Welcome everyone!

It's been a while since our last update, hasn't it? We took a few weeks off to rest after the crunchy rush that was releasing the demo, we were hoping to finish it before BIG Festival so our team members in Brazil could show the game to folk there, and we succeeded~

Now we are resuming regular development of Moth Planet until we reach completion and release the full version, so this is officially our first 'Devlog' and we hope to make one every week discussing new things we are working on all the way until Moth Planet is finished!

So, where are we at right now? Let's break it down:

- BIG Festival

- Release Window

- Current Plans

- Current Progress

BIG Festival

Our team members in Brazil visited BIG Festival, originally due to one of them being invited to a roundtable on public policy as representative of her state collective, this however also posed an opportunity to attend several presentations on all kinds of topics regarding game development, they even had a Godot Engine booth and presentations there~ 🤖

They also managed to meet some developers of renown, and had some time to personally consult with them, one of these developers issued a challenge to us as a means to help us grow and learn on the line of fire for how we can turn our passion for game development from a hobby to something we can do for a living. They'd like for us to release Moth Planet on Steam in 3 months.

3 Months sounds like a lot of time for such a tiny game, but it's still a daunting task given most of us still have regular jobs and responsibilities beyond Moth Fried Games, there's still lots to do in terms of art, software, level design, production, marketing, etc etc. It actually feels like it may not enough! But we are up to the challenge and we'll do our best to put them up and throw hands with time. 👊

Release Window

So given the challenge, and what we must do, after several meetings, we set some tentative dates for ourselves in hope of setting realistic time tables for each part of the game that needs to worked on until we can put it out there, which are the following:

- Alpha: September 1st, 2023

- Beta: September 15th, 2023

- Release: October 13th, 2023

These days may fluctuate, of course, given the volatile nature of our work as new indie developers who can't afford to just work full time in our cute little game, but we'll do our best to get to each milestone!

Current Plans

Currently, we aim to expand on the variety of biomes available in Moth Planet, for the Pre-Alpha Demo we released only the 'Forest' biome, as it was the most complete in terms of TileSet and usable Hazards, and even so, we did use Hazards meant for other biomes, namely, the Fire Orbs, as some extra spice for the Demo.

Right now, we believe we are able to finish up and polish the TileSets for 3 other biomes we originally wanted to put in the game, namely, the Village, the Caverns and the Ruins, which tie up the narrative of why our little Moth reporter is risking fluff and wings for those juicy interviews.

Robin will have their work cut out for them, as we also hope to have unique hazards for the Caverns and Ruins, along with the Hazards you may have already seen in the Forest.

We also are working on usability improvements, quality of life and polish to help folk get further into the game, such as an interactive map that many requested through the feedback forms, more on that in a bit!

Current Progress

There's lots of game artifacts, tools and assets completed for the game so far, here's a not very comprehensive list of where we stand:

General

• Player (Robin) (Done)
• NPCs (Done)
• Dialogs (Done)
• Movers (Done)
• Checkpoints (Done)
• Unhiders (Done)
• Water (Done)
• Flows (Done)
• Map (In Progress)
• ???

Village

• Horizontal Static BG (Done)
• Horizontal Parallax BG (Done)
• Landmark (Well?) (Planning)
• ???

Forest

• Horizontal Static BG (Done)
• Horizontal Parallax BG (Done)
• Stalker Plant (Done)
• Trapper Plant (Done)
• Snapper Plant (In Progress)
• Landmark (???) (Planning)
• ???

Cave

• Horizontal Static BG (Done)
• Horizontal Parallax BG (Done)
• Mushrooms (In Progress)
• Landmark (???) (Planning)
• ???

Ruins

• Horizontal Static BG (Unfinished)
• Horizontal Parallax BG (Unfinished)
• Fire Orbs (Done)
• Light Orbs (Done)
• Retractable Spikes (In Progress)
• Arrow Launchers (In Progress)
• Landmark (???) (Planning)
• ???

We don't want to spoil too much, so we won't go into detail here on everything that's currently being done, but here's something a lot of you asked for!

MAPS

Just a little early preview, but you'll be able to zoom and pan the map around to situate yourself in the game, with rooms revealing as you discover them, rather than fully displayed like the example above, regular map stuff~

And with that, we come to the end of our first Devlog~ We are very excited to bring you more as soon as we can, we are probably delivering these weekly, as previously mentioned, but publishing schedule may vary here and there depending on our workload.

Until next time, hopefully with more Moth Planet News~

Moth Fried Games team.