Dev Diary: Relationships, Character Polish, and Map Progress

Hi fellow Frost Hunters! 🫶 Welcome to our first dev diary! We wanted to start sharing more about what we’ve been working on behind the scenes, including features that are still in progress, small improvements we’re making, and some things players have been begging for (yes, we’re listening!). We’ve been working on a few different areas of the game, including NPC relationships, some visual polish for character skin tones, and an in-game map! Let’s have a quick look at what we’ve been doing. 😉

Relationship Feature UI

NPC relationships are a super important part of Moonfrost! We have entire character arcs planned out for each villager, including romantic story events for our bachelors, deep moments where they choose to open up to you, and just plain fun slice-of-life moments to share with these characters. You think Ash sucks? Don’t like the way they mock everyone around them? That’s fine! You can choose to ignore them outside of main story tasks, even gift them trash if you really hate them! Or you could give them a chance, let them open up about their troubled past… and you may just discover your new favourite character! Chats with our villagers will be dynamic, unlocking new lines of dialogue as you progress through their relationship. Some characters may start off mean or guarded and become really kind and loving as you get closer to them. These days we’ve been working on the relationship feature’s UI, where players can track their closeness with villagers, track their favourite gifts, unlock relationship events, and see their friendships grow over time. We want these screens to feel helpful without being overwhelming. As you spend more time with villagers, give them gifts, and experience special moments with them, the UI will gradually become a place where you can look back on everything you’ve learned about each character. This is still a work in progress but we’re excited about how it’s starting to feel in-game!

Skin Tone Smoothing

We’ve also updated the skin tones for Next Fest. Players who tried the game before and after our Next Fest update may have noticed that the skin tones look smoother and more consistent! As we continue development throughout Moonfrost we discover more and more things about our characters, 50% from our internal tests and 50% from the community. We always knew the character would need to undergo polish at various stages, which we try to find time for in-between many (so many) other tasks. The skin tones seemed to change drastically with the in-game lighting; we admittedly only had time to do a single pass before the demo deadlines. Luckily, this “leave it till later” task arrived much quicker than expected! We’ve also been working on new clothing and hairstyles, which players might have noticed in the latest demo updates, and we have many more planned for the launch of the game! Your comments are a really good way to help us shift priorities in the right direction, so please do keep sharing your thoughts, it will help us to build a much better game.

Map Feature Progress

Many of you asked if we could add maps to the game, and we listened! Our scenes can be pretty large, and our temple will become quite labyrinthian as you unlock special shortcuts between different sections, so it made a lot of sense for us to add maps to our game!

The map feature is still in development, but we’ve been exploring how to make it useful without taking away from the feeling of discovery. New locations will be added to your list as you unlock or discover them. Special landmarks will appear on these maps as you advance through the game. We’re also listening closely to feedback about other things players would like to see added to these maps. If you have suggestions, please feel free to share them in the Steam Discussions or in the behind-the-scenes map thread on our Discord. We’ll be gathering that feedback and considering it as we continue working on the map. There are still details we’re testing and adjusting, so we’ll share more when the feature is further along.

That’s it for our first dev diary!

Thank you so much for all your feedback, suggestions, and support. Features like relationships, customisation and the map have received a lot of requests, and your comments really help us understand what players are looking forward to most. Since this is our first time writing a dev diary, we’d love to hear what you think. If there’s anything you’d like to know more about in future updates, please let us know! We’re excited to keep sharing more as development continues! 💜