How Moon Hunters rustles up a tasty cooking system from classic JRPG ingredients

Hello there, PlayStationeers! I’m Tanya Short, designer at Kitfox Games. You may remember my original post last year announcing that Moon Hunters would be coming to PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. Since then, we’ve grown the game tremendously, adding in two extra player classes, the mountain and river biomes, and most recently the cooking system. We’re on track to release the game to PlayStation 4 in Spring 2016.

Today I’m writing in because I wanted to tell you about the cooking system, which has been a rare pleasure to develop.

The internet is full of horror stories about Kickstarter, especially Kickstarting indie games. They say the pressure crushes you, your community turns on you, physical rewards bankrupt you… failure is always around the corner.

Sitting at your desk, your blood pressure can go up from reading a single “Awesome!!!” comment. It seems your backers want to write, “This had better be awesome… or else!!!” It seems unlikely that strangers would be genuinely excited, because you’ve only managed to express a tiny fraction of its awesomeness through gifs and words.

But we ran our Kickstarter during PAX Prime last year, which let me meet our backers in person. I discovered that those backer exclamation points aren’t threats – it’s naked optimism. Backing a project on Kickstarter is a deeply optimistic act. Backers side with a struggling creator, against all of the odds that drove them to Kickstarter in the first place.

It’s been a full calendar year since we Kickstarted Moon Hunters. At the $75,000 stretch goal, we promised a PlayStation 4 version. This improved our community – after we announced our support for PS4, not only did more pledges pour in, but the positivity surrounding the game grew. I don’t know if it’s because there’s something special about indie-loving PS4 players, or maybe everyone just feels more hopeful when there’s console versions in the mix, but I’m grateful for it.

$10,000 later, we promised a cooking system. I always felt cooking would be wonderful, but it would almost certainly have been cut if we hadn’t gotten that extra Kickstarter boost. We’ve mailed out T-shirts, posters and postcards, answered countless emails, but nothing has given us the satisfaction of making this cooking system!

Cooking in games is deeply nostalgic thanks to classic journeying games like Suikoden II, Tales of Symphonia, and Monster Hunter… but I think cooking nostalgia goes even deeper than that. Modern chefs use fancy tools and techniques, but even back in ancient Mesopotamia, cooking was essential to Gilgamesh and Enkidu on their travels. It may be the oldest art form, given that the human species evolved around the same time as the use of fire.

The cooking in Moon Hunters is straight-forward. Mix two ingredients together and depending on the result, everyone in the party gets a bonus. Explorers will enjoy finding all the different ways you can find and unlock new ingredients – shopping, dialogue, killing monsters, etc, with various regional flavors. The most delicious fish are from the river, rare berries grow up in the mountains, the desert village cultivates apricots, etcetera.

Perhaps due to that ancient urge, despite its simplicity, cooking has been a hit with playtesters! Groups of players cheer and laugh, whether their chef has successfully made Moon Cakes or fumbled into Weird Soup. In fact, they cheered almost as much as defeating a boss.

Yet implementing cooking has felt like an indulgent luxury. As an indie dev, I’m not used to exploring my wish-list features. Combat, lighting, movement… those are needed. Cooking… not technically, no. It’s a rare pleasure to round out a game-world, and we couldn’t have afforded it, if it hadn’t been for Kickstarter.

So, thank you for this rare and delicious opportunity. Until Spring 2016, please feel free to sign up for our newsletter for important updates, and/or follow us on Twitter and Facebook!