Hauntiiis an upcoming title featuring a one-of-a-kind, hand-drawn world full of mystery and whimsy. In Moonloop Game’s newindie title, players will control a ghost with the power to haunt the objects and creatures of Eternity to overcome challenges and pave a way through the enchanted world ofHauntii.Along the way, players will enjoy twin shooter mechanics, puzzle solving, and captivating world exploration complete with a dreamy soundtrack as they uncover the mysterious past of the titular main character.
Game Rant spoke with Leo Dasso game designer and founder of Moonloop Games about the interesting way in whichHauntiiplays on the classic twin-stick shooter mechanic, how its art style was informed, and more.This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
RELATED:8 Best Co-Op Twin Stick Shooters, Ranked
GR: I’ll just start off by asking you to do a little self-introduction. Who are you and what do you do?
Dasso:I’m Leo Dasso. I’m a game designer. I’ve been doing game design for something like 20 years in some regard. I studied illustration, which was good because game design is a very broad topic.
So it was kind of something of an entry point of focusing on the illustration aspect. When you study any kind of visual art, you learn a lot of things that are extremely relevant to games, like a focal point in how to draw the eye. If every artist has this image in their head of what they’re creating, then the audience will see it, and they’ll see something totally different. You have to be aware of that.
That’s especially true in games. It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that your audience understands what you do. Then, you show them your game and to them, it’s just a confusing mess, and they have no idea where to start. So most recently, I founded a company called Moonloop, and we’re creating a game calledHauntii, which is sort of an adventure with ghosts in the afterlife.
GR: So going right intoHauntii, can you give me the background of your inspiration and what your starting point was?
Dasso:Sure. Yeah, Hauntii started—I mean, the original project was just for fun. I had just finished a previous game, I was so sick of making games, and so I was studying web design. I was like, I’m just going to get a nice corporate job, which I did. I worked in a finance company for a while. And during that time, I would just toy around in my free time. I was playingMario Odysseyat the time and I really loved the capture mechanic where you can control like any other creatures or pieces of the environment.
So I was like, “oh, I’ll try something like that,” and that was sort of where the prototype forHauntiioriginated. The story ofHauntiihas a lot to do with, you know, you play as this ghost who arrives in the afterlife, and a lot of the story deals with letting go. It was kind of something I felt like everyone can relate to. Everybody has to move on from something at some point. At the time, I had just moved from the States. Well, first I moved from California to Minnesota which is in itself a big change, and then I moved to South Korea in a city called Anyang. So there was a pretty big difference.
There were a lot of things that were changing in my life. So I was like, “oh, this is pretty, pretty relevant to me right now.” In that way, I think I had sort of a distinctive viewpoint on this, but certainly everybody can relate to that. At the same time, I didn’t want it to be a grim duty to play this game. It should still be fun and lighthearted, so it’s not like depressing. It’s really focused more on being a fun and entertaining experience but also explores the theme of moving on.
GR: When you were toying around, did you always know, in terms of design, that you wanted to go for this twin stick shooter puzzle game or did that kind of develop over time as you worked on it more and more?
Dasso:Yeah, it was,it was actually a twin-stick shooter first. I think I had that implemented in like two days from a fresh Unity project to working twin stick. It’s pretty quick to get a prototype like that implemented.Hauntii’smain mechanic is what we call haunting. You basically shoot an object with essence and it builds up a charge, and then once it builds up, you can control and basically haunt that object.
That has gone through so many iterations like it’s changed so much since the beginning. I built a complete system, then polished it, and then when I was playing with it was like, “I don’t like this” and scrapped it. I did that like three or four times. There was just all this like garbage code in the project from previous iterations.
GR: And then in terms of the actual shooting mechanic, is there a reason that you went for the sort of twin-stick style rather than maybe something else like a trigger to aim and button to shoot kind of mapping?
Dasso:I’ve always enjoyed twin sticks. Yeah, I feel like they’re quite intuitive. That being said, there are different mechanics, too. There are some creatures where you actually do have to pull the trigger to shoot. There’s a creature with a revolver, and there’s this feeling when you pull the trigger. It’s very weighty, so I wanted to at least capture that kind of thing.
