Devlog #5 Storyboard & Gameplay Design Refinements

Is that you? 

During last three weeks, the Team has finally met each other in person for the first time. The four of us have been working together closely for about one year, yet still we found it was hard to put the face and voice together when we met. It was a very interesting experience.

Thanks to our friend Fred, we finally had some co-working picture. From left to right: Betty(Artist), Fox(Manager), W.Guan(Programmer) and W.Qian(Musician)

Although in this day and age long distance communication has become a common way of co-working, especially usual for indie teams, still there is nothing more productive than a real time, face-to-face communication. This has indeed become both an advantage and disadvantage for many indie teams. We’ve avoided the high cost of renting a studio or buying office equipment, but sometimes we really do suffer from the feeling of isolation and sense of disconnection, due to not being able to see your teammates very often.

So during the two weeks of intense meeting this month while our artist was in China, we had the opportunity to sort out quite a few important gameplay and design issues that troubled us before. 

Storyboard

The draft storyboard for the four major cinematic clips during the game is almost completed. We now have the visuals of the key events, locations and characters’ background stories. This will help our musician to work in advance on some new music compositions. It is important that the visuals be delivered to everyone as complete as possible. It might seem like just the artist's job, but the mood and emotion of the story can help other teammates to have a more complete understanding of the game. Everything needs to be shared and discussed.

                                                                  some of the storyboard drafts

                                                          Example of one completed storyboard

Gameplay and design refinements

According to the previous work plan, during the meeting we have finalized the theme for all the rooms (levels). Each room now has its own function and content. Also, we don’t want to put any objects that don’t relate to the environment of the room, just for the sake of the puzzle. As much as we don’t want to have the puzzles standing out too much from the theme, we also have to consider the feedback we’ve received often from players, that no one likes to click through the entire screen to find a clickable object. This could be one of the biggest challenges in the design part.

Furthermore, in order to provide a smoother gameplay experience, we are also going to re-adjust the difficulties between levels. For example, in the early stage as the story still remains a mystery, the puzzle difficulty curve might be a constant upwards curve.Then during the middle stage, as the puzzle requires more complicated cooperation between characters, we are then going to adjust the difficulty curve or even reduce it a bit. Meanwhile as more cinematics kick in, the story and all the mysteries will be slowly revealed. We even would like to break the puzzle pattern completely at this stage, in order to switch players’ attention more towards the storytelling rather than just focusing on the puzzles. In one word, we hope LUNA will not only be experienced as a series of puzzle challenges, but rather an interactive story, delivered as a game.

Along with the gameplay details of the levels being continuously refined, we are going to start optimizing some old problems, such as the walk cycle and oversized texture issues. 

Devlog #4 Additional help, new map & LUNA creatures

Since we launched the KS campaign and started the development, there has been many designers, sound composers and artists who contacted us offering help and support. We are thrilled and also really appreciate all the offers, however due to the team location and our limited budget, we can't always bring new team members onboard as we wish. 

But sometimes, luckily, things do work out. Last month we invited our first local QC tester, Erin, to the project to give a try on one of the new semi- completed levels, which helped us detect some great/bad bugs (developers sobbing). Also, via our musician’s connections, we’ve been introduced to one brilliant sound designer, Mr F, who has extensive experience on game sound design. He showed strong interest in our game and is willing to give us a hand in the future. We wish this help will bring in new fresh point of view and productive boost.

Map Expanding  

This month, we are exploring the possibility of taking our character completely out of the tower, expanding the adventure map to a bigger area. It was already part of the story, but we decided to bring this part of the cinematic into the gameplay. Therefore, players will be able to have a bigger perspective to look around the LUNA world. This will also allow more freedom for us to play around with different gameplay mechanics which will involve more character movement control. Some kind of vehicle or transporting system is also under development. We really hope this new design will live up to its full potential.  

                                               A dock? A bus stop? A train station?

                                                        Design for an new location

LUNA Creatures

LUNA might seems like a desolate world, but it surely has more creatures running around in the corners. They are not exactly part of those shadow beings, and clearly look different from our main characters. What will be their stories and what are the relationship between them and our characters? It’s been a lot of fun for us to design them and these mysteries will be waiting for you to discover.

Since we have completed writing 90% of the story, it’s time to have them drawn as storyboards or even start some animation tests. Also during the next month, the team will finally have our first gather together (by now we are all working separately from our own house/office/studio between London and Shanghai, mostly communicating through skype call and chat). We will try to use this opportunity to boost our game production.

Devlog #3 The Shadows & Interactive Objects

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.

Devlog #2 Garden & Puzzle Design Paradox

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. 

                                                                       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

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 .

                                       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.