Part 5 - Demo and Release

ATLAS:  We still had a lot of work to do before we could call the game finished. We wanted to add more story to the game, Myr wanted to optimize the build further and we had so many planned rooms to make.

MYR: At this stage, I had finished developing most of the game objects we’d need to build the rest of the game. So I focused most of my efforts on bug fixing, adjusting things to better serve the designs that Atlas and Selene were coming up, and supporting them as much as I could with new features or changes to game elements that they were already making good use of.

ATLAS: Starting off with the immediate connection to the Forest, the Caves were the next part to be developed. Like the Forest before it, we sat down and sketched out a possible player progression, making sure to think about places to hide secrets and make the player feel as if they're lost or exploring uncharted territory.

Selene would focus her efforts in the incredibly complex section of the Caves where rocks fall and the lake above, while I worked on the main path towards the ruins. However due to personal issues, map making was slow, and eventually I took over the lake, starting work on the ruins when I was done.

The main idea for the Caves was that Robin would find their way to the entrance of the ruins, just to discover they need to get the gate open, and thus have to explore the entirety of the caves.

SELENE: I didn't originally start on the caved-in section. At first, I started with water and placing the cat room - had to have a room with a secret cat statue! I then thought about how to drop rocks on moths in an entertaining way. 

I first designed a simple hallway and then thought of shapes, tested the room until droppping shapes worked and felt good! Then I had to develop the next room, that had a lot of segments and falling rocks. I wanted to design it in such a way that the stairway at the top would fall while you were in the middle of the room, but the audio cue for that was getting lost and I couldn't quite fix it.... so I made it fall sooner. I snuck a little secret you can only enter after a rock next to it fell through a hole, and as most players look left to exit the room and don't notice the block on the right, I think it delivered! 

Then there was the mushroom passage... that one. At the start, I wanted to make another pass where Robin would go through a lower path, then a quake would close it and the player would have to go back and take the higher road. I didn't do it because the design for the blocks didn't feel quite right, so instead you got mushrooms! Then you got the segment with two passthrough platforms. With older versions of the cordymoths, it was a bit harder. 

Then I designed the falling block room. I wanted to deliver an experience that was close to what I had in Yoshi's Island, though it didn't have scrolling and the blocks would need to stay. I would have to make it possible to go through afterwards. I ran through several ideas, along with the shape and width requirement before settling on hollow blocks! All that remained was to design the shapes and how they would fall. The blocks are actually split in two or three sections, there's windows here and there to give a hint that they are hollow, and even a moth inside one block! Designing that one was fun. I'm glad instant movement was put in part way through, otherwise I would have had to do a lot more math calculating speeds and heights to make the blocks fall at the right speed. 

About making them fall... I did have to experiment with speeds and how to make them fall. I first settled with each block having an area detector but the way the blocks fell was too inconsistent if I did that, so I ended up grouping them with a timer, so each group would fall together at the same speed and delay. 

Then I set myself to design the maze on the left. in this one, there are dangers in the tunnel! You have to dodge cordymoths that ambush you! You have to thank Atlas for pointing out that players may need more visibility of when the moth is there. I implemented unhiders that showed the entire area when Robin was meant to be able to notice them. In retrospect, I think the flow for the top of the maze isn't the best. It's not evident enough that you can go to the middle of the room to fall down, and I should have had a first path leading there. Also, maybe designing traps to try and lure the cordymoths into would have been fun! I'll keep that in a corner for a future game. 

All while this was happening, my other job kept suddenly becoming  more active, making it a lot harder to work on any other day than Saturday. It was way more fun to work on Moth Planet though, so I decided to PTO and use that both to relax and to do game dev work! I think that paid off. 

I wanted to, if we had the time, design a maze for the ruins, but, after playtesting the areas... I think the ruins had enough content as they were. Maybe it would have been good to have that for a secret! But the idea of having sections that expose you to the void and have spikes... I think we would have needed a different lighting technique to show hazards and the location in the maze more clearly. If I do more of those, new tech is likely going to be involved!

