Moonglow Bay is a relaxing, slice-of-life fishing RPG due to release on Xbox consoles and PC in just a couple of week’s time. Ahead of the game’s official release on Oct. 26, I was lucky enough to sit down and talk with creative director Zach Soares and art director Lu Nascimento to get a better idea of what players can expect from life in Moonglow Bay, and the depths of the deep blue sea off this coastal town.
In the interview, we cover their inspirations within the slice-of-life sim genre, an initially ‘darker take’ for Moonglow Bay, how relationships work with the characters, working with Microsoft, and making the decision to launch on Xbox Game Pass, as well as achievements and much more.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank both Zach and Lu once more for taking the time out of their busy schedules to share so much about the creative process behind Moonglow Bay, in what was a truly fascinating conversation. You can read it in full below.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Twinfinite: So first off, I just wanted to say, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedules to sit down and talk with us today about Moonglow Bay. I, and the rest of the team have been waiting with, pardon the pun, bated breath to check it out for ourselves next month. So to start us off, could you just give us a quick introduction of who you are and what your roles are within the development of Moonglow Bay.
Zach: Yes, I’m Zach. I’m the Creative Director, that’s my primary role but I also do all the voxel art for the game.
Lu: I’m Lu, I’m the Art Director and do everything to do with the effects, the UI, everything. And thank you for having us.
Twinfinite: No problem. So, what were your inspiration within the slice-of-life sim genre for Moonglow Bay?
Zach: One of the first major ones was Harvest Moon.
Lu: And Legend of the River King as well.
Zach: Yeah.
Lu: And then, I think it was Animal Crossing. Not the newest one because it was not out when we started making the game. It was New Leaf.
Zach: Yeah, just the dynamic that occurs in that game, interacting with the people that live there, that kind of stuff.
Lu: Like the whole becoming friends with the villagers.
Zach: Yeah, becoming friends with them, learning about them a little bit more and that’s basically what drove the friendship system in our game.
Lu: And there was also a lot of manga and anime.
Zach: Oddly enough, yeah. I read a lot of manga but the one that stuck out most was Toriko. We didn’t take inspiration from the entirety of the manga, but just the initial premise of people who just punt weird creatures and cook and stuff with it.
Lu: There’s loads of slice-of-life manga and anime that exists out there too that inspired us.
Zach: Silver Spoon, is another manga and anime that’s really good. But yeah, those are the basics things that kind of inspired us for it. Aesthetically, our inspirations are a little different. It was more along the lines of the ‘Ghibli palette’.
Lu: Especially Ponyo.
Zach: Yeah, Ponyo had a lot of that because of the fish and stuff like that. Like the way they emphasize the wildlife at sea is really nice and we wanted to play with that idea. And anything else aesthetically, like polaroids and being able to flip through an album. That’s a really interesting one. Flipping through an album and seeing the past and stuff like that kind of inspired how the UI went, which is an interesting take, and also the voxels kind of dictated the squareness of the interface.
Twinfinite: So the reception to Moonglow Bay has been really positive. I think quite a lot of people are very excited about it. Has this put more pressure on the team or is it kind of encouraging you all to really push through those final months up until launch?
Zach: At least for me, it’s a bit of both. Definitely the pressure’s on to make sure people are really pleased with it when they’re playing. We’ve played it and people have tested it and played it a bunch and everyone seems to enjoy the game, so we’re like “alright this is good, good.” But there’s always that expectation that people build internally while they’re looking at it from the outside, and I’m like “oh please, oh please.” *laughs*
Lu: For me, it keeps me motivated because in my head I’m always keeping my expectations really low, so if anything goes wrong, at least I’m not going to end up disappointed myself, so when I see people actually like the game I’m like, “Oh ok, yeah this is really nice.”
Zach: Yeah, at least for Lu and I, we’re a team that really beat ourselves up. *laughs*
Lu: I feel like for the others in the team, it has been very motivational, especially because they couldn’t say anything about the game.
Zach: Yeah, and they all worked on games previously, where they haven’t really been able to speak about them. Either because they’re working on a AAA, or they worked on indie games that had already came out, so they were kind of just there as an assist. There’s not that same excitement of “we worked on something secretly, and then we’ve announced it.” The announcement definitely made all of us really pumped to finally talk about it. For me definitely, my productivity just before we announced was so low, and as soon as we announced, all of the reception kind of just boosted me up, like “We need to impress, we need to do well!”
Twinfinite: So I just want to quickly talk about the actual fishing mechanic for a moment. I noticed in the gameplay trailer, the float kind of bobs around a few times before it disappears under the water completely. Then the music picks up as you wrestle with the fish. Will players need to complete a Quick-Time Event (QTE) to successfully catch a fish, or is this more or less like a cutscene similar to Animal Crossing?
Zach: It depends on the layers. So there’s three layers to fishing itself. The initial being, if you’re just fishing in open water, and you get like a tier-one fish. So, smaller fish. Typically, it’s going to be closer to Animal Crossing where it’s just an immediate reaction and you just start pulling.
Lu: Yeah, but it’s not exactly like Animal Crossing where it catches it immediately. You actually need to be pulling against the direction that the fish is pulling.
Zach: But the tier one fish, because of their size and the fact we determined them tier one, they’re much easier to catch. So you can expect your encounter time to be something like a few seconds.
Then you’ve got the tier two and tier three fish. Tier three fish being like shark-sized creatures, like really big fish. One of them is the Sailfish. That’s a tier-three fish and that will have a QTE instance, where the fish jumps out to do their boost, which is their way to try to escape and break the line, and you will have a window. So we tutorialize this initially, we tell you ‘this is the window in which you have to react,’ and then later on you’re expected to study that window when you’re fighting the fish. Then within that time, you have to pull and react in the correct direction and then you can stun it, start pulling it in and you can resume your encounter, but it’s that kind of stuff. Like, we add a little bit more to the tiers, so that the encounter feels like there’s a reward balanced to the size of the fish.
And the monsters of Moonglow don’t make use of that exact mechanic. They take on the fishing mechanics and put a little bit of a twist to it.
Lu: You’re not catching them really.
Zach: No, so yeah, that’s one of the big things about the monsters in Moonglow. It’s not about catching them, it’s about figuring out what exactly is wrong with them and helping them in their scenarios. Like the very first one, you’ll see it’s struggling and in pain, and you’ve got to help it out by relieving that pain with your rod, and you kind of figure it’s pretty obvious when you see it.