LUNA The Shadow Dust News

Tales From the Far East Bundle - Meet the Devs!

[h2]Interviewees - [/h2]
Lantern Studio: LUNA The Shadow Dust George Eastmead - Community Manager

Mojiken Studio: When The Past Was Around Brigitta Rena - Illustrator and Developer

[h2]What is your game about, and what does the player do in the game?[/h2]

LUNA The Shadow Dust
LUNA The Shadow Dust is a hand-drawn point and click puzzle adventure game. Players control both characters to journey through a magical tower in search of the mysteries of old. Gameplay is joined together with a series of hand-animated wordless soundtracks in an emotional story with an original orchestral soundtrack.

When The Past Was Around
When the Past was Around tells the story of Eda, a girl who lost her way in the journey to achieve her dreams. Until she met The Owl. From this game, we could see how Eda found love and spark in her dream with Owl’s help, but after a brief time, Eda realized that Owl will not be there with her for long. It’s a bittersweet story about love, moving on, and letting go.
The game is a simple point-and-click puzzle game with beautiful hand-drawn art and classic music. A short silent narrative experience that can be finished in less than 2 hours.

[h2]What inspired the development of your game?[/h2]

LUNA The Shadow Dust
Classic adventure games such as The Neverhood and Machinarium inspired the gameplay of LUNA The Shadow Dust. Thematically, the magical worlds of Ursula LeGuin novels and rich animation style of Studio Ghibli all played a huge part in the formation of the game.

When The Past Was Around
When the Past was Around is a work of fiction. At first, I’m not sure what kind of story happened between Eda and Owl. All I know is I want to make a bitter-sweet story. So, we discussed it with everyone's life experience in the studio, and the result is what you can see in the game!
Even though it is a work of fiction, somehow we put little details like Eda & Owl's favorite drinks, date spots, etc. from our own romance experience. What we’ve done with our partner, and how it feels to lose someone so dear to you.
Other than that, I take inspiration from many things I like, from games like Florence and Rusty Lake, from illustrator works like Puuung, Maori Sakai, and Yuko Higuchi, and from comic books like The Ancient Magus Bride and The Girl From The Other Side.

[h2]The Tales from the East bundle celebrates Asian game development. How did your team form?[/h2]

LUNA The Shadow Dust
Lantern Studio is a four-person all-Chinese game dev team, with two of the group based in London and Toronto, respectively. Beidi Guo, the art director behind the game; met Fox, the project manager, back in high school and together formed the rest of the team bringing in Wang Qian, the composer and Wang Guan, the programmer who was previously working with Ubisoft at the time.

When The Past Was Around
It started in 2013 when a group of college friends from Indonesia decided to make their own game development studio. All of us majored in visual design so we had zero experience with game development, especially programming. So, we made our own internal game jam named Mojiken Camp to learn anything we needed to know from programming to marketing. This Mojiken Camp soon became something that we routinely do every two years.
Fast forward into 2019, we invited our audience to decide our next Mojiken Camp theme. The selected theme was “Future Memories”, and we formed small teams of 3-5 people to make small demos from this theme, one of the demos was “When the Past was Around”.

[h2]What themes or tropes from Asian culture are present in the game?[/h2]

LUNA The Shadow Dust
The inspirations from Studio Ghibli animation are clearly apparent to most players of LUNA The Shadow Dust. Where many Asian productions present a balance between light and dark as a conflict between good and evil, LUNA looks to show this eternal struggle as a necessary conflict that helps form the intricacies of the world.

When The Past Was Around
We try our best to capture the modern culture and everyday life atmosphere in Indonesia nowadays. We made it kind of subtle, so players from wherever they live can still grasp the concept and relate to the story.
For some examples, we show the concept of a Kost, a long-term rented room that is usually found in Indonesia. We also showed some props and furniture that are familiar to Indonesian people like the shape of our post box, classic naco window, enamel mug, in both Eda and Owl fashion (my favorite was Eda’s white kebaya), and many other little details. This was inspired by how I love Japanese culture from furniture, tableware, to fashion. The aesthetic is in the little details so I want to show these details but in the Indonesian version.

[h2]What is unique about your game that differentiates it from similar other titles?[/h2]

LUNA The Shadow Dust
Unlike many point and click games, LUNA avoids an inventory system and never forces you to backtrack from your location to solve a puzzle. The wordless narrative pushes the story forward and makes the game accessible to all cultures and languages.

When The Past Was Around
While there’s nothing unique in terms of theme and mechanics, When the Past was Around is something very precious and personal to us. The story of When the Past was Around was inspired by our story; Brigitta Rena the art director and Elwin the technical artist. Of course, with a tweak here and there. I think that this personal touch is what makes the game special and has a value of its own.
We also try our best to make this game without any dialogue. So the story is told with character gestures, environmental storytelling, and music. I hope that with this, people can interpret the story of When the Past was Around freely depending on their experience in relationship and life.

