Hello! I'm Mr. Slate and here you can find the patch notes for v.0.9.49 of the MoonWard Demo! This is the latest and as of today current MoonWard patch version.
The focus for this patch was the multi-stage boss fights, quality of life features like favouriting items, polish and bug fixing.
Lastly, before I continue, you can download the latest version of the MoonWard Demo here!
Please consider joining my Patreon, for early access content and many more perks, or donating through my Ko-fi page!
Let's get to the patch notes!
1. New player character art!
I finally managed to get this new art in the game! I've had it done for a few months now, have just been busy with other stuff. It was made by the awesome Zap over at Instagram and I'm really happy with all of it!
This patch has all the player character avatars replaced with the new art. All enemies still use the old art apart from some I had to touch up to fit lore-wise. I'm going to be adding the old player portraits to the enemy pool to give them a much needed boost of variety.
2. More hex tile art!
This has been a long time coming. A bit of context is probably necessary. Every area in every county has a pool of possible tile variants. The pool is predefined by the designer (that's me!). This allows for counties to look fairly different in game.
So far I had done the unique hex variants county 1/2 but not for 3/4/5. This wasn't an issue so far because I was focusing on the demo. Now that I'm working on the full game, I figured I might as well start with the hexes because they help mould the overall feel of the counties.
This patch adds all unique tiles for county 3 and about 50% of the unique tiles used in county 4 and county 5. I'll be adding the rest of the new tiles in the next patch or two.
3. County music looping improved.
So far the way music worked on the map screen was that one track would simply be picked and looped forever.
This is no longer the case! I implemented a manager which makes sure tracks only loop 2 to 4 times and the next track is always different from the previous. In brief - county tracks will now change after some time instead of looping forever. There's also a short delay between the two tracks.
I also have a surprise announcement! I'm working with someone to get some more music for MoonWard! There are eight more tracks in the works! I've heard early versions of some of them already and I think you'll love them and they'll really enhance the mood in the hubs!
4. Disable-this-popup button on popups.
Sort of a simple addition. Some context. A large amount of popups in MoonWard can be disabled in the settings menu. This is done through a sub-menu and is really easy because you can also turn all on and all off.
Something I noticed was that sometimes I got annoyed at the popup, immediately forgot to turn it off and then was annoyed again when the popup re-appeared. The solution was pretty obvious - I added a button on popups that can be disabled. The button brings another popup asking if you'd like to disable the original popup. Whatever you click the original popup remains for you to dismiss. I think this was an elegant solution and it immediately improved my experience.
5. Map zooming is animated.
I was a little apprehensive to do this. There are a few systems that interact with the camera and originally I wasn't sure if adding animations would create opportunity for bugs.
In the end it turned out that I was overly-cautious... and had future-proofed my code. As a result the animations didn't break anything and were plugged in quite easily. I'm pretty happy with the final effect - it looks nice and smooth and it works well.
6. Added speech checks to some stories.
While MoonWard is primarily an action game, I've made a lot of effort to allow multiple play-styles. One of those is using charisma to resolve situations. Unfortunately I'd missed a few stories where speech could have helped a lot.
I'm not going to list these because spoilers, but I've added over half a dozen new speech checks to that many stories. I feel this aspect of the game is a bit lacking so I'll be adding more in the future!
7. Quality of life improvements.
Primarily balancing changes.
8. Fixed bugs and typos.
There weren't many bugs left after last patch, though I admittedly didn't stress test it as hard due to time limitations. I'll go back to much more rigorous playtesting for next patch.
So these were the MoonWard Demo patch notes for v0-9-49. Let me know what you think in the comments or on our Discord server!
Thank you all for your time! I work hard on these patches so please give the MoonWard Demo a try!
Have a great week and like always,
stay awesome!
Comments