If you've got a dislike of spiders, why not play Driftmoon with the Cuter Spiders mod? It's exactly like normal Driftmoon, except the spiders are a bit nicer looking. Just fire up Driftmoon, and click the mod to play.
Inspired by Eric Johnson of DIYGamer. 
Just a quick notice, I got the difficulty level slider backwards when it counts towards the combat difficulty. Thanks for all who sent this in! So the current hardest level (Guardian) is supposed to be the normal (Champion) setting. So if you're finding the combat a little bit difficult, you might want to select the Guardian level.
I'm fixing this along with a lot of more minor things soon, so don't forget to change the difficulty setting back when the game is updated.
Here comes the new official trailer for Driftmoon, fresh off the drawing board! Be sure to watch it in 1080p mode. 
I want to thank you all for the feedback you've given us, when playing the new alpha! Great to hear that you've had fun with it! AND you've spotted some really interesting and strange errors, so I'm going to have my hands full for many days. I probably won't have enough time to answer all of you back unless you've actually asked for something or I desperately need more information because the problem is so interesting. Rest assured that if the feedback form said it was sent, I definitely got and carefully read your feedback - and if it said there was an error sending it, I probably got it even so.
Once we get all the little things fixed, we'll naturally make an automatic update, that'll be offered for download, when you start Driftmoon. We hope you enjoy the adventure, and keep the feedback coming!
Get ready for Driftmoon Alpha 7! Half a year in the making, it's now ready for our preorderers. If you haven't preordered yet, you can still get your copy for 20% off, and at the same time show us your support! If you'd rather wait until Driftmoon is ready, why not sign up to be notified when the game is released?
We nearly completed all of the new areas last August. But when testing the whole game through back then, we discovered some areas of the game-play and the content, that we wanted to tune a bit further to make them just right. It was a relatively large and time-consuming task, but now that we've spent the last two weeks playing and replaying, we're really happy we decided to do it. Why? Simply because we ourselves have now had so much fun with our own beta-testing play-throughs. And if we've really enjoyed adventuring in Driftmoon ourselves (even though we know beforehand pretty much everything that'll happen), we have high hopes that you will too!
Next on our plate is to release a new trailer with some of the new features and areas, and a demo! After that we'll retreat to our secret chambers to make the final areas of the game. We'll release one more alpha version before the final release, so Driftmoon is not far from being completed!
PS. If you've got the previous alpha version, you should be able to update to the new alpha just by starting the game. We hope you can still give us plenty of feedback on where to improve the game, so don't hesitate to use the feedback button in the lower right corner of the game!
Among the hundreds of new things in this version, we have two new large areas (and another smaller area), a murder mystery, new enemy types, boss fights, tons of new quests, and as a whole a much more polished experience. To put it plain, there's a lot more to play, and the bits we already had, we've made better. See the changelog for more details.
New areas:
Monastery and Crypt, along with a mystery of treason, murder and theft! The quests and the many characters you can meet and chat with are the part we've spent most of our time with, but unfortunately we cannot tell you much about them without giving away too much.
New companions:
Velvet the Queen Panther, Stone Dwarf, Stone Giant and Stone Titan. The stone-faced guy is a summon you gain early on, and it keeps getting more powerful (and bigger) as you progress.
Combat enhancements:
We worked on making new enemy types and enhancing our existing ones for weeks. We made sure each enemy type adds to the combat in unique ways, making each fight different depending on what kinds of monsters are involved. You can even use the enemies against each other! We also have critical hits, new combat skills, a system for mana, the list goes on. Here's only a small portion of the creatures we've created. I'll tell you more about them in another post.
First of all, thank you for all the feedback! This post is for the game and software developers among you, and for those who are interested in Driftmoon internals. Today's topic is lessons learned from the feedback form in Driftmoon.
To those of you not familiar with Driftmoon, the current alpha versions have a small feedback button in the lower right corner of each screen. When you click it, the game shows a text field, along with an optional field for the player's email. And best of all, it allows you to attach an automatic screenshot of the screen you were in when you pressed the button!
This tool has been invaluable to us during our beta testing. When people have a button they can press when any big or small problem arises, they can send their feedback without interrupting their game for more than a couple of seconds! This greatly improves the quality and quantity of feedback. Another game I'm working on called Ekapeli has an option to send feedback when you shut down the game, and by that time people have mostly forgotten what they wanted to tell us.
The screenshot feature is a must-have. When somebody writes to us that there's a spelling error in some NPC's conversations, it's a hundred times easier to actually see a screenshot of the actual problem, than it would be to read through all the texts of that particular character. Often the problem is also visual, simply that something looks particularly wonky, and a screenshot would be the only way to communicate that. And other times the problem may not be visual at all, for example it's a sound related bug. But getting a screenshot along with the problem description allows you to roughly know where in the game world the error occurred - something you don't often get with descriptions of sound errors.
Techinally the feedback form is nothing special. It saves a screenshot right at the moment the feedback button is pressed, as a highly compressed jpg. Using high compression saves both the player's bandwidth, as well as ours. The game does a simple HTTP POST to a predefined URL. I've written a java servlet to handle the incoming request - it actually just sends the feedback and the screenshot to my email. If you're using a bug tracker, it might be a good idea to send it there as well.
Since the button takes up valuable screen space, we might want to remove it once we release the game. But we still want to keep the feedback system, possibly activated by a keyboard key. The hard part is to remind the players that such a key exists.
We've found this feedback tool so useful, that we use it in our internal testing. When I'm playtesting the game myself, I continually click the feedback button and send myself feedback. Why would I do that? I could just type the errors in a text document. I do it simply because I also get the screenshot along with the error description. Often it takes a couple of days for me to go from testing the game into fixing the errors, and seeing a screenshot with the text helps me recall what happened at that particular time.
How about you, have you found useful ways of getting great feedback from your users? Or if you've used the feedback form in Driftmoon, how would you improve it?
PS. Check back in a day or two or three.
Get our newsletter!