Interviewees -
Lantern Studio: LUNA The Shadow Dust
George Eastmead - Community Manager
Mojiken Studio: When The Past Was Around
Brigitta Rena - Art Director
What is your game about, and what does the player do in the game?
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.
What inspired the development of your game?
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.
The Tales from the East bundle celebrates Asian game development. How did your team form?
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”.
What themes or tropes from Asian culture are present in the game?
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.
What is unique about your game that differentiates it from similar other titles?
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/
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