Black Sailors will shine a light on a dark part of the Black diaspora’s history
Posted: Mon May 11, 2026 2:24 pm
At Gamescom Latam, Tiago Prudente told me that he is from the “blackest” part of Brazil — the city of Salvador.
The reason there are so many Black people in Salvador is that it was one of the closest destinations to Africa and was a top port for the arrival of slave ships centuries ago. It’s a demographic that was hundreds of years in the making.
Prudente started Mandinga Games with his brother, Daniel de Melo Prudente, to bring attention to this dark chapter in history, and he belives he has found a hopeful message about resistance for the game, which is expected to come out in about a year.
Mandinga Games is making Black Sailors, a real-time strategy pirate ship combat game that captures that lore. But in a twist, the pirates in this game are the heroes, not the villains. The Steam game will highlight the slaves who resisted slave owners and fought to take over the ships that carried them from Africa to South America.
Black Sailors is being made by a very small team at Mandinga Games. Source: Mandinga Games “It’s a game about freedom, about resistance, about fighting back,” Prudente said in an interview with GamesBeat during Gamescom Latam.
And Prudente believes that this game could be appealing far beyond the shores of Salvador, as it could resonate with the larger Black diaspora, including those on the African continent as well as Black Americans in the United States — as well as any people of the world who are interested in history or historical games.
Origins
Taigo Prudente of Salvador, Brazil, is making a real-time strategy game called Black Sailors. Source: GamesBeat/Dean Takahashi The Prudente brothers didn’t have a formal academic education in game development. Prudente himself is a civil engineer and while his brother Daniel is an aeronautical engineer.
“We are entirely self-taught in programming and gamedev, starting out with Unity tutorials on YouTube and online courses before participating in game jams and starting projects as a hobby,” Prudente said.
Over time, their roles evolved organically. Prudente took over game design, administration, and bizdev, while Daniel focused on tech art, physics simulations, and more technical aspects. They both still work on programming.
Black Sailors is a real-time strategy game you can wishlist on Steam. Source: Mandinga Games The turning point was in 2016 when they won a game jam that included a cash prize. The game was Tinker Racers, which they were able to post on Steam.
That made Prudente realize a professional career in the industry was possible. He began a career transition that year, which he fully completed in 2023. The brothers have made four Steam games to date.
“I’m from Salvador in Northeast Brazil,” Prudente said. “Salvador was at the epicenter of the Atlantic slave trade. It was one of the main routes. And because of this, Salvador is the blackest city outside Africa in the whole world, and we have a Eurocentric education.”
He added, “We learned at school that we were formed by Portuguese indigenous people and Africans.”
Mandiga consists of the Prudente brothers, but they have outsourced the art to others. They have received a government grant for the game and they announced the game a month ago and have received around 2,000 wishlists on Steam. Mandinga Games is also part of Brazil’s accelerator program and it was highlighted in the Abragames booth at Gamescom Latam.
Prudente hired a historian to identify the different ethnic groups that could appear in the game. He showed me the gameplay with its focus on ship-to-ship combat. His team has been working on the game for the past two years, and they probably need another year of development ship it to the market, he said.
“We are trying to market in the game everywhere we can,” he said. “We attract people who want to see the real history. We are told in history through the eyes of the colonizer. That bothers a lot of people.”
The turn-based and real-time strategy blend of gameplay for Black Sailors. Source: Mandinga Games In terms of flipping the story for pirates to be the “good” faction, Prudente said it’s not unlike Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, told from a slave’s point of view. The criticism that targets those trying to tell true history is what inspired Prudente and his brother to do the game.
The idea is to infuse some Brazilian history and culture in the game, but to try to make it appealing on a global level, which is a strategy for many Brazilian game developers who want to reach the largest market.
“We want to showcase black culture in the Afro Brazilian perspective that makes sense to other diaspora people who will say, ‘I want to see this point of view of another diaspora,'” he said.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/f_4T16b07ss?start=1&feature=oembed He added, “So African artifacts are on display at the Louvre museum, and other places where they go and extract that art. This is a game about reclaiming art. It’s a game with the African perspective.”
In the single-player game, you manage various characters in your crew. Depending on how you manage them, you can change the behavior of your ship. If you want to sail fast, you can put more people on the sails. If you need to fight, you can put more people on the guns. It’s a turn-based game with real-time strategy elements. There’s a planning phase and an action phase. You can see where the fire is aimed in the planning stage and the direction the ships are going. Then you can decide where to go in the next action phase. So it follows a “plan, resolution, plan, resolution” cycle. You can stage fights against forts, but there is othewise no land combat in the game.
Black Sailors is based on historical research. Source: Mandinga Games
You can engage in repairs, upgrade a ship, get more health, unlock more guns, and rescue slaves to join the crew. Right now, each ship can have as many as 12 characters in the crew. Your main adversaries are the Portuguese, who are coming destroy Colombo, a haven for the escaped slaves.
“We are getting awesome support from the industry” and some have become mentors for Prudente.
There are a variety of characters in Black Sailors. Source: Mandinga Games Prudente said others have told him they want a perspective from the Afro Brazilian perspective, and that’s why they want the game.
“I have consumed games from the African perspective, and from the Black community in Norht America, but it occurred to me that I never saw anything about the Afro Brazilian perspective, and I see here the first game that has the potential to do this,” he said. “This game needs to go live, and it will bother a lot of people. If we bother people, that means we are doing something right.”
Disclosure: Gamescom Latam paid my way to Brazil, where I moderated two sessions.
