We at Black Mermaid are very excited for the upcoming release of Moonscars, our first game as a new studio!
If you watched our trailers, you probably already know that we are fans of the Souls series. We’ve long been inspired by their rich worldbuilding and approach to gameplay and wanted to create a game for other fans like us.
We set out to create a challenging experience set in a 2D world, with quick and responsive-feeling combat that suited the peculiarities of 2D. Today, we’d like to share a bit about how Moonscars came to be—and some of the lessons we learned through our own cycle of trial and triumph.
Myths and masters
In Moonscars, you play as Grey Irma, a clay sculpture made in the image of a fierce woman warrior and brought to life. Her visual design carried over from a painting Stefan did in 2015 (above), and while her personality was crafted to fit best with the story, her appearance was defined a long time ago.
The creator of all living statues, The Sculptor, was once a great man. At the time of the events in the game, he still wields great power and is driven to make the world a better place according to his vision—yet very few are willing to accept the costs and sacrifices to make it come true.
We liked the concept of the legendary Cypriot king and sculptor Pygmalion and his ivory statue Galatea, which tells the story of a sculptor who fell in love with his creation, and wanted to imagine a world where this concept is expanded more—perhaps with a dark twist to it. The central elements of our story and setting are sculpting and molding: a world of clay, bone, and ichor.
Visually, we took inspiration from the Dutch oil painting old masters, which led us to create a world using a muted palette of dark grays, with accents of reds and greens. The dark palette also favored us a bit in the background painting process, given our small team.
Shaping the game
We (Stefan and Alex) met working together in jobs creating gamified experiences for promoting br. For quite a while we talked about starting our own project, and so we took a leap of faith, quit our jobs, and set on our own journey.
With Stefan’s experience in traditional painting and a newfound passion for animation, coupled with Alex’s knack for programming and overall dexterity, in a short time we created a sneak peek of our new project and showed it to the public. It attracted lots of attention and positive reactions, which gave us a confidence boost. Months later, when we partnered with Humble Games, we started expanding our team and brought on Andryi Moroz, our game designer and story writer, Andrei Platon, who also shares a passion for animation, and a few close friends who helped us on a per-task basis.
And so, the creation of Moonscars was underway.
As we started a new studio, we faced a couple challenges. One was finding local talent to complete the team.
We were also short on past experience developing full games, so we had to learn this craft on the fly—and when starting the project, we didn’t consider how much time we’d need to get to that stage where t