LUNA The Shadow Dust: The Art Book

Four years ago, Lantern Studio started our indie game project on Kickstarter. With all the love and support from our backers along the way, after many challenges, the game was finally published on Feb 13th, 2020. Since then, we have been blessed by so much support and appreciation from both players and the game industry alike.

Since the completion of LUNA, I immediately decided to devote myself to the artbook’s creation. Although it was the first book-design project for me, I wanted to do it as professionally as possible. Just as we learned much during the game development, I wouldn’t be able to gain an understanding of bookmaking without taking on this task directly. Luckily, with all the generous help from friends and family, and after almost half a year, the team and I were proud of the final result.

LUNA The Shadow Dust - The Artbook is like being backstage of the game - or as I see it, a visual record of the journey from the beginning towards the end. As the game itself does not contain any dialogue, players are given the freedom to enjoy, fantasize and wonder about the world of LUNA.

In presenting the hardcover copy of the artbook, we hope it will bring further delight and a deeper understanding for you when playing our game. Furthermore, we’d love to share the wonderful game making experience with many more out there. Last but not least, I would not be surprised if one day, the seed of an idea for another game or creative project from us emerges from this book, just like how LUNA The Shadow Dust was inspired and born.

Now, it is finally happening! This book is made for you.

✨ 158 pages full-color Laminated hardcover print
📕 An extra 30 pages of content over the digital version
🖋️ Limited Signed copy exclusive to Kickstarter backer

Please support our Kickstarter Campaign HERE to bring it to more people!

Thank you for supporting us along the way!

Devlog#24 August Update

The heat wave has finally passed in the UK; are you feeling cool or still boiling?!
Put on your sunglasses and dive into the pool! Here comes our August dev update!

First of all, LUNA is going to Gamescom and PAX West!

Thanks to our convenient remote team structure, we’re able to attend both of these super-big game conventions this month! Beidi, our Art Director will be going to Cologne, Germany for Gamescom and Susie, our composer, will bring LUNA with her to PAX West in Seattle. Come and say hello if you are attending any of the events; we’d love to chat with you and share the latest news and our inside story!

How’s the game going?

We can now confidently say that we are 99.99999% of the way to reaching our biggest milestone yet! 

All sound FX for the gameplay have been completed and the cinematic sound effects will also be finished within the month. The game is almost ready. Hurrah!! No more extra graphics nor gameplay changes are needed and we are starting to push towards the testing stage. 

This month, we’re going to start a full-length internal test and debug round, firstly within the team. With the help of our publishers, we will then invite professional QA to help us with the formal bug reporting. Once we have the full build ready, we will need to test the SDK for every individual platform to make sure our players can download a playable build with all the achievement features.

What else are we working on at the moment?

We’re working on the design of the hardcover copy of the upcoming official artbook. Some backers will receive it as part of their chosen reward level and it will later be available for everyone to purchase as well. The hardcover book will be jam-packed with visuals and more on the background story of how the game was conceived and developed. Although we may release a digital version of the book at a later time, the physical book will showcase a tonne of exclusive content ONLY in the hardcover version! 

We’re also looking to start preparing the survey system for our backers so we can deliver digital rewards to you in advance, before the final release.

This little bundle of fluff has almost become LUNA's unofficial mascot. We're definitely looking into the possibility of making merchandise of them as well. We will keep everyone updated! Go on, give us your own nickname for this furball?

Health issue

After almost three years of high intensity workload and pressure, from early in the year it was clear that some of our team members’ health issues had started to become a cause for concern. A healthy body and mental state are always the foundation behind any work and unfortunately, we are no longer at the prime age to recover from a few sleepless nights and still be able to work at full strength. 

We knew from the beginning that health issues can be quite common among indie developers. Without health benefits, regular exercise and a very tight budget, health issues are easily ignored. Once health problems like constant tiredness or back pain begin to show, it is hard to recover.

As a result, after doctor’s advice, we gave some of our team members a one month (July) break from game development and went for necessary treatment and rest. Now in August, we have resumed our normal workload but have consciously decided to take things a bit slower than before. In order to avoid a delay, we’re also trying to optimize our workload more efficiently than before, so we can deliver LUNA on schedule.

Last but not least, check out our brand new interview series on our YouTube Channel!

It’s really our pleasure to share this ‘behind the scenes’ development story with you. We’re getting closer and closer to the final goal and we really couldn't achieve this much without you guys! Thank you all for supporting us all the time!

Until next time, peace out! 

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#16 Steam Page, Indie Prize Nominees and recent development progress

Summer is near, I always love the summer. The memory of summer always seems associated with holidays, reading comics, playing video games, swimming pool trips and watermelons. The good old days without smartphones to tell you that you might just miss a million of fun things. Although we can’t really go for holidays in the middle of development, however with that uplifting summer spirit, we’ve got a lot accomplished during the past weeks.

Steam Page Announcement

LUNA's Steam Page is out! It's officially here! Now you can add LUNA to your wishlist and be notified with LUNA’s release news and other stuff! We’ll really appreciate that you help us spread the news, tell your friends, family, or anyone who might enjoy our game!

Speaking of which, we’re introducing our Lantern Studio's "No-budget-for-marketing-DIY-indie-style” promotion event. Every week, anyone who re-post news related to LUNA from any two of our social media account ( Twitter | Facebook ) will have the chance to win a free A3 poster or one postcard with hand-drawn doodles!! 

This event will start from June 16th till August 31st! Winners (two each week from each platform) will be announced on Friday! For example, retweet this dev update from Twitter or share it on Facebook will give you the chances to win these goodies! 
Our social media account:  Twitter  |  Facebook 
 

Indie Prize finalist and nominees

LUNA was nominated for Best Game Audio in this year's Indie Prize awards! It was a really great experience for LUNA to receive a music-related nomination, as we’re very proud of LUNA’s original music design. 

