Great News!
LUNA has won the Best Visual Art of the Year award in the Indieplay 2016 games festival (Shanghai, China) last week! Woohoo! ╰(*°▽°*)╯
Like many indie game studios or dev individuals all over the world, sometimes it could feel quite isolating and daunting during game development. It's not easy to be a one-man band, so it's always nice to meet other game developers to bounce ideas, make connections, and most importantly, to show support for each other.
Trying to take a baby step for LUNA in the industry, we (Lantern Studio) submitted our game’s demo 2 months ago to Indieplay 2016, one of the biggest indie game festivals in China. Regardless of whether it would have won anything or not, it would already have been a great experience for us. During the last couple of weeks and the 2-day festival show, we met many game industry experts, individual developers, indie game studios, and indie game supporters. To our surprise, it could not have ended in any better way, as LUNA won the prize in the Best Visual Art category! This is such a huge encouragement for a small team like us, with still many miles to walk. We thank you all for keeping believing in us.
Okay, now let’s get back to the dev log.
The Shadows
You do notice that our game has a small subtitle call “The Shadow Dust” right? So what is it? If you have tried the demo, you must remember the shadow crow in the beginning. In fact, these shadows will be playing a huge part in the latter part of the game. It has also a lot to do with the character’s past and the mystery about the tower. So during the last month, we focused on developing the “shadows” side of the story in some of the levels. Here are some animations and concept art about these things from the dark side.
Shadow Creature - Concept Art
Shadows among the Paintings
Interactive Objects
LUNA is actually not a typical point-and-click game. With no dialogue/text to read and click through, it relies heavily on the interactive animations, music and randomly popped up effects to keep the player entertained while solving the puzzles. So we were also trying to get as many items in the background clickable as possible. Many still object are now being animated, designed with new sound effects and mini-game features. We hope they will add more fun and magic into the game world.
