhauled our sound engine to XAudio2. To its credit I can say that it worked, and didn't have any bugs that I could see. But it had one little flaw - it required the absolutely newest DirectX version. That's not going to be a problem in a few years time, and it's not a problem for any larger games where your average user is willing to upgrade his whole computer to play the game. But I couldn't just put in a message saying you need a new DirectX pronto, chop chop to Microsoft and install it, hope it runs on your outdated hardware, then if you still remember, try our game. So I completely overhauled our sound engine to DirectSound. I've been using it in all of my previous games, starting from the year 1999. It works just as perfectly as it ever did, and even though Microsoft says it's deprecated, I'm sure they don't really mean that. So that's what I was doing for the past two or three weeks. I'm really glad I can get to working on the actual game now...

One of the feedback we picked from the Driftmoon preview was that some players (me) didn't like the way the plot of the game started. I'm looking for a way to improve the beginning, and while we're at it, we could make the player character more interesting. If you have an idea for the plot, don't read any further before posting it to the comments, or you might forget your unspoiled idea. So now that you either don't have an idea or you've posted it already, I can tell you my ideas. Looking at the current setup, the player is just a general chap who's father was the baron of Driftmoon, and the player didn't know this. Someone said he'd preferred playing Paul the Librarian, and I would have preferred playing Bobby the Skeleton. Often RPG characters are weak nobodies who just happen to be at the right place, such as in all Fallouts and Oblivion. The argument there is that it's easier for the player to feel sympathy for characters similar to themselves. Also that allows character development, the player can mold the character as they will. Call me crazy, but I'd like a my character to be a little more interesting, perhaps even have a background of their own that I could learn while playing. My favourite example of RPG player characters is The Nameless One from Planescape: Torment. The protagonist was handed an ugly tattooed character with an unknown background, only the knowledge that he lived forever and had lived many different lives in the past now forgotten. You could develop him while playing by getting him to remember some of his past lives, and you learned quite a bit of his past. He was an interesting character from the start, it was cool playing him and you wanted to learn about him, but since he had no memory of his past the character itself didn't force your choices. Unfortunately the forgotten past is one of the most used game elements today, but this was ten years ago when it was still nearly new. So here's my initial ideas for the player character. I don't want to completely redo the starting levels, but I could for example start the player in Driftmoon and turn Samuel (the professor with the teleport) into some sort of a wizard or sage, and move his house there.

• The player is the baron himself, come to the past to stop himself.
• The player is a golem created by the wizard.
• The player is a dwarf trying to escape from the mines, mistakenly tunneled into the wizards house.
• The player is the king of Driftmoon from a thousand years ago, woken from his grave by the wizard to stop the Curse.

This is the final vote, so if you like Driftmoon, vote now and ask your friends to vote for us as well. If we win, it means I will have a chance to focus more on Driftmoon - and finish it sooner. (The poll closes 30.11 at 11:59 PM EST.) For those of you not familiar with Driftmoon yet, the preview version is available here. And for those who don't yet even know about the contest yet, here's a link to 2beegames.com. The contest organizers would appreciate it if you also registered there, though it is not obligatory at the moment.

It was tight, but we made it to the final round of voting at 2BeeGames. The next voting will start tomorrow, so check back to vote for Driftmoon. Thanks for all of your votes this far!

The competition is really tough! If you like Driftmoon, please vote and ask your friends to vote for us at http://www.2beegames.com/. UPDATE: This is the most critical moment this week, if you haven't voted yet, please vote!

Edit: New preview version is here. If you haven't tried the game yet, that's a good place to start.