Play Tales from the East bundle
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/18778/Tales_From_The_East_Bundle/

Dreamhack Beyond 2021 - LUNA The Shadow Dust: Dev insights & gameplay

[h3]Event Information[/h3]
We're part of the Dreamhack Beyond 2021 Event from July 24- July 31. We'll run multiple events and announce them here. Apologies if you see several announcements.

[h3]Dev insights & gameplay[/h3]
We introduce the team and talk about the inspiration and ideas behind LUNA The Shadow Dust.
We show concept art and some gameplay. A lot of behind the scenes content is waiting for you.

[h3]About LUNA The Shadow Dust[/h3]
LUNA The Shadow Dust is a fully hand-animated Point&Click puzzle adventure, brought to life through wordless storytelling, beautiful cinematics and a breathtaking original soundtrack.

Watch the broadcast on the store page

Dreamhack Beyond 2021 - LUNA The Shadow Dust: Dev insights & gameplay

One year since the release! Dev Note & few thoughts

Hello to our lovely LUNA The Shadow Dust supporters,

It’s been almost a year since LUNA launched! Today, we’d like to share what we’ve learned during the game’s development and tell you about our biggest successes (and failures). If you are planning to make a game yourself, we think you’ll find our experiences helpful!

[h2]The Backstage Experience[/h2]

Many of you might know that after the game was released, we produced high-quality merch (pins, posters, postcards) as a way of breathing new life into our characters. We also ran another KS campaign to make our physical LUNA artbook a reality.

We’re so thankful that our book and OST have received such great feedback. LUNA just feels so much more alive now. It’s hard work, and the costs are high, but because we’ve also been inspired by many other great art books and albums in the past, it only felt right to contribute back to the community.

[h3]Visit our Merch Shop HERE![/h3]

[h2]Our Successes (and lessons learned)[/h2]

Over the last year, we’ve earned the community’s recognition and have received many awards and nominations as a result. It really is the best feeling knowing that your hard work has paid off! (oﾟvﾟ)ノ

We still consider the release of the game to be our biggest success. The harsh reality is that many games—not only indie titles but some big IPs—never see the light of day for various reasons. To see LUNA finally out there is a blessing in and of itself, and we’re even more thankful that the global pandemic did not directly impact our release. It’s no secret, however, that we—and the game industry as a whole—have been affected by the newly-imposed travel restrictions. None of us were able to attend conventions, talks, and festivals. We miss meeting people face to face, and we sincerely hope that life will get back to normal as soon as possible!

Now, it’s time to shed some light on what didn’t go exactly as planned.

Our ambition was to use LUNA’s fully hand-drawn yet content-heavy cinematics to tell our story in a unique way. However, players often felt that the story was a little ambiguous, and during cutscenes, some grew impatient. The slow walking pace might have also affected players' mood as they solved puzzles. We also received some criticism regarding the difficulty of our puzzles. Some thought they were too hard; others found them too easy or repetitive.

Obviously, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to these problems, but we agreed that the gaming experience could be improved for the better. This is why our team decided to redesign one of the most criticized puzzles, improving the characters’ walking pace (without compromising the game’s feel) and optimizing repetitive routes between puzzle-solving sessions.

“But the game’s already been out for a year; isn’t it a bit too late to apply such changes?” some might ask. Well, these optimizations are not bug-related, so there’s no need to rush. We’d rather take the time to decide whether they’re really worth changing from a game design perspective. And as most of you already know, indie games need time to grow; it takes time to assess feedback and see how other players react to the same design choices. All these changes will be available to experience in the next major update.

It’s rare for an indie title to blow up overnight, but we’re confident that more and more people in the future will slowly get to know LUNA and that our community will keep growing. With that in mind, the game should always be as polished as possible.

[h2]Slow Growth [/h2]

The press often offers indie games publicity for the first 3 months or so after release, but after that, many small games vanish from the radar as new titles emerge.

Getting to our players is a slow process, but that doesn't mean we just sit and wait for LUNA to magically grow on its own. Over the past year, with help from both of our publishers, we’ve continuously tried to expose more people to the game. We attended Steam’s virtual festivals and ported the game to various platforms. Our next goal is to bring LUNA to mobile for Android and iOS—spoiler alert: We’re almost there!

As a team with no other investments, we’ve still not broken even one year after LUNA’s release. But we're getting there. Your ratings, merch purchases, recommendations, and reviews all help keep the dream alive. Making and releasing indie games is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. It’s an uphill battle, but as we’re slowly heading toward our goal, we hope LUNA’s success will help us create more awesome games in the future.

Thank you for all your support. (●ˇ∀ˇ●)

Yours,
The LUNA Dev Team