Driftmoon - Enchanted Edition

[sah]

I don't know man, this dialogue is reaching toward Dragon Age-level retardedness. Also, completely top-down perspective is just weird.

Humorous, not retarded. You sure complain about everything.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Fap fap fap fap fap fap fap.

 

[curry]

Ville Mönkkönen used to make good games but now he just sucks.

 

[DraQ]

So you can't do sprites in an isometric top-down view, huh?

Assuming you can rotate sprites freely, going sprite-based top-down compared to sprite-based iso with, say, 8 possible orientations cuts your spriting and animations by the factor of 8, while allowing smooth rotation and allowing you to get rid of code determining which set of sprites should be displayed.

Assuming you get stuck with a grid and no free rotation, you don't get the extra benefits, but you still only need to make two sets of sprites instead of 8 for everything. That's still a four-fold reduction of workload.

In both cases you also don't need to handle occlusion code- and gameplay-wise (the former being irrelevant if you use 3D engine as it will have to handle occlusion anyway).

I can definitely see the reason here.
Sure, top-down doesn't look as nice as iso, but is more practical to make and play, and iso is not exactly flashy these days anyway.

As for the RPG itself, so far it didn't catch my interest for several reasons:


1. There seems to be little information about anything in particular, sure, you probably don't want to reveal plot and its twists, but something to spark some interest in the gameworld would be welcome. So far it's something along the lines of "blah blah yet another generic indie RPG" - guess what? Generic indie RPGs are dime a dozen, you're competing with fuckload of other small developers all producing generic indie RPGs vaguely aimed at same small number of people. With potential market this small you'd do better making your indie RPG less generic and more distinct, which takes to my second point...

2. Screens look horribly generic, unmemorable and unappealing. From what I gather from the screens, you spend most of the time in game running around generic looking jungle, generic looking rocky stuff and generic looking corridors, sometimes engaging in generic, if vaguely humorous dialogue with generic looking NPCs. Uhh.. Where's the appeal? I know the overhead perspective is somewhat disadvantageous in terms of interesting environments, but not exactly crippling and surely you can do much better. Also, variety - all the stuff in all those screenshots would take about three shots to portray, that there much more such shots hints at the game including only about three-screens worth of diverse content repeated over and over.

3. You would benefit a lot from smart use of lighting. Smearing areas with homogeneous, blueish or greenish light is not smart use of lighting. Hacking in some shadows or faking them would help game cope with 'flattened' perspective, but isn't necessary.

4. You would benefit a lot from smart use of height. Even if for some reasons you want the gameplay area to be of uniform elevation, the engine is 3D, which means that it can natively protray high structures and long drops. Duking it out on a decaying bridge above mist-shrouded landscape is certainly going to be more memorable than blah blah jungle corridor jungle.

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

Hopefully he will come back and answer my queries.

 

[ville]

I'm one of the developers, just popped in to answer some of the questions. Thanks for posting about Driftmoon Petrell!

I couldn't care less what perspective it is. From what I can read and see it looks interesting, however....I need to know a lot more regarding combat, character building, skill use in-play (apart from just in dialogue), etc. You know, the important stuff.

The combat in Driftmoon is a lot like any older Bioware RPG, like Baldur's Gate or Knights of the Old republic. Turn based realtime. It's very similar.
As for character building, you have the basic stat system with strength, constitution, intelligence, dexterity and agility. In Driftmoon they work pretty much as skills do in many games. In addition you get talents, which give you new combat skills (attack moves, defence moves) and various interesting noncombat skills (I haven't implemented many of these yet, but they're going to work like feats in Fallout).

I do admit the top-down view is something you don't see in mainstream games these days. I chose it because I personally like it, and I believe you really do get used to it more quickly than you expect.

There isn't much info about the plot yet on the website, because we haven't been completely satisfied with all the details yet. We're hard at work on it right now, and we'll be revealing more information about the plot in a few weeks, so remember to check the website.

The reason to play Driftmoon is simply this: It's an adventure RPG with lots of dialogue and a good story. You'll just have to wait a bit to know how the story actually starts...

 

[quasimodo]

I don't know exactly what "turn based real time" is, but it sounds like a way to remove what is good about TB combat without adding what is good about RT combat.

 

[Berekän]

Turn based realtime

 

[Roguey]

"Round-based realtime" would be the preferable term. And sorry, but it doesn't seem as though you've put much critical thought into this.

 

[Petrell]

Thanks, Ville, for stopping by. I was afraid I'd have to find answers for all the difficult questions with my limited knowledge.

As for me, I want to make it clear that I'm not affilated with Driftmoon or Ville in any way (well other than we both being finnish :-p). I've been following his game development for quite few years and development of Driftmoon pretty much from the start. I just wanted to spread the word of game's existance. Many such indie RPG's are hard pressed to gain atteption of press and gaming community alike.

Some of you seem to have mistaken me for the developer and I hereby apology the confusion I seem to have caused. The developers are, as I said in first post, Ville Mönkkönen along with his wife, Anne Mönkkönen. I failed to mention this in first post but Gareth Meek, a 20 year old film, tv and games composer from England, is respossible for Driftmoon’s soundtrack.

 

[sirfink]

Is that the Dungeon Siege engine? Looks like top-down Dungeon Siege.

 

[Petrell]

Is that the Dungeon Siege engine? Looks like top-down Dungeon Siege.

No, the engine is self developed. It's 3D engine but uses fixed top down camera and sprites instead of 3D models to represent characters and creatures to speed up development and to make modding easier.


