Black Heaven Archives - The Occult Triangle Lab

January 31, 2021January 31, 2021

We’re Launching A Kickstarter for “Black Heaven”!

The official launch date is set for April 30th, 2021! You can see the full announcement on Itch!

Here’s an excerpt:

“When I started work on Black Heaven, a game about romancing ghosts in the aftermath of an apocalyptic plague, I didn’t expect a real-life pandemic to spread across the world. Now, the themes of isolation, loneliness, nostalgia, and longing for human connection have become a lot of people’s day-to-day experience. It’s pretty surreal.

“This is a game about ghosts, memories, and rapidly unraveling sanity, so one of the key features will be “Fractal Madness”: if a player tries to repeatedly reload a save file to change their actions, the narrative may be altered in unexpected and disturbing ways. Did reality change, or were your memories wrong?

“Apart from that, Black Heaven is meant to be a deep dive into the dark corners of the human heart that are too terrifying, painful, and universal to ignore. It’s an exploration of the darker side of love, as well as what it means to be human.”

Follow us on Itch to get notified when the Kickstarter is live, follow us on Twitter for updates, and sign up for our email list to get super-early access to stuff!

We’ve also created a fun, free personality quiz that matches you with one of the characters–try it out here!

You can download the free 2-hour Extended Demo for Black Heaven here!

July 12, 2020January 31, 2021

The Demo For Black Heaven Is DONE!

After eight months of work, including creating a Game Design Doc, learning Ren’Py, writing the opening 20 minutes of the game, and finding artists…the demo for Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim is done.

I’ve gotten almost universally positive responses for the Beta version of the demo, and now I’m super excited to send it out into the world. From the art to the music, I’m super stoked about everything in it!

I’ll be doing promotion and PR outreach for the demo in the coming weeks, including hopefully showcasing it at PlayNYC this year.

In the meantime, thanks to everyone who collaborated with me on this project:

Linnea Kataja (Character Art)
Lim Chin Yang (Background Art)
Eric Gerdlund (Music)
The Embalmer (Music)
Sarcastic Sounds (Music)
Marek Domagala (music)
Re.Alice (GUI Design)
BaiYu (Programming)
Joel Clapp (Logo Design)
Alex Sherman (Trailer)

You can play the demo on itch.io here!

Stay tuned for more updates!

— Chris Mahon, Creative Lead

January 14, 2020January 15, 2020

Black Heaven Vision Board

To help aid in art design for the game, I created some Pinterest boards for characters and costumes! You can check out some of the key reference images below.

Note: these images are not official art for the game–they’re just inspirations.

No-Eyes

One of the key sketches of No-Eyes, the necromantic antagonist of the game. He wears a black, eyeless helmet with human teeth embedded in the jaw.

Key Appearance Traits: close-fitting black robes with high collar and silver buttons, smooth, eyeless helmet, leather satchel, white gloves, no exposed skin, 6’0, emaciated

Occupation: Necromancer and scholar

Personality: No-Eyes is irreverent, charismatic, and entirely without morals. He sees other humans as amusements or puppets, and is highly adept at twisting them to his own ends. His humorous and often devil-may-care attitude is carefully cultivated to disguise his true intentions.

Ru

Ru is one of the three main romance interests. She is the main character’s tutor.

Key Appearance Traits: Medium-length blue hair and bangs, large glasses, willowy, 5’10

Occupation: Scholar/teacher (Physical regeneration specialty)

Personality: Ru is shy and bookish, but her passionate side shines through when tackling a puzzle or difficult problem. She’s widely recognized as a leader in her field, but her relentless work ethic has isolated her and made her even less comfortable interacting with people.

Keywords:Gentle, empathetic, obsessive, anxious

Leathe

Leathe is one of the key romance interests. She is a skilled surgeon and one of the protagonist’s classmates.

Key Appearance Traits: medium-length, red, curly hair tied up in a messy bun, freckles, roughly 5’8

Occupation: Student (Artificial vessel specialty)

Personality: Leathe is charming, clever, and an unapologetic queen of drama. She loves to gossip and play with people’s hearts, and can appear callous and shallow. However, her outward persona is mostly a façade, which hides her deep insecurities and her wariness to trust others.

