The MindTrek jury writes:
Driftmoon [..] Competes in very difficult genre which has the most demanding but also most loyal users. Fascinating story offers possibility to prevail.
How right they are, roleplaying games are extremely demanding to make. When starting work on Driftmoon I had no idea it would take years to finish it. But now that it's nearly complete, I'm glad we decided to take the challenge! 
So go on to the MindTrek page and check the other nominees!
Update: DIY Gamer has posted an article on the competition.
In our last Driftmoon alpha, there was little reason to use bows in combat, since (1) the arrows were limited, (2) you got the bow pretty late in the game, and (3) most of the monsters were far easier to defeat using melee weapons. We're changing that right now, bows will be much more useful from now on! I thought about a hundred very complex ways to make that happen, but finally I realized it's not nuclear physics. We simply needs some monsters that are easier to defeat using melee weapons such as swords, and some monsters that are easier to defeat using ranged attacks, such as bows.
We're now in the middle of weighing different alternatives that would make it convenient to react to the new varying enemy types. For example, now that I frequently want to change my weapon set, a button that changes between two weapon sets would come in handy. I could reserve the right mouse button for this purpose.
Another problem we've been thinking about is that some of the attack skills, such as the Retreat skill, should actually work outside combat. But you can only activate the skill while in combat because the skill buttons only show up when you're fighting someone!
So I'm thinking that we could turn the current quick item slots into two-purpose slots, meaning you could fill them with skills as well as items. We'd get rid of the current skills list that only appears in combat. I think this opens up a lot of possibilities for modding, with the player being able to activate skills out of combat. Since skills are just scripts, modders could make skills that make the player invisible before combat, or skills that make the player change into a werewolf shape - all without requiring the player to carry special items to do that.
The only problem that I see with the multipurpose slots, is that you'd get 10 slots less! Any ideas? Don't need more than 10 slots? Go Warcraft and add as many slots as the screen edges can take (but you'd loose visibility?)? Make the weapon set button, the right mouse button perhaps, switch to another set of 10 slots?
The code is only about 12000 lines, but I didn't have time to put it into separate files at the time. Unlike Bikez 2, which I released earlier, Wazzal is mostly in English! Bear in mind, that it is still one of my earlier projects, so I'm releasing the code on one condition: If you're ever thinking about hiring me, don't judge my coding skills by this.
PS. We're making more enemy types to Driftmoon. And let me tell you, it's hard work training new monsters! They ate through my hat, and one of them nearly got away with Anne, but I've managed to capture a good number of them into Driftmoon! I'll tell you more about the little critters later.
Jgprof in the forum wanted to know a bit about Driftmoon's background. I thought the question interesting enough to write a short post about.
"What language is Driftmoon written in, and what libraries are you using? How many LOC is it and how many hours have you spent on it?"
The Driftmoon game engine consists of about a 100 000 lines of C++, including the editor tools. It's a lot of code on one person's plate, I find it a great exercise for my memory. There are a lot of libraries we use. Ogg Vorbis, the sound decoding library. DirectX for graphics. Box2D for physics. And of course the standard JPEG and PNG libraries. Zlib. The actual game is written mostly in the Driftmoon scripting language, but I don't know how many lines of code there would be. Thousands in any case.
A quick calculation shows that we must have spent about 5000 hours for the game and the engine in the last six years. We've worked on the actual game content only for the last two years, after I had to drop the Cormoon project and adapted the engine to Driftmoon. The tough part at the moment is getting enough hours to work on Driftmoon, as we have two lovely little distractions running (and crawling) around the house and I have my day job. But we've managed pretty well, I think.
"Simlarly for the content: how much time goes in to creating a level as beautiful as the ones in the Alpha release?"
It's hard to say how long a good level takes to make, as we always have to work on new additions to the engine and the overall experience. And there's a lot of testing that we have to do. The upcoming monastery area and the adjoining crypt took about two calendar months to complete. Our current rate seems to be about one hour of gameplay per month of work, as we don't have to touch the engine so much and can finally focus more on the content side of Driftmoon. Making the content is very hard work, since we're committed to keeping each hour of gameplay fun! We're certainly hoping to keep that up for the rest of the development time.
Just wanted to let you know of an interesting vote that's opened in TIGSource just recently. The list of Most Anticipated Unreleased Indie Games (2011 version) includes a long list of upcoming indie titles, Driftmoon included. So, in case there is an indiegame, or -games you're anxiously awaiting, this is a great opportunity to go and cast your vote (it's possible to select many games when you cast your vote - just be sure to select them all during the same vote, because you can't change your vote later).
Check the list and vote especially if you're interested in coming indie titles. It's a great chance to update your knowledge on what's coming - and maybe even find some new pearls in the bunch!
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