Bunnyhug Games Talk Moonglow Bay, Inspirations & Lessons Learnt

"I could finally talk to people about the game that we’ve been making!"

Moonglow Bay
Moonglow Bay

If you’ve been keeping up with indie games this year, Moonglow Bay might be one that’s caught your eye, the fishing RPG/life sim from Bunnyhug Games that’s coming to Steam, Xbox One andXbox Series X | S, as well as being available on Xbox Game Pass. The game was featured as part of tonight’s Future Games Show presentation as part of Gamescom 2021, with an October 7th release date finally announced, the EGS version coming a month later on November 11th.

Thanks to the game’s publisher, Coatsink, we were able to sit down for an interview with Zach Soares and Lu Nascimento, Creative Director and Art Director respectively for Moonglow Bay, and the co-founders of Bunnyhug Games, to talk about their upcoming game, some of the challenges they overcame during development, and what makes a great life sim game.

What inspired the name Bunnyhug Games?

Zach Soares: We went through many studio names to begin with, and a lot of names were related to the fact that we were small. Pocket Sized was one of them. [Lu: Everything sounded mobile.] Lu Nascimento: I pointed out that the term “Bunnyhug” is Saskatchewan, and it means hoodie. It’s really cute, and it’s Canadian, and we’re making a Canadian game.
ZS: So we were like “yeah that works, let’s see if it was available”, and we checked if it was available for trademark, and it was, so we decided “let’s do it”. Mind you, if we did register in Canada, it wouldn’t have been available. There’s like a million companies with that name.

For those who don’t know, what’s Moonglow Bay about?

ZS: Moonglow Bay is a fishing RPG set in Eastern Canada in a fictionalised version of the 1980s. The story starts after a three year gap where your partner was lost at sea and basically deemed to have perished.
LN: You moved to this small town to open your fishing shop, but didn’t open it because of your partner being lost, and now your daughter has come to kick you in the ass and say “hey, let’s go fulfil that dream that the two of you had together”.
ZS: It was meant to be a retirement dream, as you were both in your late 50s, and you planned to move back to the town you’re both from originally.
LN: You get to fish, you get to cook, you get to build an aquarium.
ZS: All the while, there’s a story of the town itself where everyone’s afraid of going out to sea, because not only did your partner pass, but like many people prior to have passed, but your partner was kind of like the final straw. “Well, if this person who’s super experienced has passed, we don’t stand a chance.” So as you go out to sea and go through the story, you’re building that confidence back up.

So, in my head anyway, a small town afraid of going out into the water because of what’s out there, I’m hearing similarities to the Pixar film Luca.

ZS: Yeah, perhaps they should have waited until we released Moonglow. [laughs] Yeah, I saw Luca, and that’s perhaps the only true similarity is the atmosphere of the town where the older people are saying “don’t do it, don’t go to sea and stuff, there’s monsters out there”, while the younger generation is like “nah, I wanna go check”. In our game, you’re like mid-to-late 50s, so you’re just like “whatever, let’s do this”.

The game’s set in Canada during the 1980s, which is when Canada began to deal with the realities of overfishing to both local and foreign industry. There was even a moratorium declared on Northern Cod in 1992, and the fish has struggled to recover ever since. How much of that historical context plays into the game’s story, if at all?

LN: It doesn’t show up in the story itself, but there are things in the game that, if you start overfishing a species of fish, you’re going to see things change.
ZS: Yeah, so the economy system plays into what you’re fishing, so if you’re overfishing a certain fish, no one in town is going to want to buy that fish anymore in order to motivate the player to not overfish a given fish. There’s also a side story where the mechanic in town is very keen on preservation and specifically highlights the Atlantic Cod being overfished, saying “hey, this might happen in a few years” because the game’s set in the 80s while [the moratorium placed on Northern Cod after rampant overfishing] happens in the 90s. The museum is also entirely based on the fact of preservation and looking after the fish. It’s scattered around in the mechanics of taking care of the environment and not overdoing it.
LN: And you can even enter the ocean to clean up the rubbish others have left behind too.

So I imagine preservation is an important issue for yourselves too?

ZS: Oh of course, absolutely!

Moonglow Bay is a historical piece, but also features mythical creatures called the Mystical Monsters of Moonglow. How much, if any, of the game’s emotional beats are based on real life or folklore? Did a similar story to this take place and does the game draw from that?

LN: The fish themselves are completely original, but the overarching story is based on someone in Zach’s life.
ZS: It’s my father’s best friend, who was like a second brother to me when I was a teenager. He lost his partner when he was in his mid-50s, they’d been together since they were 15, and they were a “one-and-only-love” kind of thing, so it’s just interesting to see from his perspective of like “well, I’m not gonna date anymore, I lost that one person”.
LN: Yeah, he wanted to be with his community, with his friends, with his family.
ZS: So I thought that was an interesting story to tell, and how could you flesh that out. Moonglow Bay fits that kind of story perfectly.
LN: As for the mythical monsters, it’s an entirely new mythology.
ZS: Yes, it’s an entirely new mythology, but what we did was take inspiration from existing mythologies of fish. Japan had a lot of stuff, and Nordic mythology had a lot of stuff related to fish, so we just took inspiration from that on how they structured their mythology. We would create stories and descriptions for our fish and creatures, and the designs would come from that.