Key words: shrewd, witty, manipulative, flirtatious

Izagi

Izagi is one of the key romance interests. She is a martial artist and one of the protagonist’s classmates.

Key Appearance Traits: long, straight black hair, fit and toned, 6’0

Occupation: Student (Physical augmentation specialty)

Personality: Izagi Ito is focused, disciplined, and confident, but beneath the surface, she’s still struggling to rein in her chaotic emotions, which range from fierce competitiveness to anger over her past. For her, martial arts are a way to tame her own mind.

Key words: fierce, confident, disciplined

December 22, 2019July 12, 2020

New Plans for “Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim”!

Big announcement: I’m planning on turning “Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim” into a full-length, commercial visual novel!

Though the project likely won’t kick into gear until Fall 2020, I’m laying the groundwork for the game now, including 1) an early version of the demo with placeholders, 2) marketing plans, and 3) an outline for the full game!

The Game

Here’s the working description of the game:

In Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim, you must collect three ghosts in a magical grimoire and return them to a mysterious necromancer named No-Eyes, who offers to bind one of them to you forever. The journey will take you into the depths of this ruined world as well as the memories of each of the ghosts you meet, but you can only give your heart to one of them. Who will you choose?

Ru, the shy, brilliant scholar?

Leathe, the fiery, sharp-witted conwoman?

Ryu-Ito, the fierce but kind-hearted martial artist?

Be careful—in this world, ghosts can take on many forms, from beautiful shades to Lovecraftian horrors, so you’ll need to use your kindness and cunning to survive!

The game is meant to be in the dark fantasy/horror genre, and is planned to have some 18+ material, including romance scenes and some Silent Hill-style horror imagery.

Right now, here are some of the planned key features of game:

Three romance-able characters
Simple interactive mini-games
Lo-fi hip-hop soundtrack with original and licensed music
Hidden routes and multiple endings
8-hour playtime

One of the gameplay elements I’m super excited about is a feature in Ren’Py that allows the game to remember certain player decisions, even if they don’t save the game, exit, and reload a previous save.

This ties is nicely with one of the key narrative elements–chronomancy, or time magic. The player character is given the ability to go back in time and change their actions (manifested as the player reloading a save), but when they do, some characters will remember the unsaved “alternate” timeline.

Since two of the key themes are memories and blurring of reality, this opens up a lot of possibilities for weird, maddening things to happen to the PC.

Making the Decision

When I first posted about “Black Heaven” several months ago, he project was only planned to be a portfolio piece, something to demonstrate my narrative design and team management skills.

After starting work for the Loresmyth and Tales in September, I shelved “Black Heaven” to focus on my professional work, which included writing and coding the pilot for a novel-length interactive fiction series.

Once my schedule stabilized a bit and I finished up the pilot for Tales, I decided to keep working on “Black Heaven” in my free time. I felt like I really had something special, and my work with Tales had served as a crash course in writing and coding interactive fiction.

After a few weeks of thinking and researching, I decided that once my writing commitment to Tales was finished, I’d try to make “Black Heaven” into a full-length commercial game.

The Plan

The current development and release plan looks like this:

Establish an LLC to publish the game and act as legal entity
Build the dev team (consisting of a character artist, background artist, composer, and UI/game designer)
Create a 30-min demo with full music and art assets
Promote the demo
Promote a Kickstarter campaign for the full game
Launch Kickstarter campaign
Create full game once funding is secured
Deliver full game to backers (plus any stretch goals)
Release full game on retail platforms

Right now, the estimated budget of the game is between $1,800- $2,000 and the retail price is planned to be around $7.99, though these figures may change.

I’m not planning on making any money from the Kickstarter to keep the funding goal low. If I make any money, it’ll be from selling the game commercially.

The Demo

I’ve already written up an alpha version of the demo, which is about 20 minutes long. The demo uses placeholder art and music (from Persona and various YouTube artists, respectively), but most of the text and mechanics are there.

Here’s some screenshots of the demo: