Moonshot - The Great Espionage News

We're very happy to announce that Moonshot - The Great Espionage is now available.

It's been a real roller coaster ride for us since we started in December. While we are incredibly good at creating good games for Game Jams in a short period of time, a longer-term project was a new challenge that we took on.
We are very happy to have now reached an important milestone on our journey into unknown territory, namely the release of "Moonshot - The Great Espionage".

We hope that you can spend a few enjoyable hours with our game.

Thank you very much for everyone who has accompanied us on our journey so far.
Thank you for all the feedback and constructive criticism.

And of course, thank you if you buy our game.

Hello, good news everyone! We haven't posted in a while, but there's a reason for that: Beta 1 is now available.

Unfortunately we had to deal with the loss of one of our level designers, so many tasks were pushed back and forth in order not to endanger the planned release.

But enough "bad" news. We are pretty much feature complete now. The only slightly bigger chunk will be the localizations and the implementation of the choices that decide the outcome of the story. Currently we have 10 of 32 levels in a good beta state. The graphics are largely implemented and will be polished further. The sounds and music are still missing a few small things.

Participate in Beta and Win!
The really good news is that we have finished our Beta 1 and are still looking for testers. Those who play through the levels and answer a small questionnaire can also participate in the giveaway of 3x Amazon vouchers. If you want to take part in the beta, just contact us in Discord or write a short email to [email protected].


What`s next
We are working with high pressure on the open issues and missing levels. With beta 2 we want to be feature complete as well as level complete. This will be ready in about 4 weeks. The remaining time until the release we plan to spend with bugfixing and polishing.


Thank you for reading!



Support us
Links: Moonshot Game Jam Version | Discuss with us on Discord | Follow us on Twitter

In this issue of the Devlog we want to give you some insights into our level design process as well as talk about world design in general.


Moonshot is set in three different cultures. Besides the music, this should also be reflected in the level designs. A simple way to do this are the skyboxes, which represent the different cultures.
The rural Ustria, the bluish US metropolis and the red Soviet metropolis. The color mood together with the music, the western and eastern guards and the objects distributed over the level, some of which are unique, should hide the fact that the same textures are often used.
In addition to the cultural groups, the lighting design plays a big role not only in the visuals. The visibility of the player has an influence on whether he is seen by the security cameras or guards. For this purpose, a distinction is made between 3 visibility levels: Full light, barely visible and darkness. For example, a guard will sound an alarm if the player is in full light and within the guard's field of view. While a guard who sees the player in barely visible light only becomes suspicious. To enhance the light effect, all missions are set at night and the level is artificially darkened. To create a little variety there are three different levels: Dusk, Night and Dawn.

To keep the level design consistent, we have developed a "Puzzle Mechanic Playbook". Here are some extracts from it and insights into the level creation process.

A level at Moonshot consists of three main building blocks at the beginning of the design process:
- The Goal
- The Challenge
- Losing Conditions

The Goal or Mission Objective is derived from the story background. We currently support the following variants: information gathering missions (safe-cracking and photo missions), sabotage, kidnapping and theft missions. Challenges are the obstacles the player has to overcome in order to fulfil the mission goal. To make the obstacles a bit harder and add some pressure on the player there are some losing constraints in the form of player detections - e.g. Security cameras or guards.
Every level shall rely on two main puzzle mechanics only. This gives the player a better feeling on how to handle situations, does not overload the level and make the levels overall more diverse. Level designs shall be designed “form follow function” approach in contrast to what we had in the game jam. Design the puzzles first and afterwards design the rooms.

Example:
In the screenshot from the Godot Editor we will show how an puzzle could be designed. In this example the player wants to reach the room 9. In order to that the has to overcome the guard first by stunning him. After that the player will find out that door 4 is locked and must be opened by a switch. To do this, he can climb up on position 2 and press switch 3. Switch 3 in turn opens door 4. At position 5 there is a pressure plate button. As long as a weight is on it, door 6 is open. If the weight is removed, the door closes again. To get to switch 7, which opens the last door, the player must lay the tased guards body on the pressure plate button. Typically such a puzzle design is put on paper first.

Thank you for reading!



Support us
Links: Moonshot Game Jam Version | Survey & Win! | Discuss with us on Discord | Follow us on Twitter