We are working on getting the game ready for early access, which is scheduled for Q4 2023. In the last report we have already told you about the tasks we have to accomplish. Thank you for following the project's development!
Charachters
All of Friedrich's sprites are now complete. this marks the end f our work on the characters that our protagonist can have a love story with.
We have already started work on the next character. It will be a young girl called Lucie. We are hoping to show her in the next progress report.
CG arts
Unfortunately, January was not a very productive month in terms of illustrations: some people were on holiday, some were sick, and some were busy with studying and exams. But we have made one new sketch and finished two arts.
Script and text
William's full route is complete in two languages. We got a little closer to voicing the entire orange branch, which will have two finished stories about the brothers: Silvan and William, who you may have already met in the demo.
Additional content
The entire series of stories about Jane Holland has been translated. It's full of secrets, with big bets at cards, fateful encounters, suspence and passion. Moreover, there are six stories in Walter's series already written, in which you'll learn about the aftermath of that one fateful game of poker.
Demo version is already available!
We've prepared a progress report for December 2022. The main event for "Tenebrae" was the release of the game's demo. This was followed by working on bugs, optimizing the project and predicting further development. Now let's go through it step-by-step.
The content of the demo:
- Three to five hours of some light detective story with varying narrative dynamics. - One full-fledged, albeit dead-end ending. Four paths of varying difficulty to different story branches which will be available in the full version of the game. - Six phone calls and 90 text messages. - Getting to know most of the key characters. - Fourteen illustrations and original soundtracks. - All dialogues voiced in English with subtle animation. - A bit of satire, irony, all sorts of humour, aesthetic eroticism and suspense.
What we have done since the release of the demo:
- Fixed a lot of bugs found by players and testers. - With the gradual display of the text we added the ability to quickly display it after a second click on the text box. - Changed the way images and sounds are stored, thus accelerating the game's loading speed, and optimized RAM consumption. - Significantly reduced the game's weight by finding optimal settings for 4K images.
Our bug list isn't empty yet, but we will continue to improve the demo, without delaying bug fixes until the full game or an early access release.
How the release of the demo helped us:
- We were able to go through all the steps of publishing a full working build of the game, which gave us tremendous experience, knowledge, and feedback. - We realized that we need more technical documentation to ease the work of testers and make it more efficient. - We now have an optimized project which has passed all the stress tests, in which we are confident and know precisely what we need to improve in the technical part. - We learned about all our mistakes in creating game UI, as we watched dozens of streams with the playthrough of our demo. - Now we have the confidence that we are making an interesting product for the audience we originally had in mind. Many thanks to everyone who gave us feedback, shared their emotions and opinions on the game. You have no idea how important it is when developing such a complex and voluminous project. - We have closed the first gestalt. Our team can finally show off their work, participate in various events and declare their serious intentions. - It became easier to plan our work and calculate the budget.
Plans for the coming year
In 2023 we plan to finish working on an impressive portion of the game to open early access with two full routes from the orange branch. This will help us monetize our work and invest in further development not from our own savings, but from the revenue.
Early access
By the worst case scenario, we'll be able to finish the "minimum" plan closer to the end of 2023. What will be included in the early access:
- A reworked central route that was part of the demo. We want to change a couple of scenes, making the branching between the blue and red routes more logical. - All of the content from the orange branch. It's a small block with choices between William and Silvan, as well as their personal routes with two endings each. In terms of length, this will add up about 5-10 hours of reading. - Additional scenes on behalf of other characters of the visual novel. - Improvements to the game's UI and mechanics. - A gallery of illustrations/characters. - A map of plot branching so that the player can learn about possible forks in the story. - A setting to keep track of reputation points to make for easier playthroughs. - Controller support and rebinding keys. - Environment sounds.
A little bit of numbers
What we will need to do to release the game in early access:
- Reworking about 2/6 of the text from the orange branch. *It will take about $350 and 2-3 months to finish.* - Voicing the entire orange branch. Preparing the necessary documentation, working with the actors, listening to all the recordings, choosing the best takes, cutting, putting together. *A huge amount of labour that will require about six months of gradual work and an investment of $5,000. The processing of the finished tracks will cost about $500.* - Drawing six characters. A total of ten different poses. *About ten months of work and $800.* - Drawing nine backgrounds for the locations. *A year's worth of work for sure, and the cost will be about $300. Have not yet considered how much the simple animations and effects might cost, but there are plans to work with that.* - About twenty new illustrations. *On average, we draw two or three illustrations a month. They will cost about $700.* - Directing the scenes, if we have the content ready, will take two to three months.
