Dive into the fantastical world of Moonman
Retronator Games Watchlist
This is another repost from Retronator Magazine on the Stampsy platform. I only have a couple of articles left, so my new home on Medium will soon have the complete collection of features. Original publish date was June 1, 2015.
I missed the Kickstarter for Moonman at the beginning of this year, but I gladly became a late backer once I found the project, developed by Ben Porter, through his Twitter community of daily pixel art challenges @Pixel_Dailies.
Moonman’s world is a visual treat, which makes it perfect for our next adventure in this thing I like to call Retronator Magazine.
And with that, let’s dive in!
Moonman is a lot like Minecraft or its 2D cousin Terraria.
There are materials to mine, items to craft, dungeons to explore, quests to fulfill and enemies to fight.
The world itself is, typically for the genre, procedurally generated from a set of biomes. Forests will be inhabited by (mostly) tranquil animals and offer a large resource of wood.
Volcanic regions under the moon Agre will offer a change of scenery from the prevailing green color.
Digging into the depths will reveal caves and the dungeon of Azkaez.
Back on the surface, climbing into the mountains will bring you into the snowy regions with their stone fortresses.
Scroll down slowly through this final image to appreciate all the details.
Quite a remarkable world. The game’s alpha was already released (to backers at the $20 tier) and is currently available for Windows.
Ben (a.k.a. @eigenbom) provides a lot of updates through Kickstarter and Moonman’s forums and is in general a wonderful human being.
Here he’s drawing one of the 190 custom postcards for backers.
He recently published a postmortem of his 365 Days of Pixel Art right here on Medium. I have no idea where he finds the time and creativity to do all these wonderful things at once.
If you want to follow the development process yourself you can pre-order the game here. Just watch out, you might find yourself, and the Moon, turning green.
Wow. Just wow. Going back over this article makes me fall in love with the game all over again. Since I initially wrote this, Ben made a lot of progress. Here are some extra GIFs just for you, Medium.
Coming up next we’ll probably look at the wonderful community that is PixelJoint. Their monthly top 10 is a much loved feature on my tumblr so I have a good feeling you’ll enjoy it a lot.
Till then, yours in pixels,
— Retro
