Devlog#21 Hello 2019!

Happy New Year Everyone!

Hope you all had a wonderful Holiday Season, relaxed and well fed, and now fully boosted to welcome wonderful adventures in the brand new 2019! We can’t believe time passes so quickly - this year will be one of the most important for LUNA, because we are aiming complete production and deliver our final release!

Game production and level gameplay optimization

Right now, these pieces of work are all going ahead together. While Betty works on the last few bits of animation and UI design, Susie is beginning the musical composition for our cutscenes. Fox and Guan, meanwhile, are full on with coding and optimization. Aside from all this, we are also continuing to work on our own real-time gameplay tests for LUNA, before moving towards external QA. In a nutshell, we will play the completed 25-level game ourselves from beginning to end countless times, to ensure it is smooth and well balanced.

Gameplay testing is vitally important. Over the past few months of initial proofing, we received a great deal of important pieces of feedback. As a result, we rearranged some of the levels to make sure that the puzzle order is nicely structured. Our original design might have looked good to our eyes, but at the end of day your enjoyment of LUNA is the most important aim for us. Third-party viewpoints are incredibly valuable!

Some screenshot from the cutscenes animations

Susie’s working progress for one of the animation cutscenes

Player friendly hint and guide

We have thought a lot about how to apply a hint system in LUNA. Different games do this in various ways, so there is really no golden rule here. We don’t wanna take away the challenge and fun for puzzle lovers, but at the same time, we have to consider what will happen if players actually do get stuck.

The trend nowadays for many games is to rely on a step by step guide, which some say is helpful for players to understand quickly, but in our opinion, sometimes it dulls the experience of the game itself. LUNA’s fundamental core is point and click gameplay. The player explores their environment with the cursor. Above all, we really need to make sure when player focuses on an interactive area, they receive clear feedback that points towards the result, a direction or a solution. One of the key reasons we all love indie games is the freedom to break away from standard game industry design rules - if rules make our game less fun, why should we follow it.

In response to this, we’ve improved some of the mouse functionality and the appearance of interactive objects, so that the player doesn’t feel like they are just hunting for pixels! We’ve also designed a new loading UI/system to help people find their location inside the game better.

The improved cursor designs (arrow/hand/feet) for a clearer interactive experience in the game.

New loading screen, also serve the purpose as an in-game map, level selection page.

Colorblind friendly optimization

In testing, we learned a very important lesson when we realized that one of our levels might appear to be particularly difficult for colorblind players or those with similar visual impairments. During the past few weeks, we redesigned some parts of the offending level to allow all players to see it clearly.

We also wrote a devlog about it, explaining what is the method we used to solve the problem. We’re now testing this level again with players who might have found it confusing before. If you’d like to volunteer to help with this, please contact us - it will be very much appreciated!

Next few weeks plan

Professional QA will be invited to help us debug, meanwhile we are working on ways to size down LUNA for final distribution. Last but not least, visual effects will help create an even better atmosphere for the game. How can magic be magic without pretty particle effects! *Lumos Maxima!*

By end of January, we’re aiming to finish all the cinematics and in-game animations. So the third milestone will hopefully soon be reached.

A new demo will be released soon in the first Quarter of the year, available for everyone to play. We will also be sending out a second round beta test after the debug is complete.

So that’s all for this update, LUNA will be waiting for everyone very soon in 2019! See you guys very soon with more news!

Devlog#20 Optimization LUNA for Players with colorblindness

When I was young, I read the story about John Dalton who described his own color blindness in 1794. In common with his brother, he confused scarlet with green and pink with blue. This story has always fascinated me, because with ‘normal’ vision, it’s hard to unsee the color you’ve seen or simply imagine seeing the world through a completely different color palette. And I’ve often wondered how can I ever be sure that the color “yellow” I see, is the same “yellow” as everybody else’s.

My childhood wonder had quickly been forgotten until many years later, when we started working on LUNA. After sending out an alpha demo to players, we suddenly realized there was a particular level in the game, in which a small group of people become seriously stuck where most other players usually wouldn’t.

In the puzzle, players are required to pick one particular color (the correct answer) among six different colors. To my eyes, these six colors were distinctively different from one another, however I later on found out that not everyone agreed with me. Finally I came to realize that the players who had difficulty completing this puzzle simply did not see the same color as me, either aware or unaware of their color weakness.

Working as an illustrator for many years, I am so used to selecting various shades of similar colors just to make a drawing perfect to my eyes. I will easily get frustrated when prints come out just a bit darker or bluer. I actually never really truly realized how different the experience can be between people with normal vision and those with limited color recognition. Until now!

