Incredible things have been going on with the project since our last post we made last year.
We released a demo together with a new trailer, which went viral on Twitter! We did the first definitive shooting sessions for the cinematics of the game. And we also won the biggest prize a game can get in our country!
We’ll tell you everything about that and much more in this post.
To start off, at the beginning of 2023 we got a Mega Grant from Epic Games. This has helped us a lot to keep working on the project without needing to use our savings 💸
They were three intense (but super fun) working days with a lot of movie professionals, including actors, scenography, make-up, special effects, cameras, lighting, among others.
And right now, we’re preparing the second part of the definitive film sessions for the end of the year, where we’re looking to complete a very important part of the story.
In terms of the game itself, we continue working with the unmatched team of graphic artists: El Toreh as concept artist and illustrator, Attar doing most of the pixel art and Pedrito Caval in pixel art and animations for characters.
But this time, a well know friend of us joined the team: David Levill, the music producer and sound effects composer from our games Doorways, Hellbound and Out of Bounds; and the guy who did the remaster of The Black Heart soundtrack.
For Tenebris Somnia, David is doing the music and sound effects for the 8-bit version 👾
David Levill at his studio in Santa Cruz, Río Gallegos (Argentina)
PLAYABLE DEMO
This month of September 2023 was without a doubt the most important month for Tenebris Somnia to date.
After working for more than a year on the project, both in development and making the movies, we finally launched a playable demo of the game so everybody can taste a small bit of what this dark and twisted survival horror adventure is all about.
Didn’t try the demo yet? Go to the next link and find the big green button to start the download 👇
Since the release of the demo, we have been reading and listening to every opinion and feedback you gave us. Even though the reception was great in general, there were some things to fix and improve. So we have made a quick update to the demo including some changes based on your feedback. You can find the full list on the bottom of this post 🗒️
Don’t stop letting us know about what you think! You can use the Steam discussion section for that.
FEAR FEST AND TRAILER
We launched the demo together with a new trailer which was broadcasted for the first time at the event Fear Fest: Black Summer 2023 hosted by Feardemic and featured at the IGN official channels. The new trailer is short, but super intense, and shows new characters, locations, mechanics and (above everything) a lot of horror:
During the event, there was also a special interview with the game director Andrés Borghi. You can watch it in the link below:
https://youtu.be/3FNLzRIgx6E?si=sBy3Wb9EYpLgptmp
Both the demo and the trailer traveled through the internet all around the world. From the dev team, we were shocked with the impact and reception the game had. The news came out on big sites like PC Gamer, RPS, Vandal, Meristation and Bloody Disgusting; but the demo was also played by big influencers from different parts of globe 🤯
EVA AND RECOGNITION
A week after the big announcement, we participated in the most important local event of game development here in Argentina: EVA 2023. We were there with the team presenting an extended version of the demo of Tenebris Somnia so people from our country could check the new mechanics and cinematics.
And speaking of events, we’re right now participating for the second consecutive years in the online event Realms Deep 2023, hosted by the guys at 3D Realms 🙌
Don’t miss all the sales of great indie games with retro vibes! Also, tomorrow (Saturday 30th), a broadcast will start with announcements of new titles and interviews to the developers. Check everything here!
To finish, we want to share with you how happy we are right now with everything that has been going on with Tenebris Somnia. There’s still a lot to do, but we have all the motivation in the world right now. Thank you for that!
Below are some new screenshots from the game and on the very bottom of this post is the changelog of the demo update. Don’t forget to leave your feedback!
A big hug from the team! Thank you once again for all the support and stay tunned for more news and behind the scenes material at our accounts in Twitter and Instagram 👌
Cheers, everybody!
Tobías and Andrés
NEW SCREENSHOTS
DEMO CHANGELOG (v0.2)
Bug fixes
Sometimes, opening the inventory or re-entering a room during a fade transition blocked the game
Some texts went out of the screen in 16x10 monitors, including the Steam Deck
Fixed the vertical synchronization (VSync) issue
General improvements
Added blood particles when afflicting damage and when receiving it
New sound effects for certain steps, elevator door, oven, among others
Visual improvements for some of the props of the environment
Added a one time language menu option when the application starts
Besides skipping the text screens and movies using the action key, there was a skip-all shortcut that was barely used. We removed that key now.
During the confrontation with the first enemy, now you can interact with any part of the environment, including doors to avoid it
Improved some of the texts from dialogues and interface, mostly in the English version
Now, the options can be selected like a carousel, moving to the sides left or right
Added a new set of controls combining the mouse and the keyboard (see image)
2022 VIDEO RECAP 😎
Hello, people! How was your 2022?