ATLAS: A lot of visual storytelling went in these last two biomes, with the castle tileset being mixed up with the caves the closest the player got to the portico, as well as the castle itself being broken down and consumed by the void. I don't know if anyone's noticed as well, but in the ruins, there's always a moth corpse beneath a ghost! Fun!

Alongside the Caves' development, we were working on adding more flavour to the story in Moth Planet. These came in the form of cutscenes and photographs

The cutscenes were meant to further communicate to the player what the story was about, and what they should be doing. Introducing the Editor before actual gameplay was crucial for this. We'd then have three more, one for when the player died for the first time, to suggest there are supernatural powers at play, then the one before the boss fight and one before the credits, to wrap everything up.

Finally, the photographs were introduced as an extra reward for finding the anomalies, and the illustrations should help paint a better picture of the mood of each area. The final two were special, for we wanted them to serve as mood-setters for pre and post queen fight. And of course, they had to be cute in their own way!

When the first pictures and cutscenes were ready, we decided to update the Demo with these new QoL changes, and change its layout so it'd be a shorter experience, and to give people who play the full game new things to see in the Forest.  

By then, we were also submitting the game to this year's BIG Festival, in hopes of it getting showcased, but we didn't end up being picked for the main selection. We also finally put the game up on steam, everything was shaping up for a smooth release, honestly.

In some ways, this last leg of development felt like a blur? We had ideas, and we needed to execute them, so we did them.

MYR: Given my output slowed down during the beta, I decided to work on what was missing to actually finish the game. Our ending, the finale, the final confrontation with whatever it is that is causing these anomalies and the mysteries of Lycosina. I began to work on the Spider Queen fight. 

I had some ideas for it long ago in development, when we first came up that the big baddie would be a giant spider exoskeleton with a grudge. I didn’t want to animate the spider corpse or make it attack the player directly, I knew I wanted the room to change to provide challenges from other parts of the game every phase, but we needed something scary and angry that could actually threaten the player even when safe from other hazards. 

I took the fire orbs, and modified them into mobile agents of Lyconia, able to follow the player through geometry after having spotted them, they wouldn’t give up chase unless the player left the room or they finally got to take a shot at the player with their void beam. Or, if close enough, a radial melee attack, which we decided not to include in a bid to make the orbs more prone to long range sniping if the path to take their shot and the player was clear. They’d be the first and only entity that players could actually ‘fight’ with their camera, the only entity players could actively retaliate against.

Void Orbs turned out to be the most complicated game object I'd made. Had to make means to prevent them from getting stuck in geometry, since they needed two raycasts to ‘spot’ and ‘aim’ at the player to make them more fair. So they had a timer to warp back to their starting position, if they spent too long inside stage tiles or inside another void orb. We also made it so that they could ‘push’ other void orbs away, to avoid them stacking on top of each other while chasing the player. 

Their final behavior includes them having line of sight to the player, considering them ‘spotted’, after which they’ll try to turn their eye to look and ‘aim’ at the player. If the player is still in their sights by the time the eye looks at them, they’d charge and shoot a void beam at them. If the player had moved away from their sights, they’d give chase until they can take a shot at the player.

Once satisfied with Void Orbs, I made an object to keep track of several of them in a room: a ‘Miniboss Gate’. It checked if all void orbs in a room were defeated before activating something, or if the player dies and leaves the room, the Gate would respawn all void orbs that were defeated and reset the room to its original configuration for the player to try again. This became the basis for each Phase of Lyconia’s fight.

After that point, it was an iterative process of figuring out how to make Void Orbs the main mechanic behind the boss fight, how to make the room change biomes between phases. At first, we had 4 void orbs per phases and you had to do all 4 phases of the fight in one go. 

I accidentally got so good at it while testing that it didn’t feel that much difficult to me, so when Atlas and Selene actually tried the fight themselves, it was a reminder that developers shouldn’t ever be the one and only judge of their game’s difficulty. We tuned the fight to have checkpoints per phase and lowered the void orbs to two, also changed the layout a bit to make it slightly more feasible to dodge the other hazards that’d show up.

