Milkmaid of the Milky Way - Interview on Edamame Reviews

Are you in for an awesome pixelated 2D adventure! …If so, you’ve sort of come to the right place… Today we would like to share our interview with the Machineboy Team, the developers of Milkmaid of the Milky Way!

You can check out our review of the game here.

Before we start we’d like to thank the Machineboy Team for participating in our interview and for answering all our geeky questions! Thanks guys!

…and without further ado, our interview begins…

Ok first up, how did you come up with the idea for Milkmaid of the Milky Way?

I had thought about making an adventure game for a long time and knew I wanted to make a game about a character living in a remote, exotic area far away from people. I also wanted to do a sci-fi game and ended up combining these ideas when I wrote the script for MotMW.

Now obviously Milkmaid of the Milky Way would be nothing without the Story. Could you tell us a little about how the story was developed into the game?

I had the basic idea down first and knew what kind of feeling the game was supposed to have. When I developed the story, I worked like a scriptwriter for a movie would do. I made a synopsis and character bibles and fleshed the story out from where I needed the character and story to go. This was really a fun part of the game design process – when everything is possible and ideas just come flying!

Could you also tell us a little about how the pixelated visuals were made in Milkmaid of the Milky Way?

I wanted to combine hand-painted backgrounds with pixels from the beginning, and spent a lot of time on sketching and art directing at the start of the project. Since this is a one-man project, I knew I didn’t have the time to make super detailed graphics, so I tried to make something clean and readable, but used animation to bring life to the pixelated sprites. The backgrounds were painted on a Surface Pro in a program called Clip Studio Paint, while the sprites were all drawn and animated in Aseprite.

Edamame Reviews We’ve used both programs and they work great!

What advice would you give a new player trying Milkmaid of the Milky Way for the first time?

Take your time, walk around and take in the atmosphere and story. All problems have a visible solution, so try to pick up everything you can find. And read the diary – you’ll get to know more about Ruth and her past, and also how to make the butter and cheese!

Ok, now for some geeky questions. What programming language and or software did you use when making Milkmaid of the Milky Way?

The game is developed in Unity with an asset called Adventure Creator. It handles lots of the logic and game-specific technical stuff of point and click adventure games, and has a pretty great forum for troubleshooting and support.

Here is a difficult question. What was the hardest problem you needed to overcome when developing Milkmaid of the Milky Way?

The hardest thing about making Milkmaid was definitely just the sheer size of the project. Even if the game is not super long, it has lots and lots of backgrounds, characters and animated cutscenes, and also music tracks for the whole game. So just being able to get through all the work was a major hurdle, and it took roughly two years of working most nights and weekends to finish.

I also had various technical troubles, with floor walking bugs and save errors in development which were luckily amended in later versions of the Unity asset. And launching on Steam and iOS at the same time was pretty stressful!

Last question. Where do you get your inspiration or ideas from?

From life, I guess! I don’t play as many games as I used to, but I get inspired by reading, watching movies, series and animated films, not to mention art in all forms and shapes. I also get inspired by the people around me that I care about.

A few words to Milkmaid of the Milky Way fans on Edamame Reviews.

I have lots of ideas for new games, and I hope to release something in the not too distant future. But working alone means things take time, however reading all the nice reviews and feedback from Milkmaid is a huge inspiration to keep making games!