Winter Update 2024

Season’s greetings, friends! Winter has arrived (or will soon if you're reading this early as a paid patron), and it’s time for our final progress update for the year 2024. Now that we’re doing quarterly updates, we won’t be doing the Moonshell Island Annual Retrospect this year. Sometimes a new approach is needed to keep things flowing, and this has helped me maintain things here while reserving more effort for the work itself.

This time last year, I was feeling discouraged with progress and unsure that the work done in 2023 would turn out to be meaningful. I am happy to report that it did, much thanks to Ain and bryan joining the team and working so hard with me to reach our goals for 2024.

With all the demo art done and the technical side roughly 90% complete, it seems possible we will finally be pitch-ready with a solid demo in early 2025.

To close off this year of working towards that goal, please enjoy this summary of the past season's progress!

Heads up: This post includes animated GIFs which are best viewed on your browser!

Pitch Ready Demo Timeline: Behind Schedule!

In my Autumn Update I shared an estimate of how my time will be spent leading up to Pitch Ready status. Unsurprisingly, things didn’t go as planned.

At the time I started this phase of development, my soon-to-be-ex-employer had reduced my health benefits. Because my ADHD medication was no longer covered, I was switched to the generic brand. I hadn’t realized what a difference the brand would make, but the flow I had been sustaining on this project quickly declined as a result. After a friend helped me realize why I was struggling so much, I did manage to switch back to the brand that worked for me and am feeling like myself again. While I did lose some ground and fell behind schedule, I am hopeful that it’s not too late to get Moonshell Island pitch-ready in Q1 2025.

Despite my challenges, we did make some significant progress this past season – let’s get to it!

Pitch-Ready Demo Milestone 1: Narrative Design – Complete!

My first sprint of this phase was about updating the demo narrative and gameplay flow. I used the new demo map to literally map it all out across the 2 in-game days playable in the demo. From there I composed and revised cutscenes and noted any outstanding assets to address in following sprints. Here’s a high-level look at the demo narrative plan on our Miro board:

I’ll be following this outline closely during the Implementing phase!

Pitch-Ready Demo Milestone 2: Final Touches – Complete!

The sprint labelled ‘Final Touches’ consisted of additional assets and mock-ups required by the updated demo narrative, since these hadn’t made it into my previous Demo Art phase. Excluding some spoilers, the following is what got done during this sprint.

That’s it for my contributions to Moonshell Island this past season. Let’s see what Ain got up to!

Concept Art Update: Future Nomster Designs!

Another part of our Pitch-Ready plan is preparing for the full game, so Ain’s began designing concepts for future nomsters! Check out these berry scary Grapes and Cherries!

Okay, maybe not scary, but how fun are these berry noms??? I love the personality and charm Ain’s concepts always bring to the project, but the additional layer of gameplay design included in these sketches is truly impressive to me.

Now let’s hear about this season’s technical progress from bryan!

Demo Technical Update: A word from bryan!

Hey all! Technical work these last few months has been an exciting mix of UI development, world optimization, and above all weaving connections between Moonshell Island’s systems. 

Although we’ve had much of the core gameplay in place for a while, we’ve continued to rely on hard-coded logic to test narrative and game states. Now that the project is slowly scaling up, I’ve been focusing on creating tools and data structures to manage overarching player and story progress! This isn’t very glamorous work, but it’s extremely important – and also a good opportunity for me to review (and hopefully improve!) my work up to this point.

On the UI side, I’ve been implementing Sam’s brilliantly organized mockups for game menus, cooking and managing recipes, and tracking quest and story progress. This part is a lot of fun because I get to watch the transition from concept to gameplay evolve in real-time.

Finally, I’ve been tackling some older, trickier issues with how we manage detail-packed scenes with lots of objects and animations. Some of this is optimizing how we draw the world, some of it is figuring out how to efficiently manage dynamic states over time (i.e. destructible props). This work can also be a little brain-breaking at times, but addressing it now lays a cleaner foundation for the more robust level designs we’re planning beyond the prototype! 

*Sam returns with remnants of RecipeName6 on her face*

Ahh yes, I understand.

*doesn’t understand really but is too scared to admit it*

Thank you for another excellent season of technical progress, bryan! It’s thrilling to see the evolution from vision to functionality take place with such care and attention to detail. It’s been an incredible year of technical progress since bryan joined the Moonshell Island crew, and the future of the project is looking much brighter for it.

To prepare for this brighter future, I’ve started slowly rebuilding a social media presence on a new platform where the skies seem relatively blue-er than other places at the moment.

Cheeky Business: Social Media and Branding Switcheroo!

This past season saw some weird world events that drove me to finally complete my great migration over to Bluesky. While I’ve only been posting old art and footage on an infrequent basis, it’s been nice to connect with the arts and games communities again like I used to on the old bird site that is no more.

I mainly post from my personal account (shown above), but establishing Moonshell Island and Cheekynauts on Bluesky prompted me to finally get around to a small branding update I had been sitting on for the studio:

The old logo holds sentimental value and is an important part of the studio’s history, but this new one feels more flexible in representing a team that has changed and grown over the years and likely will continue to evolve. Rather than representing any specific member(s) of the crew, this mascot represents the animal-loving spirit of adventure and silliness behind our games. I hope you like it!

Eventually I will need to do a full branding revamp here on Patreon and on our dusty old website, but that’s gonna have to wait at least until we’re in the final stages of pitch prep for Moonshell Island.

Future Outlook

While bryan works on the last 10% or so on the technical side and Ain designs more nomsters for the future, I’ll be spending this season implementing assets, maps, cutscenes and audio. If all goes according to my vague guess at a timeline, Moonshell Island may even be pitch-ready by the end of it.

I’ll also be unemployed. This is going to be a challenging season as I navigate unfamiliar and high-stakes territory with this project while losing a reliable income from a job I’d worked for 8 years. There’s no guarantee we’ll be able to get Moonshell Island funded before things become unsustainable, but I would love to make this project my main job and to pay the team reliably so we can see it through to release in a reasonable timeframe. Funding would make that possible, so for now I’m focusing all my energies on making that happen rather than on restarting my career elsewhere.

To me it’s worth the risk I’m taking, but I may soon need to start paying myself from the support received on Patreon. I haven’t done that since founding Cheekynauts in 2020 as it typically only covers our overhead costs. It would make things a lot less scary if that support could grow to help us get by personally until the big funding comes.

So if you’re reading this as a free or non-patron and can afford to, it would mean a lot if you decide to sign up for a paid tier. Paid tiers get access to more posts like this, our patron-only Discord community, and biannual postcards* specially designed and hand-written by me!
*Shooting Starfish tier or higher

That said, I know it’s an expensive time of year and many are struggling in general these days. Another way you can help is moral support on Bluesky! Every kind comment and engagement feeds my dopamine-starved brain with motivation and helps us connect with more friends of Moonshell Island.

To those of you who have supported us in any way so far, thank you for caring about this project and the team behind it. Your kindness is the fuel that keeps us going on this journey, despite the potholes, bad visibility and limited rest stops. Like a winter road trip across Canada in a car full of cats, every kilometer forward gets us closer to comfort and sanity.

On that note I’ll wrap this up with warm wishes of happy cozy times with those you love, and the means to face the insanity that awaits us all in the new year.

Your friend,
Sam