Oct 28, 2019

LOST EMBER - SinDangDevil

Oh you guys!

I don’t know where to start…
How ‘bout I just throw you a teaser that tells you?

And also, look at this: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/lost-ember-ps4/
So official, it’s almost like it’s going to be real in like a couple of weeks! Waaah! 4 weeks may still sound like a long time to you guys. To us it feels like it’s the day after tomorrow (hopefully without all the disaster :D)

In case you’re still listening, I’ll try and tell you a bit about the last couple of weeks, or months, maybe months actually, but my feeling for time is all messed up by now.
We went through several submissions for PS4, XB1, PC (Steam and GOG). Oh yea, we have a GOG page as well now.
Created all the words and pretty pictures for storefronts. Worked on loads and loads more fixes on the games, while also handling localization into 9 different languages, three of them fully voiced (English, German, Japanese). And tested and fixed some more and tested again… Quite a bit of paperwork was also part of the deal. Game development is so diverse, at least when you’re a small team :D Max is still working on the teaser next to me while I’m writing this. Tobias seems to be fighting storefronts in all languages. I’m still implementing Chinese in the background, switching back and forth.
So, over all, our brains may be slightly scrambled by now and we’re very very ready for an island somewhere with no internet, but we’re sticking around to see all of your guys’ feedback to the game so soon. Can Not Wait. (actually there’s still loads more to do, so we’re certainly not sitting and waiting, but you know... brains)

Love you people!

Your Moonies

Jul 4, 2019

Dev Blog #6 - A Long Summer

LOST EMBER - SinDangDevil

Hey beautiful people,

We have to tell you something and you’re not gonna be thrilled to hear.

We’re sad to have to tell you that we’re not going to be able to hold up the announced release date for July. We know this must be a disappointment and we’re so so so sorry!

Head over here for the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy8bS-KAvr0

Or over here for same words with more pictures: http://blog.mooneyestudios.com/66-lost-ember-dev-blog-6

You may have encountered undercooked and buggy games in the past and we’re pretty sure you’d prefer to have Lost Ember in a state that will not crush your enjoyment of the experience. That’s why we’ll have to take a little extra time to fix a couple of issues that would definitely hurt your fun with it. Lost Ember is especially dependant on a smooth flow all the way through as it’s so atmosphere heavy, so we need to ensure that flow the best we can.

How did you not know this earlier, you ask? Well, one thing is, I guess, we’re possibly too optimistic, but mostly, we didn’t have much QA until late in development and weren’t quite prepared for the list of issues that is still growing actually :/ So until we know exactly how long that list is planning to grow, we cannot give you a new date. I can only say we think it’s going to be a couple of extra weeks on top of the release date. We promise to do what we can do to bring you your game as soon as humanly possible.

Oof, do you know how shitty I feel writing this? So let’s talk about other things, happier things now?

Overall, it looks like we might actually be making a pretty good game, well, except for the bugs… The boyfriend recently played it for the first time and I was a little scared of what he would think because he’s usually super critical and impatient with games. You know what? He loved it! He had fun and at one point even a tear in his eye. Can’t be that bad then :D So that’s good.

Let me try and remember what we’ve been working on the last couple of months. And you know, as usual, there’s a lot of details that I cannot mention, as they might spoil the game for you. A lot of work went into level readability, trying to make sure players can explore a bit but will also be able to tell where to go to progress. We put all remaining animals in and fine tuned the controls and camera for each one. We finalized and polished the script and the memories that convey the story. And recorded the voice over a couple of times actually. We were lucky that our sound guy Will was able to record new VO very spontaneously so we could try out different versions. See a snippet from a rehearsal session below. That’s Will. Say hi :)

We started work on all the console ports and outsourced a bit of it to some helping hands. And then, obviously, we had to put some time into release and marketing preparation and what not. You know, all the things you need to do when you don’t have a publisher to do it for you. Sometimes that’s pretty awesome though, for example when our preparations took us to San Francisco for GDC. One of us (me!) even got to go to Japan to promote our little critters.

What a year! Goodness. And it’s not like it’s getting any less crazy from here on out. Right. Will get back to work now, so we can give you a game soon.

We love you guys and hope you can forgive us one last delay <3

Hugs and Kisses!

Your Moonies

Jul 27, 2018

Dev Blog #5 - Diets, Memory Loss and Paperwork

LOST EMBER - SinDangDevil

Here's our 5th Dev Blog Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MBfWdD6MAM&feature=youtu.be

If you want more GIFs with your update, head over here: http://blog.mooneyestudios.com/65-lost-ember-dev-blog-5-diets-memory-loss-and-paperwork

If you're not into GIFs or videos, here's a wall of text for ya :D

Let’s get this out of the way first:
So, we’ve had a couple of obstacles to overcome lately and they ate up quite a lot of our time (and nerves). I’ll start with what is probably most important to you, and most painful for us: We are not going to be able to make the release this year :( Lost Ember is definitely gonna happen, so don’t worry! We are aiming for a release in Spring 2019 now and we hope that you still have a little patience left for us. Now let me explain. Don’t know if you knew, but we’re pretty much a bunch of stubborn perfectionists when it comes to Lost Ember. It’s our precious little baby and we’re unwilling to compromise. We need to make right by our baby and by you guys. So we had to make a decision a while ago to part ways with our writer. We had (possibly too slowly) started to realize that we would be unable to bring together the story that he wanted to tell with the one we had in mind for Lost Ember. We potentially put too much time into trying to make it work because we really wanted to and finally making that decision was hard. We needed a little time to digest this and figure out how to continue before we felt ready to tell you. We are in a really good place by now, so here we are, lying down on the couch, telling you. Together with our new writer Edwin, we now put the story we wanted to tell in place and are very happy with it.