About $13,000 of the author's personal money has already been invested in the project over the course of two years. New funds that can be allocated to the project are very limited by monthly earnings, so early access would be a great option to recoup at least some of the investment and order the very expensive voicing for the blue, red and purple branches as soon as possible.
Full Game Release
After the early access release, we will focus on adding the rest of the content. By then we'll have almost all of the characters, most of the text, a lot of illustrations and backgrounds ready. The work will go faster, and the hardest part of everything is working with the voice acting. It's hard to give an exact date for the full release yet, we will be able to predict it after the early access is released. Right now you can support the game's development by sending us feedback on our social networks, donating on Twitch channel or subscribing to our Sponsr, Boosty and VK pages, where we post a lot of interesting content about the game, the universe and publish stories about our characters once a week.
Report article: October 2022
We're back with an update on the development progress and preparation of the demo.
During October we didn't manage to complete all our tasks, but we are much closer to the release of the demo. In the image with stats you can see which areas are being worked on.
- The scenes directing is 26/40 ready. - Music has been approved for most of the scenes. - Illustrations have been fixed. - The mechanics of auto-reading are implemented and the work on saves is almost complete. - One complex background is finished. For the demo, we have one more to rework. - We have reworked the SMS interface on the smartphone and improved the overall layout.
Characters
As planned, we've started work on the last character with whom our main character can have a love line. In October we managed to draw one of the three poses for Friedrich, developing his unique and richly detailed style. Look at the precision with which the artist chose the colours.
Content
Everything is prepared for the demo, all that's left is the cosmetics: solve the controversial points in the illustrations, make the illustrations look nice in the smartphone, clean up the voiceover that has already been cut, adjust the volume. Most of the artists are already drawing content for the full version of the game, while the voice actors are waiting for the final text approval in the orange branch.
Storybook
Last month has been a fruitful one for short stories. There's already a trend: the more intense the work on the whole project, the more we have to turn to the prequel to switch things up and take a break.
- Lucie's series: 3 new stories. Complete. - Friedrich's early series: 10 new stories. Complete. - Beatrice's early series: 3 new stories. Complete. - Friedrich's late series: outline made, first story written.
Our subscribers on Boosty have by now read four stories told on behalf of Lilia Horák.
Plans for November
- Finish directing the remaining scenes, do some test proofreading with a focus group. - Finish what's been started: game saves and auto-scrolling through the read text. - Clean the audio for at least 2/3 of the voiced lines. - Draw the last background for the demo. - Prepare at least a prototype build for moderation on Steam.
Add Tenebrae to your wishlist and subscribe to our social media pages. See you in December!
Report article: September 2022
We want to tell you what we have achieved in September and what the current state of the Tenebrae demo looks like.
Characters
We have finished drawing all the characters involved in the demo. They have already been added to the engine, animated and ready for shot directing. Speaking of directing: we have prepared the entire game's prologue. That's seven out of forty scenes included in the demo. We want to finish them all this fall and fine-tune the mechanics at the same time.
In October we plan to draw the last character who will have a love line with the main character. Unfortunately, the plot doesn't involve getting to know him early in the game.
Backgrounds
We haven't progressed much in this direction, but quality rework is never a quick process. The first version of the park's background was very weak compared to all the other locations. Now even on a rough sketch, this location looks lively and attractive.
Apart from the park, the demo will require some minor colour corrections for one background in the city and a serious rethinking of the background in the forest. We want to add some colour to it, improve the landscape and bring it closer to the overall style of the project.
CG arts
A total of fourteen CG arts are planned for the demo. Nine of them are already complete. One is in rendering now and will be ready in the next few days. And four more require minimal modifications. Somewhere shadows need to be softened, and somewhere facial features have to be corrected.
The art team is already at full speed drawing illustrations for the full version of the game.
Voices, music and sounds
We're almost done with the voice acting, equalising the loudness of the voices, averaging the frequencies and the overall volume. We are not in a hurry to check the boxes for the music tasks, although we have a lot of tracks ready to go. Only when we are sure that one of them fits the scene, we can close the task.
We are not sure that we will have all the sounds ready in time for the demo release. The ones like rustles, doors opening, footsteps or broken windows. They bring a lot of life to the picture but require serious and thoughtful work from very busy team members.
Perhaps such an omission won't be too fatal. That's what the demo is for, after all.