The post Black Sailors will shine a light on a dark part of the Black diaspora’s history appeared first on GamesBeat.
Source: https://store.steampowered.com/news/gro ... 7367362246
The reason there are so many Black people in Salvador is that it was one of the closest destinations to Africa and was a top port for the arrival of slave ships centuries ago. It’s a demographic that was hundreds of years in the making.
Prudente started Mandinga Games with his brother, Daniel de Melo Prudente, to bring attention to this dark chapter in history, and he belives he has found a hopeful message about resistance for the game, which is expected to come out in about a year.
Mandinga Games is making Black Sailors, a real-time strategy pirate ship combat game that captures that lore. But in a twist, the pirates in this game are the heroes, not the villains. The Steam game will highlight the slaves who resisted slave owners and fought to take over the ships that carried them from Africa to South America.
Black Sailors is being made by a very small team at Mandinga Games. Source: Mandinga Games “It’s a game about freedom, about resistance, about fighting back,” Prudente said in an interview with GamesBeat during Gamescom Latam.
And Prudente believes that this game could be appealing far beyond the shores of Salvador, as it could resonate with the larger Black diaspora, including those on the African continent as well as Black Americans in the United States — as well as any people of the world who are interested in history or historical games.
Origins
Taigo Prudente of Salvador, Brazil, is making a real-time strategy game called Black Sailors. Source: GamesBeat/Dean Takahashi The Prudente brothers didn’t have a formal academic education in game development. Prudente himself is a civil engineer and while his brother Daniel is an aeronautical engineer.
“We are entirely self-taught in programming and gamedev, starting out with Unity tutorials on YouTube and online courses before participating in game jams and starting projects as a hobby,” Prudente said.
Over time, their roles evolved organically. Prudente took over game design, administration, and bizdev, while Daniel focused on tech art, physics simulations, and more technical aspects. They both still work on programming.
Black Sailors is a real-time strategy game you can wishlist on Steam. Source: Mandinga Games The turning point was in 2016 when they won a game jam that included a cash prize. The game was Tinker Racers, which they were able to post on Steam.
That made Prudente realize a professional career in the industry was possible. He began a career transition that year, which he fully completed in 2023. The brothers have made four Steam games to date.
“I’m from Salvador in Northeast Brazil,” Prudente said. “Salvador was at the epicenter of the Atlantic slave trade. It was one of the main routes. And because of this, Salvador is the blackest city outside Africa in the whole world, and we have a Eurocentric education.”
He added, “We learned at school that we were formed by Portuguese indigenous people and Africans.”
Mandiga consists of the Prudente brothers, but they have outsourced the art to others. They have received a government grant for the game and they announced the game a month ago and have received around 2,000 wishlists on Steam. Mandinga Games is also part of Brazil’s accelerator program and it was highlighted in the Abragames booth at Gamescom Latam.
Prudente hired a historian to identify the different ethnic groups that could appear in the game. He showed me the gameplay with its focus on ship-to-ship combat. His team has been working on the game for the past two years, and they probably need another year of development ship it to the market, he said.
“We are trying to market in the game everywhere we can,” he said. “We attract people who want to see the real history. We are told in history through the eyes of the colonizer. That bothers a lot of people.”
The turn-based and real-time strategy blend of gameplay for Black Sailors. Source: Mandinga Games In terms of flipping the story for pirates to be the “good” faction, Prudente said it’s not unlike Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, told from a slave’s point of view. The criticism that targets those trying to tell true history is what inspired Prudente and his brother to do the game.
The idea is to infuse some Brazilian history and culture in the game, but to try to make it appealing on a global level, which is a strategy for many Brazilian game developers who want to reach the largest market.
“We want to showcase black culture in the Afro Brazilian perspective that makes sense to other diaspora people who will say, ‘I want to see this point of view of another diaspora,'” he said.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/f_4T16b07ss?start=1&feature=oembed He added, “So African artifacts are on display at the Louvre museum, and other places where they go and extract that art. This is a game about reclaiming art. It’s a game with the African perspective.”
In the single-player game, you manage various characters in your crew. Depending on how you manage them, you can change the behavior of your ship. If you want to sail fast, you can put more people on the sails. If you need to fight, you can put more people on the guns. It’s a turn-based game with real-time strategy elements. There’s a planning phase and an action phase. You can see where the fire is aimed in the planning stage and the direction the ships are going. Then you can decide where to go in the next action phase. So it follows a “plan, resolution, plan, resolution” cycle. You can stage fights against forts, but there is othewise no land combat in the game.
Black Sailors is based on historical research. Source: Mandinga Games
You can engage in repairs, upgrade a ship, get more health, unlock more guns, and rescue slaves to join the crew. Right now, each ship can have as many as 12 characters in the crew. Your main adversaries are the Portuguese, who are coming destroy Colombo, a haven for the escaped slaves.
“We are getting awesome support from the industry” and some have become mentors for Prudente.
There are a variety of characters in Black Sailors. Source: Mandinga Games Prudente said others have told him they want a perspective from the Afro Brazilian perspective, and that’s why they want the game.
“I have consumed games from the African perspective, and from the Black community in Norht America, but it occurred to me that I never saw anything about the Afro Brazilian perspective, and I see here the first game that has the potential to do this,” he said. “This game needs to go live, and it will bother a lot of people. If we bother people, that means we are doing something right.”
Disclosure: Gamescom Latam paid my way to Brazil, where I moderated two sessions.
The post Black Sailors will shine a light on a dark part of the Black diaspora’s history appeared first on GamesBeat.
Source: https://store.steampowered.com/news/gro ... 7367362246