Black The Fall

After decades of toil, an old machinist plots his escape from the oppressive grasp of the Communist regime.

Black The Fall was born in 2014, as an art project: a black & white stealth-platformer, set-up in an alienated world. The game concept came as a way to illustrate and express rebellion against the mechanisms of a heavily corrupted system, rooted in the decades of communism Romania has endured.

Sand Sailor Studio competed for the Square Enix Collective program with the prototype for Black the Fall, where they had a 70%+ YES. This feedback empowered the team to build a successful campaign on KickStarter. Then Sand Sailor Studio won a scholarship with their prototype and took part in Execution Labs' accelerator program, from which they came back with the know-how to see Black The Fall's development to release, delivering 36 chapters of puzzles and seamless gameplay.

Black The Fall was released mid-2017 and published by Square Enix on Steam, PS4 and Xbox. It was received by an active community which helped us polish the last rough edges. Black The Fall enjoyed the wave of dark platformers of that time, standing proud side-by-side with Limbo, Inside and Little Nightmares. To find out more about the game, check out its official website.

Developing Black The Fall

Stack:

Unity | C# | HLSL | Visual Studio | Git | Jenkins | RenderDoc | PIX | PS4 | Xbox

When I joined the company in 2016, Black The Fall was mid-way through development with a team of 2 senior developers, 4 level designers / artists and 1 community manager. A small team meant that I got to develop some of the fundamental systems of the game, while my focus was mostly on rendering.

    Rendering:

    • Developed and maintained a custom rendering pipeline within Unity
    • Wrote custom cross-platform shaders for the game’s materials and particle effects
    • Implemented post-processing techniques such as a highly optimised masked bloom, volumetric fog, realtime volumetric lights, gamma balance and dithering filters

    Consoles:

    • Squeezed the last performance gains for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch
    • Created a seamless experience throughout the game, for each console’s inputs and OS behaviours
    • Kept everything in line with Sony’s and Microsoft’s technical requirement checklists
    • Set up the game’s services and prepared the product for launch on each console’s store

Play Black The Fall!

Black The Fall is available on Steam, PS4, XBox and Nintendo Switch!
Take your chance at escaping the old dictatorship.

Developed by Sand Sailor Studio

Behind the vision of Black The Fall is Sand Sailor Studio, a creative bunch of people who are consistently releasing wild games.