Long time no see!
Madora is a very important project for us. It's our way of expressing our love for games, art, and Brazilian culture.
It's also our first major project (big for us, at least) and it's been a challenging journey. We are a Brazilian team of 6 people, along with incredible partners, trying to make every little piece of the game carry something of those who participated in it — including the Brazilianness that we so strongly believe in as an art form.
Our dream has always been to create a roguelite that makes the player think, test builds, and rack their brains, but that at the same time is beautiful, alive, and artistic.
And making a 3D game proved to be a gigantic challenge.
Modeling, animation, map design, interactions, combat… the famous phrase that became a meme within the team was: "it would be so much easier in 2D".
After more than 2 years working on Madora, we've learned a lot. Including by making mistakes.
One of our biggest mistakes was putting the game on Steam Next Fest too early, practically as a prototype. The experience ended up teaching us a lot about development, positioning, and project direction.
And that's precisely where the new Demo came from.
We focused on making the map more alive, with more interactions and exploration. We reworked abilities to make them clearer, improved objectives, expanded enemies, adjusted systems, and started to find a better balance between "going wild with ideas" and keeping our feet on the ground.
And there's still a lot coming to Early Access: a deckbuilder system, new maps, enemies, unlockables, and much more.
The Demo released today represents the vision we've always had for Madora:
unique characters, different builds, exploration, and a world inspired by Brazilian folklore, fauna, and flora — plus some of our own crazy ideas along the way.
It's still only a fraction of what we want to build, but we're happy with how much we've evolved so far.
It's been a difficult but extremely rewarding journey.
Thank you to everyone who has supported the project so far — friends, family, funders, and especially those who played and sent feedback, both positive and negative. You probably have no idea how much this helps us to keep going.
And now, the invitation:
Try the new Madora Demo and share your opinions with us. It really makes a difference.
You can find me on Discord as Tonyyy (yes, the avatar is Sukuna… and I'm not going to defend myself for it). Peace!