Zimra and I made a ludum dare three years ago with the theme “You are the Villain”. The result was The Villain’s Rules, a game that reached #6 overall and Silver medal on Theme (yay!). We also wrote a post mortem about it. After finishing some important projects, including the game Freaking Meatbags on Steam, we began the production of Machiavillain. Machiavillain is the evolution of The Villain’s Rules, and while we changed some things, it’s still in the same silly spirit.

Basically, the game changed from a linear level with traps to a procedural world where you have to raise your monsters, build your mansion and slay the victims by the villains’ rules. The game was really praised for its mood, the horror clichés and the jokes. We wanted to go further on this funny side and deliciously evil mood while making the game more management / strategy style. We felt it was definitely better mechanics that can be played for longer hours.

Making ludum dare was very important because thanks to that Zimra could work on her first game, I had an interesting project to build after Freaking Meatbags and we’re even doing our first Kickstarter!

Meet the monsters, discover our gameplay systems and come see our mad scientist laboratory on Kickstarter. You can donate with blood or money… just kidding about blood. Or maybe I don’t. Not sure.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/335326767/machiavillain-horror-mansion-management-game
PS: we gathered more than 20% of our goal in the first 24H hours ! Thank you everyone