Summary
Cozy games are all the rage as life feels increasingly hectic and out of control, and the latest game to land in that space isMoonstone Island. Taking notes fromPokemon, Harvest Moon, Slay the Spireand many more sources, this creature collector blends thecozy gamelife sim charm with its cute critters.
Moonstone Islandtakes place on the titular island, floating in the sky alongside other islands high above an ocean world. After an ancient civilization fell, the spirits thrown out of balance reared their heads, and plucky young alchemists like the protagonist venture forth to calm them and restore harmony with the world. Theblushes of Ghibli-inspired narrativesare no accident here, said Sandy Spink, creator ofMoonstone Island,who spoke to Game Rant following the game’s release.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: What were the main inspirations behind Moonstone Island?
A:I think about this a lot because it sort of came to be over a long period of time. I feel like it’s sort of like a love letter to the games that I grew up on,likePokemonandLegend of ZeldaandHarvest Moon, as well as the TV I watched and especially the movies I watched. As a kid, I would rent a Studio Ghibli movie every week, and I think that I’ve never let that go wherever I’ve gone creatively. I’ve always kind of brought that with me. More recently, I’d say deck-building games likeDominion,Magic the Gathering,andSlay the Spirespecifically.
Q: What’s your favorite Ghibli movie?
A:It’s such a tough question! It does change. But I think the one, if I don’t think too hard about it, isKiki’s Delivery Service. ButCastle in the Sky? I feel like it’s tied for first place, if I can say that.
Q: I also see the influence of both of those onMoonstone Island.
A:Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, the tutorial honestly is basically just the whole first thing ofKiki’s Delivery Servicealmost verbatim. I just felt like it would work well and think it has.
Q: How did you approach balancing and blending the farming sim and spirit battle mechanics?
A:Yeah, that was one of the things where it all of a sudden clicked. It was when I knew that I wanted to have this farm sim creature collector. I feel like previous attempts that I’ve had at it didn’t gel together, and I needed a way to make those systems work together.
I went back, I was playingPokemon Redspecifically because I’m old, and I realized that a big part ofPokemonis actually the item system. Since in our game, I wasn’t really planning on having an item shop, I thought “What if your farm is your item shop?” Your farm provides your ability to tame spirits, your ability to boost their stats, and even level them up; all the things that you can do in aPokemongame with items the farm inMoonstone Islandcan provide for you.
Q: What are some of thecards in the battle deck?
A:Each spirit element has a different set of cards that it can draw from. So water spirits can get water cards, poison spirits can get poison cards, etc. Each spirit is essentially a mini deck. When you put three Spirits together, you actually shuffle all their cards together, and each turn you’ll get a different hand of cards from across all three of their decks.
For example, water spirits have cards that mostly heal and also provide some boons. I saw them as like the cleric, so they have cards that will provide regen, or they have another card called Hydromancy, which will upgrade all the cards in your hand for the rest of combat.
Then there are Earth types, which are more focused on just physical attacks. They have a lot of tackle cards in their deck that are just a plain normal damage attack. But then they also have a card called Focus, for example, which is kind of fun to build around because Focus reduces the cost of all tackle cards to zero. So you can get this one thing going where you pull a lot of tackle cards, and then play a focus card and just sort of like throw down a bunch of tackles.
Poison spirits will just apply poison, and they have cards that will like triple the poison. They also have cards that can actually feed off of the poison and heal themselves a little bit. Psychic spirits are particularly good at drawing cards and building energy, so a lot of players use them as sort of a tech system if you’re trying to go infinite, which is definitely possible.
Q: What are some of your personal favorite spirits in the game?
A:That’s another tough one! I really like Lookachoo, he’s just sort of a handkerchief ghost. I also love Fishbo, he was one of the first, and he’s one of the ones that a lot of people have really been drawn to. I also love Longlog because I don’t know, it just feels kind of like the name is absurd. I really just kind of like any time that things are dumb in a nice, good way.
Q: What are some of the home upgrades you can get?
A:That’s something I’ve really enjoyed watching players engage with lately, too, because I feel like there’s a lot to do in the game. People only started focusing on the home decoration once they’ve established themselves and sort of engaged with some of the other mechanics first. That seems to be the trajectory I’ve seen.
