Lunaraxia: Magpie Sings of the Year’s End

※ The text below was AI-translated from Korean.

Hello, It feels like just yesterday that we began developing Lunaraxia back in February.

Steam post image(▲ A mock gameplay GIF we made back in February)

Yet the Time, as it is known to do so, flows at a cruel pace, drawing 2025 to a sudden close.

For us, 2025 was a year full of undeserved attention; even winning Beaver Featured during Beaver Rocks (formerly Burning Beaver), a prominent indie game festival in Korea.

while also being a year of anxiety and intensity, as we continued development quite literally with our lives on the line.

As we wrap up 2025, we’d like to briefly share our current development status and what comes next.

#1 Development Status

Right now, we are putting all our effort into boss battle development.

We are building a boss in the same role as Sekiro ’s Genichiro —one you can only defeat by fully leveraging the game’s core mechanics (parrying, wish magic, dashing, etc.) and making full use of them—so it is being designed as a humanoid boss.

Steam post imageSteam post image As you can see, the boss is being implemented with rough animation as of now. Our plan is to playtest animation timing and hitboxes before fully committing our artist’s time.

And for that beaked goober you may have seen at the very end of our build at exhibitions… well, it’ll show up properly one day, right?

On the other hand, we are also refining and rebuilding the roguelike elements that were prototypical in our Demo Preview Builds. Based on feedback from multiple playtests and exhibitions, we were able to establish the following design pillars to implement a significantly improved roguelike loop built. Please look forward to it.

• Add roguelike choices that better fit the action-game experience (especially risk-taking as a means of expressing skill, and HP as one of the standards for improvisational decision making).

• Add a roguelike map system that is fun for both improvisation and mid-to-long-term decision-making, while keeping the barrier to entry low.

• Reduce the weight of vertical progression that makes repeated runs less enjoyable (especially the progression system in the Demo Preview Build where gathering and salvaging expensive items and upgrading weapons/shields was highly effective), and increase the weight of horizontal progression (the act of collecting items itself).

• Revamp random events to better match the tempo of other content.

• More varied combat content.

• Improve UX clarity and convenience.

In addition, based on feedback on the Story Mode that we applied experimentally in the Demo Preview Build, we concluded that it is difficult for players to be fully immersed in both gameplay and “what is happening right now” at the same time. Accordingly, more of the story will be shifted to “things that already happened in the past.” We will also change the storytelling so that players uncover what happened and, as a result, find an ending they believe is fitting for the characters.

#2 Next

We are actively developing with the goal of releasing an official demo that includes all of the above. For now, all we can say is that it will likely be in the first half of next year (with a margin of error of 6 months!). As the demo build nears completion, we are also considering plans such as a private Discord playtest and crowdfunding ahead of that.

We will return with an excellent demo worthy of the overwhelming interest you have shown us so far.

Many Thanks, Lunaraxia Development Team