There has been lots of updates this month, including lots of new screenshots and new features.

New screenshots:

March 3rd - Island
March 4th - Password
March 4th - Stables
March 5th - Explosion
March 5th - Plotho
March 6th - X Marks the Spot!
March 6th - Random House
March 7th - Alchemist’s
March 8th - Hannah the Ghost
March 8th - Fish Bones
March 9th - The Blessed Heart

New features:

March 10th - Talent Tree!
March 14th - Sharper Terrain
March 16th - Random finds and item combining
March 20th - Quick Travel
March 22nd - Shop Shop Shop!

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

I will keep my eye on it, however...

The team has chosen unwisely. It is using the Baldur's Gate style of combat with story being the main focus. Unfortunately, many people that prefer these aspects also love their AAA graphics, while those of us who don't give a damn about visuals, and rate the story as a secondary, or complimentary affair to the gameplay, prefer turn based mechanics with depth.

But as I said, I will keep an eye on it.

 

[JarlFrank]

Well, I do like the BG style Infinity Engine games and don't care much about graphics. I do care about artstyle and presentation, though, and those screenshots just don't cut it for me. Top-down 3D is just utterly fugly, 2D would be a much better choice.

Or maybe it's just because that perspective combined with a rather close zoom level. Try to make the camera zoom out more, and it would look a lot better.

 

[Petrell]

Well, I do like the BG style Infinity Engine games and don't care much about graphics. I do care about artstyle and presentation, though, and those screenshots just don't cut it for me. Top-down 3D is just utterly fugly, 2D would be a much better choice.

Or maybe it's just because that perspective combined with a rather close zoom level. Try to make the camera zoom out more, and it would look a lot better.

I too somewhat share you concern. Lot of textures seem rather blurry. My main concern is that many interactive items and items you can pick up lack sharpness and are hard to distinguish from background (maybe shell shading or something could be used?).

Other is related to scouting and view distance as scouting skill removes fog of war beyond what you see on screen. This may lead to situations where you think that you've explored a place already because area is cleared from fog of war in mini-map. I certainly agree that greater viewing distance would be nice but would that make things even harder to distinguish?

Btw, you did click on blog images to see full screen images (the thumbnails in blog posts are cut and compressed). They've been taken in 1024x768 resolution and makes me wonder if the game allows higher resolutions...

Hopefully Ville or someone else will post another video when next version comes out as I plan to wait at least until then before I buy.

 

[ecliptic]

Looks pretty good to me.

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

Or maybe it's just because that perspective combined with a rather close zoom level. Try to make the camera zoom out more, and it would look a lot better.

That is actually a good suggestion. I don't normally care about visuals at all, but zooming it out is also good for tactical considerations. Just a touch though, otherwise things may become very difficult when it comes to working out what is what.

 

[Kalin]

If you zoom out a bit more and get rid of the rotating feature, the game would pretty much have the same perspective as the classic Grand Theft Auto.

 

[Morkar Left]

Isn't it already more zoomed out in the latest screenshots?

 

[Petrell]

If you zoom out a bit more and get rid of the rotating feature, the game would pretty much have the same perspective as the classic Grand Theft Auto.

Zooming out more should not be impossible I think as, in preview video at least, game zooms in during conversations. But what rotating feature do you speak of? Character following cursor movement? If you mean perspective, then no, that won't change.

Isn't it already more zoomed out in the latest screenshots?

Now that you mentioned it, yes, it seem that way. "Shop Shop Shop!" seems to be zoomed in due to being in converstion/shopping mode but most other screenshots have far more zoomed view ("The Blessed Heart" seem to be somewhere in between the two zooming levels).

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

Well it seems to have nice sounds, that's more important to me than graphics. But it will be the combat that makes or breaks the game for me.

 

[Visbhume]

Top-down perspective reminds me of Dreamweb (a good thing).

 

[gromit]

Instead of moving the camera south and tilting it north - which as you wrote can make the top-down sprites look odd - have you tried toning down the perspective? (Codex: perspective and angle are two very different things.)

A big part of why the shots feel funny to me, and probably to others, is not that it's top-down in and of itself, but that staring straight down into a receding viewpoint can give a serious fisheye effect, or make the gameworld seem spherical. There's no part of the screen remains truly "top-down" except the center, and this might even cause sprites on the edge of the screen to occasionally look jarring, as they're drawn top-down next to the surroundings, which are at (radially increasing) sidelong angles.

This has the opportunity to be vertigo-city. I watched your video, and in small, flat areas, during zooms, and while there's no NSEW screen movement, it's not so bad. However, things got a bit weird on the beach with its rolling altitude.

 

[Elhoim]

The main problem is the unevenness of the texture resolution. There are some high res textures right next to extremely blurry or even stretched ones. The later seem to come from the terrain. Probably they are using the engine terrain and adding some meshes on top, that's why it's so dissimilar.

 

[DraQ]

Well, I do like the BG style Infinity Engine games and don't care much about graphics. I do care about artstyle and presentation, though, and those screenshots just don't cut it for me. Top-down 3D is just utterly fugly, 2D would be a much better choice.

Disagreed on the second point.

There was this fairly decent shooter in 1997 called "Take No Prisoners" using similar 3D top-down view with most stuff represented by sprites. It looked and worked pretty well in general, so it may be worth looking into for some pointers regarding visualization.

Still, this game here just looks utterly generic and bland. This is the main problem here. I've seen top-down games looking better (in terms of catching interest and in terms of interest, rather than technical aspects, obviously) on c64 dammit!