Devlog #11 Classic or Cliché?

Current Progress Overview

During the past 2 months we’ve got 4 more mock up levels developed, including one of the outdoor levels as our adventure mostly takes part inside the tower, which can be bit restricting. We have also been working on another cinematic cut-scene which has (spoiler alert) a new mystery character in it who might play an important role in the story.

                                                              screenshots from some of the mock up levels

                                                                                         the stories from the past...

We are now aiming to finish all mock up game levels by the end of this year, then focus on polishing the art and remaining features programming from early next year. 

Also during the last weekend we participated in the 2017 Weplay game exhibition in Shanghai, China. Quite a few people experienced our latest version of game and we received some great feedback (and bug reports of course). Thank you all for coming!

 

Classic or Cliché?

Now, here are some dev thought + design challenges we’d like to share with you. When we're frustrated and feel some design is heading towards a dead end, our friends and family always comfort us by saying: one door closes but a window will open, don't give up! But during Halloween we might say: if this happens, your house is probably haunted! 

During our game play development, there has been an issue we always seem to be struggling with:  When does a puzzle routine become Classic or Cliché? 

In the early developing days, we were deliberately trying to avoid the puzzle routines which can be found in most puzzle games in order to achieve a higher overall level of uniqueness. It worked for a couple of levels and did give people a wow factor, but then during the further game tests we realized this could develop into a new issue: once players figure out the logic behind, it becomes very fun and challenging to play, but if the logic is too exclusive, has no continuity with the previous level, or is simply by its own and totally isolated from the story, in another word, just trying to be clever, then most of the players will find it less enjoyable and don't feel the sense of achievement we hoped for. 

So we relooked some of the ideas we once put aside just because we thought they were not original enough, re-valued the design and took out the core goodness of it, analyzed why people enjoy these type of puzzles over and over, and why some continue to give us a fresh feeling but some failed. It also reminded us to re-play some of our favorite games and pick up which one element that touches us the most from it.

We realized that it's really down to how one puzzle design plays along with your game's atmosphere and storyline. The logic tricks could be so clever but if that has nothing to do with the development of the story, it could be dull or leave people confused. 

Here is one example: 
As some of you might remember one of the very interesting puzzles from Samorost 3, the one that you need to arrange the cards in the little box to complete a story.

                                                                The Mushroom picker's puzzle from Samorost3

It was no doubt many people’s favorite puzzle in the game, it was very neatly designed, easy to understand, yet quite challenging (it's not a short progress) but you never felt a dull moment because even by making the wrong choice, you still get to see some super fun animation showing random results. However, we find it’s a shame that such a brilliantly designed puzzle had almost nothing to do with the storyline whatsoever! It was so isolated from the whole thing that it left us a bit disappointed. Otherwise it may be an unlimited puzzle design people could look up to all the time!

So after all these adjustments, we picked back some ideas we previously threw away and looked for a good place for them again in LUNA. These include: a music puzzle, a cooking challenge and two maze designs. We wish they will appear to be some familiar elements to puzzle game lovers but will still have LUNA’s own twist, as we tried to blend them more into the environment and story. Have we achieved what we expected? That will need more tests to tell.

                                                                     design sketch of the cooking puzzle in LUNA

Devlog #10 Artwork optimization, Admin work & New designs sneak peek

It has been a while since our last update, dated by the end of May, which sounds almost like 3 months ago. So it's really about time to share some news of the game with everyone again!
 

Game reconstruction updates

We have made great progress on the code rebuild, 85% of the existing code has been rebuilt, which includes another 3 extra new levels that we haven’t fully tested yet. Also we’re still busy working on preparing the Alpha Demo ( for exclusive backers ). It is going to delay a bit ( at first we thought we could have it released by this month), and this is due to the extra time we need to apply for debugging and testing before we send it out to the players. As a very small team, we can honestly say that we are lacking of almost everything, including game testers but we are tying our best to get help from everywhere we can. It's a bit slow, we know, but never does a day goes by without us working on LUNA.  
 

Artwork optimization

Game development takes time, and as time goes by, some of the old graphics in the game might have looked good enough by then, but as we learn and grow, as the game gets proper, you can’t help to think “it’s not good enough now and it needs replacement to match the new quality”. But if we continue replacing everything all the time like the ship of Theseus, the game will take forever to finish, so we are still trying to keep a balance. And here is one updated graphic comparison from before and now.

                                                                          A shadow crow animation. Before & After.

Admin work, marketing meetings & other “I have no idea” stuff

To be honest these are sometimes the hardest parts in indie life because they have almost nothing to do with game development, and we’re all newbs when it comes to “terms and conditions”, “marketing strategy”, “legal knowledge”... stuff like that. But sadly this is also an important part that goes along with game development. 

During the past few months, we’ve been busy arranging meetings with some potential publishers and media, in order to help us find out what’s the best way for LUNA to be introduced to market in the future. Recently we’ve been given a chance to broadcast our game on a live stream in the popular Chinese gaming website VG Time, as well as taking part in the ChinaJoy games festival. In the future we will also be preparing in advance for attending game festivals like GDC, PAX, TGS and game competitions such as SXSW etc. 

Additionally, by sharing problems and struggles with people in the game market, it has also helped us gain a broader view of the indie game market. This has and will continue to affect certain decisions during the game production, such as adjusting the length and difficulty of the game. 

All these preparations will eventually take up some game dev time, but it is needed and even crucial in the long term.  
 

New level designs sneak peek

Back to the more important things, we are also working on some new level designs. These are the precious happy times which really make us feel rewarded as indie game developers. So less talk, more pictures. Here are some graphics from some of the new levels that we really like, and hopefully they will be enjoyed by players later. 