To inform my actions, I did a bit of research about the different types of colorblindness, really wanting to find a solution to a color themed puzzle that everyone could play without struggling.

From the research, I learned there are commonly three main different types of colorblindness. Each of them has a restricted color vision within certain range of colors. Some are not sensitive to blue and green, others find it hard to differentiate from red and purple (see image below).

I realized that almost all sufferers experience issues with the color green. This was the problem with our level in LUNA, a lot of greenish colors were associated with the color picking step.

If we wanted our players to be able to pick a green tone color as the correct answer to complete the puzzle, deuteranope and protanope groups of players would have difficulty figuring out the right answer. To their eye, there were other colors that appeared to be the same (see example below).

Now we knew what the problem was, the next step was to redesign the colors for this puzzle. But the challenge, even now we were aware of the situation, was that there would still be no way for us to know which group of colorblind players would be playing this game. As all are sensitive to different rage of colors, simply changing from one color to another might just cause the problem for another group. We needed something for everyone.

First of all, we decided to avoid putting any green tones together in the design, as all three groups of colorblind people would have issues here. Secondly, we tried to avoid primary reds and greens in the same group, next to each other, as they often appear to be very similar as well. To help colorblind players, we added a bluish tint on the original design. By doing this, it knocks them into a different color range . Now, after the changes, players can distinctively tell the difference from A and B.

Last step, we re-designed the choices pool. From the previous six color choices we had before, three of them appeared very similar for colorblind players. Instead of changing the red color we wanted to use for the correct answer, we changed the other five, to make sure that all the other choices can still appear varied enough for colorblind players to distinguish within the range they can see. Although the final colors lose some of their original color tone, the answer color now looks different from the rest of other choices, and can be picked out more easily.

That’s how we attempted a more color-friendly redesign! We still have to test it with players to see if it actually works as intended, and also how much it might affect the original puzzle difficulty. We hope this will make everyone’s gaming experience more enjoyable. It was a very valuable lesson we learned from the feedback we received from our recent exhibitions and shows. You guys are helping us make the game better and better.

Devlog#19 October Update

With the leaves slowing turning to yellow, we thought it was about time to give you guys another update on LUNA! Can’t believe these two months have flown by like an arrow. We’re heading closer and closer towards our production deadline. The past few weeks have been intensely busy for us (as usual) so let’s see what we have accomplished so far.

The walking System Optimization

We’ve been focused on optimizing the walking and interaction system recently and have upgraded it to a better, smoother one with some improved new animation sets.

Instead of doing it the most common way, by moving a flat character walking animation between two spots, which usually might appear like sliding/floating on the floor while moving, we have built our walking system with a more realistic, handcraft look.

We added more frames between the idle post and the walking cycle to give it a nice transition. With the variation of 8 different set of walking animations, our character is now able to stop on a very specific spot to interact with an object, each step firmly on the ground without sliding when walking.

This has been one of the most challenging things we've worked on since the beginning of LUNA. It is time-consuming and quite difficult to do. During all this time we couldn’t help thinking, "no wonder most developers choose not to do their walking system in this way!". This is the kind of challenge that makes us really grow and learn from the journey, and it is one of the the few precious moments of pride in indie gaming, knowing we stuck to our unique approach and it worked!  Together with our characters’ cell animation and the 2d draw backgrounds, the world of LUNA now feels both magical and also has the tangible feeling we hoped to achieve.

We wrote a dev log about this issue, if you’re interested in the details you can read it here from our website.

Cinematic Production

Knowing the storytelling will largely rely on the cinematics, we’ve been working on the story for a long time before finalizing our storyboard. Even so, there're still many details, the motion design of each scene that needs to be done along with the animation.

Background - draft animation - line drawing - clean up - coloring. This was and still is the ONLY way for traditional 2D animation nowadays. The magic button I am ever longing for to automatically create the in-between frames still waits to be invented. Until then, keep calm and keep animating.

We have in total about 15-20 min footage of hand-drawn animation in LUNA. Now we've done half of it, basically, 5-10 sec per day is our aim. Our plan is still to finish all the animation before the end of this year. It is a very tight schedule but we intend to keep up the pace! We’re really excited about it and can’t wait to have them all in the game as a whole.

Here is some sneak-peek footage of the animation we’ve done so far.

Music and sound Fx

Two thirds of the levels now have music. We have to tell you, the music adds so much more emotion immediately felt when you play the game. It makes a huge difference.

