03/11/2025
Ahoy!
I am Captain Joe, Manebeard Joe: A pirate, herbalist, dockside slums strummer, breeder of roosters or other small animals, and tamer of yokai of all sizes.
Intrigued by the arcane and mystical art of world creation, I founded this project two years ago.
Jokes (maybe) aside, I have always been passionate about comics and video games. I’ve been fascinated by the cel shading technique ever since the days of Dragon’s Lair.
So, inspired by games like that one and Zelda , but more precisely by more recent works such as Genshin, ToF, BP, etc., with which I have a love/hate relationship, I started developing the idea of creating a cel-shaded virtual space, cartoon-style, where players could communicate with each other through a comic-inspired chat system using balloons.
And since I’ve always been passionate about pirate imagery, everything naturally took shape in a pirate setting (I grew up loving Monkey Island, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the father of all voodoo piracy, Stranger Tides).
The result was unexpected and beyond my expectations, and soon other skilled people joined in, coming from all over the world (Italy, Spain, South Africa, Cuba).
Since everyone, except for us three "tinerfeños" , was working on the “magic” remotely, Black Art Studios was born.
Recently, because one of the main programmers left the project, we had to start everything again from scratch.
However, we took the opportunity to fix and improve the control system, the combat system, and the Chat System (BubbleChat).
We currently have a working online prototype, still in its Alpha version, of the system we called BubbleChat: it can be used between two players on one of our servers to communicate in-game.
In the next few days, we plan to upload some videos to get feedback and organize a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project, improve it by involving professionals, and make it accessible from all platforms (console, mobile, desktop).
We’ll soon update our website, where we’d like to share something about our world through a few comic panels.
