The Little Black Bestiary: A Playful Proposition

In this episode of The Little Black Bestiary, the protagonist gets talked into a video game strip-bet with his friend Tainara. Tainara is an Iara, a race which stems from Brazilian folklore, and has traits adapted from aquatic mammals like dolphins and manatees. (Since Our first episode featured a dragon we wanted to pick something a little less well known.)

The game is available for free as both a windows download and HTML5 at
Itch.io and Newgrounds

First Blog Post = First Demo!

So, with our first official dev blog post, we may as well start with our first official game demo!

Our first game, Mana Maze, was originally conceived as a 'pac-man' styled maze running game, where you explore a maze collecting pick-ups while avoiding monsters. The twist on pac-man is that there are different types of monsters with unique behaviors, different types of elementally charged powerups with both passive and active effects, and as the game progresses, puzzle elements for interacting with the environments are introduced. 

Our 0.1 demo is currently available on Itch.io; and mostly serves as a proof of concept. We're currently reworking a few things for a better and more fluid gameplay feel, but you can still try out the current demo to get a general sense of what we're going for. The demo comes in "Standard" and "Hardcore" editions, the gameplay for both is the same, but the latter has more explicit 18+ scenes for when a monster catches the player. 

We're currently working on refining the main character's controls, movement and animations. (She's even getting an improved sprite!) so expect some more details on that later. That is, after all, what a dev blog is for. In the meantime, you can download the current demo from the pages below: