Devlog #3 The Shadows & Interactive Objects

August 2, 2016 Beidi Guo

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.

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.

Devlog #2 Garden & Puzzle Design Paradox

July 2, 2016 Beidi Guo

This month felt like it went past really quick for some reason, so many things happened around us. UK has left the EU, England football team has been kicked out off the Euro Cup (good luck Iceland!), Roses died along with the young king under the seven pointed star, and Dragons are finally crossing the sea…but most importantly we have finished the design of one of the most complicated levels (so far).

The Garden

This new level includes three different locations which all applied with the dual character game play system. This means not only the artwork load has been tripled, but more beloved bugs are on the way (deep breath). As this dynamic dual feature is one of the thing most people are looking forward to after trying out the demo, so we are trying our best to make sure it's fun to play and easy to understand.

However the typical paradox of any puzzle game is always :

“How to balance the difficulty of the puzzles between player’s ability and expectation?”

If we made the puzzle too difficult, it might discourage the players to carry on. If we reduce the difficulty too much, it might lose some of its originality and the wow factor. On top of that, not to mention how hard/easy is a puzzle to the everyone? Simply this question do not have a straight forward answer.

So during making a hard level like this, we have to decide, are we more likely to favor the hardcord puzzle challenge, or more leaning towards easier puzzles with a smoother gameplay experience? After analyzing all the feedback from different groups of testers (gamers, game designers, friends and family), we agreed that to deliver a good game experience is more important than how clever or hard can the puzzles be. This means, based on what we have done so far, we need to reduce some of the difficulty of the puzzles even more than we thought.

Instead of hoping players think their brain off to solve the puzzle, we will now provide some clues within the game (different from hint system). All the while making sure that it is not very obvious to the player to notice at the first place, however if you observe carefully, you will find it in the environment. In the same time, we’ll also pump up the" Mission Complete” rewarding sensation with more animation, effect and music.

Therefore, due to the complicated puzzles in this level, during the next month we are expecting a lot of time will be needed to spend on the gameplay test. We have known this issue since the beginning of the development, but while making this level, we are really starting to face these challenges more than ever before. Programming and art has its set progress speed, 40 hours / week work load has been consistent since the ending of the KS campaign. However, the gameplay test is actually THE MOST time consuming part of the game development.

Okay, hope you don’t find that bit too boring to read. Now, brace yourself, without giving away too much, here are some new design and animation tease for this level.

&nbs… — Some concept art, level mock up and sketchs

This level requires a lot of new character animations, this is one of them

Devlog #1 The Grand Plan, aspect ratio & The Tower

June 3, 2016 Beidi Guo

The Grand Plan

After the most incredible campaign month ended, the team had a few days rest and then immediately jumped into the new development stage of LUNA. The days that "do whatever we feel like, whenever we feel like" have officially ended. With some solid funding in hand (thanks to you guys), we have now finally got the chance to plan about how we're gonna make LUNA really happen as a complete game instead of just a bag of interesting ideas.

A grand plan for LUNA has been established for approximately 18 levels ( 25+ locations ), with two storylines going side by side and delivered by animated cinematics. At the moment we've got ⅓ of the levels close to completion, another ⅓ of the levels require different amounts of redesign and the rest is still waiting to be done. That sounds like a LOT of work and we got just about 1 year to finish it, so you can bet that we are either working on LUNA or thinking about LUNA.

It’s gonna be the busiest, hardest year in our life thus far, but considering that we are doing what we love, this is also gonna be an amazing experience.

Change of aspect ratio

As many of you already noticed, our demo game runs at a 4:3 aspect ratio. The reason for that is because the demo was also used to test the iOS version in the early dev stage, and all the iPads have 4:3 screens. However for the best visual and game play experience, we think 16:9 would be a better and up to date screen format choice after all.

However, due to the massive amount of different mobile / tablet devices on the market, to have just one size able to fit all these different screens perfectly became a really big challenge for us. During the last few weeks, the team has been re-programming and reworking on some of the existing art materials to fit the new resolution and aspect ratio.

The change for the menu settings are also under modification, once it's done the players can manually quit the game and jump to any previous level whenever they like. It will allow the players to choose between different display modes, adjust graphics quality and audio settings anytime during the game.

The Tower

It is the landmark in the world of LUNA and where most of the adventures will take place. No doubt, the tower is one of the most important design elements we are going to perfect. Here are some of the latest design and concept art for the tower and its environment.

We'd like to thank Concept artist Tang, who is helping the project voluntarily .

Players can expect to not only solve the puzzles inside the tower, but also experience the world outside it. We are also designing more actions for the characters, so in some game levels, they can jump and climb in the environment outside the tower., which we believe is gonna bring more fun into the gameplay.

The birth of LUNA

March 16, 2016 Beidi Guo

By Beidi Guo

Back in 2006, during the last year of my University, I was working day and night restlessly on the final project, a short animation film called "The Plenilune" . A story about a man who piloted the moon as a spacecraft and the long distance relationship between him and his family because of this special duty. ( see screenshots below )

Almost a decade later, I find myself still often thinking about that film, or more precisely , thinking about that world. Although it was a student film, it still attracted me with its mundane and also mysterious atmosphere. I felt it was a job uncompleted. Seemed like it had a great potential to become something much more than that. I felt like something was already there, I just happen to discover it. And questions just keep popping out, like: Who build this tower? Who lived there before? Why are they able to control the moon? What does the moon mean to the people there? What is the history or legend of this world? .... The more I think the more I realized the possibility behind that simple idea.

Mean while as a gamer who specially like puzzle game , sometimes I enjoy just doodling some puzzle ideas myself. One day after some draft sketch ( see image blow) I suddenly thought " What if I try to make a game based in that unfinished world that I was longing to develop for years, how about that? " Because every time I played a great games such as : Machinearum, Gorogoa, Year walk, Limbo etc. (Oh, can't forget to mention my all time favorite "The Neverhood" by dreamworks from the 90's, also my first computer game experience ever) The desire of making my own game just grown a bit stronger. So now I know where the story gonna take place, why not turn it into a proper project?

*Early game concept art & Character design*

So I shared my thoughts with my game developer friends Fox and Guan and they both showed strong interest in it. Then half year later, while the story and research almost completed, followed by the joining of the 4th member , Qian the sound artist, the production of the game officially stated. Now we are 5 months into the production, we are hitting the first quarter mile stone and thinking to launch a kickstater campaign to make it go further.

However I still often be amazed how that little idea has grown, the story has become so complicated. Now we even have some charming characters who wonders in the game just like they have always belong there. Seems like it's not us who created the world, rather we are just lucky to help the world reveal itself.