Interview: Moon Egg Studios Talks Castronauts, Fishing on Hostile Planets, and Launching Playtesters Into the Void
Most fishing games are about calm.
Castronauts is about fishing while something very large decides whether you are worth eating.
We recently caught up with Moon Egg Studios to talk about their 2D co-op extraction game, where you and your friends drop onto untamed planets, hit a fish quota, and try very hard to make it back to the ship in one piece.
We spoke about procedural animation, five separate attempts at a fishing minigame, and the collision bug that fired playtesters clean out of the map.
Quickfire Round
First console/system you ever owned?
A SEGA Genesis, with Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as the first game they remember playing on it.
Favourite boss fight of all time?
Ganondorf in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, with an honourable mention for Roxas in Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix.
Go-to snack during crunch?
Dove Chocolate.
Pizza topping that must survive the apocalypse?
Roasted red peppers.
One game you’d love to experience again for the first time?
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Fish, Friends, and Things That Want to Eat You
The pitch is straightforward enough, right up until you get to the part about surviving.
A 2D fishing extraction game where you and your friends must explore untamed planets full of dangerous hazards and creatures to catch the requested amount of fish to survive in this unknown solar system.
Castronauts is not the first version of this idea. It is what was left standing after a bigger one got shelved.
Castronauts evolved from a previous game I was developing that was called The Little Dark, a 2D top-down extraction game. However, that idea got too complex and I dropped it (for now).
What came back was leaner, brighter, and considerably more retro.
Recently, I got into 2D platformers, and I thought I could make a multiplayer extraction game that uses 2D platformer elements with a tighter gameplay loop and more simplified pixel art, so I repurposed most of the network and shader code from The Little Dark, went for a retro sci-fi aesthetic, and added fishing since I wanted a unique thing for the players to collect.
Nothing wasted. Just repurposed.
The Monsters Move Wrong on Purpose
The biggest technical headache turned out to be the exact thing that makes the creatures unsettling.
Anything procedural animation. Early on, I realized that procedural animation made the large roaming creatures feel scary because their movement felt primal, but procedural animation is a fickle thing and is hard to make it feel right. It’s a lot of trial and error that eats up much of our dev time, but when it works as intended it is a huge accomplishment.
Primal is the right word.
There is a real difference between a monster that walks and a monster that moves like it has never been told what walking is.
Five Fishing Minigames Later
The moment the game clicked was not a headline feature. It was one small loop, finally getting it right on the sixth go.
It was figuring out the fishing minigame. At first there wasn’t a fishing minigame and it was just waiting for the fish to bite, but we quickly realized we needed a minigame to break the monotony of fishing.
Attempt one was a Stardew Valley style bar, turned sideways.
It felt too slow and clunky. I made four more iterations and I still wasn’t satisfied because I wanted players to feel like they were playing a fishing minigame and not just a minigame to get fish.
Then the obvious answer showed up, the way it always does, right at the end.
Then it hit me: the minigame should have the player actually pull a fish from the water to the surface while avoiding obstacles. A day and an overhaul later, we got the fishing minigame we have today.
One day. After five attempts. That is game development in a sentence.
The Ship Is the Real Star
Ask what they are proudest of and the answer is not a planet or a creature.
It is the room you keep coming back to.
The player’s ship, which doubles as the hub. Its visual evolution over time helped refine the style of the game as a whole. There are many systems that depend on the ship to make the game work, and the way it is structured is the reason why there are no loading screens during play sessions.
No loading screens as a happy side effect of good architecture is the sort of thing only developers get excited about.
They are right to.
I love the safe, calm, isolated feeling while the player is on the ship drifting through space, and we wanted to nail that tone since players will spend much of their time on the ship.
The Boglurker Incident
Every good dev story involves a creature doing something it very much should not.
There is a creature called a Boglurker which can hide in pools of water to surprise players, grab them, and then toss them. However, the first time playtesters ran into them I didn’t configure the collision handling for client players correctly, so players would be caught by the Boglurker and then be launched out of the map and fall endlessly into the void as their screams echoed for everyone else.
Endless falling. Echoing screams. Everyone else listening.
Terrifying, and arguably working as intended.
As for a secret cheat code, it would unlock a hidden area to explore, at which point they immediately started wondering whether that should just be in the game anyway.
Three Planets Is Bigger Than It Sounds
The one thing they want players to know before dropping in is not to judge the scope by the planet count.
Although 3 planets do not sound like a lot, the planets themselves are filled with various biomes that contain distinct fauna, flora, and color palettes to make the planets have depth and variety. We want to give players the opportunity to discover something unique on every expedition they experience.
And the feeling they want people to leave with is a simple one.
I want players to walk away feeling like they had an immersive experience with friends exploring the worlds we created.
Looking Ahead
Launch is not the finish line here. It is closer to the halfway point.
At launch, players will have 3 planets they can explore, but we plan on supporting the game with additional free content for about a year that will add new items, creatures, cosmetics, and planets. We already know what the 4th planet will be, but it will be released sometime after the launch of Castronauts.
After that, the studio heads back to a project with a title that needs no explanation whatsoever.
We will be back to working on LumberGnomes, our 3D game project where you play as a buff gnome cutting down mushroom trees.
There is also an unannounced single player project. And on the subject of a dream publisher, Moon Egg gave us a firm and diplomatic “no comment.”
Understood…
Wishlist Castronauts
If dropping onto a hostile planet to catch fish with your friends sounds like a good evening, the best thing you can do is add it to your Steam wishlist and follow the studio.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4953420/Castronauts
Website: http://mooneggstudios.com
Team Page: @mooneggstudios
Castronauts is a game about the quiet bit and the loud bit: a calm ship drifting through space, and everything that happens the moment you leave it.