The alarm greets you as you enter the game. The faint piano music underlying the sounds of the house develops into a more somber song.
It’s a stormy day in the nearby woods. Wake is finally ready to enact “The Plan.”
“I’m leaving, not that you care,” Wake writes. “Don’t come looking for me.”
So begins a coming-of-age adventure crafted by the Portland-based game studio Moonlight Kids. It’s the studio’s first game.
After nearly three years of development grind, The Wild at Heart launched in May.
“Even from the very beginning, we formed Moonlight kids and then pretty much right away we got an invite to Day of the Devs,” said developer Chris Sumsky. “We didn’t even have a game yet. We rushed to get a demo together.”
The last six months were the most difficult as the studio, with plenty of late nights and early mornings, prepared the game for launch.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say we were probably working 100-hour weeks for five or six months,” Sumsky said.
The four developers who started the project connected while doing work for Cartoon Network. They started discussing the idea for The Wild at Heart around 2017 and founded Moonlight Kids a year later.
At first, they used their own personal savings to fund the game’s development, paying themselves the minimum salary so they could afford rent. But those funds had an expiration date, so the team went on the hunt for publishers, eventually finding Humble Games. Humble provided the main funds while Microsoft offered early funding.
The game is set in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a 2D puzzle-based adventure game set in a fantasy world of magic and mystery.
The cartoon-animated journey follows a young duo facing the forces of evil to save the Deep Woods, while also struggling with their own battles at home.
Justin Baldwin and Alex Atkins came up with the idea and story behind it. They've said that one of the main characters, Wake, is an amalgamation of both of them in their childhood, Sumsky said.
The game also takes inspiration from stories popular amongst the group.
“There’s a lot of inspiration drawn from Justin’s favorite studios and art inspirations,” Sumsky said. “Both visually and tonally, I’d say a lot of coming of age stories like "Where the Wild Things Are," "Never Ending Story," "Spirited Away," (are) just kind of pulling from a lot those things we love and they love.”
Sumsky and Ankit Trivedi took the lead in developing the game and its mechanics. They took cues from popular games like Pikmin and the Dark Souls series.
About a dozen developers worked on The Wild at Heart.
Although the game is in a 2D format, it didn’t make it much simpler to design. The actual mechanics behind the game were complex, and it took time to get things to work correctly.
“It looks like a kids book, it looks so cutesy,” Sumsky said. “What’s going on behind the scenes is pretty complex.”
Developing AI for the creatures in the game posed one of the greatest challenges.
“At times it really felt like we were trying to tame wild creatures,” Sumsky said. “It wasn’t like, ‘why is our code buggy?’ It was like ‘why are they doing that?’ It was like they had little minds of their own.”
The game has been received well. It has a strong audience and reviews across its multiple platforms are very positive. It's available for PC and Xbox consoles.
“We have people that email us just to say ‘We love your game, thank you for making it,’” Sumsky said. “It just makes it all worth it, in a way.”
Moonlight Kids is planning to keep updating The Wild at Heart, and is making plans for future games.
“We like making games, and we want to keep making games,” Trivedi said. “We’ve been talking internally about what we want to do next. That ball is rolling, slowly.”
