Keylocker | Turn Based Cyberpunk Action · published
It is a new year, and today I will answer any possible questions you may have about the future of Moonana this year and going forward as we tackle money issues, development hurdles, and the start of a new project. There’s good news in this post, so don’t skip it!
First, let’s quickly clarify a few things. A while ago, we announced Moonana had been going bankrupt for a while. Bankruptcy is actually a very interesting phenomenon, because it doesn’t just suddenly hit you. The developers of Disgaea, Nippon Ichi Software, apparently were going bankrupt, and made Disgaea their last title! You know how long a game takes to make by now, so they took a long time being bankrupt and saved themselves from the ditch with that title that became their biggest banking game! Now, the whole time they were making that game, they were still slowly going bankrupt, but sometimes you have a dream, and where there is a dream, there is a way!
Now, fast forward to Moonana 2026, and we found a way. Somehow.
We announced a while ago the game Clowned King, an innovative tactical RPG about a troupe of Clowns fighting the main character’s dad's empire, with all sorts of inventive and fun ideas, like a mission-building system that would allow players to not only create their own missions but also a story for the missions and even possibly implement their own original characters later on. Of course, this is my absolute dream game, and it’s also incredibly difficult to make!
We realized pretty early on that making a game like this would cost us a LOT of money, and publishers were simply not interested; they wanted the same game but for half the price (who would’ve guessed), meaning cutting costs on our own production, meaning the quality and initial vision would not be kept at all. Ultimately, we decided on one thing instead.
We won’t be reducing scope for this game AT ALL. Instead, we will wait longer to produce it, when we feel like we can fund the project and integrate all artists, programmers, etc. that will be working on it, and everyone will be fairly paid. But that means simply not working on this game at the moment and moving on to a smaller project.
Many of you may know, Keylocker was conceptualized before Virgo Versus The Zodiac, but Virgo was a more viable project to be done as a first game. The graphic style was quicker, the scope was smaller, and funding was much less, making it perfect for a first project. Keylocker is much more complex, making it an excellent second project. At the moment, Clowned King is beyond what we can do with our resources and funding, so we’ll move onto another project instead, while keeping Clowned King intact as it is to be developed in the future. When? We don’t know yet, but we heard our fans are quite patient.
Now, in terms of our bankruptcy! Moonana has been reduced to a company of 3 people instead of the previous 5. We can’t afford wages for everybody… tragic, I know! I’m sure many of you have been going through hardships of your own. The world is kinda bad right now.
With that in mind, we brainstormed what kind of project we could do without a programmer and maybe faster than previous projects (to further reduce the funding ask, already planning a smaller scope from the start that we can handle). By that, we mean “something one of us can learn how to program from scratch”, and of course, we leaned towards platformers. They’re fairly easy to make and can definitely be done by 3 people, heck, even by only one. There we went, with a little idea, a dream, some concept arts crafted even before Keylocker was released (because, like Keylocker being conceptualised before Virgo, this game was conceptualised before Keylocker!) and infinite gameplay tests to reach a satisfying gameplay that isn’t… buggy. And hey, two characters from this game made a cameo in Virgo, too! You’ll have to guess where, though…
At first, Anglerman didn’t want to make a platformer; To be entirely honest, he hates them, but now he absolutely loves this game (reminder that Anglerman was the biggest Cyberpunk hater before we made Keylocker!).
In fact, I bet you’re curious how a platformer made by a platformer hater plays like. I’d say it’s really, really fun!
It’s an action game and not turn-based, and we never worked with those before, so that’s equally challenging and exciting. It’s really fun to just go around killing enemies. The combat we’re going for is a push-and-pull thing where you use your own HP to attack, so you constantly have to keep your HP safe by killing enemies and stealing their blood. It’s a vampire concept, there’s lesbians, there’s taboo romance between a human and a vampire, there’s disgusting eldritch creatures, there’s court intrigue and Hungarian/Romanian mythos… Think Vampire Hunter D, Trinity Blood, Castlevania, Bloodborne and all the classics, in a package of Wired’s artwork, the one who worked on Virgo’s physical cover. That’s the kind of game we’re working on now!
Although we’re not officially announcing this title today, I will leave you all with a teaser.
This is our main concept artwork of the main character.
For now, I’ll stop right here. We are not ready to fully announce this new game just yet. We just wanted to let you know, Clowned King hasn’t been abandoned, it’s just gonna cook for longer while we keep ourselves afloat by creating a new, quicker project that will fund us for longer.
We are currently looking for funding for this platformer and will start contacting publishers soon (and possibly planning a Kickstarter as well). We have several kinds of plans for it. This game is also currently in a competition, and if we win, we get money, which would be great, so please send your positive energy our way!
Thank you for your time, and I hope you all continue to support us in the future, even though each new concept we put out there is completely different from the previous. I can only promise to bring fun stuff, not to be consistent.
Nana Moon