ATLAS: The Ruins were somewhat challenging to work on. As, besides Myr working on the boss fight and void orbs, I was left to my own devices there. In a way it meant I had full control of how this section would play, but it was also a lot of work for one person.

We wanted the player to have to fight the void orbs in preparation for the boss battle, as tutorializing and training, and we'd have two main locks. One requiring the player to find the two keys at the opposite ends of the ruins, and one requiring the player to have taken pictures of the other anomalies up until then. This was decided early on, as we wanted to make sure the player would be experienced enough to fight the queen, and to make sure they'd be good at the game's platforming for the fight to feel fair.

One of the last story revisions came as I was writing the moths in the ruins. The idea of the world having been "reborn" in a way was in the lore since the bible was written, but we figured there would be some poetic justice to Robin coming to beat Lyconia again, even if now they're just a silly journalist. Therefore, many of the moth dialog inside the ruins was reworded so as to make it suggest that Robin was the one to detonate the bomb and kill Lyconia in the past version of the world.

Looking back, maybe I could've foreshadowed it a bit better throughout the game, but it's fine. It's our first game after all!

With the game essentially done, I focused on making a new Key Art for the game. The original one was made in a few hours before we launched the Pre-Alpha, because we needed a picture to be able to show the game around. It was okay for the rush order it was, but for the final game I wanted us to have something bigger, more evocative and eye-catching... And something that would work better in the store pages.

MYR: With the Boss Fight done, my last efforts focused on polishing every other cutscene in the game; fixing up the interface to clean up some aspects that didn’t look right under Atlas’ direction, as well as adding more settings to customize your game in the settings menu; Steam Cloud support; Steam Input support; Steam Achievements. The GodotSteam addon really saved us in that regard. 

My role changed towards more marketing and community management tasks as Atlas made trailers and art for our pages and social, and before we could even blink, Moth Planet was out to the public. 

There were some patches to deploy to address some issues here and there post-release, but thankfully, we had lots of evidence thanks to streamers playing our game and helping us with their feedback. Having video proof helped a lot in replicating some of the issues they found. Moth Planet sits at version 1.0.9 right now, up from 1.0.1 as it was released. 

Looking back, it didn’t feel real, it took me a few days to truly feel like we launched the game, or that we were done with Moth Planet, or that people were playing it and loving it.

Part 6 - Goodbye Moth Planet

ATLAS:  Release went smoothly besides a few day one bugs we missed. We're really grateful for everyone who's played the game and who've been following development since the pre-alpha!! While we don't have any plans for Robin and the world of Lepidopteros anytime soon, I know I'll always cherish this bouncy little guy and all that we learned and made for this game :) I'm also very grateful for everyone in the team. Myr for being a very good friend and an extremely capable programmer, Selene for having these wild ideas that really made parts of the game shine and feel special, and Lobba for being there to support and also inspiring me with very good considerations on game design, many of which I don't think I'd come to by myself.

But an extra very special shout out to Myr for entertaining my silly idea of making a moth game <3

MYR: Thank you so much for pushing me to go forward with all this. Honestly, I would probably never have done any serious game dev in my life time without y'all to give me that one push to get it done. I can't believe we get to make a new game together again so soon, I'm really lucky to have found you all, I can't even find proper words of gratitude for your friendship and support. And Cloud Hop, thank you so much for your audio support!

SELENE: I can't believe we did it! WE MADE A GAME AND IT IS FUN! 

The reception was amazing, I can't thank you all enough for playing. I want to also thank Sylvie for Cat Planet; Giik for Super Cat Planet; Raocow for the exposure to it all; Atlas and Myr for willing to stick and try this crazy idea; Lobba for helping us keep it together in the early stages and everyone who has played the game, even if you didn't finish it. 

I hope to continue making games that are fun to play, I hope to continue to make Moth games! And maybe sometime something else, but there will always be room for Moth. Can't say what we are working on next but we'll be trying various ideas, experimenting and making fun games! I do plan to look into coding more, but what I'm gonna work on is a secret for now!

___

And thank you so much for reading this far! This is not the end of MFG, we have new games on the horizon! Stick around and you'll see!

- XOXO
MFG Team