Documents and presentations
September was an eventful month. We managed to have a pitch of the project, to have it evaluated and reviewed. Several people from the team completed training courses related to game design and drawing. They have slowed down the game's development to some extent, but have provided helpful experience and knowledge.
Within a month we had time to move almost all the documentation from Google and Trello to Notion and organised a convenient workspace within the unified service. We didn't even realise we had so many documents, spreadsheets, charts and lists until we built a user-friendly architecture. More visual than just nested folders and hyperlinks within files. We still need Google spreadsheets, but all the technical tasks, design documents, content plans and world descriptions have confidently moved to a new place.
Storybook
We publish this content for subscribers on Boosty as a thank you for supporting our project. In the future, the storybook will appear as a DLC to the game on Steam. We don't know how to add this to the game's interface yet, so it will most likely be something like an online book.
- Jane's series: 9 new stories. Completed. - Beatrice's series: 2 new stories. - Ryu's series: 1 new story. - Lucie's series: 1 new story.
Plans for October
- Characters: draw two of the three poses for Friedrich. - Backgrounds: finish the park, finish the city streets and take on the forest. - CG arts: finish all the tasks for the demo, continue drawing for the orange branch and make a plan for the images on the smartphone. - Voice acting: finish processing the tracks for the demo. - Music: select music for the scenes in the demo. - Sounds: assess whether we can fill the demo with sounds by the end of autumn. - Layout: redesign the SMS chat window in the smartphone, complete the settings menu, and create a menu for saving the game. - Programming: implement game saves, complete adaptation of all windows for different screen resolutions, and fix minor things which don't work correctly. - Directing: arrange avatars and characters for all the scenes in the demo with further tweaking after the test proofreading.
See you in November!
Report article: October 2022
We want to tell you what we have achieved in September and what the current state of the Tenebrae demo looks like.
Characters
We have finished drawing all the characters involved in the demo. They have already been added to the engine, animated and ready for shot directing. Speaking of directing: we have prepared the entire game's prologue. That's seven out of forty scenes included in the demo. We want to finish them all this fall and fine-tune the mechanics at the same time.
In October we plan to draw the last character who will have a love line with the main character. Unfortunately, the plot doesn't involve getting to know him early in the game.
Backgrounds
We haven't progressed much in this direction, but quality rework is never a quick process. The first version of the park's background was very weak compared to all the other locations. Now even on a rough sketch, this location looks lively and attractive.
Apart from the park, the demo will require some minor colour corrections for one background in the city and a serious rethinking of the background in the forest. We want to add some colour to it, improve the landscape and bring it closer to the overall style of the project.
CG arts
A total of fourteen CG arts are planned for the demo. Nine of them are already complete. One is in rendering now and will be ready in the next few days. And four more require minimal modifications. Somewhere shadows need to be softened, and somewhere facial features have to be corrected.
The art team is already at full speed drawing illustrations for the full version of the game.
Voices, music and sounds
We're almost done with the voice acting, equalising the loudness of the voices, averaging the frequencies and the overall volume. We are not in a hurry to check the boxes for the music tasks, although we have a lot of tracks ready to go. Only when we are sure that one of them fits the scene, we can close the task.
We are not sure that we will have all the sounds ready in time for the demo release. The ones like rustles, doors opening, footsteps or broken windows. They bring a lot of life to the picture but require serious and thoughtful work from very busy team members.
Perhaps such an omission won't be too fatal. That's what the demo is for, after all.
Documents and presentations
September was an eventful month. We managed to have a pitch of the project, to have it evaluated and reviewed. Several people from the team completed training courses related to game design and drawing. They have slowed down the game's development to some extent, but have provided helpful experience and knowledge.
Within a month we had time to move almost all the documentation from Google and Trello to Notion and organised a convenient workspace within the unified service. We didn't even realise we had so many documents, spreadsheets, charts and lists until we built a user-friendly architecture. More visual than just nested folders and hyperlinks within files. We still need Google spreadsheets, but all the technical tasks, design documents, content plans and world descriptions have confidently moved to a new place.
Storybook
We publish this content for subscribers on Boosty as a thank you for supporting our project. In the future, the storybook will appear as a DLC to the game on Steam. We don't know how to add this to the game's interface yet, so it will most likely be something like an online book.
- Jane's series: 9 new stories. Completed. - Beatrice's series: 2 new stories. - Ryu's series: 1 new story. - Lucie's series: 1 new story.
