Driftmoon

[Volrath]

That is the worst camera angle ever.

²

 

[Excidium]

Yeah, can't say I like the camera angle either, but a game shipping with an editor is always good.

http://www.instantkingdom.com/2011/09/155002/

P. cool.

 

[Mortmal]

Yes theres a vocal minority not liking anything, i am not part of that minority i do enjoy a good game still, lastest rpg coming to mind is KOTC , new vegas and as action rpg witcher 2.
Again double standard when it comes to indie, you shred obsidian for their camera angle in nwn2 , but the pov of driftmoon is ok ? This choice of angle is absurd , why not put it 10meters up more that will be even less details to draw on the sprites! Come on....
No i dont require tough guy talk and grimdark violence, but i definitively prefer a game of throne or the black company to a disneyland faery world. I could also enjoy a different setting than classic fantasy, we always get the same old stuff why indies dont try different settings, its not like they are taking much more risks the sales will be poor anyway, plenty of choices, how about ww2 with werewolves, deadlands, hollow earth, some historical settings, a bolchevik revolution , i dont know.. anything but the elves and dwarves sword ansd sorcery stuff.

I see a candid developper is posting here ,a rare thing to behold, well i can tell you romances and light fantasy isnt exactly the common meal for people posting here

 

[Haba]

Don't interact with these people, they will only poison what looks like a promising project, and perhaps your life.

Don't listen to the old man, he is a fool and a liar.

It is perfectly safe here, deep down we're a very friendly and helpful bunch.

Oh, and also:

Voi hyvä luoja, juokse tyttö henkesi edestä kun vielä voit! Ja tuo apua!

 

[sgc_meltdown]

It is perfectly safe here, deep down we're a very friendly and helpful bunch.

 

[Radisshu]

If manual dodging plays an important role in combat it's pretty much an action RPG.

 

[Metro]

You had me until RTwP combat. Everything else was fine (or at least tolerable).

 

[Davaris]

Don't interact with these people, they will only poison what looks like a promising project, and perhaps your life.

She has a masters in psychology, so I'm sure she would find this place fascinating in a professional capacity.

As for the engine, I was surprised at how good it looks. From their blog comments posted here on path finding, I was expecting a project done by kids and it quite clearly is not.

That is the worst camera angle ever.

²

We can also make all of our characters from cleverly placed sprite sheets, so it's very easy to make new characters and monsters in the game. That is a big time-saver for modders

They have a massive number of posts in their forums, many of which are on modding, so I thought this would interest people here:

How does modding in Driftmoon work?
Driftmoon comes with the full tools used to make the game, and they will also be available in the demo version. So basically you can fiddle around with Driftmoon, and make your favorite changes to it. Or, you can implement that great game idea that's been floating around your head, waiting to get out. When making your mod, you get to use all of the Driftmoon content (including images and sounds) in any way you choose, or create your own. It's a complete roleplaying game building set! What's more, there's an automated mod distribution and installing system built into the game, so you don't have to worry about hosting your mod. And if you choose to ask money for your mod, we can arrange that as well.

I would have suggested we ask them to make a turn based version available, as they say the engine is TB underneath, but the node placement for pathfinding, is only suitable for real time combat.

 

[curry]

The combat system in Driftmoon has similarities with Dragon Age...
... Possibly even more importantly, of course there are romances in Driftmoon!

 

[RPGMaster]

So there is hot sex?

 

[curry]

So there is hot sex?

do it wrong and it will make you sick

 

[DarkUnderlord]

So this is a game where you walk around with someone else and a green light following you? Interesting... Though personally I'd add more game-play elements.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Hei Ville ja Anne! Kunnianhimoinen projekti. Tuo kamerakulma ei minua suuremmin vaivaa, tuttuhan se on KotC:stä ja Ultimoista. Paljon suurempi ongelma on jos taistelu on Diablo-tyyppistä hiiren raiskausta, ehkä väistö/torjunta-nappia välillä iskien. Onko vuoropohjainen taistelu ehdottomasti ja täysin pois suljettu vaihtoehto? Varsinkin koska sankari ei ilmeisesti ole yksinään maailmaa pelastamassa. Toinen kyssäri koskee sitten sitä keskustelua ja sen merkitystä - onko se Bioware-tyyppistä "valitse minkälaista hahmoa pelaat ilman sen suurempaa merkitystä" vai enemmänkin Troika-tyyppistä "keskustelu avaa/sulkee eri reittejä/mahdollisuuksia" - eli voinko kusettaa sillanvartijapeikkoa vai onko minun, hahmosta riippumatta, pakko se peikko aina tappaa?