Ours, full of news and a lot of different games! Here's the video recap I did telling you about the most important milestones we had at Saibot Studios (IT INCLUDES ENGLISH SUBTITLES):
Out of Bounds is a peculiar title that was originally created for a game jam the past year (Epic Megajam 2021). As a solo dev, I had 7 days to create a game that was later released for free on Itchio.
Since I liked the result of the jam, I decided to keep working on that idea for the next months and also some great devs (former colleagues from other projects) joined me to get the best results in visuals (Viktor Ahmed and Claudio "Scuzzo" Sagrera) and audio (David Levill) 🙌
THE GAME
Out of Bounds is a title about "creating" a game and "fixing" bugs... Yeah, it's crazy. You will pickup blueprints, compile shaders, test sound effects, drink a lot of coffee. But watch out for the bugs! Grab your Line Tracer and get rid of them 👾
https://youtu.be/U7Q1M-wRbMg
Things are starting to get better here in Saibot Studios and Out of Bounds is part of that process. I'm looking forward to bring you news about bigger projects in the future, but for now give a chance to this crazy puzzle shooter with humor and puzzles 🤓
You can follow Out of Bounds on its new Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/OutOfBoundsVg
Hello there! How are you? How's your 2022 so far? 😎
From here, we have a few things to tell you...
As we mentioned you in our last post, this year we reached an entire decade since we started making games as an independent team in Saibot Studios. But it was just now that we actually make something special to celebrate it. Check out the special video!
Buying the games from the bundle, gives you a 15% of discount on all the titles. And if you already have one or more of the games included in the package, it will discount you the titles you're missing without needing to buy the entire bundle 👌
TENEBRIS SOMNIA
On the other hand, we receently announced our new creation: Tenebris Somnia. This is a very unique title by the great Andrés Borghi, creator of The Black Heart 🖤
We're developing this project Andrés and I (Tobías Rusjan), together with a great team of artists. You can read more about it and the dev team in this other post we did the past week.
If you like the concept of the game, don't forget to add it to your Wishlists. We're aiming to have it ready during 2023 👍
In the mean time, I keep working on my little jam game Out of Bounds, a rare title with action, shooting and puzzles. We released a demo in June and it's still available to check directly from the store page:
This month we received the great news from our (now) former publishers that they're giving us back the IP of Hellbound 🤯
What does this mean?
Finally, we at Saibot Studios are going to start receiving sales from Hellbound on Steam. Since the release of 2020, all the sales went to the publisher because that was what we stablished: they recoup their investment first, and then we split; but we never reached that last step because they never recoup their part with the sales we had.
But now after two years from the release, they're giving us back the game so we can atleast see some of the sales. Also, we got back the full rights of the project to take any desision we want from now on 🔥
In March of this year there was the Best of Boomer Shooters Bundle, the first collection of Humble Bundle focused on retro FPSs. Hellbound had the honour to be included in that package, becoming the first argentinian game in participate in the iconic Humble Bundle:
https://youtu.be/ndqIlyYFVJM
Both the sales from this collection and also the sales from now on (September of 2022) at Steam are going to us at Saibot. Yes, finally!
But unfortunately, this aren't earnings for us yet, since we still need to recoup all we put to create the Hellbound: Survival Mode in 2016-2018.
So the future of Hellbound is still uncertain... The good thing is that everything has started looking brighter now, we'll see how things turn for our Hellgore in the next months 🤞
That would be all for now, people. Hope we have some more news for you soon, follow us in our networks to stay updated:
Tenebris Somnia is a survival horror in the vein of old-school classic Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, but set in a 2D environment, with pixel art 8-bit visuals 👾
The distinctive feature that makes Tenebris Somnia stand out from other games is the cutscenes. As you progress in the game, you will come across movies filmed with live-action actors in a real life set. This creates a huge contrast of styles never seen before, increasing the sense of strangeness and terror…
The Tenebris Somnia project is an idea by Andrés developed together with Tobías and a great team of artists: Attar (main pixel artist), El Toreh (concept artist) and Pedro Caval (character animator) 🙌
Left to right: El Toreh, Andrés, Attar, Pedro and Tobías
The past week was the EVA 2022, the biggest annual event about game development here in Argentina. During the event, we showcased a very early version of the game for the first time so people who attended the expo could play it 🕹
The reception of the game was EXCELLENT! Thanks to you, we know what to fix and improve in order to reach the best game results 👌
But this has just begun! There’s still a lot of work to do and right now we’re looking for fundings and publishers interested in helping us out to make the full project a reality.
In the meantime, we’ll continue working and keep you updated on our social networks. Follow us!
