We are thrilled to reveal further details on The Tartarus Key, and delve into the mysterious and enigmatic world of Sigil design in the game.
The Tartarus Key is infused with Symbols, Sigils, Magical Circles, and other esoteric drawings. Our designs are rooted in real historical alchemy, chemistry, and demonology from the Ancient and Middle Ages. Referencing historic Grimoires on demonology such as the "Key of Solomon", as well as real medieval alchemy and transmutation concepts, we've researched the intricate nature of these designs, ensuring that they are both authentic and compelling.
Our research ensured that each design was not only unique but also aligned with the historical and medieval alchemical concepts that served as the foundation of our work. All while adding our own mysterious twists to enhance their mystique, as well as more modern aesthetics.
Sigils play a crucial, but hidden role in the game's story and gameplay. Players will find themselves immersed in a world of mystery, uncovering the hidden meanings of each Sigil as they journey through the game.
We hope that our attention to detail in the Sigil design will provide players with an immersive and captivating gaming experience. The world of The Tartarus Key shrouded in mystery and intrigue, and we can't wait for players to uncover the secrets hidden behind each Sigil.
Thank you for your support, and we'll see you in The Tartarus Key!
Dev Log: Mirrors!
One of the most interesting aspects of our game, The Tartarus Key, is the implementation of reflective mirrors. While most modern games rely on screen space reflections or render targets to achieve realistic mirror effects, we decided to take a different approach and draw inspiration from classic games like Mario 64.
For some of the mirrors in the game—take the bathroom mirror, for example—we duplicated the entire room and cut a hole in the wall for the player to look through. This process is lengthy, but it allows us to achieve a realistic mirror effect, while also remaining authentic to the era of games that inspired us, without using any camera trickery. The end result was worth the effort, as the mirrors look great, function how we hoped, and during playtesting were a feature that stood out to players. A surprising number of players would comment on the mirrors, and other devs would theorise about the method we used to create them. We never realised people liked mirrors so much!
However, due to the time-consuming process of creating reflective mirrors in this way, we opted for different solutions for the majority of the other mirrors in the game. For example, we intentionally made some mirrors "broken" or "dirty" to work around the limitations of our aesthetic and development time!
During the implementation process, we also encountered an issue where the player character, Alex, would poke through the mirror if she got too close to the wall. To address this, we simply detect the player's proximity to the wall and shrink Mirror Alex to a teeny tiny size whenever necessary. Some solutions are more entertaining than others!
Our decision to use a unique method to create mirrors in The Tartarus Key provided a distinct visual style for the game. While it was a lengthy process, we believe that it was worth it for the special mirrors that are featured in the game. We’re excited to see how players react to these mirrors during key moments, and how they impact the overall experience of playing The Tartarus Key!
Dev Log #3: Atmosphere vs Jumpscare
Hey everyone! We thought this was a great opportunity for us to talk a bit about how we approached some of the scarier elements of The Tartarus Key, and why we often went with creepy vs cacophonous when it comes to our scares.
When we first started developing the game, we wanted it to be entirely devoid of jumpscares. While a lot of people really love them, we know for some people they can make a game challenging or unpleasant to play, so we were determined to avoid them completely. And we did, for much of development! Atmosphere is about building tension and fear overtime, through the visuals and sound. This is harder to pull off and involves making something that appears scary in the mind of the player. The same kind of fear that people feel looking into a dark room, it's more about what could be there, regardless of if it's rational or not.
Surprisingly, we found this really limiting. Most people take "jumpscare" to mean "something unexpected pops up in your face and screams really loudly" or the equivalent. But more subtle sudden movements, loud noises, even when used in moderation, are jumpscares too. Used carefully, a jumpscare is just another tool to enhance the players' experience. We do believe that players are more apprehensive about jumpscares now due to the rise in horror games that use them. After all, they lose their effectiveness with repetition. If every candle in the game blew out as you approached it then by the third *POP* you would probably start to be more annoyed than surprised. Remember this classic?
It's a sliding scale. Not all jumpscares are equal in that not all of them are intended to accomplish the game thing. There are no screaming ghost faces in TTK, but you might find doors that slam shut as you approach them, candles that go out, and books that fall. These are jumpscares, largely involving motion or sound that you weren't expecting, but we soften the blow by making sure that the player was already looking in the direction and aware of what was happening. We try to avoid having things surprise from offscreen.
Atmosphere is hard, and sometimes ineffective, because you can't predict how people will respond to it. An example we had early in our playtesting is the very first hallway you can enter near the beginning of the game. One of our testers opened the door and simply refused to step into the hallway, to paraphrase "No, I can't. Something's going to get me." It took a lot of reassuring and promises to get them to move on. Darkb bloody hallways have a way of scaring people - can't imagine why. Another didn't give it a second thought, threw the door open and ran straight to the next room; hadn't even considered it scary.
The end result is that a lot of time has gone into trying to strike that balance between "this is creeping me out" and "this is way too much". Some of the scares we have are blink-and-you'll-miss-them subtle, while others are more in-your-face. However, we've tried to make sure The Tartarus Key is unsettling more often than it purely makes you jump, and we hope when you finally play it, you'll agree... and appreciate those few jumps all the more.
Dev Log #2: People Then vs Now
Hey everyone! Dora here, your friendly neighborhood producer. While the team is hard at work polishing puzzles and blasting bugs, I thought I'd step in to share an update.
