Indie Game Spotlight: Moonlighter

Indie Game Spotlight: Moonlighter

We’re back! This week’s Indie Game Spotlight fulfills all of our secret dreams of being a shopkeeper. Moonlighter is about a humble shopkeeper, Will, who dreams of being a hero. Sounds peaceful, right? Sure, except Will’s merchandise doesn’t come from bulk deliveries. He has to explore dungeons and fight for all that good, good loot. This game uses two distinct styles of play— ARPG/Roguelite in the dungeons, and a light management game in the town. 

We were able to ask video game developer Javi Gimenez, the director of Digital Sun, all about the part shopkeeper-simulator-monster-slaying-dungeon-crawler game. 

Moonlighter is often described as part shop-keeper simulator and part monster-slaying-dungeon-crawler; where did the idea come from to merge these two amazing concepts together?

Well, it all started with us wondering how a game on which you played as the typical JRPG shopkeeper would look like. Then we started to add elements from games we loved like The Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy or Harvest Moon, and we ended up with this concept of a game with two sides to it.

The visuals are gorgeous in Moonlighter. What inspired the art style in the game?

Thank you! We wanted to find a balance between traditional 16-bit era pixel art (for example, Chrono Trigger), things like Zelda: The Minish Cap. and modern tendencies like the gorgeous Hyper Light Drifter. I believe Moonlighter has a modern approach to pixel art, there are many things in the game that couldn’t be done 20 years ago because of the technology.

Did any real life situations inspire the game? Are you secretly a dungeon-crawling shop keeper?  

I wouldn’t tell you! Well…we started as a service company, building video games for other people. But, deep in our hearts, we always wanted to be indie heroes, and work on the kind of games we truly loved. So, yeah, you could say there is a parallelism there with the story of Will. We often joked about this internally.

If you had to change Will’s occupation, what would it be?

Well…that’s hard to say because we didn’t develop the personality of Will a lot on purpose. He is a silent hero, so he can be a vessel for the player. I have my own idea of who Will is, but it might not be the same as the idea of anyone else. I think that he’s an explorer, someone who wants to see the world, and experiment things. He could have been a great Han Solo type of character to me. But, like I said, this is not canon, just my impression :D

What’s next for the team?

Since Moonlighter has been quite successful, we are going to be able to work on more games. Our idea is to develop a couple of games at the same time and be a multi-game studio. We want to focus on high quality indie games. We don’t plan on building very large games, but focused mid-sized games that tend to do just one thing—but try to do it right. We are also still doing work for other people (which we love sometimes!) and we are interested in collaborations with other studio or IP owners, too. Right now we are exploring our options, I guess. We are still a very young studio!

Ready to quit your day job and become a dungeon-crawling shopkeeper? Us too. Moonlighter is available now on available on Steam / PS4 / Xbox / Nintendo Switch.