First of all, if you haven't voted for Driftmoon yet, please vote! The last vote next week is the most important, that determines the winner! I actually came here to talk about download statistics. Those are often well kept secrets, you wouldn't want your competitors to know you're doing bad! The reason I wanted to reveal my statistics is that one of my games is keeping me up at night. It's weird. A bit of background. Most of my games are from way back. I actually started making games in 1998, and the oldest one available here is The Forge released in 2000. The newest actual release, if you don't count Driftmoon, would be Notrium from 2003. Now six or more years is a lot of time to get downloads. Too bad I've only got statistics from 2004 upwards, so we can only guess at what numbers these games have started with. And I'm only talking about downloads directly from monkkonen.net. I honestly have no idea what the numbers would be from other sites that offer my games. Should I double these or what? I said I didn't have statistics from before 2004. Well I lied there. I tracked Notrium in 2003. To a young man just starting game development it was a huge success, with well over 300 000 downloads in the first couple of months alone. After that the downloads settled into about 5000 per month, gradually declining to 2000 per month that I now see. So that's in the range of 600 000 - 700 000 total downloads up until now. Before Notrium there was Magebane 2, and after a rough start it soon settled into 5000, declining to current 2000 per month. The total numbers for Magebane are pretty similar to Notrium. The difference between the games is that Notrium took two years to build, and Magebane about half a year. Wazzal and The Forge have always been pretty regular with 500-1500 downloads per month. I think they're both at about 100 000 total for their lifetime. So what was the fuss about?  It's about the fact that Bikez II has netted well over 2,5 million downloads! I think about 80 percent of the downloads are from Brazil. If you're reading this from São Paulo, here's hello to you. If I got a dollar from each of you, I'd get a decent income. The download numbers for Bikez II are actually continually increasing due to more people getting an Internet connection in Brazil. The counter at one of the bigger sites Baixaki is going at 1.2 million. So what do you make of it? My statistics software claims it doesn't count robots and download accelerators, so the number cannot be that far off. Did the game just get lucky in Brazil, such that it has nothing to do with the actual game? Maybe there's potential for making money out of these growing economies? Is there a huge demand for games like Bikez II, enough to warrant an eight year old game to continue succeeding? Is it riding on the success of Grand Theft Auto, with the difference that it works on really old computers? Or is it just the girl in the menu? I'm at a loss with this one, I really am. Who wants to see Bikez 3? If one million comment, I'm going to start right now.

The 2BeeGames.com voting continues. Last week we got 17% of all votes which means we reached first place out of 120 games!  Thank you everyone! This was only about 170 votes, so don't think your vote doesn't matter! There are two votings left, so please vote for us this week and the next, and get all of your friends to help (we are following the instructions of the contest organizers, and advertising a bit ourselves )! You can vote at 2BeeGames.com. In other news, I've been hard at work replacing our sound engine with a brand new custom made engine. We used to use Audiere, which turned out to crash at random due to threading bugs. So now I'm implementing a new sound engine from scratch. This is good old low level coding with threads and getting my hands greasy with bytes and char arrays. My first choise was to use Microsoft's new XAct interface, but turns out it has horrible bugs if you don't use their own sound bank generation tools. Since I want to encourage open formats such as OGG, I'm going to use a lower level API called XAudio2. Unfortunately this means I have to write my own streaming routines and a lot of low level code. But it also means I have complete control over it, and it means our modders won't have to use any proprietary tools to create their audio. It's a bit more work for me, but hopefully rewarding in the end!

Driftmoon got into the finals! But we'll get eliminated if we don't get enough votes, so please help us! There are two places I need you to vote. The poll on the right side of the 2BeeGames site is the most important, so cast your vote there. The other is the star rating on the 2BeeGames Driftmoon page. Let's do it people! I know we can win this!

Here's something for anyone interested in making maps for Driftmoon. It's the editor interface for AI paths. Some of you may remember that Driftmoon's predecessor Notrium didn't have any path finding abilities, and as such the AI was really idiotic in closed areas. In Driftmoon the map maker can define paths that the AI can take if it wants to get from one room to another. The reason we need to have a good pathfinding system is not just enemies, but also your companions. They need to be able to follow you intelligently, and not get stuck somewhere. My original pathfinding system was based on a very thick grid, and the game would check which points were accessible from which. Unfortunately that wasn't good for open areas, as there could be up to hundreds of points within a very short path, and it wasn't good for dungeons, as the automatic points tended to be too sparse for thin corridors - the game thought they were solid rock. So now we have to place the points manually, and the paths between the points are made automatically. It only takes a few minutes time, and the AI behaves much better, so I think it's worth the time spent.

