Hey everyone, I’m Danilo from JoyMasher and I’m excited to tell you more about Vengeful Guardian Moonrider, our next big game! And believe me, it’s quite a ride.
After tackling the run ‘n’ gun genre with our previous game Blazing Chrome (inspired by timeless classics like Contra), with Vengeful Guardian Moonrider I wanted to retain the retro goodness of 90s action platformers while updating experience in a fun way.
For this, I dug deep into the territory of 16-bit games and even some early CD games, and tried to create an authentic experience, as if you had just found a MegaDrive game in your basement/ Unpublished Genesis. For this I for example used red book style sound and even recorded speech to give Vengeful Guardian Moonrider an authentic feel of that era.
But games weren’t our only inspiration for Vengeful Guardian Moonrider and I also tried to mix many different cultural influences that I had during my childhood, playing amazing Japanese action games, watching anime dark and reading speculative and dubious science fiction novels. Genocyber, Cybernetic Guardians, Kamen Rider Black, and Hakaider have all been overhauled to help chisel out the kind of universe in which Vengeful Guardian Moonrider takes place. Watching all those amazing shows again was of course very serious work and not at all an excuse to have a good time, hehe…
All of Vengeful Guardian Moonrider’s character designs and overall game art direction were heavily inspired by Japanese artist Keita Amemiya, the designer of many video games, anime, and tokusatsu of that era. I also drew a lot of inspiration from HR Giger, the artist behind the otherworldly visuals of the Alien series.
Most of the enemies have lots of biomechanical parts and have a very scary feel. The boss room backgrounds also have their share of body horror and organic elements, giving another good layer of that spooky feel I was looking for while still keeping them looking very cool! I was also very influenced by yokai (Japanese demons) and their representation in traditional Japanese art.
As you must have guessed by now, references are very important to me and a great source of inspiration, and I think they were mandatory to bring me to the proper mindset to create an atmosphere of science – horrible fiction that you would like to explore. Everything about Vengeful Guardian Moonrider is harsh, dark, and brooding, but not without reason. The story is also a dark tale of an alternate reality where an oppressive state uses its weapons – the Guardians – to subjugate other nations and its own people. Moonrider is a guardian who, after an incident, decides to fight for his people and destroy the evil regime.
We know there are a lot of action-adventure indie games out there, however, we’re really trying to make something special, something that replicates the feeling of 90s action-adventure games while bringing a new twist to it. dimension. The mood is of course a great tool for this, but the gameplay is also fundamental.
Vengeful Guardian Moonrider is an old-school action platformer, but we tried to mix fast-paced arcade style with some object hunting and exploration with the chip system, giving you new abilities and powers during your game. For example, there are power chips that can grant you double jump, weapon range extension, HP regen, and many other useful abilities, letting you really pick and play however you want.
And that’s it for this blog post! I hope you are as excited as we are about Vengeful Guardian Moonrider and I hope you enjoy it as much as we got to. Stay tuned for more retro love and keep an eye out for Vengeful Guardian Moonrider, coming to PlayStation.