Plans for October
- Characters: draw two of the three poses for Friedrich. - Backgrounds: finish the park, finish the city streets and take on the forest. - CG arts: finish all the tasks for the demo, continue drawing for the orange branch and make a plan for the images on the smartphone. - Voice acting: finish processing the tracks for the demo. - Music: select music for the scenes in the demo. - Sounds: assess whether we can fill the demo with sounds by the end of autumn. - Layout: redesign the SMS chat window in the smartphone, complete the settings menu, and create a menu for saving the game. - Programming: implement game saves, complete adaptation of all windows for different screen resolutions, and fix minor things which don't work correctly. - Directing: arrange avatars and characters for all the scenes in the demo with further tweaking after the test proofreading.
See you in November!
Report article: ~September 2022
We wrote our last report on the project in December to take a look back over the past year. Since then, we've done a lot of work, got even more people involved in the project and now a lot of effort is being put into getting the demo out for about 3-5 hours of reading.
With this publication we want to start a monthly blog to keep you informed about the development of Tenebrae. And today we're ready to present you a round-up of the last eight months. Let's start with the characters.
In 2021 we drew William, Silvan, Beatrice, Charlie and Martin in eight months. In 2022 over the same time frame we created Morris, Dante, Ryu, Hans and four constructors for supporting characters who have little impact on the story and come into the picture as extras or to bring the world to life. We've talked about them a lot on social media: Twitter, VKontakte, etc. This is about ⅔ of the intended character work.
Things are going slower with the backgrounds. As of today, we have about half of the locations ready, but we are about to finish improving the ones included in the demo.
We got down to the artwork very late in development, but took off at a good pace and divided the sketching, lining and rendering among the three artists. Out of the fourteen images planned for the demo, we have only three more to complete. Apart from these, we have already prepared eleven images from the "Dreams" series, which will be used in the promo video and in the game.
Here's one of them:
We deliberately used different stylization, in which we paid attention to shapes and colours, neglecting details in order to separate what happens to the heroine in the present from her memories, dreams and states of affect.
In addition to the graphics, we did a lot of work with the voice acting. We started casting actors back in the autumn of 2021 and by the summer of 2022 we had final approval of most of the roles, recorded all the character voice lines for the demo and are already in the process of directing frame by frame.
The technical side of things wasn't left unattended, either. The game settings were implemented: changing the language, adjusting the volume of sound, music, and voices. We have carried out global optimization and refactoring of the code which was responsible for displaying characters and their animation. A lot of different bugs were fixed, main mechanics and UI were pre-tested.
This is what the settings menu looks like:
The rework of the text is going slowly and very thoughtfully, as we consider this part of content to be the most important for the visual novel genre. We have spared no time or money in improving the text, be it the plot, the relationship background of all the characters in the story, the canonicality of the dialogues, character development, emotions, motivations, sentence construction, text dynamics, and spelling. Three of the twelve logical sections have now been completed and the fourth is being reworked.
Visually, the plot branching scheme looks something like this:
So far, we have a lot of secondary material and documentation on the Tenebrae universe ready, which we are sharing on our social media channels. In her spare time, as a way of venting, the author writes series of short stories that shed light on the past of the characters in the novel. These stories can be read by subscribing to VK Donut or Boosty for a fee - or you can wait for the game's release and buy the anthology as a DLC to the game. For now, it is an exclusive piece of content for those who support the project's development.
See you in October!
Report article: September 2022
We wrote our last report on the project in December to take a look back over the past year. Since then, we've done a lot of work, got even more people involved in the project and now a lot of effort is being put into getting the demo out for about 3-5 hours of reading.
With this publication we want to start a monthly blog to keep you informed about the development of Tenebrae. And today we're ready to present you a round-up of the last eight months. Let's start with the characters.
In 2021 we drew William, Silvan, Beatrice, Charlie and Martin in eight months. In 2022 over the same time frame we created Morris, Dante, Ryu, Hans and four constructors for supporting characters who have little impact on the story and come into the picture as extras or to bring the world to life. We've talked about them a lot on social media: Twitter, VKontakte, etc. This is about ⅔ of the intended character work.
Things are going slower with the backgrounds. As of today, we have about half of the locations ready, but we are about to finish improving the ones included in the demo.
We got down to the artwork very late in development, but took off at a good pace and divided the sketching, lining and rendering among the three artists. Out of the fourteen images planned for the demo, we have only three more to complete. Apart from these, we have already prepared eleven images from the "Dreams" series, which will be used in the promo video and in the game.
Here's one of them:
We deliberately used different stylization, in which we paid attention to shapes and colours, neglecting details in order to separate what happens to the heroine in the present from her memories, dreams and states of affect.
