MoonWard v1.0.40 Patch Notes!

Hello! I'm Mr. Slate and here you can find the patch notes for v.1.0.40 of the Android and iOS versions of MoonWard and the Demo on Android! This is the latest and as of today current MoonWard patch version for both iOS and Android.

If you'd like to support me, please consider joining my Patreon for frequent updates.

I used this release to introduce some long-planned quality of life improvements and small non-gameplay features as well as fixing up some more serious bugs! Unlike last time there is some content here but it isn't related to gameplay... kind of. You'll see!

Let's get to the MoonWard v1.0.40 Patch Notes!

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1. Added lore friendly Seasonal events (Offline)!

Alright, this feels out of character for MoonWard because seasonal events are usually used as a monetisation tactic and loot FOMO. Well, there are no money involved here - and there are no locked items. This is completely offline, based on your device's date. I'll sometimes have to do small patches to add content but otherwise you should be able to experience these offline. Instead, think of this as a set of small temporary boosts to spice up gameplay a bit.

The way these events work is that four times a year, three months apart, there will be a month-long seasonal event. During this event each of your characters will get a special trait which boosts a few thematic stats. For example, during the summer event your fire resistance and damage will be boosted.

Additionally, the events give me the in-universe opportunity (excuse) to add a handful of new items each time and write books elaborating on the world, which is always nice. In fact, the first two of these lore books are in as part of this patch!

2. Added a Credits menu in settings!

Like I said a few weeks in a post - this should have been in since the beginning. It just legitimately got lost in the bottomless pit that is my backlog. You can access the credits with a new button in the settings menu which opens a popup.

I did think about actual end-game credits but some of the endings drop you back into the world and I couldn't figure out a good way to do it so I ended up with the current system. If I get a better Idea how to tie this to ending videos I'll do that too, but for now at least I have a dedicated place to thank the people who helped me make MoonWard. Ultimately, that last part is all that matters.

3. Fading transitions for loading screens.

This was surprisingly tricky. Don't get me wrong - I do think it was worth it. It definitely makes navigating much, smoother. Unfortunately, I hadn't taken the fade effect into account when building the game, so I had to do a bunch of hand-tweaking to hide all the state transitions. Not a mistake I'll make in the future. Still, like I said - totally worth it.

Except for the one place where it wasn't. Adding the transition was in fact uncomfortably difficult in one specific case - to the point that I had to stop trying and let it go for now. The loading screen taking you to brawls is quite a lot more complex than all the other loading screens. It's actually using the same system to put together the bounty location image as the journal. It uses several layered images to put together the location. On top of that, I count on you to not see some parts of the image. Because of how the Unity engine works, fading these layers out never looked good. The separate layers are too complicated and as soon as they become transparent they begin to clash and artefact awfully. All of that to say - the brawl loading screen was consistently an eye sore so it is the only loading screen that didn't get the fading effect.

4. Added 16bit Page File support (Android Only).

This is the biggest technical upgrade in this patch. It's largely irrelevant to most of you and 100% required by the Play Store. Essentially it's new memory management tech used in the latest phones to... make things smoother by caching larger chunks of memory... in some way. Look, frankly, I don't particularly care what this does. No doubt it's another in a recent string of optimisations that tries to squeeze all the possible performance from hardware that's just not providing the year-on-year advances it used to. Anyway, I feel validated by the fact that 99% of you won't even have phones that support this.

There's actually a MW patch resolving a close equivalent to this requirement coming for iOS soon. Apparently by the end of April, iOS apps will require being built on a machine with the latest MacOS (26). This is kind of a left field requirement since for the longest time the cut-off was a much older version (18). I don't know - maybe it has to do with Apple's Liquid Glass UI push.

Actually, I'll take my cynic hat off for just a moment. One good thing coming from these frequent update requirements is the potential culling effect it has on the stores. It brings a smile to my face thinking that thousands of junk apps must be delisted every year due to failing these requirements. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I hope it's the case.

5. Fixed stagger exploits.

Oh this was a fun one. Did you know that you could parry an opponent and then stagger them while parried, letting you do twice the critical damage? Or that it was slightly easier to stagger opponents during the wind-down phase of a move? Yeah. Can't do those anymore! To be fair they weren't actually that useful anyway, but they definitely gave the wrong signals to the player. Generally speaking when it comes to game design, inconsistency leading to confusion is worse than something being visibly broken. So the exploits had to go.

6. Fixed brawl panels sometimes appearing twice.

This fix was actually easier than I thought it would be. It turns out I had a redundant bit of code sometimes being called in parallel with the intended code. This created a duplicate panel which then animated as usual.

Honestly the bug happened quite fast so the only way I knew was by the echo in the sound effect. The brawl screen is already quite complex and I'm struggling to keep its performance up. This was a completely unnecessary performance drain, even if the game did handle it gracefully.

7. Fixed bugs & typos.

There are much less fixes this time, hopefully that's a trend going forward. Nothing game-breaking.

I also started addressing a whole group of bugs - item duplications. There are a few stories where if you perform certain steps during dialogue, you can end up with two of the reward items instead of one. This was by far the most time consuming fix as trying to track it and design a solution took the better part of the day. So far I've only addressed this bug in one story but that's mostly because tracking the bug took most of the time I had allocated for this task. Now that I have a process I should be able to fix the rest much quicker.

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So these were the MoonWard patch notes for v1-0-40. 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 consider giving MoonWard a try!

Have a great week and like always,

stay awesome!