Celestial Tear: Demon's Revenge (RPG created by Black game developers)
- Thread starter Responsible Allen Iverson
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Black Game Developer Fund
blackgamedevfund.com
White Guardian Studios: Building a Universe
May 23, 2022
The studios in the Black Game Developer Fund are each bringing their unique backgrounds, perspectives, and skills to bear in creating distinct, highly compelling games. To offer a glimpse of what’s in store for players, the BGDF team will be posting an ongoing series of interviews that shed more light on each of these games and the talented people behind them.
Whitney and Tyrell White, aka Yin and Rell, aka White Guardian Studios, are the wife-and-husband team behind the Celestial Tear entertainment universe, comprising multiple comics and games. Their upcoming game, Celestial Tear: Lost World, is their most ambitious yet, blending an original sci-fi setting with elements of the sandbox, survival, and Lovecraftian horror genres. We reached out to them to find out more about their work and the experiences that led them to create such a unique entertainment property.
How did you both come to pursue games and comics as a career?
Whitney: I started my journey into games in large part thanks to my brothers. After playing a bunch of games, I wanted to be a writer for them, to entrance people in a new world. My mother encouraged me to do what I wanted and so I did. I went on to create a bunch of story-driven games that never saw the light of day.
I ended up going to college for game design, which I guess turned out fine because if I had gone to a different school, I would not have met Tyrell. When I met him, he encouraged me to continue my work and, thus, Demon’s Revenge was started, based on an original concept of mine from when I was a young teen. Tyrell was the artist. He brought my characters to life and fleshed out the plot holes in my stories. He also had his own world that he’d created. When Tyrell and I combined our worlds, the result was the Celestial Tear universe.
Eventually, somehow, after messing around with a bunch of different game genres and engines, I ended up as the programmer. I began taking commissions for some small games and, after a while, landed a role on the Omocat team for Omori.
Comics just seemed like the natural next step. When I first started reading comics, I was mesmerized by the art in the Tomb Raider/Witchblade crossovers. Tomb Raider was and still is my favorite game—the art has been imprinted in my memory, and the comic art style in general has become a key influence for the Celestial Tear universe.
Tyrell: I always wanted to make games. Early on I came across the RPG Maker and M.U.G.E.N engines. I spent hours doing what I thought was creating games. I think what I did at that time would be more looked at as modding. When I went to college at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh it was for culinary arts primarily because I didn’t really have any support for creating games. At that time, in 2005, gaming was not the glamorized career it is today.
I eventually met Whitney while in college and she inspired me with all her ideas and the fact that she was doing something that I dreamed about doing. We would find that we had a similar interest and experience in making games. I loved Whitney’s ideas and characters in Demon’s Revenge despite her saying my original game, “ERUPT,” was trash. We eventually combined our skills and started working on Demon’s Revenge together.
Comics were a natural thing for me. The characters and worlds I create are just things I have pulled from my childhood and matured. My brother and I would use up endless amounts of paper to create comics and trading cards. We would make playing cards by cutting them out and wrapping them in tape. It was fun. Whitney and I still do this, but now we have a laminator.
Though we’d been developing Demon’s Revenge for quite a while, it wasn’t until we discovered Kickstarter that we thought we might be able to actually live our dreams of being game developers. That is when we started to take it seriously as a business. That is when we learned the basics of marketing. We failed three times before we got funding through Kickstarter. We never gave up. We managed to release Demon’s Revenge a year after funding. We thank our backers greatly for believing in us. Some of them are still around too!
How would you describe Celestial Tear: Lost World? What kind of game is it, and what will the experience of playing it be like?
Alien meets Stardew Valley. You control a trio of gifted characters trapped in an alien dimension as you try to build a base to protect your sanity and your life from Lovecraftian monsters.
Celestial Tear: Lost World has elements of horror, tower defense, and story-driven RPG. You have to gather materials to build a house to protect your characters. This can be anything from mud to bones. If you stay out in the wilderness too long, a huge monster will hunt you down and straight-up destroy your party. You can pretty much eat anything: the monsters you kill, the materials you gather, and what we call distilled slime. All three characters use these materials uniquely, especially Trask, who is a tall plant-like being. When Trask eats anything, particularly the wildlife, she adopts some of their abilities and traits for a short time. This can be anything from summoning bugs or converting her arms into crystal-edged tentacles.
We designed the monsters, which we call Gorlings, kind of like Pokemon. The twist is that you do not catch the Gorlings; they come from an anti-universe, so their elemental makeup is extremely dangerous, or toxic, or indestructible. Instead, you hunt them down, take whatever useful organs or body parts, and fabricate them into food, weapons, and even shelter. You have to “hunt or be haunted” in the Lost World.
We think anyone who likes tower defense combined with RPG elements would enjoy Celestial Tear: Lost World. It brings something new to the genre while also providing familiar and accessible gameplay. You defend yourself with a unique and exciting combat system that combines strategy with fast-paced action, and you survive by making quick decisions and issuing your orders in real-time to each member of your party individually.
What are some of the learnings you’re applying from Demon’s Revenge in Lost World?
While making Demon’s Revenge, the biggest lesson we learned was about marketing.
As a developer you are responsible for understanding your game on a marketing level. Even when you have a publisher, no one knows your game and the ideas behind it like you do. This was a lesson we learned early on and, around the time of the release, we needed to learn again. We now know more about how to promote a game than we did at the time.
Another big thing we understand is what it takes to release a solid game. When we were working on Demon’s Revenge, we had this huge idea, and we also had a goal to complete the game in a year. We worked tirelessly every day until its completion, even in our hotel room at PAX when we were showing the game. We made our goal, but ultimately there were issues at launch. We have learned from that experience about what it actually takes to make a well-polished idea come to fruition.
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered as independent developers, and for those facing a similar challenge, how have you gone about dealing with it?
We think the biggest challenge is and will always be time. Not only is there a finite number of hours in a day, but there is also only so much actual work time an individual can take. We have learned, especially over the last year, that taking some time to breathe can actually increase the productivity and quality of what we are doing. Weekends and days off did not align with our goals, so we had been working almost nonstop on game development and ended up crashing here and there. Now, we give ourselves breaks when we need them. Take some time to breathe, and when you do get back to work you will more than likely be way more productive.
What advice would you share with other independent developers who are also interested in creating a multimedia universe like Celestial Tear?
For us, the universe started small. Then, as we wrote more lore and introduced more characters, everything kept expanding. It wasn’t planned to be multimedia, but we had so many characters and so many stories that it couldn’t be told with just one game or in one medium.
The advice we’d share is to start small so that when you have to inevitably retcon something you don’t have to go so far back or so far into the future of your universe that it creates a million plot holes (haha). And start with one medium at a time (unless you got it like that and can just hire people to do the others while you oversee everything).
CodeKansas
Superstar
Two nikka nerds linked up in school, meshed their worlds, and are now making games based on that world together?
I fukk with it.
Best of luck to them.
I fukk with it.
Best of luck to them.
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I just hate the artwork. Black games always have lacking artwork. shyt bout to make me redo their avatar and send it to them for free.
CodeKansas
Superstar
shyt, DO IT. If they humble, it'll work out for the both of y'all.I just hate the artwork. Black games always have lacking artwork. shyt bout to make me redo their avatar and send it to them for free.
Any word on this game.?
Wait ...so this dude would rather draw smut with anime characters built like Dexter's mom on steroids all showing feet, over trying to push out a video game that could have been successful?
Probably makes more money doing that
What you talking about?
I think he posted in the wrong thread.What you talking about?