We've already hidden about a dozen feathers in the game in hard to spot places, and the plan is to include a hundred of them. Each one gives you more XP, and if you've found enough by the end of the game, you can unlock something. But what? Unlock a weapon? Unlock a party member?

Thanks to your replies in the previous combat post! I've read them carefully over and over again in the dark of the night, and tweaked and tweaked. And here's the short of how combat in Driftmoon works right now. Bear in mind that Driftmoon is an RPG, and not a very action oriented at that. This is not Diablo, and you will not be blindly fighting enemies for hours at an end: you'll be doing much more questing (eg. exploring, finding interesting places/items, solving mysteries, having deep and/or entertaining discussions - perhaps even meeting Bobby). Combat will be real time, but can be paused to use items and give orders. I switched ranged combat from Diablo style constantly clicking into a more strategic style. Now we click once on an enemy to attack it, and from there on we select from various attacks we want to use. In the screenshot we are wielding a bow and a shield, so we can select from two bow attacks (Double shot is cool!) and one shield attack (ram enemy). Another change is that we have damage types. The basic damage types are slashing, piercing, crushing, and slapping(!), and we're going to have more for magical weapons and creatures. The skeleton is pretty resistant to piercing damage, as arrows go straight through it. Flying insects are resistant to all other damage types than slapping. So you can kill them simply by slapping them real hard. The new system also allows you to wield all kinds of weapons simultaneously. Wielding a shield and a bow in the same hand is not prohibited. If you happen to find a spiked helmet, you can use that to headbutt your enemies. All weapons can have multiple different attacks. And I'm actually thinking of making the torch a weapon as well! Personally I like the new combat system. It allows a fair bit of strategy and differentiation, and it is fairly simple in the beginning while it can get more complex later in the game. Plus we've got slapping! Your comments?

Right now we're working on ambient sound. The kind that's on the background, and makes the game feel more like a living world. If you saw the video and listened to the ambient sounds there, you're probably wondering what are we doing, there was ambience on the video! Didn't fool you? Alright, I admit it, the ambient sounds on the video were an addon, so we're just now working to add them. What I'm currently planning is that we'll create soundscapes, a sort of collection of sounds that go together to create say, a jungle, or an ocean, or a cave. Then I'll create a tool to paint these soundscapes to the world, and we've got positional ambient sounds. So you can go to the beach and hear water roaring, and go back to the jungle and hear the birds chirping. The volumes of all these sounds are cleverly computed on the background, and all I'll have to do now is paint.

This week we've been busy with making this video of Driftmoon. Tell us what you think!

This is Bobby the Stranded Skeleton. He's the man (or skeleton) behind our new menu, walking around and sharing his thoughts on being stranded and life in general. So the menu is really a map in the game, only without the player. I'm sure you modders out there will love this, as you can make the menu background a heated battlefield, or a flowing volcano. So back to Bobby. I don't have too many quotes for him just yet, so if you're reading this, share your own sentences in the comments. My only requirements are that it's a really short text, and it must fit into being said by a stranded skeleton called Bobby. The best ones will get into the game! Here's what I've written myself, to start you up:

• I'm a poor lonesome skeleton.
• Is that a boat?
• Maybe I'll plant a tree here.
• Well look at that. A new seashell!
• Man, I wish I could swim!

This week we've been working on adding sounds to the game. Mostly we're using sounds available at http://www.freesound.org/, they have plenty of useful free effects available. As opposed to any of my previous games, we're really putting an effort to make the soundscape believable. This means we're using multiple samples for each action, and we're trying to find sounds for most ingame actions. For example we already have over 30 footstep samples whereas the original Notrium had exactly 6. Another useful addition compared to Notrium is that we're using different buses and different attenuations for different kinds of samples. In practice this means the sounds get bogged down a lot less, because we can dynamically reduce the range of heard footstep. In Notrium you used to hear all of the aliens' footsteps at one go, producing a terrible mass of sounds where you only wished to kill the aliens to quiet them down. For modders I'm trying to make a lot of things automatic unless otherwise specified. An example, you can drag many objects in the game with your mouse. Dragging a large cupboard produces a lower sound than dragging a chair. I've automated the pitch changing to depend on the mass of the object being dragged, so you don't have to specify a drag sound for each and every different kind of chair you make. Another helpful feature is that actual sound files are no longer used in any of the game scripts. They're just referenced with cues. For example my script could say playSound("eat") and I would have a cue in my sounds.ini file like this: [eat] soundFiles=crunch.wav, gulp.wav. Well you may wonder where's the use in that? Simply put, you can now change any of the actual sound files in one place, you don't have to go into a dozen scripts to hunt them down. And you can have some definitions for each sound, like minimum and maximum randomization volume, plus pitch. Not to mention that you can define any number of actual sound files, and the game will choose one to play at random.