blindskystudios

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Very excited to tell you that we've finally begun work on a follow-up to Mandagon. It's been a joy diving into that world again!

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So we're switching focus a little, and sadly we've had to put Adam on hold for the time being. However, there is something new we've been tinkering with - more news on that soon!

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An early look at some new Adam gameplay.

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adam?

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A new collection of Mandagon things is now available! We’ve got art prints, phone cases, greetings cards and all manner of pretty things!

Click HERE to have yourself a brows. As always, sales from these products directly supports Blind Sky Studios and helps us make more games!

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Our artist Tom Kitchen will be exhibiting some art work/prints along side illustrator deprivedanxiety at the SHO gallery in the Castle Emporium, with an opening night 7pm on the 15th of Oct.

Tom will be showing work taken from Mandagon - We'll have Mandagon running through a snazzy projector on the opening night as well. Pop along for a drink and a peek at pretty things!

Click here for more info!

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Mandagon original soundtrack and digital art book is now available to download! Head over here http://store.steampowered.com/app/515270/ and see what’s up!

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Hi, I was just wondering if Mandagon will be coming out with apple support on steam? It looks like an amazing game and I'd love to play it but all I have is an apple laptop so I can't play it yet.

Hey there, We’re currently working on patching a couple of little bugs that have surfaced since release. But once those are cleaned up we’ll be looking into porting to Mac for sure!

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Mandagon is available on Steam, for free no less! Explore a world inspired by Tibetan theology and philosophy. With a focus on life and death, discover what it means to make a true sacrifice . . .

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One more day until Mandagon arrives on Steam!

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Mandagon - Coming 4th August! Only 2 more days!

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3 more days to go! Mandagon will be available on Steam soon!

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Mandagon will be released on 4th Aug - Only 4 days to go!

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Less than a week until Mandgaon is released on Steam!

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6 days and counting until Mandagon arrives!

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Mandagon will be coming to steam on the 4th August! A little later than expected, but we’re all very exited!!

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It’s ScreenShotSaturday time! So here’s a bunch of stuff, some screen shots, some not so much, but hey, whos keeping count!

We’re super close to finishing Mandagon and super excited to put it out! So in the meantime let’s take a look at the makings of a Mandagon level, as told by our artist Tom - 

I thought it might be fun to break down my level design process, apologies if any of this is rudimentary to any of you. I was pretty new to this when I started on Mandagon, so I thought I'd share what I was able to learn along the way! So it goes without saying Mandagon is built mainly from tile based pixel art. Very early on I was playing around to figure out what resolution to work in - After a lot of mucking about I settled on 32 X 32px for my tile size. I personally found it to be a good balance between detail and representation (if that makes sense?). Pyxel Edit Was my work horse at this stage, and still is. Can't recommend it more strongly, it's still in its beta stages right now so it has its little quirks here and there, but it has served me well Throughout! Next step was actually figuring out how to build levels from tiles - Mandagon is like the second or third game I've worked on, and I'd never worked with tiles before, so every day's a school day! My googling brought me to a little program simply and aptly named Tiled Map Editor. So I had my first tiles and my tiled map editor, well equipped to begin mucking about! I was also teaching myself a bit of C# at the time, so with my 32px scale locked in I was able to play around with the relationship between level size and player movement speed - I had one test with a smaller map and slower movement speed, another with a massive map and a speedy player. Once this became a full project for me and the rest of us, we had a bit of an internal discussion and landed somewhere in the middle, not too fast, not too slow, not too big, not too small. I then began to build the level you can see in our Greenlight trailer After a modest but mostly positive reception on the Greenlights we were keen to deliver. Discussions led us to add new ways to traverse level and bump up the exploration side of things. So to compliment this I decided to scrap our original level and rebuild from scratch at double the size - que countless sleepless nights. All that left me with a map that needed to be 187 tiles by 248. Throughout all this I realised classic pen and paper wasn't gunna be much use to me and my work process - I wanted a way for my layout sketches to feed directly into the final build. Also working at full scale in Tiled was just too daunting. So here's what I did - I already knew the exact size of my map, that was locked in. So I just made a Pyxel Edit canvas that was set so one pixel equaled one tile, 187px by 248px. I had a colour pallet to represent my main tile sets. This gave me freedom to sketch chunks of the level as I would on paper and then zoom in to work on specific sections with more focus.

Then zoom back out, paint in joining sections and larger chunks. Zero back and fourth between sketchbook and computer. And then, knowing the players max jump height/distance, I could run my cursor through the map to see if there were any dead ends or sticking points.

Once I was as happy as could be with the layout, I saved myself a PNG, brought it into Photoshop, then, since my final tiles are 32 by 32, I just multiplied the resolution by 32 to get my full sized map. I could just drop this full sized image into Tiled as a base and start layering up the final tiles.

Once I'd got the basics in I could test the level for real and iron out a few creases.

And finally, after a bit of back and fourth between building and testing I felt safe enough to start getting my detail and polish in.

This is the stage I'm at now, adding new tile sets when needed, and still optimizing sections of the level as I go. Although it's mostly the aesthetics that I'm working on now.

We’ll have a shiny new trailer to show you real soon too!