Sculpting Moonscars, an adventure inspired by 2D Souls launches September 27 – PlayStation.Blog

We at Black Mermaid are excited for the upcoming release of Moonscars, our first game as a new studio!

If you’ve watched our trailer, you probably already know that we’re fans of the Souls series. We have long been inspired by their approach and rich world building and wanted to create a game for other fans like us.

We set out to create a challenging experience in the 2D world, with a fast and responsive combat that matches the ethos of 2D. Today, we want to share a little bit about how Moonscars came about — and some of the lessons we’ve learned through our own cycle of challenge and victory.

Myths and masters

In Moonscars, you will play as Gray Irma, a clay sculpture made in the image of a fierce female warrior and brought to life. Her visual design was carried over from a painting Stefan did in 2015 (above), and although her personality was crafted to best fit the story, her looks been identified a long time ago.

The creator of all living statues, The Sculptor, was once a great man. At the time of the game’s events, he still possesses immense power and is driven to make the world a better place in his vision – but very few are willing to accept the cost. and sacrifice to make it happen.

We like the concept of the legendary Cypriot king and sculptor Pygmalion and his ivory statue Galatea, which tells the story of a sculptor who is passionate about his creations and wants to imagine a world where the concept This concept is more expansive — perhaps with darkness twisting into it. The central elements of our story and setting are sculpting and molding: a world of clay, bones, and anchors.

Visually, we draw inspiration from the old Dutch oil painting masters. The dark palette also favored us a bit during the background painting process, for our small group.

Shaping the game

We (Stefan and Alex) met while working together on creating fun experiences to promote br. For a while we talked about starting our own project, and so we took a leap of faith, quit our jobs, and started our own journey.

With Stefan’s traditional painting experience and new passion for animation, along with Alex’s knack for programming and overall ingenuity, in a short time we’ve created a compendium of your new project and show it to the public. It attracts a lot of attention and positive reactions, giving us a confidence boost. A few months later, when we partnered with Humble Games, we started expanding our team and brought in Andryi Moroz, our game designer and story writer, Andrei Platon, who also shares the same passion. animation and a few close friends helped us -base quest.

And so, the creation of Moonscars was underway.

When we start a new studio, we face some challenges. One is to find local talent to complete the group.

We also don’t have much past experience developing full games, so we had to learn this craft right away — and when we started the project, we didn’t consider how much we needed. time to get to that stage where things start to click.

We also decided we wanted smooth hand-drawn animations, and while we were aware of the time-consuming nature of creating them, we weren’t counting the number of iterations we had to do. Fortunately, this improved later in development.

Another thing that we didn’t expect was how quickly we would improve our skills and the things we did even six months ago would quickly start to work and we wanted to do it. back them. Considering we’ve been working for over three years, this has happened a few times in the art department.

Original cartoon sketch, with example on the left from 2018

Looking back, we were a bit too ambitious to start such a project, but we managed to get to the end with the help of our team, Humble Games and the community that has formed around the game. play.

The biggest challenge is probably getting everything into a state we might call “done” and actually stopping working on it to launch. There is always an urge to do something and change it, and it never ends. It’s important to know when to stop, and we’ve learned a bit about how to recognize the right moment, as well as how to improve our process quite a bit for future projects.

The journey is coming to an end

The final game is quite different from the original idea we had. Andriy introduced new and very interesting mechanics that players enjoyed in the demo. During development, we learned that we shouldn’t snuff out ideas just because they conflict with the original scope, and instead let the project grow, focusing on its strengths. and amplifying them, which ultimately made Moonscars a better game.

We thank our friends who helped us play, gave us feedback, and cheered us on along the way. And when demo on our PC, we got more valuable feedback, as well as words of encouragement, which gave us great mental motivation to keep going and not stopping. improve the game. (We’ll try doing this a bit earlier with our next project, hehe.)

With Moonscars coming out, we were both nervous and excited to see the reaction of the gaming community. We really look forward to you all being able to play the game when it launches on September 27th for PS4 and PS5!