Sibilla Tech Demo

Ciao! Sibilla is my new solo-dev game in development for the original PlayStation. This is not just a game with a PlayStation style, it’s a real PlayStation game capable of running on the actual original hardware!

Sibilla is a fast-paced, side-scrolling platformer set in Apulia (southern Italy), during the late Renaissance. You play as Sibilla, a young messenger whose job is to deliver objects and messages as fast as possible.

The game is inspired by famous titles like Mirror’s Edge Mobile, Canabalt and Vector.

I released the first version of this demo exclusively here on Newgrounds for the 2026 Low Poly Day. The demo contains two chapters of the story and can be completed in about 10 minutes.

The first release was made in just 7 weeks in my free time outside of my day job.

My game, the PsxSplash runtime and the EmulatorJs emulator I used are all in early development. Because of this, the graphics, level design, gameplay mechanics, and story elements are still pretty far from their final state.

Play or Download

👉 You can play Sibilla on Newgrounds here

⬇️ Download the Chd to play in an emulator (Duckstation and PCSX-Redux are currently supported)

⬇️ Download the Bin/Cue to play in an emulator (Duckstation and PCSX-Redux are currently supported. Open the Cue file to have music during gameplay)

Original Soundtrack

The OST is available on Newgrounds and Soundcloud (Soon on other platforms)

💽Quies Ante Cursum (Main menu theme) • Newgrounds – Soundcloud
💽Cursus Nuntiae (In-game theme) • Newgrounds – Soundcloud

Gallery

Story

(No spoilers here, don’t worry)

Sibilla is a young woman in her twenties from 16th/17th-century Apulia (Italy), with a role that is as crucial as it is dangerous: delivering urgent messages and smuggling small packages that very few would dare to carry. She is a wanted woman in virtually every county, yet many nobles are quick to put their personal interests first, secretly hiring her for their own schemes.

Most people know nothing of her true identity or her past, largely because she is a master of disguise, blending seamlessly into any crowd.

As one of the few people with an intimate knowledge of Apulia’s land and regional factions, Sibilla is an invaluable asset. Though she looks like an ordinary peasant, she is sharp-witted, fully literate, exceptionally agile, and possesses unique stealth skills. These talents allow her to complete her missions swiftly and consistently outsmart the local guards.

In the game, Sibilla is mostly seen in her favorite working attire: a brown leather vest, black boots, and off-white trousers and shirt. This “masculine” clothing allows her to avoid unwanted attention and move swiftly across rugged terrain and hazardous locations under any conditions. In an era where women’s freedom was strictly limited and traditional clothing severely hindered movement, Sibilla chose a different path, one built for survival and speed.

How I made this game

This game was created and programmed with these projects:

SplashEdit – A Unity add-on. Unity, in this case, is used as a visual editor to streamline level design and manage 2D/3D assets and objects. It also provides a control panel to manage libraries, scenes and the compilation of the final bin/cue that you can literally burn onto a CD-R and play on your (modded) PlayStation. The current iteration was announced and released on 14 april 2026.
PsxSplash 2.2.3 – A runtime engine written primarily in c++, which SplashEdit utilizes. For this project, I slightly modified the source code to fix some issues.
PSYQo – A modern community-made c++ library for making software and games for the first PlayStation, made by the team behind the PCSX-Redux emulator.
Lua – The main programming language I used in the making of this game.
EmulatorJs – The HTML5 emulator used ro run my game directly on a web page. It uses PCSX-ReARMed as its core.
PSX BootScreen Editor – A tool I used to customize the bootscreen. Running Sibilla on real hardware, you’ll see my logo instead of the PlayStation logo. You won’t see the real boot screen on the web version because I’m using Openbios instead of a real PlayStation BIOS
Chdman – Used to convert the bin/cue to chd. The game now occupies just about 15MB instead of 50MB, making this web version loading way faster.

Credits

Pasquale “Pasqui industry” Pignataro (Hey, it’s me!): This is a solo-dev project, so I made almost everything: IP, Game Story, Programming, All the 3D models, Character design, most of the textures, music.
The PsxSplash and PCSX-Redux community for PsxSplash, SplashEdit, PSYQo and the emulation core
Allan Niles and Ethan O’Brien for EmulatorJS
Wikimedia Commons as the source for all the other textures. All the textures were edited and adapted for the games. Full credits will be available soon. All the names are provided from inside the game.
Freesound for most of the sfx. Also, full credits will be provided soon and are already available from inside the game.
The BBC Orchestra for providing the VST I used for making the OST of the game
Adobe Mixamo for the animations, which were also edited to fit the constraints of the PlayStation

Full Gameplay on real hardware (Spoiler alert)

You can see the full gameplay here, played on my PlayStation PAL SCPH-7502