MoonWard Going Forward (March 2025)

Welcome to the "MoonWard Going Forward" (MGF) blog!

I'm Mr. Slate and I'm here to let you know what's been happening with MoonWard as of March 2025!

Please make sure to check out the MoonWard demo on the Google Play Store and our Discord Community!

If you'd like to support us, please check our Patreon and Ko-fi!

Let's talk about the new stuff! I'm focusing on the following in this month's MoonWard Going Forward.

Next Patch

Patch v0.9.59 for the MoonWard Demo on Android will come out on the 8th of April.

Books & Updated Notes

I've added books to the game! They are of type valuable, can be bought in the market and can be used to gain experience and in some cases they unlock notes. This mechanic will be used in stories. For example, you'll have to buy a specific book to gain a note in order to continue the story. Books will be fairly expensive too so they'll act as another rewarding way to spend gold.

With that change I've decided to update the notes system so now notes can be associated with an author and a book. This should have the added benefit of making the notes system a little more organic than before. I probably shouldn't mention this before designing it but... I'd also like to add multi-tier notes. Ones where as you read about a topic you gain more paragraphs in the related note.

Oh and as a result there will be more notes added in the next version!

Updated NPC Icons

While last patch I updated the player icons, this time I'm focusing on the NPC's. There were a few old icons I wanted to replace because they clashed with the lore. I've began creating icons for the new stories as well but those will only be featured in the full version.

More Hexes

I have to be honest this is a lot more work than I expected! Sure, the wilderness tiles are fairly easy because I have a lot of assets to build them from, but the town and city tiles take so much longer. Buildings in both County 4 and 5 have a completely different architecture to what's in there already and I'm still figuring out what I'll do about them. To be fair this problem extends to the area images in the journal as well. I'll keep soldiering on and we'll have to see what happens!

Bugs & Feedback from the event on the 8th/9th March

The event a few weeks ago was once again extremely valuable for getting feedback and even finding some bugs! Mostly fringe stuff but I'd rather fix as much as I can before release! I've been slowly taking care of the bugs over the last couple of weeks and am about to start with the new features! It all falls under quality of life - nobody saw anything major missing - but like bugs - I'd like to ship in as polished state as possible!

Features

Here's a list of done, approved and work in progress features as of writing this. The WIP percentages are all over the place, that doesn't mean I've started and stopped work on these, or working on them in parallel. In games development larger features are broken down in standalone tasks that can be as small as 1 hour. For example, a "New Enemies" task can be 4 separate tasks of varying duration and the tasks can be done in any order. So with that in mind...

Enough rambling! Here's the current approved major feature list:

DONE: New music! It'll be in the new versions going forward! Unfortunately a lot of it is in counties outside the demo so you'll have to wait till the full release to hear it.
DONE: More County 2 content. Finally managed to finish the last side story of County 2!
WIP 80%: All player characters are done, I now need to replace and update story and bounty portraits.
WIP 70%: Increased hex variation. Finished hexes for County 3 and began work on County 5 hexes. Will begin working on County 4 shortly.
WIP 20%: Long term Save Game. Currently all of your characters are deleted forever when the game is uninstalled. This is obviously not ideal. Modern games save these in the cloud. I'm not interested in that. I did some research on this and it seems plausible.
WIP 1%: iOS Release. I've began looking into this again. Hope I won't get messed around by Apple for 3 months again.

Pricing and Support

Lastly, I'd like to elaborate on a couple of things regarding the demo and pricing.

Price. The demo (and App Store intro version if that's even happening anymore) will always be free. The full version (on Android and iOS) will always be a one time purchase. There will never be any in-app purchases. There will never be any adverts. There will never be battle passes. There will never be Web3 technology.
Support/Patching. When the full version is released, the demo will continue to receive patches at the same rate as the full version. This will include new or changed content in county 1 and partially (side stories and bounties) in county 2, as well as any upgraded/new systems and mechanics available in those hubs. The demo will also get bugfixes and balance updates in parallel with the full version.

Before I go, if you'd like to support us, please check our Patreon and Ko-fi! Any donations and patronage towards Slate Games and MoonWard development are greatly appreciated!

Thank you all so much for your continued support! It's very humbling to be able to do what I love!

Like always,

stay awesome!