Games made with passion, creative freedom and love for the medium, because to make great games, you have to be a gamer first.
Black Cat Entertainment was founded 2017 by a professional storyteller and several industry veterans. We named ourselves after the most fun, creative and magical creature we could think of. In some cultures black cats are seen as lucky. In others, the opposite. There's an element of the mystical to them that reflects our ethos.
Our mission is to treat games like an art form, where nothing is off the table, and everything is made with passion and love. As great editor Damon Knight once said to great writer Robert Silverberg, to make great art you have to sit at the keyboard and open a vein. This stands every inch as true for comedy as it does for a thought piece, and of course everything in between.
We will contribute to this great artform with all the heart and personality we can muster.
Games
Works In Progress
Roald's Adventure
Little Ben is sick with a curse called The Withering, and his zest for life is dwindling away. It’s up to Roald to inspire his son to rise up and fight! Get out there in a multi-genre adventure where you’ll run through platformers, solve puzzles, race log boats and fight “road man” birds. Most of all, help the quirky characters of this world, come home and tell Ben how you became a hero. Your score is tied to Ben’s health, so the better you do on your adventures, the better he’ll get.
Guy of Warwick
A 2D game set in medieval England. Guy's story is one of the coolest, and most unsung tales of English legend, and we're going to bring it to life. The project is in its early phases, but we have expert lore consultants, a custom game engine, a passion for ancient legendry and a love for the legendry of England, all lined up to make this concept shine. More details on this will follow as the project comes together, so watch this space.
The Puppet Master
Blending the love of roguelikes and JRPGs, we believe we've found a way to get protagonist-driven storytelling into a metaprogression system. This will let us blend our two favourite genres, which have generally been considered incompatible. Are we mad? Yes. Will it be awesome? Also yes.
Narrative Consultancy
We found some seriously great authors with a passion for games. Their skills are proven and audiences won in the world of literature. Authors have a lot to offer the games industry. Novelists are master hypnotists, asking the reader to become another person and go on a journey in those shoes. That's exactly what we do in games.
Contact us to hire a masterful storyteller, contracted to craft your narrative to your specifications, and unleash the power trapped in the story you want to tell.
Scott Bradfield
Novelist, short story writer and critic, and former Pofessor of American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Connecticut. Works include The History of Luminous Motion, Dazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog, and The People Who Watched Her Pass By. Stories and reviews have appeared in Triquarterly, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Baffler, and numerous "best of" anthologies. He lives in California and London.
He has stories and essays forthcoming in The Weird Fiction Review, The New Statesman, The Best From Potato Soup Journal, Delmarva Review, The Baffler, The Moth, Albedo One, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Flash Fiction Magazine.
Carmen Capuano
Carmen Capuano was born in 1966, in Govan, Glasgow and came to England at the age of eighteen. A full and varied working life saw her move from London to Birmingham and finally to the small Worcestershire town of Bromsgrove.
A prolific writer, she has penned twenty novels in just six years, covering every genre from chick-lit to science fiction. Works include Ascension, Split Decision, Alone, and Storm Clouds.
Eighteen months ago she began writing screenplays. Lyv is her film debut.
Robin Wyatt Dunn
Born in Wyoming in 1979, Robin Wyatt Dunn is an author of 26 books, and producer of 3 feature films. You can find more of his work at http://robindunn.com/.
He was a finalist for Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2017.
On top of being an accomplished author, Robin is editor in chief of Chrome Baby, an e-zine that has seen monthly publication since 2012. You can find Chrome Baby here: http://robindunn.com/chrome-baby-index.html
Brian Evenson
Novelist and short story writer with a dozen books to his name, including Song for the Unraveling of the World, Immobility, The Open Curtain. Under the name B. K. Evenson he has published two novels based on the video games Dead Space, a Halo novel and a book set in the Aliens universe. He has co-written novelizations Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem and James Demonaco's Feral. He has been a five-time finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, a finalist for the Edgar Award, and a winner of the International Horror Guild Award. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches fiction writing at CalArts.
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Kim Newman
Kim Newman is a movie critic, author and broadcaster. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines. His books about film include Nightmare Movies, Millennium Movies, Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit. His fiction includes the Anno Dracula series, Life’s Lottery, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, An English Ghost Story, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School and Angels of Music. His comics include Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland and Anno Dracula Seven Days in Mayhem. As ‘Jack Yeovil’, he wrote the Vampire Genevieve and Dark Future novels for Games Workshop. His most recent novel is Anno Dracula 999 1Daikaiju. He has written for television (Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema), radio (Afternoon Theatre: Cry-Babies) and the theatre (The Hallowe’en Sessions), and directed a tiny film (Missing Girl). His official web-site is at www.johnnyalucard.com. He is on Twitter as @AnnoDracula.
Black Cat Academy
As industry veterans, we know how hard it is to learn the skills necessary to make a game. It's also hard to find the right people to hire, while aspirants are left in the dark as to what those skills even are. The absurdity of the situation isn't lost on us, and so back in 2016 we began outreach.
Since then, we have co-authored a Masters degree for Coventry University, and put on a successful industry-driven bootcamp that saw many students land employment and some even a publisher for their own game idea. The academy is growing, and we're passionate about training the next generation of game developers with the skills both they, and the studios, need.
Founders
Luke Richards
Creative Director
Luke does not know how to smile for profile pictures, but he's actually very friendly. He was an author for many years before striking out into the games industry.
As a freelance designer Luke has worked on dozens of projects, from narrative design for RPGs to gamification projects for private clients and goliaths like NHS England. While game design and narrative are the main interests, Luke can get his hands dirty with art assets (especially pixel) and even putting games together in Unity, Game Maker, Unreal and UEFN.
Link Richards
CEO & Mascot
A professional mascot with 2+ years' experience. Aside from inspiring teams, his favourite things are playing fetch, telling Luke what he sees out the window, extracting chicken bones from the garbage and hiding them under the sofa.He oversees all managerial decisions.
Collaborators
We've made games with indie teams, industry veterans and midcore studios, but Black Cat is new. There are some amazing people we're presently building prototypes with, along with the academy. More will be written here as projects come closer to prototype.
Our Culture
We'll keep it simple: great entertainment comes from either suffering or joy. We've consulted lawyers and apparently must inspire the latter.
Everything else is just buzz words, and we all agree it's meaningless to say. As the old writer's saying goes, show, don't tell.
If we're fun to work with and genuinely care about the wellbeing of our teams, you'll hear about it in time. Same goes for if we suck.
Contact
This cat prowls the streets of Leamington Spa, one of the UK's biggest games industry hubs.