                    More information about space, dimension and background story to be revealed soon

Devlog #9 Unity Event, Sound Design & Game Reconstruction Updates

One year ago, we launched our game  campaign. Since then, both LUNA and Lantern Studio have grown so much and became something more than we thought we could be! We surely could not have reached where we are now without all our lovely supporters. As we will be continuously working hard on LUNA, we’d like to say thank you again for being incredibly patient and understanding. Thank you for all the warm support we've received during the past year!

It has been a while since our last update, so here are the things we’ve been working on during these days.

Unity - Unite 2017 Shanghai

This month our team attended this great event where more than 4000 game developers could gather together, to meet up with the Unity experts and industry leaders to explore some of the new creative potential of the Unity engine.

We also met a lot of other local indie game teams during the event, shared our experiences and the challenges faced during the game development process and, last but not least, had a good peek at what other great new indie games are under development at the moment, and hopefully in the future we could give each other more help and support.

We have been introduced to a lot of exciting new technologies for the Unity engine by the Unity dev team, don’t wanna bore everyone with too much tech terms, but for example we’re thinking about using the new Unity Analytics tools for our upcoming Alpha demo, which could help us get the best of all the feedback and data received from the players in order to bring out the best gameplay experience.

Sound Design

It’s time for sound FX to be professionally designed and modified into our game. Together with our game reconstruction, we are now switching to a more effective way for our sound designer to work more closely with the level development. By using the FMOD sound engine, now the interactive parts of the level and its sound design / editing can synchronise much better than before.

Game Reconstruction Updates

Half of the existing levels’ reconstruction work have been completed. According to the plan, there will be 7 levels which is about 25-30% of the whole game content included in our Alpha release. We should be able to give a bit more information about it in our next update, so stay tuned guys!
 

Devlog #8 Game Reconstruction & Early Bird Beta

Here we are reaching the first milestone of 2017. We have been going through quite a few big changes and are very busy working on the game, so this updates came a little bit later than usual. Let’s break it down into three different sections.

Game Reconstruction Updates

Since half a year ago, thanks to the Kickstarter funding from our lovely backers, we then dared to push ourselves a little bit more from its original plan on this project. Over the last few months of 2016, in order to make the story richer and the gameplay more challenging, we have increased the number of levels and cinematics within the game. Due to these workloads, from the beginning of the year we have been working on the code refactoring of the whole game, by switching to reactive programming, as we believe the future workflow will definitely benefit from it. Although it is quite time consuming at the moment, thanks to this change all the trickier gameplay features will be able to stand on a much more solid foundation. By doing so, we can also reduce the debug time later on.

About the upcoming Early Bird Beta Version

Last year we’ve had promised some of our Kickstarter backers to be able to participate in one of our early bird beta version test. We are now planning to launch it around the mid of 2nd quarter this year, and the details of the download links and game activation keys will be announced in the next backers exclusive update. 

Here’s the new stuff that players could expect in this version:  

• A new and easier to understand hint system to smooth the gameplay experience.
• A couple of new, carefully selected, challenging levels which represent some of the newly developed puzzle types and gameplay. 
• Since the new control system of our two characters is mostly complete, in this Beta version players will now finally be able to have a taste of the dual character system we’ve been talking about a lot. 
• Last but not least, improved / optimized game backgrounds and new cinematics! 

Kickstarter Related Update:

Following by the reconstruction work schedule, there will be changes about producing the physical rewards for some of the backers. In order to focus 100% on the game development as the priority at the moment, the time of dispatching the physical gifts will be delayed until the time of our Steam release. We do hope our backers understand the reason of that and stay patient with us. Because by making this change, if they are produced after the whole game production is completed, the physical gifts will be able to contain a much more complete game art and soundtrack collection, and overall the backers will receive a much higher quality gift set.

Devlog #7 Explorer and the Aborigine

New level development 

The gameplay mechanics of this new action-based level is almost ready. However, as the mechanics of this level are quite different from those of the other point-and-click levels, it has taken lot longer for us to work out a suitable design. Plus, we’ve introduced a new action for the character, and the artwork of this level has also gone through several changes in order to keep the gameplay experience smooth enough. Therefore, as you can see from the screenshot below, the bugs that can come along with all this new stuff are just borderline ridiculous.

And For the past few months, while we were developing the levels which heavily involved the dual characters system, we realized that we can not use one single control system for both of the characters. So on the programming side, we are now working on separating them into two.

In order to explain why both of the characters should not share one control system, we’d like to explain a little bit more about each character’s role in the world and how they might affect the gameplay design. 

Explorer and the Aborigine

The main character, our young boy, was designed as the classic “explorer”. You and him start the game together with the same very limited understanding of the surroundings. But along with the development of the story, the more you two learn and discover, the stronger the sense of connection and achievement can be developed between you and the character. This “emotional bond” is actually what we hoped to achieve the most during the game design. So based on this purpose, the gameplay experience will be more important than the action design itself. So far our main character has already got almost 25+ sets of animations, which is more than enough to cover most of the gameplay needs.  

This was the system we followed, and it worked fine until recently, because we do not just have only one character. And their role in the game are really quite different.

Past the first half of the story, the player will soon find out that our secondary character has an unique ability, which will make it more like an aborigine of the LUNA world or a guide that was sent with an unknown mission or purpose. So in order to emphasize this important role difference, both the action and gameplay that are related to it have to be designed differently. 

If we keep adding new features and action sets into the old system, it might cost more serious bugs in the future and is clearly not the best solution. So our programmer is now working on making sure the old and new features can be played smoothly. It’s not an easy task and it is taking longer than what we expected, but we believe the future progress will definitely benefit from this, so no shortcuts.  

Finally, some animation to let everyone know we are still alive and working hard on LUNA.

                                                            chomp chomp chomp