Right now, Edwin is working on putting it into dialogue and we cannot wait to hear it all in game. Anyway, as nice as this is now, a change like that takes quite a bit of time off of everyone's schedule. We gave our very best to make as few changes as possible to the world we already had, but things like designing new character models and starting some memory elements from scratch could not be avoided, not to mention the time we spend figuring everything out together with Edwin. As I said, we needed some time to digest the whole thing and have by now made a lot of progress, but obviously, a lot of other things had to wait, so we need a little more time and this actually leads to the next time consumer: Needing more time inevitably leads to needing more money as well, as we kinda still need to eat and stuff, so we had to go and hunt for more funding. And what can I tell you, researching all the different options, preparing all the material and information needed, contacting people and actually talking to people also takes time. And we’re still in the middle of it all. We have a couple of options and now we have to decide which one’s the best for Lost Ember and for the team and the next project. Does it sound weird to be thinking about future projects when we haven’t even shipped this one? Maybe, but we would very much like to keep working together after this. So fingers crossed and if you happen to have a rich uncle who simply has no idea what to do with all the moneys, you know where to send him ;) Anyway, don’t worry, we have several possible scenarios in mind, giving up is not one of them. We are going to get our baby out the door, we just need a little more time. Thanks for the session, we’re feeling a little better now, just a little though.

What else we’ve been working on
Oof, glad we talked about that, now let’s talk about some fun stuff too. A big topic for us recently was interactions. We wanted to give the different animals more personality through little interactions with the world and each other to make everything feel more alive. A bunch of animals already got some cute little things to do like eating berries, shoving each other or breaking items. Also, most of our vegetation is now physical, meaning they rustle and move when you run through them, and the impact of this working is huge. The hummingbird now has little parcours here and there that you can fly through for funsies. Right now we are working on the goat and the environments she inhabits and we had to put her on a diet, as she was a little chubby for the athletics we wanted her to do :D We’re also reworking how UI works and have it be less prominent. Thing is, with a dozen playable characters, hints and tutorials can hardly be avoided, but cluttering the screen with hints is also knocking out the experience cold, so we’re working on ways to get just the right balance there by trying out different approaches.

Good News (for some)
We have good news for everyone who backed above the Physical Gold tier and for everyone attending Gamescom. We’re planning to be ready to send out your Alpha keys within the next weeks, so do look forward to playing at least some Lost Ember soon-ish ;) And for everyone that is planning to go to Gamescom this year: Pascal, Sinikka and Matthias are taking our updated demo to Gamescom. We’re even going to have our own small booth for the first time ever! (it’s not as expensive as we thought it was :D) So if you’re not receiving an Alpha key, come by and play the demo at least and have a go at our Wheel of Fortune to win stuff and things. We’re gonna be in hall 10.1 at booth A019, so go make a big red note in your calendar now ;)

What’s next?
Now we’re going to go full steam ahead trying to finish the Alpha. We just had a massive planning session and the list of things to do looks long and scary, but when you look closer, the items are rather small. Also, Unreal Engine’s version 4.20 is freshly released and it brings some pretty cool features that might actually save us a little time here and there. We still have a tortoise and a sloth waiting to join the zoo this milestone. We’ll hopefully get story dialogue finished in a couple of weeks, or rather Edwin will, then record everything as dummy VO still, because we have to test how well it’s working in game. As soon as we have the dialogue, we’ll make the memories work, they’re only in in a placeholdery manner right now. And then there’s loads more set dressing, animating, implementing of everything to do. It’s gonna be wild and that’s why Tobias and Max are not allowed to come to Gamescom with us, they need to stay put and work, so you might want to give them a hug.

We’d like to hang out with you
Oh, and one more thing. We have this Discord server and up until now it was supposed to be exclusive to Drip supporters and backers, but actually it’s kind of lonely over there so we’d like to invite everyone in and make it a fun place to hang out. We’re going to make it the go-to place when we’re giving away stuff like wallpapers and any other goodies that might come up. In fact, we'll be placing the first couple of wallpapers there in a minute. We’d also like to hear all your suggestions on how to make it a cool place to hang out. What’s the kind of stuff that makes a Discord fun? We’re noobs, please help :D And obviously, you can ask any questions about Lost Ember, us, the world and the universe there. So come on over, you’re just the kind of people we’d love to hang out with. Because we know that we have some people in the community that don’t feel quite as comfortable with speaking English, we’ll also have a German channel, but don’t worry, no secrets there, we promise to translate anything interesting that might happen over there ;)

Join our Discord here, if you haven't done so yet: https://discord.gg/jP5VAyN

Hugs & Kisses,

Your Moonies