LUNA The Shadow Dust News

Hello, Lovely LUNA The Shadow Dust Supporters!

It’s update time! So much has been going on over the past few months, we really appreciate everyone's incredible patience (all these years). Thanks for sticking with us! Now that the dust has finally settled, we’ve got some very exciting news we’d like to share with y’all.

February is a Real Month

February is real. Yes it is. February is a real solid month on the 2020 calendar which is less than 4 months away from now.

And most importantly - it’s the month we can finally confirm for the release of LUNA The Shadow Dust!! ╰(*°▽°*)╯

We were really disappointed to miss our previous release forecast (this Winter), and firstly, it’s important to apologise for the delay here. We know you are eager to play LUNA! Sorry!
We wanted to share the full story behind the delay, and the real struggles that faced our small indie team in the wide world of game development. Hopefully, our supporters can understand the difficult situations detailed below. Thankfully, it’s now coming to an end and we can finally feel a bit more relaxed, free to share these stories with you.

Challenge One: The Unexpected

We never thought this would become a serious issue, but it did. During September, the collaboration with our previous sound FX co-worker suddenly ended. We’re not going to go into the details, but the fact that we were now suddenly lacking 50% of the required cutscene sounds at the very end of development, put us in a sticky situation.

Do we have the time and money to try and find someone to create that 50%? we asked ourselves,
Or should we try free SFX libraries so at least there will be something in those scenes??

Either seemed like a grim solution. It would be a shame to compromise on the quality of the sound FX, so we decided to find a new sound professional instead of using free resources.



FatBard, a two-man audio team from St.Louis, Missouri, came to the rescue. We’re so thankful for Zach and Partick's quick production speed and professional work which really helped us against the clock, with no time to spare! We’re also super thankful to Fred, our composer Susie's husband, who helped us financially when the SFX budget was next to nothing. With the determination and the hard work of everyone on the team, we managed to produce a full set of SFX created for LUNA by October, with no compromise in quality.

Challenge Two: The Narrow Release Window

When a game developer or publisher looks at the calendar, debating the best time to release their game, there are usually only a few months to consider - especially if you’re an indie team.

One of the key survival (not even ‘big sell’) rules for an indie launch is simply, “do not clash with AAAs titles”. Secondly, landing in a key sales season would also be a bad option, and there are many! From Winter sales to Summer sales, the calendar is dotted with distracting discounts for every public holiday and festival. Thirdly, as a small team, we really need word of mouth. From the media, press and our fans, it’s vital that the news spreads as far as it can, given our limited resources. This means we also need to consider launching the game when people are not on holiday.

If you’re still with me, then you’ll notice the window of opportunity has been getting narrower and narrower. Lastly, and most importantly, we have to consider the quality of the latest build. We cannot and will not rush out a game that may still have bugs. We are determined to deliver the best experience to people. As a result, if we miss one release window, we will have to wait until the next one.

Challenge Three: The Global Release

As you may know, Lantern Studio is an all-Chinese dev team, with members scattered across three continents. Since our initial Kickstarter campaign, our global support has been matched with high expectations and support from our Chinese fans. Throughout this whole process, we’ve been really keen to bring LUNA to both the Western audience and our Chinese fans at the same time.

During recent years, however, publishing games in China has become increasingly challenging due to drastic rules surrounding game development. All game studios need to apply for official licenses. Considering the sheer number of game companies/studios across China (and the world), the queue is enormously long.

Trying to get ahead of the curve, we started the relevant procedures almost a year ago, with the help of our Chinese publisher, Coconut Island. It took us a lot of time to prepare the game for review while simultaneously managing development. Nearly eight months later, with a number of modifications and a lot of back-and-forth, we finally have the document that allows us to publish LUNA in China!

All this time, we’ve been facing one of the toughest decisions of the project:
Should we wait - with no update on the licence’s progress and no more budget left to burn - or should we release LUNA globally, with China to follow at a later date?

It killed us to think that as a Chinese team, we couldn’t release LUNA in China at the same time as the rest of the world. There was a point at which we felt so hopeless about the situation, the spirit of the team dropped to an all-time low. Now with the biggest unknown out of the way, we can’t help but feel the enormous relief that we no longer need to make this tough decision.

Combining all of these challenges together, we’ve been able to mark a clear time for launch. Unfortunately, this has pushed us into 2020. February will be the earliest available window. We sincerely apologize for the long wait, but it is now over - for us as well. For the exact launch day, we will announce once we are 100% ready, and it will come very soon. ;)

How’s The Game Going BTW? xD

All milestones for development have been met!!!

• Heading towards the release, we’re continually testing and fine-tuning tiny details. Most players might miss these, but we believe some eagle-eyed players will spot them. So for those gamers, we will not let you down!
  

• With some black magic, we also managed to shrink down the game build size from 1GB to 500MB without losing quality. Meanwhile, we’re working on making sure all PC/Mac/Linux and DRM-free builds are compatible with the platforms.

Marketing materials, a brand new trailer, and merchandise have now become our next priorities. Hopefully, we can have some of these goodies ready when LUNA launches!

Last but not least, we would sincerely like to ask everyone a big favor...