 

[villain of the story]

Thank you for the thoughtful and informative post. Just a word of advice, you're never going to satisfy the people on this site; there is a small but vocal and obnoxious minority of people who hate everything that isn't [favorite game X from late adolescence], so just keep up the good work and pay little attention to this thread or most others about your game. People will curse you for RTwP game play, they will curse you for the camera angle, they will call you a "LARPer fag" because the game is heavy on dialogue that is not about gritty betrayals, hard-boiled tough-guy talk, and pointless grimdark violence. They will will pick apart every figment of content in that trailer and explain why they have already lost interest in your game because obviously you have bad taste in game design and are a terrible writer.

Don't interact with these people, they will only poison what looks like a promising project, and perhaps your life.

How holier than thou of you.

 

[Pope Amole]

She has a masters in psychology, so I'm sure she would find this place fascinating in a professional capacity.

Codex requires no less then a grandmaster of psychiatry, so no, doubtful.

Not that interested in this game, though. Top-down is all fine with me, because, unlike most of local population, I'm a very reasonable and pragmatical man and I perfectly understand how excellent top-down is for making your game in spare time and on a budget, but that doesn't change the fact that the combat part of the game should be fun and, frankly, it doesn't look at least a bit fun in the trailer, on the contrary, it appears to be flawed from a design standpoint. I mean, you just watch how the game goes and see that melee-combat is a dull clickfest/buttonmash (because top-down is kinda ill-fitted for it), that archery forces you into endless kiting which gets boring fast and that magic will probably be kiting too, although with some options, I guess. So, unless it has a really, really great story (that is very unlikely, simply because of statistics - you know that very few games have a story that's actually worth something), it doesn't look like there's anything to do in this game.

 

[villain of the story]

Hey any chance you could add an alternate camera option to make it more like Take No Prisoners? That alone would put the game back in the interest zone of many people, including none other than ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!

 

[sgc_meltdown]

suurempi ongelma on jos taistelu on Diablo-tyyppistä hiiren raiskausta, ehkä väistö/torjunta-nappia välillä iskien. Onko vuoropohjainen taistelu ehdottomasti ja täysin pois suljettu vaihtoehto? Varsinkin koska sankari ei ilmeisesti ole yksinään maailmaa pelastamassa. Toinen kyssäri koskee sitten sitä keskustelua ja sen merkitystä

what foul sorcery are you conjuring here

 

[Zyxil]

Also, the pathfinding story was a good read. If I wasn't meddling with this on my own recently, I swear I'd hardly understand anything written there at a first glance. I just hope the addition of the priority queue is going to prove itself worthy. After all, Ville's been investing months of his work in this...

A good overview of pathing is the postmortem for SimplePath for Unity: http://aigamedev.com/open/news/unity-simplepath/

Dude knows his stuff.

 

[Marobug]

Thank you for the thoughtful and informative post. Just a word of advice, you're never going to satisfy the people on this site; there is a small but vocal and obnoxious minority of people who hate everything that isn't [favorite game X from late adolescence], so just keep up the good work and pay little attention to this thread or most others about your game. People will curse you for RTwP game play, they will curse you for the camera angle, they will call you a "LARPer fag" because the game is heavy on dialogue that is not about gritty betrayals, hard-boiled tough-guy talk, and pointless grimdark violence. They will will pick apart every figment of content in that trailer and explain why they have already lost interest in your game because obviously you have bad taste in game design and are a terrible writer.

Don't interact with these people, they will only poison what looks like a promising project, and perhaps your life.

