Interview: Spirit City Lofi Sessions Was Originally Planned As An Adventure Game

Keith: My name is Keith, I’m the Art Director and one of the Co-Founders of Mooncube Games. My main role in the project is creating 3D art for the environment, characters, and Spirits in the game. As a small team we all wear many hats, so I also helped with various other aspects, such as marketing and socials.

Mooncube Games is a 3-person indie team from Montreal, Canada. Aside from myself, the other two members and co-founders are; Felix, our Designer and Programmer, and Alex, our Audio Director and Business Manager.

Keith: Our first goal was to create a cozy, welcoming environment. We spent a lot of time gathering references and looking at other cozy games. We wanted the space to be relatable, but also lean into the fantasy of having your own cozy loft looking over the city.

We approached characters the same way, focusing on comfortable clothing first. For the Spirits we started with ideas for ones that could be found inside or around a bedroom. We tried to create Spirits that embodied different aspects of coziness, such as reading with Chapterpillar, or a warm fireplace with Hedgelog.

Keith: Spirit City was originally going to be a platforming adventure game where the player had to chase down and capture spirits on camera! After creating our initial prototype, we knew that to reach the level of quality we wanted, the development would be too long. So to keep the scope manageable, we focused on one single feature of the initial pitch, a bedroom, where the player could chill to Lofi music.

With the popularity of Lofi playlists on YouTube, we found that it was the perfect music style to promote productivity and focus. From there it only made sense to add in productivity tools to make it a complete package.

Keith: Throughout the development, we tried to ensure that all the additional features weren’t too distracting. This included not having distracting popups or notifications that could interrupt the player when focusing.

Spirits were a solution we came up with to add a passive discovery element to the game, allowing players to unlock them as pets, and little snippets of info in the Spiritdex. We wanted them to have a puzzle element to them, but nothing too difficult so as to not frustrate the player. Keeping them as pets was a natural evolution to this, who could resist a cute Spirit pal?

Keith: We wanted the soundscapes to create an immersive experience for the player. The first soundscapes we created were ones that we knew could affect the environment in different ways, such as rain and thunder.

The fireplace and vinyl player aspects in the room were created specifically to interact with their corresponding sounds. We allow players to choose what level they’d like for each soundscape, affecting the visuals at the same intensity.

Keith: Listening to community feedback is essential. We plan on continuing to add quality-of-life features as well as even more Spirits and customization options in future updates.

Keith: As a team of 3, we had to be very proactive in setting our scope to be manageable. The game we released was very close to what we set out to create early on. We didn’t get to release all the customization items we wanted for the room and Avatar.

As the only artist on the team, there was always a balance between Spirits, Animations, Room items, and Avatar items. As mentioned above, we plan on adding lots more content in future updates.

Keith: Spirit City was in development for about a year and a half, and most of that time we were working on it part-time while working other full-time jobs. We were a core team of 3. We also had some help from freelancers for concept art.

Keith: We recently released a survey to our players, receiving over 4000 responses! We asked players their thoughts on various aspects of the game and will use this to determine where to focus our efforts for updates.

We also receive tons of comments on our Steam forums and Discord channel. Players are very vocal about what they want to see!  We hope we can meet those expectations in the future.

Keith: I just want to say that we have such an amazing community. Every day players share stories about how the game has helped them in their daily lives. I’m very proud of the game we have created, and it brings us so much joy to know that players are benefiting from it.

We want players to know that we want to support the game as long as possible, and we have lots of exciting updates planned for the future! Our next major update should be coming out by the end of May or early June.