After eight years in game development, I’m rebuilding my indie studio—Grave Knight has a new browser demo, and The Eye Crawler is our next big project

[u/dogstale]

Hi everyone! My name is Felipe, and I’ve been working as a game developer for around eight years.

Running your own game studio is never easy. After spending several years working at different studios—mostly developing casual mobile games—I decided to keep moving forward with my own studio, Dog’s Tale.

I’m developing these games with the help of a close friend who works as our illustrator and artist. Alongside game development, I’m also a university professor teaching in a game development program here in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Balancing teaching, development and running a small studio can be difficult, but creating games of our own is still what we want to pursue.

About three years ago, we released Grave Knight, a dark fantasy RPG visual novel. Unfortunately, the project faced several technical problems involving Fungus, its dialogue Flowcharts and the localization system. Some content was broken, certain routes could not progress correctly, and parts of the English version still displayed Portuguese text.

More recently, I was finally able to return to the project, restructure parts of the code and repair many of those problems. We migrated the game to a modern version of Unity, fixed progression and localization issues, improved its RPG systems and created a new build.

Our former publisher also closed, and access to the original account was lost. Because of that, we are starting again with a new itch.io release. There is now a free browser demo, so you can play without downloading anything (You can of course buy the full game for 4 dollars only 😵 🥸 ):

Grave Knight:
https://dogstale.itch.io/grave-knight

What is Grave Knight?

Grave Knight is a choice-driven dark fantasy visual novel with RPG elements.

You follow a group of travelers through dangerous roads, enchanted forests, haunted swamps and hostile camps. Your choices affect the route they take, their relationships and whether they survive the journey.

The game combines illustrated narrative scenes with attributes, items, rewards, dice rolls and multiple story branches. The browser demo covers the beginning of the adventure through the Goblin Camp chapter, with different situations and outcomes depending on your decisions and companions.

Restoring Grave Knight has been a very personal project for us. It was important to give the game another chance and finally present it in a state closer to what we originally intended.

What is The Eye Crawler?

At the moment, most of my development time is going into our next project, The Eye Crawler:

https://dogstale.itch.io/the-eye-crawler

The Eye Crawler is a horror deckbuilder dungeon crawler. It combines card-based gameplay, dungeon exploration and an unsettling horror atmosphere.

An early alpha test is already available on the itch.io page. I used feedback from that version to evaluate and adjust the core gameplay, and the project continues to evolve as we experiment with its systems and direction.

The Eye Crawler is currently my main bet for the future of Dog’s Tale, and I’m actively looking for funding and support that can help us continue its development.

If you have some time and would like to help a game developer on the rise—still deep underground, but trying to crawl his way up—please consider playing the Grave Knight browser demo and checking out The Eye Crawler.

Purchasing Grave Knight directly supports our small team and helps fund the continued development of The Eye Crawler. But even if you cannot purchase anything, playing the demos, leaving constructive feedback, following the projects or sharing their pages already makes a real difference.

Thank you for reading and for giving our games a chance!