Moonring 1.0.0 - Dedicated to Ken 'Scan' Lilly (1986-2025)

It's here! Version 1.0.0. What's changed? Not a lot. That's kind of the point. If there were a lot of changes I'd be holding off.

But here we are, V1.0.0 at build 947. Well, that's a lie. I wish 947 really was an accurate count of all the builds, but it's only a count of the builds created since I began tracking them, which was at least 2 years into the project. So it's probably a thousand or more. Criminy.

I began writing this game back in 2019, after finding myself playing Bloodborne through for the third time, unable to find a different game I wanted to play and feeling I should probably do something more productive with my time. So I said:

"Hey, I'll create an Ultima-like game. It'll take, like what... a year?"

Turns out I was... off... by a bit. I hear that happens. Covid did weird stuff to time, anyway, so some of those years don't count.

There were moments where I was convinced I lacked the skill or talent to do what I wanted. Moments where I thought 'You... just suck.' Well, it turned out I was right, and so - while learning to suck less - I had various people help out along the way. They are mostly listed in the Credits page. I'm so grateful for their help.

There's one guy who I didn't include in the credits because he didn't directly contribute to Moonring. He didn't code for it, or make art, or discuss its design over the years. But he's in there now. He's at the top. He died last week, kind of unexpectedly. He'd had medical issues for a while, and most of us thought he'd get better. And then... he... didn't. His name is... was Kenneth Lilly, known as 'Scan' to many of us. He was a veteran, on full disability after being severely injured in Afghanistan. He loved cooking. He loved The Dresden Files. He loved his cat, Zorro. He loved his friends. He was one of the first people I met when I started playing Final Fantasy 14. He was kind, patient, intelligent, and so ridiculously knowledgeable and nerdy about RPGs. Especially Final Fantasy. He knew the names of every music track. Every piece of lore. He became our D&D Dungeon Master a little after that, and it turned out he'd created a whole world. He was so proud of it, and we really enjoyed our time exploring it in the years we played. I learned more about being a GM from him than any books or videos.

But now he's gone and the internet is full of digital mementos of his life... ...all the things he was never able to finish. And I miss him far more than I ever expected. Grief really sucks.

Moonring is a game born from my love of RPGs of all sorts, both as player and GM. GMing teaches you about balancing player agency, storytelling and world-building, and Scan taught me to do these things better just by being who he was and doing what he loved.

And so, I'm dedicating version 1.0.0 of Moonring to his memory.

Thanks for bearing with me on this patch note.

Here are the details:

[DONE] Stopped spawn/despawn conditions of a boss being incompatible and making the game crawl [DONE] Re-fix for a slowdown when getting Tutorial messages [DONE] Fixed description of the Trap ability to actually reflect the new trap it places [DONE] Buffed Cruciform so it is no longer blocked ridiculously by delicate webs [DONE] Buffed Expel so it's now... probably too powerful 😕 [DONE] Expel is no longer usable in the Overworld so you can't use it on that boss I mentioned