It feels like life sim games are going through a golden age at the moment, spurred by the likes of Stardew and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In your opinion, what’s the key to a great life sim game?

ZS: That’s a good question. On a design level, the key to a good life sim game is having systems that are tied into each other. You don’t want things to be too independent. For example, Stardew Valley’s farming doesn’t begin and end with the farming, it ties into events that happen within the town. It’s the same with Harvest Moon, as the farming is just a means to keep everything going, but it’s about how that all connects within the town.
LN: I think having a variety of activities for the player either inside or outside of the core gameplay is very important. Even if you’re an office worker, and you go in 9-5 working on spreadsheets, you’re going to get home and you’re going to do something else, like you’re gonna cook, you’re gonna go shopping, or you’re gonna do some sewing. It’s about the little mechanics like that tie into the character.
ZS: Most importantly though is giving life to the people that you don’t play. What I think the big problem is when people do these bigger sim games is that characters can often be purpose driven, and they’re just there to do something for the player.
LN: If you’re gonna talk to them every single day, and they say the same thing, nothing changes and you can’t develop a relationship with them, what’s the point?
ZS: That’s why in Moonglow, there’s a whole friendship system where we have 12 NPCs whose background you can learn about, and then we have side stories for the other NPCs in town, which explains their history and how they ended up in Moonglow.

I know that was the thing that put me off Animal Crossing after a while, was that you’d log on and be like “oh, you’re saying the same thing you did last week”.

ZS: Yeah, Animal Crossing has the mechanics where you have to play daily to do the things, so you can cut through all of that text pretty quickly!
LN: In the very first instalments, the characters had much more personality, which is what drew me to the initial games. Being able to talk to the villagers, understand their personalities.

A lot of life sim games, Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley in particular, have you play as a rookie, and in Moonglow, we’ll play as a rookie angler. What is it about being new to the profession that works so well in games of this genre? Does it make storytelling easier, or the tutorialising?

LN: I think it hits the learning curve of the player very well. Like, it would feel weird if your character was so experienced, but you don’t even know how to throw the line in the water.
ZS: And also, if we just load all the mechanics onto the player immediately, even if it is intuitive, it’s going to be deeply overwhelming for them. Also, from a progression viewpoint, it’s very hard to manage. You’d have to make all the mechanics wholly usable from the get-go, but of course we don’t want to spoil the whole experience right away. We have to pace it, which does work well for a rookie story.
LN: There’s also a bigger connection with your character when you do the rookie stuff, because you’re a rookie, your character’s a rookie, you’re gonna grow together. It’s just a nice feeling.

Yeah, because I guess the alternative would be “oh no, I caught a fishing cage to the back of my head and forgot everything!”

LN: Yeah, exactly! [laughs]

In your interview with TrueAchievements, you mention Xbox and Microsoft consistently showing interest in your game, and that’s how the Xbox and Xbox Game Pass deal came forward. Did you always intend to make a console exclusive or were you planning on just releasing the game on PC and figuring out consoles afterwards?

LN: We were actually focused on consoles first, but we weren’t sure on what console specifically.
ZS: Basically, the control scheme works really well on a controller. That’s what we were going to aim for, any console. As for PC, that was just going to be an inherent thing anyway. You’re testing it on your computer, so you may as well release it on PC too. It was just never defined which console we were going to release, but Microsoft seemed to show the most active interest.
LN: And that’s when we made the decision that we were going to focus everything on Xbox consoles, so like the button prompts and things like that.
ZS: We were in touch with Microsoft for, what, like 3 years. So like, 2017 when we started. They were always interested, but after that, it was like “now’s the time that we want to start discussing deals”, which is the case for any game that when you get closer to completion, you start discussing those deals.

This is Bunnyhug’s first game as a team. Is there any advice or something you’ve learned that you wish you would have known when you first started developing Moonglow Bay?

ZS: [sigh] A lot! [laughs] It was like a double whammy; it’s not just a new team, it’s a new studio.
LN: For me, it’s not so much something we wish we did differently, but one thing that’s made all the difference so far is that we’re very communicative with each other. We have documents everywhere, we talk to each other, we check on what we’re doing, which helps because we’re a fully remote team with multiple different time zones.
ZS: I would say: don’t prototype for too long. We prototyped for a long time to figure out all of the mechanics, but with an RPG, and very much so with a “slice of life” RPG with narrative, a lot of systems won’t work until they’re all in. I remember even speaking to Eric Barone (the creator/developer behind Stardew Valley) once, who said it was the same thing with him. Only in the last couple of weeks did it finally feel complete because everything was working together.
LN: So there’s certain genres of games where you’ve kind of got to trust yourself and the people who have come before you and have done the same stuff.
ZS: But mainly it’s about trusting yourself to keep moving forward with that mechanic, so you don’t over engineer that one mechanic, trying to reiterate over and over again.
LN: That one would have saved us so much development time.
ZS: Easily years!

