I'm sure I'm not the only one. Surely, you've been through it; you download a promising looking romp that hits all the boxes: the right kinks, good reviews, promising setup... only for the experience to be bogged down by pointless, tedious clicking through a maze of choices, and for the story to end up going nowhere or lacking in depth and variety. The potential is never realized, and the author is nowhere to be seen, lost in the endless sea of inactive accounts.
I set out on this pointless journey to put an end to that.
Introducing Project Moonshine
Moonshine is a game engine.
Moonshine is a board game.
Moonshine is a space for open storytelling. Where one person can focus on a single event chain and have their creation become part of a greater whole. Tedious choice mazes are replaced with a simple schedule selection where you just pick what you want to do that day and let it rip, and events with no meaningful choices can be skipped entirely once you've seen them one-too-many times.
This amalgamation of bright colored stock-photos, and chat-gpt-generated text placeholders was made using the latest and greatest tech in web development. Everything from the day cards that swing in and out as time passes to the hand that fans out as you hover your mouse over the cards. Everything is always in motion, thanks to motion-framer for those who are familiar with react and its countless frameworks.
How will it work?
My goal is to first create a functional engine and a solid base-game with enough content to enjoy on its own. But the design of Moonshine is thought out top-to-bottom to be like Skyrim, Rimworld, and others like it: everything is a mod, including my own content. Or in Moonshine's case, everything is a deck. Decks have cards, of course, but also events and tokens (think money, strength, or dick size!) Events and cards, when played, influence these tokens.
This means somebody could make a deck to implement the mechanics of a strip club, while somebody else could go all in on gender-bending mechanics and another modder puts all their efforts on a rags to riches story. There's no need to implement showering for the 100th time, someone will make in-depth hygiene mechanics for those inclined.
Editor built RIGHT IN THE GAME
Do you miss the days of Age of Empires 2, where you could fire up the game and get mapping? Well so do I, so I'm making the tools right in the game, one button away from the action. Full markdown support is included to let you format your lengthy smut to your heart's content. No coding required, no HTML tags. Create your cards, your events, add new mechanics or revamp old ones. Once you're done, pack it into a handy zip file and your readers can just drop it into their mods folder.
Okay, but how far along are you?
You got me there. I'm not done, far from it. But I just want to share what I have right now. I've put a collective month's worth of full-time labor on this, and there's still much left to do. That said, I do have a roadmap with no attached dates or specific order:
- Implement all core functionality (25% done)
- Add mod loading support and distribution
- Come up with a good setting for this game that gives as much freedom as possible to write and share what you want
- Post an alpha version of the game and get some thoughts/feedback
- Open Source the thing
- Implement AI features to assist modders with great ideas but poor writing skills, and a number of other things.
Closing thoughts
This has been a few months in the making, including a long pause due to workload, but I'm finally at a point where I have something to show and I'm really happy I got to this point. Thank you for reading if you got this far, and if you have any thoughts or feedback please share!
I set out on this pointless journey to put an end to that.
Introducing Project Moonshine
Moonshine is a game engine.
Moonshine is a board game.
Moonshine is a space for open storytelling. Where one person can focus on a single event chain and have their creation become part of a greater whole. Tedious choice mazes are replaced with a simple schedule selection where you just pick what you want to do that day and let it rip, and events with no meaningful choices can be skipped entirely once you've seen them one-too-many times.
This amalgamation of bright colored stock-photos, and chat-gpt-generated text placeholders was made using the latest and greatest tech in web development. Everything from the day cards that swing in and out as time passes to the hand that fans out as you hover your mouse over the cards. Everything is always in motion, thanks to motion-framer for those who are familiar with react and its countless frameworks.
How will it work?
My goal is to first create a functional engine and a solid base-game with enough content to enjoy on its own. But the design of Moonshine is thought out top-to-bottom to be like Skyrim, Rimworld, and others like it: everything is a mod, including my own content. Or in Moonshine's case, everything is a deck. Decks have cards, of course, but also events and tokens (think money, strength, or dick size!) Events and cards, when played, influence these tokens.
This means somebody could make a deck to implement the mechanics of a strip club, while somebody else could go all in on gender-bending mechanics and another modder puts all their efforts on a rags to riches story. There's no need to implement showering for the 100th time, someone will make in-depth hygiene mechanics for those inclined.
Editor built RIGHT IN THE GAME
Do you miss the days of Age of Empires 2, where you could fire up the game and get mapping? Well so do I, so I'm making the tools right in the game, one button away from the action. Full markdown support is included to let you format your lengthy smut to your heart's content. No coding required, no HTML tags. Create your cards, your events, add new mechanics or revamp old ones. Once you're done, pack it into a handy zip file and your readers can just drop it into their mods folder.
Okay, but how far along are you?
You got me there. I'm not done, far from it. But I just want to share what I have right now. I've put a collective month's worth of full-time labor on this, and there's still much left to do. That said, I do have a roadmap with no attached dates or specific order:
- Implement all core functionality (25% done)
- Add mod loading support and distribution
- Come up with a good setting for this game that gives as much freedom as possible to write and share what you want
- Post an alpha version of the game and get some thoughts/feedback
- Open Source the thing
- Implement AI features to assist modders with great ideas but poor writing skills, and a number of other things.
Closing thoughts
This has been a few months in the making, including a long pause due to workload, but I'm finally at a point where I have something to show and I'm really happy I got to this point. Thank you for reading if you got this far, and if you have any thoughts or feedback please share!