You start out with a single room inside your tent, but you’re able to get an east wing and a west wing, and then another room to the north. Then, you can also get a second floor and then an attic, and you can also get a basement. You can expand that basement three times until the point where it’s just absurdly large. There is a crafting station called the Decoration Station that has over 100 craftable decorations that people have done a lot of really fun stuff with.
There’s also a crafting station called the Loom which we built into the game, and it’s basically a pixel art editor that lets you create custom floor and wallpaper tiles. So people, of course, have been doing incredible things with that, making their places very, very custom. There are also a few different exterior home skins you can get; a cottage, a tree fort, and a wizard tower. We’re hoping to add a few more of those in the future.
Q: What can you share about the village on the titular Moonstone Island?
A:When we were coming up with sort of the NPCs and sort of the vibe, I worked closely with Kate Gray, who’s the writer of our game and also now our community manager. She really brought it to life. I had just some ideas of who the characters were, I didn’t even have their names yet really…I just kind of had their occupation. I wanted each character to have an arc that they went through as you go on these dates with them.
The dating system is kind of the best way to engage with the narrative of each NPC. You start out just sort of getting to know them on the surface, and by the end of it, you might learn about their personal struggles or some of the history of the world. There’s some lore on some of the dates and stuff like that. Each of those NPCs, almost all of them run some sort of shop that will either sell you items or seeds. Zed, for example, as the professor, will turn in your spirit research, and he gives you special rewards that will help you tame and fight spirits in the wild. Ferra is our lovely pink-haired blacksmith.
It’s just sort of an amalgamation of all the people that we wanted to represent. A lot ofthe influence for the characterscame from places likeAdventure TimeandEarthBoundas well where we wanted things to be kind of again, kind of like silly and dumb, but in a way that is nice. Kate managed to write a lot of humor, which is rare and really hard to do in games, and I’m very impressed with our work, I couldn’t be happier.
Q: So you’ve dived a little bit into the dates. What can you tell me about the romance system?
A:So there are a few aspects to it. On the surface, you can just engage with people by talking to them. I was kind of playing off of bothDungeons and DragonsandThe Sims.For example, inThe Simswhen you talk to another character, you then get options that are sort of like varying degrees of difficulty. So, what we have done is we have options to chat, joke, and flirt, and then we show you the odds of how successful that may be. As a baseline, chatting is 70% successful, while joking is 50% successful. I think flirting is like 20% at the beginning. You basically just click on those, those do a little die roll, and they just give you a plus or negative based on the outcome. There’s a little bit of just randomness built into that system.
But as you go, you’re able to also give them gifts, and they’ll have a set of gifts that they like, which is pretty common for farming sims. Those will raise your stats as well. You can go on dates; there are three locations throughout Moonstone Island where you can go on dates instead ofhaving a system likeStardew ValleyandHarvest Moon, where you have these random encounters. I never liked those because I always felt like I had to Google where they were, and I felt like I was missing out on them.
Our dating system is more like a classic dating sim where you will actually ask them on a date, you set a location, you set a time, and then it actually does a roll. If you’re successful, it will schedule a date, and it’ll show you the location of the date. As you move up the ranks as you increase your social points with people, your odds of all of those systems working in your favor increase. So eventually Chat will be 100% successful, Flirt can go up all the way to 90% successful, and asking on dates your odds get higher as well.
Q: Among the player base that you’ve seen, who are some of themore popular romance options?
A: It’s been nice seeing that it’s pretty spread out. I thought there would be, like, one or two that were really popular, but a lot of people are saying they see themselves or they see their partner in the game. It was really, really nice.
I think that maybe the two I see the most are Ferra–she’s a big tough blacksmith and she’s very flirty and very kind–and Tobin, who’s this fisherman that has received the most fan art so far. It kind of surprised me, but people seem to be drawn to him as well. His accent has some people confused because Kate lives on the east coast of Canada and was inspired by the Newfoundland accent, so she actually wrote him with that. I don’t know, maybe people find that charming?
Q: You play as an alchemist. What isbeing an alchemistlike in this world?
A:I always liked the idea of alchemy; it was like science and magic meeting. When I was coming up with the world, I didn’t want to go with a witch or wizard. I feel like that was all overdone, and because there is sort of like a natural sciences or natural philosophy element to what the player is doing in the game. So it doesn’t necessarily coincide perfectly with our world’s definition of what an alchemist is.