Instead of each room having an individual background track, our music composer Wang Qian took a broader approach. Each character/chapter has its own melody, each with a distinctive emotional tune. By changing the instruments, key, or tempo, we apply subtle variations that blend nicely with each level or cinematic music track. So the overall album of the soundtrack of LUNA will sound more like one big complete work.

It’s not always a straightforward production process on the music side. Music is such an abstract form of art that within the team we had many differences along the way, sometimes even arguments! But the final result you’ll hear in LUNA is the best that came out of us. (some clips of LUNA’s new music below)

Adventure X and Weplay 2018

As some of you might know already, we will be attending this year’s Adventure X  in London on Nov 9-10th, the game show will be held in one of my favourite place in London, the British Library! If you already bought the tickets please do come around and say hi, ask us questions or just chat around! For those who can’t be there in person, please follow our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, we will have the live updates during that weekend to make sure to share our moment with you all!

Players will also be able to try out LUNA at Weplay 2018 in Shanghai on Nov 3-4th. Some of team members in China might be there to great you too!

Next few weeks plan:

From now till the end of this year we will be aiming to complete 90% of the animation ( if everything goes super smooth we might even finish all of them, fingers cross), then complete ¾ of the music and soundtrack. Meanwhile, we will continue to have industry internal gameplay testing and debugging. We’re also about to start preparing the marking job and publishing / legal business.

We're also thinking to update a new free demo for everyone on the website by the end of the year, we’d announce it in all our social platforms when it’s ready. We’ll soon be back with more news!

Devlog #18 Mind the Gap-The study of LUNA's Character walking system

So, we’ve been meaning to write about LUNA’s character walking system design for quite a while. Now that the optimization of the system has been completed, we are finally able to share some of our process with everyone.

Have you ever wondered how characters walk in video games? In a nutshell - imagine we have a box. The typical method would be to program this box to move from A to B, then replace that box with your character in a flat walking cycle animation. The character will look like it is walking (or running) between those two spots.

But if you look carefully, you will notice that the walking is actually only an imitation - Technically it is a character sliding across the floor while moving its legs. Hardly the carefully hand-animated approach we envisaged for LUNA! You can adjust the start and stop speeds to make it look more natural, but still, in the middle of the animation, the character moves flatly across the floor.

8 bit Mega man game, the character slid a lot on the floor, which is consider normal in most of the game design nowadays for a smoother movement.

In real life, we walk step-by-step and our walking distance is usually not an evenly distributed motion like the above example. Our bodies don’t actually move too much between “lifting a foot off the floor from behind us” and “placing it in front of us”. It only starts to move forward when we actually step out and put the foot down, with the forward momentum created by the gap between the two legs.

If we break this action down into an animation sequence of eight frames, four per leg, there are only two frames per leg representative of moving forwards. Therefore, it is rather difficult to code an animation system this way, because the movement is not evenly distributed across the eight frames. ( see break down image for walking cycle below)

We knew we wanted to do better than this and for some reason with LUNA, we are so crazy that we wanted to imitate the normal way in which people walk, with each step having a solid place on the floor. We liked the tangible realism of this kind of animation and a handcrafted style worked nicely with LUNA’s hand drawn backgrounds, aesthetic and other animations. However, it also came with a very big challenge!

In order to interact with the different objects in each level, the character needed to be able to start walking then stop at almost any specific spot. A realistic walking cycle would surely not be able to stop at a precise stopping point. So, we had to find a way to deal with the gaps in between.

First of all, we made a total of eight sets of walking animations to cover some of the stopping points within a full walking cycle. If the total set of distance is X, the character can now stop at his ½ X, ⅓ X,¼, X⅛ ...etc. . With these eight mini-distance options and combinations in place, the programming was now able to choose the most suitable animation to play after the player clicked the point where he wanted the character to go.

Also, within each walking set, the character would not just sharply switch from walking to an idle pose. Instead, when he was about to reach his destination, he would stop more like a real person, turning the body a bit and lowering his step. If the walking distance required is a very small amount, instead of walking, the character would now do a small sideways hop like when we cross a puddle on the street!

3 steps of improving the basic walking cycle

Here we’re showing 3 sets out of those 8, which you can see they cover different distance from a full cycle to just 1/4 of it.

Everything seemed good so far, however this system still did not allow the character to stop at ANY point, because distance can be divided into even smaller fractions, leading us to create an infinite set of animations. That just not achievable (and crazy).

