Micah McCaul

Game Developer

Artwork

Mistfall Studios logo: graveyard art by CraftPix.net, title lettering in the Mana Seed font by Seliel the Shaper, wind sound by Chequered Ink, boom sound made with ElevenLabs.

Black Hills 1876 credits

Game design and code by Micah McCaul for Very Important Meeting. The squad tactics, the flags that feed your supplies and the drain on the losing side's resolve owe a lot to the Company of Heroes games.

Art

The soldiers, warriors, their horses and ponies, camps and every piece of the Plains ground (grass, trails, buttes, the creek, trees, sage and rocks) were made for this game by Micah McCaul from his own 3D models and drawn as pixel sprites.

The soldiers' walk, run, fire and fall are built on the Universal Animation Library by Quaternius, released under CC0. Find it at quaternius.com.

The layout of the ground tiles follows Tiny Swords by Pixel Frog, which inspired the style. No Tiny Swords art is used.

The waving flag on every point is from a free platformer tileset by CraftPix.net, repainted in the game as the 37-star flag of 1876, a painted hide standard of the Lakota and Cheyenne, or plain linen. Find it at craftpix.net.

The lanterns that light the night (on posts in the forts, and one at a soldier's belt in every company) are from the graveyard top-down pixel art tileset by CraftPix.net, cut down and redrawn small for the game. Find it at craftpix.net.

The pines, oaks, elms, aspens, rocks, cacti, shrubs, sandbag walls, trenches, barrels, wagons, carts, campfires, camp and farm props, tumbleweeds and dust devils, and the Bannerman's guidon are Micah McCaul's own prop sheets, one picture for each season, cut to the game's pixel size. The field gun and the mortar, their crews pushing and carrying them, the kneeling soldiers and warriors, and the Sioux War Leader on his white paint pony are Micah's own sprite sets, and the squad cards are his card pictures. The tall grass, the plateau slopes, the logs lying on a slant and the sharpened stakes are drawn in code in the colours of the Plains tileset. The yellow-grass, snow and badlands ground of the campaign's places are the same Plains tileset recoloured in code.

Until their own sprite sets are drawn, the Bannerman and the Major are stand-ins made from the infantryman and the cavalry trooper, after Micah's reference pictures.

The war map of the campaign is drawn in code as pixel art from the courses of the rivers, the mountains and the places of the battles of 1876 and 1877.

Sound

Rifle and carbine shots and the shell bursts come from CraftPix.net's free sound packs. Find them at craftpix.net.

The bow, distant fire, the shell whistle, the wind, the bugle chimes and the interface sounds come from the 400 Sounds Pack by Chequered Ink, trimmed and re-encoded for the web. Find it at ci.itch.io.

More shots, the pistol, the bows, the galloping horses and the Army bugle call come from Pixabay: gunshots by tuomas_data, Dragon Studio and freesound_community, the pistol by mrfriends, bows by freesound_community and u_2c8g87fmmx, horses by pwlpl, and the bugle call “To Arms”.

Type

Rye by Sorkin Type Co and Besley by The Besley Project Authors (indestructible type*), from Google Fonts, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (licences in assets/fonts).

Old Standard TT by Alexey Kryukov, from Google Fonts, under the SIL Open Font License.

Thanks

Thank you to Sam Stone, James Escarraz and Matthew McCaul for playtesting Black Hills 1876.

History

The battle is invented. The Great Sioux War of 1876 and 1877 was a real war between the United States and the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, fought over the Black Hills and the lands promised to those nations by treaty. The game lets you command either side and takes no side itself.

Historical sources

The campaign's fights, dates and places come from Micah McCaul's Expanded Campaign Atlas of the Sioux Wars, built on these sources.

Maps

The battlefields are drawn from the U.S. Geological Survey's 3DEP elevation and National Hydrography Dataset and the National Land Cover Database 2021 (Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium), all public domain. The campaign map's sheets are rendered from the same elevation.

Privacy

The game needs no account and sets no cookies. Your battle and your settings stay in your own browser. We count visits with GoatCounter. The full policy is at veryimportantmeeting.com/privacy-policy.html.

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