Please help us spread the word - tell your friends, family and the neighbor’s pet that LUNA is gonna be out in February 2020. We’ve put everything we have into this game and we’d really like it to reach gamers who will enjoy playing it! This is something we can’t do just by ourselves, but with your help, we can.

We can’t thank you guys enough.
That’s all for now, we will be back with a new update very soon, before the end of the year!

━━━━=≡Σ((( つ•̀ω•́)つ

with Love X
Lantern Studio Team

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!





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!╰(*°▽°*)╯




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 the game platform to make sure our players can download a playable build with all the achievement features.



We’re working on the design of the hardcover copy of the upcoming official artbook. Some of our Kickstater 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!



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?






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. (oﾟvﾟ)ノ



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!

What's a Moon Guardian?
Part human, part spirit, the Moon Guardians are charged with maintaining the balance of energy across the World. As civilization enters a new era, a new Moon Guardian takes on the role they were born to fill.

Become a Moon Guardian and gain inside information into the development of LUNA The Shadow Dust and help shape its development, in exchange for helping us grow the community and spread the word about the game!



What do you get?

• Inside information into the development of the game (requires signed NDA).
  
• Help us polish the final elements of the game - get access to the latest build for free, and help us fine-tune any final elements.
  
• Included in the game's credits - for your hard work, we will immortalise you in the credits of LUNA The Shadow Dust.
  

What do you have to do?
There are only EIGHT spaces available for LUNA Moon Guardians. Once they are filled, that's all. This is a very important position and we expect you to treat it with the utmost care. You will be expected to help us with the following:

• Help us moderate the online community for LUNA.
  
• Help spread the word about LUNA - an existing strong social media presence is a huge bonus!
  
• Help us create content with which to promote the game!
  

We'll be picking our Guardians within a week, so apply now!
Link to Apply: https://forms.gle/wZKdLToXu5aK8N2K8

Toot Toot! Here comes our June dev update! (ˊ•͈ ꇴ •͈ˋ)

We hope you guys have enjoyed our new demo, we’ve had such positive feedback from all. Thank you to everyone who helped us share the news through social media. Based on all the data we collected in our survey, we can pinpoint some specific issues and try to refine them before the official release!

Now let's see what we have been working on recently:


Now that the overall game design has been completed, we’ve been working on optimizing communication for system related functions: saving, loading, skipping cutscenes etc. They might not seem to be important elements, but as LUNA The Shadow Dust won’t contain any text, including menus, we really need to make sure players can understand how to use these UI features.

Testing resolution/full-screen display will also require us to try multiple OS systems and different kinds of computers. Depending on each hardware variation, diagnosing problems could be tricky too.

We’ve also designed a feature for players to be able to rewatch all the cutscenes from the menu page. If some of them remain locked when you finish the whole game, what could it mean? A second storyline? A hidden location? Okay, I've already said too much….


We’ve had great progress on the sound design! Some of the cinematic sound Fx is still under mixing but we’ve more-or-less completed all the sound design tasks for the game! We'll continue to optimize the sound experience, like introducing 3d sound mixing so the sound source will appear near or far, depending on how you control the characters.

Meanwhile, we’ve already started on sound debugging! What? Sound fx has its own bugs? Sadly the answer is: yes. Sound effects can be triggered in different ways and are all programmed closely to various game actions and events. We don’t want our players to hear a high pitched honk from another level when they are enjoying a quiet moment during, do we? That’s one corner we also will not cut!


Although LUNA as a game does not require localization, the marketing materials indeed have to be translated in order to reach as many potential players as possible. We’ve now localized our Steam page into 27 different languages (Which is every language on Steam!) It feels really great to start to see game broadcasters from all over the world introduce LUNA in different languages. Knowing more and more people are discovering LUNA gives us a very warm feeling.





Lantern Studio now has its own Discord server! If, aside from these dev updates, you’re still eager to know more the game and our team behind the scenes, the development story, or looking to hang out with folks who also love puzzle adventure games - our new Discord channel is the new place to be! Each Friday we will post a new micro-update on the server in the #announcements channel, just showcasing what’s been happening every week!


From next month we will be finishing off our game development and go full-on hardcore with testing and debugging. We will also work on the digital/hard copy art book of LUNA The Shadow Dust and continue composing the original soundtrack album. We’ve still got plenty of work to do but the finish line is almost within reach! :)

Until next time, peace out! ━━━━=≡Σ((( つ•̀ω•́)つ

Best,
Lantern Studio Team

Here comes the news you’ve been waiting for! We’re super-thrilled to announce that our new demo for LUNA The Shadow Dust is now available on our Steam Page from 6th May, for PC and Mac.

The new demo includes a bunch more puzzles, polished animations and new sections from the original soundtrack, with about 15-30m of gameplay.
Feel free to share screenshots or GIFs online and spread the word! (Please don’t spoil the puzzles for other players of course! ) We sincerely hope that you enjoy the demo and thank-you again for the support!

It’s really valuable having your feedback on the game; your comments, support and love ♥ have helped us shape LUNA into the game we will be proud to release, later this Summer.
At the end of the demo is a short survey (ten questions). If you have an additional 5 minutes, we would love to hear what you think.
If you miss it, please click here! Or you can buzz us on social media :)