Hello! We are Black Bear Studio, a small indie game development team. We’re currently working on our first project — Strange Island.
Strange Island is a single-player, open-world (3 km²), first-person 3D psychological horror game focused on atmosphere, exploration, and a slow descent into the unknown. You awaken on a remote island with no memory — no idea who you are or how you got there. But with every answer you uncover, even more questions emerge.
⚠️ The game is still in development and is currently listed on Steam as “Coming Soon”. A playable demo is planned for release within the next few months (in late December 2025).
Join our Discord community to stay updated on development, ask questions, and be among the first to experience the demo!
Congratulations! 🎉 Strange Island has taken 2nd place in the “Players’ Choice: Best Upcoming Indies of 2025” category in the annual competition hosted by IndieDB 🏆 A huge thank you to everyone who voted for Strange Island! 💙🌴
Dear Islanders!
We’re excited to announce that Strange Island has successfully passed the selection stage and made it to the finals of the “Indie of the Year 2025” competition held by IndieDB.com!
Over the past nine days, more than 10,000 games — both released and in development — took part in the voting process. From these, the top 100 were chosen, and then divided into categories based on development status and genre.
Strange Island has entered the “Upcoming Games – Adventure” category, where it now competes among just six finalists. The winners in each category will be announced on December 19, 2025.
💛 Help Strange Island take first place — cast your vote using the link below! Together, we will win!
https://www.indiedb.com/groups/2025-indie-of-the-year-awards/top100#vote88802
Dear islanders,
We are happy to announce that the work on placing the textures across the island is finally, for the most part, complete. A few minor, insignificant elements remain, but we won’t waste time polishing them right now — the texture pass alone has already taken four months of intense and meticulous work. We’ll finish the remaining small details later.
Over these four months, we faced an enormous number of challenges we never even imagined at the start. We managed to overcome all of them and gained invaluable experience — the kind you cannot get at school, in programming courses, or at university.
While working on the texture system, we had to create several tools ourselves — tools without which our original vision simply wouldn’t have been possible. In fact, we ended up building an entire custom module (with several supporting sub-modules) for MapMagic 2 that solved its biggest weakness: the practical impossibility of highlighting arbitrary terrain regions. MapMagic 2 is incredibly powerful and unmatched in procedural generation, but when it comes to manual adjustments… things get rather difficult.
But we made it work. In reality, out of these four months, nearly half the time was spent not on placing textures, but on developing this module. Thanks to it, we can now highlight absolutely any area of terrain with surgical precision — down to the exact pixel — and programmatically do anything we need with it. Tasks that used to take us weeks can now be completed in one or two days.
This module will be extremely useful in the future, especially as we move on to object placement (trees, grass, rocks, driftwood, and so on). But now the work will go much faster, since almost all masks are complete, and objects will spawn strictly based on them.
Our plan is to finish the island 100% by the end of this year.
In the screenshots below, you can see the result of our last four months of work. All textures were placed procedurally — not a single brush was used, exactly as we intended.
The next stage is object placement. Everything is going according to plan, even if slower than we originally expected. It’s going to be fine. We’ve got this.
Thank you all for your support and for your interest in our project! More screenshots here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island/news/strange-island-devlog-4