I know you’ve touched on it in our conversation, and you’ve mentioned working remotely in your Gfinity interview, which now seems quite forward thinking with everything that’s happened. What informed your decision to work remote in the first place?

LN: I know I particularly really like working from home. My head is everywhere, sometimes I’m in pain and I need to lie down and be in a comfortable environment, so for me, it was really important to be able to work from home. From there, we came to the conclusion of why should we limit people to being in the exact same space as us?
ZS: Also, we’re in the north east of England. No offense to the north east of England [LN: It’s a lovely place to live.], but your pool becomes really small when it comes to who you can work with if you’re trying to be so location based. Like Lu was saying, we were already doing remote more or less with ourselves, so there was nothing really holding us back. We checked with Coatsink, as they’re our publishers so naturally they’d play a role in the game’s development, so we were like “are you guys okay with remote working?” and they’re like “yeah, give it a shot!”
LN: And I think having lots of people from all over the world comes naturally, because we’re in the UK right now, but I’m Brazilian, Zach’s Canadian.
ZS: Our musician, Lena, who’s scoring the game, was already in Seattle, so our timezone stretch is quite large!
LN: Most of the people that we know are spread out across the globe, so we wanted to work with those people.
ZS: And also, we already knew that it’s kind of the right way to find the best people for the job.
LN: Not only the people who fit the job but also the environment we want to build as a studio.

I completely understand, and I get feeling cut off too in the industry. I live in the North West of England so any time there’s a press event in London, it’s like “welp, there’s another £100 on a train”.

LN: Exactly that, yeah. Not only that though, we found that if I get time to rest and organise my thoughts while working remotely, it means we can also work with people with chronic illnesses and disabilities. It wouldn’t be a problem for them, and it would come to our benefit by expanding the pool of people we can work with a lot.

Yeah, I was thinking that too when you mentioned being in pain, that remote work would be really accessible for those with chronic illness, so that’s always a benefit.

One last question: if you could play only one fishing game or fishing minigame for the rest of your life, which one would it be?

ZS: Ahhh, shoot! Oh man, oh no! Damn, because I have like one per generation.

I’ll take one per generation then.

ZS: Okay, for modern: Final Fantasy XV nails it. Legend of the River King for the early 2000s, then of course you have SEGA Pro Bass, but as much as they’re fun, they’re kinda awful for the long term. If I could just take The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s fishing, mostly because the interaction there was so silly. I just had so much fun with that one. It was the first 3D fishing I’d ever played, and it was like “it’s good, but it’s jank!”

I have fond memories of that one too, because I was a little kid at the time, but my dad spent hours playing it. I was just sat there like “Dad, you know there’s a kingdom to save, dungeons and that”, but no. He was perfectly content to keep fishing.

LN: I think mine is going to be a little bit more predictable.
ZS: Animal Crossing?
LN: More or less, because I like things that are a bit simpler and more diegetic, so definitely Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town for the Game Boy Advance, and then the most recent Animal Crossing would be good for the current generation.

I know Cozy Grove has a similar fishing mechanic to Animal Crossing as well.

ZS: Oh we haven’t tried it.
LN: We’ll have to give it a try!

Anything to announce on a release date? [Note: again, this interview was conducted pre-release date announcement.]

ZS: We’re not even fully sure of the launch window yet, but it’ll definitely be this year. That’s been the main question we’ve been getting though recently on social media, and I want to give an answer but we don’t even know! [laughs]

At least that’s a good thing though, to know how many people are excited for your game.

ZS: It’s scary. [LN: It definitely motivates me.] It’s motivating for the tail end of a game’s development, because the excitement at the beginning doesn’t last until the end, and at the end you’re excited to finish rather than I’m excited for people to play.
LN: A lot of times at the end too, it’s very taxing tasks like bug fixing, polishing very tiny things and “oh my god, it’s not 100% perfect, let’s go and redo it all”. Those things aren’t very good for morale, so getting to know that people are excited for Moonglow Bay is a great motivation.
ZS: I think one of the biggest morale boosts for the team was when we announced the game for the first time. We were silent for so long, which is unusual for indie devs as you tend to announce the day you concept it [laughs], but I think that was the biggest boost for the team. It actually helped us in part through COVID, because our morale was quite low because of the pandemic, so when we announced, everyone got hyped like “oh my god, yes, we have the energy to finish”.
LN: And I could finally talk to people about the game that we’ve been making!

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