GR:From what I’ve seen, it’s a very stylish game, but at the same time, I can see that there’s a lot of thoughtfulness behind the mechanics. So I’m curious, how have you guys worked to achieve such a striking balance between the art and the gameplay mechanics?
Dasso:I tend to focus on the visuals or how something looks to a fault. So, from the very beginning of this project, one of my design goals was that it can look pretty and it can look good, but it has to have solid gameplay. There are a lot of games, especially indie games where it’s like, it’s beautiful and it’s not fun—this gameplay is just missing. That’s kind of what I was getting at.
GR: Yeah, it seems like it’s not an empty game. It’s beautiful, but it also feels like it has a lot of varying mechanics. It feels very balanced.
Dasso:That was a very intentional thing, and I have been referencing a lot of games that I felt like do exceptional gameplay. Like, I had mentionedMario Odysseybefore. I do reference that a whole lot for how they handle certain things, and the scale of gameplay mechanics in that game is immense. This is an indie game, so it’s not going to have that scale of mechanics, but you know, you may sort of strive for that.
RELATED:The Best Twin Stick Shooters you may Play On The PS5
GR: In terms of the style of the art, was there anything in particular that influenced you?
Dasso:Yeah, for sure. The main influences of the art style for this game are actually the constraints, the production constraints. For example, to create an asset needs to be very quick. It needs to be like 20 minutes, like, I think of an asset and then draw it up and then pop it in. That’s pretty much why the game is monochrome, and that’s why it’s a single-line weight. A single line weight forces you to not get too detailed because you can’t lightly sketch in things. It’s like drawing with a Sharpie basically. You have to commit to the mark.
There was also an artist on Instagram. I actually forget his name now, but he did like a very minimalistic kind of simple and cute style. I was like, yeah, that’s pretty cool. There’s also Mobius, I believe, a French comic book artist who does a much more intricate kind of this style, but it’s a similar sort of thing and a good inspiration.
GR: You mentioned the design fundamentals, so I wanted to ask if you have your own personal design philosophy on top of those fundamentals?
Dasso:There’s a book by Jesse Shell,The Art of Game Design, which I would say the core of how I design is based on how he lays things out. I don’t know if there’s anyone who’s written a more clear translation of why you design certain things in certain ways. So that’s the core of it. My own little touch is minimalistic game design. Like if you can remove mechanics and the game is still playable, then that works. There are some mechanics that you remove, and it’s like, “oh, this is garbage now,” and you have to put it back.
But yeah, I’ve always been inspired by super minimal games likeShadow the Colossus,Journey,andFlow.There aredesigners who do minimalismextremely well, and it never feels boring or vacant. It’s like there’s always some little thing. Though I would say at the same time I also loveFinal Fantasygames, which are a complete opposite of minimal.
GR: I was reading on the website, you did a like a blog entry talking about enemy design and intentional design around the enemies types. For example, how an enemy looks so that a player can kind of inuit how they’re going to act. Are there other examples of that kind of intentionality in some of the mechanics of the game where certain things in the environment will kind of help tell a player how something might work?
Dasso: I would like to say that there are, but a lot of it’s like you just have to try it and see what it does. Obviously for enemies, you have to telegraph. Like if an enemy just attacks you in one frame with no warning, it’s not a lot of fun because there’s no skill there. It’s just random, so yeah, telegraphing is important. I think it’s actually quite difficult to properly telegraph. The classic example is you’ll be fighting a boss, and before he slams you with his fist, he lifts his arms and he’s like holding there like, “I’m going to do it.”
But yeah it’s great if the character design can indicate what the character is going to do, too. Like if they’re going to dash or like if they have a huge hammer. But to be honest, there are some characters and enemies in the game that don’t exactly line up. As long as they telegraph their moves, I think it won’t lead into the territory of frustration.
GR: So I want to talk a little bit about the soundtrack too, because it’s a really great soundtrack. I listened to some of the songs that are available already on LightReturns’s SoundCloud. How did you come to work with him on the soundtrack?
Dasso:We knew each other from a previous project, actually. We had worked together on a game calledDiluvian, which was like a submarine adventure game. We had originally met because we did a Kickstarter for that game and we didn’t have a composer yet, and then we got a random message on Reddit from Michael. And he’s like, “Hey, I love this project, and I composed a main theme for it,” and we’re like, “alright, sure.”
