Moonfrost’s Past: A Love Story To Stardew Valley

Our love letter to Stardew Valley (left) and Moonfrost concept (right)

Moonfrost was born from an idea by Gina Nelson and Ric Moore - the cofounders of Oxalis Games - way back in 2021… ‘What if Stardew Valley was made by a bigger team and enhanced with today's technology?’

Would it still be the same Stardew Valley we know and love today?’

For some additional context, Ric was one of the primary people involved in bringing Stardew Valley to mobile, and there is also great love for the game amongst the team.

Even 8 years on Stardew Valley is outstanding, and we are not the only ones who think so… Stardew Valley just reached a new all-time high for its peak concurrent player count… Amazing!

Well, we didn’t want to clone Stardew Valley - we wanted to pay homage to it and use it in the same way Stardew Valley's creator, Eric Barone, did with Harvest Moon… We have worked hard to create a brand new yet familiar experience, drawing inspiration from other incredible games such as Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Zelda, and The Sims.        

We wanted to explore all options to make the best game possible. One of our earlier decisions that branched us off from other games in the genre was our camera angle; instead of using a traditional 2D top-down perspective, could we create something new and unique for this style of game? This led us down the path of a fixed isometric camera, drastically enhancing Moonfrosts visual immersion but also increasing the complexity of the task at hand.

We have also spent considerable time exploring the uses of other technologies that could potentially better our game. One of those options was using something called the blockchain, which is often linked closely with cryptocurrency and NFTs. You can find out more in our FAQ (Whitepaper coming Q1 2025.

For simplicity of this blog series, we will summarise all three elements; crypto, NFTs and blockchain into the phrase ‘Web3 technology’.

You're probably wondering ‘What has this got to do with games, especially Moonfrost?’

Initial intentions for utilising Web3 technology in Moonfrost started way back in 2021, we began researching and exploring the potential of integrating this new tech into Moonfrost, and we envisioned various possibilities. From currencies (which we called $FROST) to creating unique NFTs representing rare in-game items and digital collectables, the potential applications seemed endless, but our core view was always aligned to only include these features if they create a better gaming experience for our players.

We will go into more detail about Moonfrost’s Web3 technology use in part 2 and part 3 of this blog series (Moonfrosts Past, Present and Future).

So back to our development journey for now.

One thing we wanted to achieve for Moonfrost is a premium quality free-to-play never-ending experience in the life-sim RPG genre. We wanted to give players a fresh experience, but one which still felt somewhat familiar - even nostalgic - at times.

So we got to work. Fast forward to March 2023 and we were ready to showcase Moonfrost to the world in the form of our Announcement Trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IreVzUhTA4A

Moonfrost Announcement Trailer

We were blown away by the overwhelmingly positive feedback and attention it got! Exceeding 8 million impressions (on Twitter), 20,000 likes and waking up the next morning with an additional 10,000 followers! This solidified our vision, we were in high spirits, and felt we were building a game that people would actually want to play! The seasons rolled on, and in what felt like no time at all 6 months had passed, and we were ready to embark on the next step of our adventure… our closed alpha playtesting stage.