InMoonstone Island, an alchemist is basically someone who has received training to live off the land, make potions, and brew concoctions, as well as tame and deal with the nature spirits that are sort of running amok because the natural balance of things has been thrown out of whack ever sincethis event that we know is the Cataclysmoccurred.
Q: Can you tell us anything about the Cataclysm?
A:If you go on a couple of dates with Cleo at the tavern, she gets into it a little bit, and I think Gaiana does as well. In fact, yes, he does. But basically, the prehistory of Moonstone Island, before this happened, was something that we know as the Old Kingdom that sort of became one global city, and nobody really knows what happened to it.
There was an event that occurred called the Cataclysm which ejected all the land from the planet below into the sky, specifically into the troposphere, where it kind of remained. The planet below is now just this large water planet that you can actually kind of see when you’re playing the game. Once the cataclysm occurred, it opened these rifts in the world, which allowed in these sorts of dark spirits, which is something that you contend with throughout the game.
Q: What has the reception been like for the game?
A:It’s been great. It’s honestlybeen better than I expected. I’m an “expect the worst and hope, then if the best comes, feel better” kind of a guy, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Honestly, the critical reception to farming sims–which is what we kind of get bucketed as even though I kind of don’t really feel like we’re a farming sim but we do get put in that bucket–often isn’t great. Right now, we’re sitting at a nine out of 10 on Steam and 81 on Metacritic, which I’m very pleased about.
It’s better than I expected and also, critics aside, just watching streamers play and just lurking there without them even knowing I’m there is a lot of fun. Seeing them just have a good time and like, you know, like blushing on the dates or like getting spooked by the Magic Man as he runs up in his chicken house behind them, things like that. It’s been really rewarding to watch people just have a really nice time with the game. I genuinely enjoy it.
Q: You mentioned that you get grouped with farming sims, but don’t see yourself as one. How do you seeMoonstone Island?
A:That’s a good question too. I don’t know, I just feel like the word… in terms of the genre, we call ourselves a creature collecting life sim, and I feel more like that. I think that there’s more exploration, combat, and creature collecting in the game than there is actually farming, and most people who have it have realized that.
I think because we’re a pixel game and because we have farming, it will always kind of be put in thatStardewsort of bucket. It has been nice to see that any sort of people who were worried or accusing us of being aStardewclone don’t seem to be saying that anymore.
Q: I’ve noticed over the past couple of years more games incorporating farming without being a farming sim. I’m thinkingHarveststella,FloraMancer, and of courseMoonstone Island. Why do you think that is?
A: I think that there’s something about the time management aspect of it. For me, I remember as a kid playingHarvest Moon, I thought it was so cool that no matter what I did, the game was always going to move forward. I could only do so much in a day, then I had to get to bed, and it would be the next day. I think that farming ties into that nicely, where it gives you this feeling of progress, almost likea very slow loading barwhere the next day you see the crops a little bit taller, you see it sprouting, and then you see it ready to harvest.
I think that the day cycle and the farming aspect being a slow gratification fit nicely together. There’s just something about it that I think our human brains like. Maybe the fact that it kind of sets a pace? It’s saying there’s time, nothing is instant, you’re going to have to wait for this to grow anyway, so why not just go and have a nice chill time and do something else for a bit?
Q: Are there any plans for future content you can tease us with?
A: We have lots of plans for stuff we’d like to add! It’s such a feature-rich game and there’s so much opportunity for things that we can do. I can’t say anything specifically right now as far as dates are concerned, but some things that we’ve said broadly are just some features that we’d love to add.
We want to add more spirits because it’s just fun to do that. I think it’s a big part of the game. There are also little things, like we want to add growable trees because that’s just something that we didn’t get in for launch, as well asbeing able to name your spiritsis something that we wanted to have and didn’t quite get in for launch, but we’re looking to add in the near future.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share?
A:Follow us on Twitter, wishlist us on Steam. You know, even post-launch that’s still a big help. We also have a Fishbo plush available for sale on Makeship, which I have a sample of and it is very adorable. I guess I’m just adding all of my shills here.
[END]
Moonstone Islandis available for Nintendo Switch and PC.
