Can’t believe the year has almost passed, we know that we were behind our original scheduled release date, but we had a lot of great progress and improvements done for LUNA in the year as well! After the crucial and difficult restructuring job was finished, we were then able to work on the new levels properly from this summer. We had also released an Alpha demo for selected KS backers as promised and researched for our future publisher in order to start preparing a bit early on the business side.
By now, we can finally confirm that LUNA will have in total:
- 21+ puzzle game levels
- 34-36 locations (game backgrounds)
- 6+ cinematic animations
- 30+ original soundtracks
The overall weight, complexity, and the number of levels of the game have been almost doubled compared to LUNA’s original design. These expanding decisions do cost a lot more workload, delays, and challenge. We do hope in each Kickstarter updates we’ve shared our dev news with everyone clearly and honestly, no matter good or bad. Because we really believe they are worth the time to improve. More so, we deeply appreciate everyone’s patience and advice. We know it won’t be easy to make the game the way we want with very limited resources and money, and yet your support has helped push us to keep moving forward.
From the image below we can see that only 2 mock level to be designed, then the level design will head into the next "polish and debug" stage. Meanwhile, the remaining cinematics will be the next development focus point.
LUNA's visual thumbnail of development progress
Current Progress Overview:
During these couple of weeks, we had a great chance to work as a whole team in Shanghai again! But sadly the good times always fly by, due to the work-related issues, our music composer Wang Qian will be moving to Canada with her husband from this month (of course, the team will still be working together on LUNA as usual), but in the future, we will need to consider another time zone to arrange the internet meetings. But on the bright side, we will be able to attend more game expos and meet more indie fellows in America and Canada in the future!
Okay, back to the dev progress, since these few weeks we were able to work closely, it has really increased the development speed. We have only two more mockup levels left to code (hopefully to be done by end of the month) and 3 existing mockup levels’ gameplay to be polished. Also, we started adding freshly designed sound effects, finally we can say goodbye to free sound libraries.
Next month’s plan:
Followed our previous plan, we will be focusing on polishing all the mockup levels’ art material and interactive animation in early 2018 while debugging all the levels. Meanwhile, we will carry on working on the remaining cinematics, sound design, and music for these animation shots.
Thank you, everyone who has been supporting us all along, see you in 2018!