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Dark Queen

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Dark Queen

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Embark on a journey inspired by Slavic mythology and Croatian folklore in this 2.5D action-adventure game inspired by the likes of Inside, Neva, and Song of Iron.

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Dev Blog 8: Building our Levels

25 Mar

Hey everyone! Today we're pulling back the curtain a little and giving you a peek at how we actually build the world of Dark Queen of Samobor. Spoiler: it's messier than you might think before it gets beautiful.

From grey box to finished world

Every level in the game starts as a blockout. A rough layout built from simple geometric shapes. No real materials, no finished models, just crude objects slapped together to test whether the space actually feels right to move through and fight in. Does the pacing work? How does the flow of the movement feel? Can you actually see what's going on during combat? These are some of the questions we're answering at this stage, not "does it look pretty."

Early Blockout

Once we're happy with how it plays, we move into the visual iteration: adding the real models, textures, lighting, atmosphere, and all the little details that make the world feel alive and beautiful.

Final Blockout

The difference is pretty dramatic, and honestly one of our favourite parts of the process.

The invisible magic: Triggers

A lot of what makes a game world feel dynamic and responsive comes down to a trick almost every game uses: invisible trigger zones. You simply walk through an area, and something happens. It's one of those things players rarely notice, and that's exactly the point.

Trigger Zone

In our case, we use triggers in all sorts of ways, for example for enemy spawning. When you cross an invisible boundary, enemies appear, but always off-screen so you don’t actually notice it.

Enemy spawning off-screen

And this is how that looks in-game, from your perspective.

In-game view

But triggers aren't just for enemies. That massive skull you run through? There's a trigger on the other side of it and the moment you pass through, it snaps shut behind you.

Skull closing on a trigger

You can also set off these triggers with your axe. In the example below, there’s a trigger on the button, and activating it makes the doors open (and close).

Opening and closing doors with a trigger

Camera triggers and cinematic moments

We also use triggers to control our camera. Dark Queen of Samobor uses a fully manually directed camera, and triggers let us switch angles at just the right moment, creating those cinematic scenes that make the world feel bigger and more dramatic than a locked perspective ever could.

Moving camera with a trigger

It's a simple system under the hood, but the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of edge cases to juggle and consider. But getting it right gives us a ton of creative control over how you experience each moment.

That's all for this one!

Hope you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain. This is just a small slice of how things come together, and more dev blogs are on the way, so stay tuned.

And as always, thanks for following along!🖤

- Downtown Game Studio team

Dark Queen

Surprise!

I love discovering games I've never heard of, and I found yours on Games From Croatia. This looks like something I'd love! Do you plan to put out a demo eventually?

AeroFunk80

24 Oct, 2024 @ 1:21am

General Discussions

Birth of the Beast: Inside Our Creature Design Process

18 Dec, 2025

Greetings, everyone.

In this post, we’d like to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we design our monsters. Every creature in our game goes through multiple stages of exploration and iteration before we settle on a final look. To show this process in action, let’s walk through the creation of one of our monsters: the Grabar.

Exploration

We always begin by exploring the overall shape, silhouette, and mood of a creature. At this stage, nothing is final. The goal is to experiment freely and discover interesting directions. Our designs are heavily inspired by local wildlife, especially when it comes to color palettes, textures, and small details. For the Grabar, we started with several rough concepts to explore different forms and personalities.

Grabar exploration - Concepts by Fran Petar Domljan

Variations

Once we settle on a general direction, we decide how the creature functions in gameplay. For the Grabar, we chose to create two variations: melee and ranged. After selecting the base look for each variation, we dive deeper into refining them individually. Below is our exploration of the ranged version of the Grabar, also known as the Spitter.

Spitter variations - Concepts by Fran Petar Domljan

Details

With the overall form locked in, we move on to detailing. This stage focuses on refining shapes and adding personality. Here are two head variations we explored for the Spitter, each pushing the character in a slightly different direction.

Spitter variations, head - Concepts by Fran Petar Domljan

Final variations

After multiple iterations, we narrow the designs down to a few strong candidates. These are close to what you’ll see in-game, with only minor tweaks left to be made. For the Grabar, we ended up with several “final look” options before making our last decision.

Grabar advanced variations - Concepts by Fran Petar Domljan

Final look

In the end, we selected these two versions as the definitive designs for the Grabar: the ranged and melee variants you’ll encounter in the game.

Grabar final look - Concepts by Fran Petar Domljan

This process is repeated for every monster and character we create. While we won’t go into the same level of detail for all of them here, we wanted to share a few more examples. Here is Bjesomar, an ancient creature of the forest, and Cesar, the ruler of the animals and guardian of the Queen’s treasure.

Bjesomar exploration - Concepts by Mato Vincetic

Cesar exploration - Concepts by Mato Vincetic

That’s all we wanted to share in this blog post. We hope you enjoyed this look into our creative process, and we’ll be back with more soon.

Thank you for following along!

- Downtown Game Studio team

Dark Queen

A Master of Film Music Joins Dark Queen of Samobor

28 Oct, 2025

Hello everyone!

We have thrilling news to share. Dalibor Grubacevic, one of Croatia’s most celebrated and award-winning composers, is joining our team! Known for his powerful and emotional film scores, Dalibor has collaborated with internationally recognized filmmakers and earned Croatia’s highest music honor, the Porin, for Best Original Score in theatre, film, or television for his work on the documentary about Marco Polo, and several other international awards.

Scoring Session

Dalibor with the orchestra after his recent concert in Zagreb, Croatia

We are incredibly excited and proud to welcome him aboard. His artistic sensitivity and vast experience will elevate the sound of the dark, immersive world we are creating, pushing our soundtrack to new heights. We can't wait to hear and share the main theme and the full soundtrack with you all, which is set to release next year.

Left to right: Josip, our Producer, Dalibor, and Mato, our Art director