Here you can listen to one of our new demo music pieces written by our musician!  
You could also click our devlog to find out more about LUNA's music story.

                                                                                     Casual connect & Indie Prize Event 2018

Meanwhile, it puzzles us that LUNA has also been nominated for Indie Prize's Best Kids Game category (?) although LUNA is not really a game that is designed specifically for kids, so this is really a surprise for us…but we guess any compliment is a form of support, we're really glad to know that young players would also enjoy our game! 

During the event, we've also met a lot of other great indie teams, made some future business contacts, and hopefully, little by little, we are getting the hang of some necessary business skills. 

                                                                     Going to Game-Con require strong body and mental strength

Level development updates

The library level is now completed with over 1000+ hand-drawn books (the pain...) to create the magical atmosphere and to tell the ancient stories of the LUNA world. One fun fact worth mention here is that the chapters on the book pages all contain real reading content. Although it was written in a made-up language that we created for LUNA, however, it can be totally decoded. By the end of development, we will release the decoded document on our website, so the hardcore puzzle players could use it as the reference to having some more fun on top of playing the game.  

                                                                                        screen shot of The library level

         The two rising stars of the Lunallywood

Next, is the tower chamber level, which really challenged us on the shader techniques in Unity. Many shadow-related gameplay ideas have been put to test in this level. We can't talk too much about the gameplay but here are something else about this level that we’re really fond of, we give you the Mouse dynamic duo. ( See img. left）

We also worked on some in-between locations. The story did not only happen inside the tower. These outside platforms and balconies not only serve the purpose of extending LUNA’s world map but also are where our cinematic animation takes place.
Quite a few major cinematic animation storyboards have been developed in the past few months.

The music has also been created along their side. I have to admit, these will be the most challenging pieces in LUNA’s development for me, the reason is that there’s only one visual artist, AKA me, in the team. (sobbing) It would be a lie to say that I never had doubts about if I could really get them done, but thanks to my 3 years hard-core traditional animation training back in the Uni, I know that as long as you continue to work on it, with steady progress, things can always be done. Rome was not built in one day, it took years. So does hand-drawn animation. (Hopefully, they won’t take years!)

Last but not least, the music hall level. Music puzzles have always been one of the classic elements in puzzle games. However, it could appear daunting to some players who think they might not have trained ears. So bear that thought in mind, we adjusted our music puzzle several times in order to make sure they can be enjoyed by as many players as possible. Musicians or not.

Also, not to mention working closely with our musician. Based on the real instruments that she used in this level's music, we designed each kind of instrument with a fantasy new look that goes along with LUNA's world genera. They are all ready to play out one big enchanted piece of music when you pass this level.

Next month's plan:  

Steady progress is what we really need now. Once you've worked on something for a long time, no matter how passionate you were in the beginning, the reality always finds a way to beat it out of you. Now it's like heading towards the most difficult part of the marathon, you're past the middle point but you start to feel the pain all over the body, the finish line is nowhere to be seen yet, self-doubt starts creeping up and looking around there's nobody else, just yourself, doing it alone.  

We know this is the period of time that you really need strong mental strength, so we just have to focus on the plan and move forward. By this point, we can’t say enough how much we appreciate our backers who have been so patient with us throughout these times. In real life, we see so many great teams that could not continue working on their projects due to many different reasons, but we’ve made it this far and that’s really lucky. So thank you again!

Devlog#15 New artworks, Character animations & Finalists of the Indie Prize Event

Here comes another update from us!

It has been super busy for us recently, during the past month we’ve attended two BIG gaming events: EGLX in Canada and INSOMNIA 62 in the UK. During the show we received a lot of positive feedback, there were a lot of people who stopped and tried our latest demo. From couples to families, from elderly to youngsters. The youngest player who was able to complete the demo properly was only 5 or 6 years old! It was really nice to see the diversity of our potential players cover such big age gaps. To be able to talk to the media and the players face to face was really an exciting experience as well. We’ve also met a lot of other indie teams along with their games, it was really nice to see this indie game circle getting bigger and connecting with each other!  

Current Progress Overview:

New background and artwork
As towards the 2nd half of the game, all the levels are getting bigger, so far there have been 5 new levels that got their new makeover done. We’re really concentrating on these parts of the work at the moment, our aim is to have all new polished artwork/background replaced by end of May or early June.

New character animation
We also worked on optimizing some of the character animations. A few of them need to have different art sets in order to look good for some special levels. In this particular level, (see image below) the character no longer walks on the solid floor, so we designed a floating + walking kind of movement for it (a bit like a dog swimming), so it now looks more like it is travelling in space.

LUNA is not an action game but whaaattt? I can’t believe we already have these many sets?? We hope you guys get to experience them all during the game!

New Platform?
From both EGLX and INSOMNIA, there had been a very frequent question from the players who tried the new demo, asking about if we are gonna have LUNA on Switch. When we started LUNA the Switch was not even out yet, but now by studying many other indie games, and how they adapted to different platforms, we feel it is definitely worth looking into! Our first launch platform will still be Steam but we will try our best to cover as many as possible. 

The Indie Prize Showcase Event
Last but not least, earlier this year, we submitted LUNA to The Indie Prize Showcase Event in London. And very happy to announce that LUNA has been selected as one of the finalists! 

The 11 best games will be announced at the 22nd Indie Prize Awards. Nine nominations will be determined by Indie Prize judges and the Best Game in Show will be selected by audience voting during the first two days of the conference. If you will be free during May 29-31st, Come to the Casual Connect London 2018 at QEII Centre, you can try out our least demo and many other indie games!

And that’s all from us this time! See you guys very soon with more news!