Pretty much what MisterStone said; some of the people you'll stumble upon here weren't even born when the games they venerate so much were released but will tell you how the old stuff was better nonetheless so yeah credibility isnt exactly free-flowing in the codex these days.
As an example, people are already mocking you for saying Dragon age is not a action rpg and for using it as an example for your game. aRPG here are seen as the biggest cancer in pc gaming, but if you ask them which one is their favourite rpg of all time half of them will answer baldur's gate.

Well just keep your thing going, it's looking good to me.

 

[Excommunicator]

 

[sgc_meltdown]

firstly, I have to reiterate that driftmoon does look like a more isometric perspective instead of top down and less zoomed in view would do it service without even changing anything else about the graphics

secondly sincerest form of flattery and all that though U7 clearly has it beat look at the wall hangings for example

is it me or do the palm trees look like weird bushes

edit: Shit, they ARE weird bushes! look at the bit where one of them clips through the wall with a frond, it's clearly well at ground level

 

[mlc82]

Just wanted to say that I've kept up with Driftmoon for a quite a while now and think it looks really interesting, a few quick points

- glad to see the developer(s) posting here, game devs who interact with their audience are rare and appreciated these days.

- I don't mind the camera angle even though I don't really like it, top down is much uglier than isometric but the game still looks better than say Avernum 1-3, which I also enjoyed (and are uglier than hell).

- Real time combat in RPGs, even pausable like the infinity games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, etc and KOTOR) makes me want to projectile vomit acid and blood all over everyone around me I hate it so much, I find it both pointless and irritating, just like I don't EVER want to see my favorte PC wargames turned into "Real Time Strategy with pause" either.

- As much as I hate the real time aspect above, still very interested in Driftmoon and will be keeping up to date with it, almost preordered a few times now but other (already released) games have taken priority for me.

Thanks for posting here Anne, will definitely be following your game and likely purchasing it now or later, hope you like my praises above and realize I'm not important enough for the complaints to matter. Best to you, your spouse and kids.

 

[ville]

Hello,
I'm the other developer of the game. I'm glad to hear Driftmoon has sparked such a lot of conversation! And thank you for all the kind comments.

Excommunicator, you are right on track. This game was started because of my favourite RPG of all time, Ultima VII. That building is actually the first building in the game, my homage to all the years spent playing Ultima...

About the combat system, we've actually been working on improving it for the past month or two. It's not, as some have thought, a Diablo style clickfest. So each strike is not a single click. It's more akin to Baldur's Gate, or Knights of the Old Republic, if any of you have played it. You can manually dodge arrows, though. But I do have to point out that combat is not an important part of Driftmoon, there is far less fighting in it than you might expect.

I hate to reveal this to you, but we actually only have one romantic quest in the game, so they don't really play that major a role. But we do have a lot of other interesting quests, such as the one where you find a tombstone that reads: "An ancient mage lies in this grave. You cannot find his mystic stave."

You can zoom the view in the game with the mouse wheel, so don't worry about any screenshots being too close or too far.

We've tried hard to make our conversations matter as much as possible, and add different ways of solving each quest. You'll just have to wait and see how well we've done!

 

[Excidium]

So, when is the demo coming out? Hard to judge a game without playing it first.

 

[lisac2k]

Also, the pathfinding story was a good read. If I wasn't meddling with this on my own recently, I swear I'd hardly understand anything written there at a first glance. I just hope the addition of the priority queue is going to prove itself worthy. After all, Ville's been investing months of his work in this...

A good overview of pathing is the postmortem for SimplePath for Unity: http://aigamedev.com/open/news/unity-simplepath/

Dude knows his stuff.

Thank you for the link. Unfortunately, I find the article more marketing-oriented, than providing an attractive substance for a (wide range of) developer(s). The few of the tips provided are useful, but they are too general. In addition, I'm all for customising existing concepts, where one should apply the best solution for the current problem, rather than adjust the problem to fit into existing solution (it does happen, trust me, and the results vary -- but I'm derailing the topic right now).

In other words, there's no need to reinvent the wheel, but there are different kinds of wheels (and one can always customise his own wheel in order to achieve the best results for the situation given). Personally, I wouldn't recommend one of the wheels of my car to a F1 team.

BTW, good to see the developers are here, greetings to them. Also:

So, when is the demo coming out?