So, after many other tests and adjustments, we decided on a minimum unit of travel, around 5 pixels. This is an insanely small distance at the game’s resolution, but is small enough to serve our purpose. Based on this spec, we distributed any extra distance that our current walking system did not cover into a few of the transitional frames among the eight sets of walking animations - usually the step-down frame which you actually need in order to move the body forward.

This has been one of the most challenging things we've worked on since the beginning of LUNA. It is time-consuming and quite difficult to do. During all this time we couldn’t help thinking, "no wonder most developers choose not to do their walking system in this way!". We don’t know whether it has been worth spending so much time on this and maybe it is not the best approach to walking issues in video games after all - but, this is also the kind of challenge that makes us really grow and learn from the journey, and it is one of the the few precious moments of pride in indie gaming, knowing we stuck to our unique approach and it worked!

Together with our characters’ cell animation and the 2d draw backgrounds, the world of LUNA now feels both magical and also has the tangible feeling we hoped to achieve. It was a kind of adventure journey into the unknown, crossing desert and dark forest but finally arriving the other side, we truly think it was a great experience that we’ve loved sharing with everyone :)

Devlog#17 Milestone reached, Steam Community & Newsletter!

LUNA’s development is moving forward at a good speed in the past two months! We’ve accomplished a lot of work in the past month, now let’s break it down in details. 

First of all, we’re really happy to announce in this update that :

We reached our 2nd Milestone! 
ALL the level design and background art for each level have now been completed!
 

This is a great accomplishment in our development, it means no more temporary mock-up blocks or shapes lurking around in the game anymore, and for the first time in the last two years of development, we get to looking at LUNA in the way we imagined it should look like. In HD quality and vivid color! 

                                                      Here are some (sneak peeks) of few of background images

The other reason why hitting this milestone is so significant for us is, now that all the gameplay related objects have locked on their final position, we can then kick off the task of precisely tweaking all the animations/interactive movement for each level. Here’s one example of an animation - before we decided on the best position for the stool and the table in the house, the mouse move distance couldn’t be finalized. But now we can push with these types of jobs. Below is the final version for this small animation.

                                                                Mouse jump animation from draft to final version

Because we can now truly visually experience the game in the same way that all players will experience it, we can also start working on adjusting the storytelling part of the game design. Between animations and cut scenes, there will usually be a transition period. It might seem like just a simple fading in or out or 1-2 short pause, but in order to give the best storytelling result, we need to treat this timing as an “editing job” like in a post-production movie. eg. Inside a dark room, do we want the players to feel excited or a bit uneasy? According to that, should we then increase or decrease the time they remain inside the darkness? Many of these nano-adjustment might seem unimportant in a puzzle game, but subconsciously, what we see and hear for a split sec will influence our emotion at different gaming stages. We could only start to play around these adjustments once we got the final artworks and animation in place.

Last but not least, this is also extremely important to our Musician, Wang Qian and Sound artist, Mr.F - by looking at each level in full detail then they give the best SFX designed for LUNA. Here is another music demo piece from LUNA.

Next (few) months’ plans:

The next milestone we are heading towards is to build a complete beta demo. We will be aiming at two major tasks in the next few following months.

1) level gameplay optimization.

From all the exhibition experiences and a few private playtest results, we already gathered quite a lot of valuable feedback. That includes major bug reports/fixes and user experience improvements, so the characters can walk, climb, perform the way players think they should. Anything that’s confusing or leads players in the wrong direction will have to be taken out. This part usually takes a quite bit of back and forth, testing to get a perfect balance.

2) Cinematic production.

All cinematics need to transform from storyboard mockups to animated scenes with music. There’s really no shortcut for that, I just need to put my head down and start to draw. We’re planning to complete at least 80% of them by when we have our level optimization done. So when we send a demo for the formal playtest by professional QC and QA ppl, they should be able to have a very complete experience of LUNA.

                                                           Storyboard drawings are ready for animation

Steam Community / Newsletter / more social media platforms are now available!

We can’t leave our marketing side-quest neglected. A huge thanks to everyone who has been spreading the word for us and please continue to do so if you can! Now, you can not only follow us on Twitter and Facebook, we’re also on Instagram and Tumblr!

We’ve also set up a Lantern Studio Newsletter and Steam Community page, just choose your favorite media, we will make sure to update on all these platforms with our latest news! 
Sign up now and you’ll get some exclusive desktop/phone wallpapers to say thanks!

                                                                      Free wallpaper for desktop & phone when you sign up

So that’s all for this update this time, we’re getting there slowly but steadily! 
See you guys very soon with more news!