Moonfrost’s Present: Rise of the Alpha Playtesters

Alpha play tester Niers trying to catch bees with the Supersucker power tool

Excuse the Star Wars pun… In late September 2023, we announced we were entering our closed alpha playtesting phase of game development. We were finally at the point where we could start to open the doors for some select (couple hundred) players to come and experience what we have been working on…

What we didn’t expect was over 15,000 people signed up in less than 1 week (currently sitting at over 25,000)! The team was ecstatic to find out that so many people wanted to experience and help build Moonfrost with us!

On the 9th of October 2023, we onboarded our first alpha playtesters to experience Moonfrost in its earliest closed alpha release. We then opened up a second wave a few weeks later to let more players experience what we have been up to and help answer these key questions;

— Have we achieved our goal of how we want the game to feel as you play?

— What it is like to be the player?

— How are the controls?

— How satisfying is it to do the small actions? E.g. swing an axe, plant a crop, run

around etc.

— What do you like to do most while playing?

And boy oh boy, did the playtesters come through on this one…

They not only provided us with all the answers to these crucial questions, but they rocketed us upward in our game development by capturing bugs, providing crucial feedback, insightful feature suggestions, review videos, screenshots and much much more!

93.6% of alpha playtesters said they’d want to play the full game, which was incredible to hear we were on the right track!

So where are we now with development?

Well, we are excited to announce we are fast approaching our next playtest which will be released soon…This will showcase some exciting new game features, integrations and the introduction of SHARDS 💎 🙌

Build Mode

In the full game you will start your journey in similar conditions to the image above, so unless you want to live in this rickety old shed forever, it is paramount we offer players the ability to build, customise and progress on their homestead. We have written an article on this feature that goes into a lot more detail - Game Dev Insights: A New Feature Which Feels Somewhat ‘Sims’ilar - so if you want to check that out it’ll give you a nice head start before playing. We will be asking players to create and decorate a home using Build Mode and all the furniture they will be unlocking by completing tasks, with the hopes of discovering improvements and additions we can make.

NPCs & Dialogue

Though we are still in alpha development, as a life-sim RPG our characters are going to play a massive role in creating a world that players will want to keep returning to. We now have two NPCs in-game - our sassy beautician Ash and kind-hearted Walter. In the game world, our NPCs appear in a chibi form, with a hand-drawn 2D avatar when in dialogue. The biggest inspiration for our dialogue System has been Hades, and we wanted to put our own Moonfrost-spin on it. We are trying to create a world that reacts and responds to you as the player, and our NPCs will comment on all sorts of things.

We have been hard at work creating a roster of distinct characters, leaning into things like facial expressions, sounds, body language and tone of voice to fully realise each NPC’s personality (…ahem, Ash may be a little spicy). We are excited to find out what players think about our characters and any favourite conversations they may have!

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  First iteration of our character

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  Second iteration of our character model

Improvements from community feedback

From our last playtest, live streams and general user interaction we received a lot of fantastic feedback that we have since used to help improve Moonfrost.

Character remodelling: Ok, the big one… we have been getting feedback on this since the announcement trailer. People expressed they loved our pixel art game world but felt the characters just didn’t reach the same standard, so we spent a lot of time trying to improve our character model. We have come up with a new and improved version - as you can see in the side-by-side images above for comparison, we have made a lot of progress so far. We plan to make a whole blog post dedicated to this topic soon!

Water quality of life improvements: One of the main issues we had was the stability of our water in the game. It would sometimes glitch and the shader would spawn random pools of water - making it hard to actually play the game for a small number of players. There was also additional feedback that the current watering crops method wasn’t really cutting it, so… We improved the shader stability, the crop watering state now has more visual feedback (without ruining immersion) and you can even see your reflection in the water - which we thought was a pretty neat addition.

Crafting: We have had a very large overhaul of our crafting system too. In the first playtest it was basic with only certain tools and seeds from one or two sites. We have now implemented more crafting sites for specific types of items; timers, massive UI improvements (still not finished but a lot better), refined resources and much much more.

It’s important to note we are still in our Alpha stage! All our features are still in development and we are continuously exploring, improving and building on what we already have. The input and feedback of our users is crucial in doing so!

A word of warning an unknown character...