In addition to the graphics, we did a lot of work with the voice acting. We started casting actors back in the autumn of 2021 and by the summer of 2022 we had final approval of most of the roles, recorded all the character voice lines for the demo and are already in the process of directing frame by frame.
The technical side of things wasn't left unattended, either. The game settings were implemented: changing the language, adjusting the volume of sound, music, and voices. We have carried out global optimization and refactoring of the code which was responsible for displaying characters and their animation. A lot of different bugs were fixed, main mechanics and UI were pre-tested.
This is what the settings menu looks like:
The rework of the text is going slowly and very thoughtfully, as we consider this part of content to be the most important for the visual novel genre. We have spared no time or money in improving the text, be it the plot, the relationship background of all the characters in the story, the canonicality of the dialogues, character development, emotions, motivations, sentence construction, text dynamics, and spelling. Three of the twelve logical sections have now been completed and the fourth is being reworked.
Visually, the plot branching scheme looks something like this:
So far, we have a lot of secondary material and documentation on the Tenebrae universe ready, which we are sharing on our social media channels. In her spare time, as a way of venting, the author writes series of short stories that shed light on the past of the characters in the novel. These stories can be read by subscribing to VK Donut or Boosty for a fee - or you can wait for the game's release and buy the anthology as a DLC to the game. For now, it is an exclusive piece of content for those who support the project's development.
See you in October!
The results of 2021!
Everyone around is summing up the results of the year and we are no exception. Let's start with the fact that it was this year that the project moved from prototype to production. And right now, almost half of the work is done, even though the project is extremely huge!
At the end of 2020, we had:
a concept document.
lore and bestiary.
the first version of the documentation for the main characters.
the name of the game and the concept of the seven deadly sins.
a scheme of our branching plot.
the layout of the interface was ready, as well as the text display.
a huge amount of enthusiasm and at the same time the understanding that you can't release a serious game alone, no matter how much you want.
During 2021 the team has been growing and is actively creating content.
The author of Tenebrae writes code, text, directs scenes and controls all processes, single-handedly funding the entire project.
The writer helped lay the foundations for the plot and tie the characters together with red threads of fate.
The “scenario doctor” constantly monitors the logic of the story and the accuracy of the facts. He also looks for weak points and helps to strengthen them.
The editor makes the text more artistic.
The proofreader and translator tidies up the finished text and immediately translates it into English.
The background artist has created half of the locations for the game in a year.
Since May, the sprite artist has managed to draw half of the main characters.
In the fall, we were joined by a CG artist who is helping to refine some of the backgrounds and is already working on illustrations.
Three musicians write amazing pieces for locations and characters.
Every day I want to thank fate for our dream team!
What we managed to create in 365 days:
A prototype of the plot with a detailed plan of 250 scenes.
The prototype of the game text - a million characters long - has passed through the hands of the scenario doctor and the editor's work is almost done with it.
The origin stories of the heroes and their motivation have been greatly improved, character traits are better emphasized. A voluminous document about all the heroes has been prepared.
Two of the twelve semantic blocks have been reworked, corrected and translated from Russian into English.
About 85% of the mechanics have been implemented. The whole code was written from scratch in Unity.
A huge number of TOR have been written for artists and musicians.
Almost all of the main characters have at least one music theme. Together with music for locations, we already have more than 20 pieces.
Almost half of the backgrounds (18 out of 37) are complete. And 15 of 34 sprites are ready.
The directing of scenes for the demo has begun.
Preparations for casting voice actors are almost complete. Four roles have already been approved in absentia: Charlie, Sylvan, Dante, Young.
We have registered and set up a page on Steam, as well as on Itch.io
Pages have been created in almost all social networks and we regularly post about the game there. That includes Patreon and Boosty with paid additional content.
The first five hundred additions of the game to the Steam wishlist!
Our plans for 2022:
Add the remaining mechanics.
Make up the remaining game menus.
Engage in directing and sound design.
Cast the voice actors.
Before the summer, we plan to release a working demo with voice acting for 3-4 hours of reading.
Rework and translate almost all of the text.
Draw the rest of the backgrounds and sprites.
Complete 80% of the CG arts.
Launch fundraising at least for voice acting, so as not to slow down in development due to limited funding.
Many thanks to everyone interested in the project! All of your likes and comments on social networks warm our hearts and motivate us to do more and better. And donations allow us to attract more people to the project, which speeds up the work and improves its quality.