You know, you get messages pretty frequently like, “Hey, like I’m an animator,” or voice actor, composer, etc., so we were like, “sure, we’ll take a listen, but it probably won’t be good.” And then we listened to it, and it was like thisinsanely awesome, mind blowing track. All the partners, pretty much the whole dev team were there, and we were like, “Hire him. Hire him right now.” So we did, and that was 2015 so it’s been a while. We’ve known each other for a while.
GR: Was he your immediate go-to when you started thinking about music forHauntii?
Dasso:Yeah, I mean, we had been talking about the game here and there, and we weren’t sure if it was going to become something. It was just like, I mean, it was many years of being a back-burner project here and there on the weekends. And you know, Michael would throw together a little piano track and be like, “oh yeah, that’s cool.” Then probably in early 2021, we started to really get something solid.
RELATED:Tchia’s Soul-Jumping Explained: What you may and Can’t Possess
GR: Were there any big challenges or roadblocks that you hit along the way that you had work to overcome?
Dasso:Oh yeah, for sure. There are so many small challenges, but the biggest one I think is that there’s a bit of a clash of genres. So with twin stick games, like if you just say twin stick, almost anybody will picture a very fast pace, constant action, flow state type of gameplay. We never wantedHauntiito be that. So, we have to design a reset of people’s expectations of like this has those twin-stick controls and you’ll get some of that, but it’s not going to be edge-of-your-seat action.
And it’s not to say I don’t love that type of game. I’m a huge fan ofGeometry Wars, which is, in my opinion, one of the best-designed twin sticks ever made. I think those games are fantastic, but withHauntii, it doesn’t really fit the subject matter or the mood of the game. In this case, there’s more of a puzzle element to it. There’s a sort of rock, paper, scissors-like choosing the right tool for the job. That being said, to satisfy people looking for more of a challenge we tried to put optional, harder arenas.
The harder arenas can’t really necessarily be the golden path of the game because there are a lot of players who are not high-skill gamers who will want to play this game. And that will be a big turn-off for thembecause it’s frustratingly difficult, and they’re just going to give up. It’s not good for anyone because those are the people that would benefit from being able to play through and see the story. So, yeah, the harder stuff must be sort of on the fringes.
GR: Would you say adding in those puzzle elements is kind of a way to help mitigate those expectations of people who are thinking this would be just a regular twin-stick shooter?
Dasso:Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think anyone who plays the first two minutes ofHauntiiwill realize it’s not. The first two minutes are very minimal. It’s black and white, and you know, we put a huge amount of effort into the shooting to make it still satisfying.
I would say one of the big ways that we manage expectations is throughHauntii’sgun in that it doesn’t just do damage. It’s how you interact with the world. Like, for example, you’re able to shoot mushrooms, and then they’ll grow and explode. And so people who play it will learn really quickly that they’re like shooting everything in the environment, and they’re trying to see what everything does when you shoot it.
GR: How has the reaction to the game so far been from what people have seen of it?
Dasso:It’s been pretty cool. I think people seem to be pretty interested. It’s sort of hard to convey because the main story of the game sort of centers around this abstract concept. So I think that part’s hard to convey, but there are other things that people attach to that we’re happy about. I think the style is sort of like an immediate like when people see it, you can kind of be like, “oh, it looks different from other games.”
We have been posting on Twitter for many months. A good day is usually like, “oh we got five likes.” I don’t know exactly what happened, but there was some point where it just got picked up, and we had a day when we got like eight or nine thousand likes on one of the videos, and that really started to snowball the following.
GR: As a closing question, what’s something aboutHauntiiyou’re looking forward to sharing with players?
Dasso:So there’s this backstory to our main character, we just call him Hauntii. There’s this backstory that it’s like a real slow burn. As you progress through the game, you get a little glimpse here and a little glimpse there, and it slowly builds up. So I’m really interested to see how people react to that. And like nobody knows, I mean, there’s probably like five people who know about it between the developers and people we’re working with that know the full backstory, but it won’t ever be told until the game launches. So I’m curious to see how people react to that.
GR: Great. Well, thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure.
Dasso:Thank you as well.
[END]
Hauntiiis available to wishlist on Steam now, and will be coming to consoles and PC in 2024.
MORE:8 Best Twin Stick Shooters you may Play On The Xbox Series X/S, Ranked