The Tartarus Key has been in development with us for over a year, and in that time I've seen the game change in some pretty big ways. Some of these come down to scrapping puzzle designs and rebuilding them from the ground up, or reworking the mansion's layout. But one of the more interesting examples I can give is how the cast has changed their style.
Our intrepid reluctant protagonist, Alex Young, is an easy example. This is Alex as you'll meet her in the game. An average young woman stuck in an unlikely scenario. But in the beginning, the team experimented with her personal style in a way that made her look a little less average, and a little more cool and capable. Someone who looked a little tougher in a way that says, "Hey you, freaky mansion! I'm not scared of you!"
Ultimately, however, we liked the idea of a protagonist who didn't look quite so capable. We're hardly the first game to go this route - Harry Mason of original Silent Hill fame is another example of an ordinary person in an extraordinary scenario. But we felt it might make Alex easier to connect to and root for.
Once we had her basic look down, we wanted to refine her dialogue portrait. Because the game is in a first person perspective, you don't really get to see Alex the way you do other characters, so having somewhere she could be seen and be expressive was really important. As you can see from these sketches, the final design changed a little from concept to conclusion, but not drastically.
And this is the end result! Say hi, Alex!... wow, she looks mad.
Beyond Alex, of course, every other character you'll meet has a portrait for dialogue, and a range of expressions to boot. Take Charles, for instance; he's one of the characters you'll meet in the game. He's a well-meaning but scatterbrained academic type, so we wanted his design to reflect a person who was intelligent, but probably also a little easily distracted and nervous.
Fun fact; while all of these characters are drawn and animated by hand thanks to our artist Leo Parra, there was a time when we considered going a different route with AI generated and animated portraits. In theory, this might have saved us some time, and anyone who has had anything to do with video game development knows time is one of the most valuable resources you have to keep track of. You can see an early experiment of that below.
While it's not bad, we wound up deciding against it for a few reasons. One of the biggest is that it simply didn't fit the look and feel of the game, which as you likely can already tell was heavily influenced by what are now considered "retro" low-poly titles from the PSOne era. We felt this might be a little more modern than we were shooting for.
There was also a lack of control, since while you could set some parameters, ultimately you got what the computer gave you. We could have painted over the results to make them truly look like what we were shooting for, but at the end they likely would have needed such extensive work that we would have negated any time we would have saved. And that would have made our producer very sad.
(Me. It's me. I'm the producer. I would have been sad.)
Anyway, that's it for this month! We're hard at work putting together a lot of finishing touches for the game, but that doesn't mean we're done. We're looking forward to being able to share more news with you soon! Thank you for reading, and for all your support!
Tartarus Key Dev Log #1: Reinventing Retro
CW: flashing lights
Hi there, Tartarus Key fans–Leo and Kevin here, and happy holidays! Vertical Reach has been hard at work on the game, so we wanted to give you a closer look at our progress throughout development, starting with the decisions and considerations that went into the game’s iconic visual style, which adds so much to the haunting vibes of the game.
The Tartarus Key uses a retro aesthetic strongly influenced by PS1 classics, like the iconic Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Multiple horror series got their start on the system; as a result, many people find the look and genre impossible to separate. There’s something truly fascinating, off-putting, eerie—any uneasy or spooky adjective would work here—about the look of PS1 games. Growing up, even a game like Spyro could suddenly look at a lot more menacing after dark.
We’ve enjoyed trying to imbue The Tartarus Key with that same energy. Paintings with textures just low-resolution and wobbly enough that appear to have their eyes follow you around the room. NPC's that, even though they're simply staring in your direction, suddenly take on a frightening quality—incapable of blinking, their faces wobbling unendingly in time to their idle animations. We had playtesters ask why we had the detective character occasionally wink at them, and with a small chuckle, I got to respond with a deliciously scary, "We didn't.” I think there's a lot to be said about retro 3D artsyles. Like with Spyro after dark, sometimes the spookiest parts of our game are the ones you imagine.
But what about the parts we made? When it comes to the art of The Tartarus Key, we're aiming to feel authentic instead of being authentic. Being authentic would require setting hard rules, and while making a game within those limitations would be an exciting challenge, it isn't what we set out to do. At its core, The Tartarus Key uses many of the PS1's iconic visual 'quirks', we've got: texture perspective warping, vertex wobbling, low-resolution textures, low poly models, limited colour depth, heavy fog and tragically short draw distance all rendered at a beautifully tiny 360p.
These alone give the game a distinctive look, but as we're not working with actual PS1 hardware we're aiming to modernize some of the rougher edges. Borrowing from the power of future technology we break the following rules:
Widescreen—4:3 resolution is great, and our game fully supports it, but we've put a lot of work into how this game looks, so we wanted to give it the love it deserves in full 16:9!
Shadows—The majority of PS1 games used vertex lighting which was only as accurate as your number of vertices... so usually not very. Considering a lot of The Tartarus Key is spent exploring dark rooms with a flashlight, we opted to go with more modern shadows.
Number of on-screen objects—Modern low-poly art expectations have moved on from what hardware was genuinely capable of at the time. Your PC can render a heck of a lot more than the PS1 could, so we're putting its power to work. Instead of rendering a single cube with a bookshelf texture, The Tartarus Key renders each book individually. It's not the most authentic artistic choice, but it's more important to us that it looks and feels appropriately low-poly.
Modern post-processing effects—We use post-process vignettes, colour grading, ambient occlusion, and other tricks that were simply impossible on the PS1’s hardware but add to the game’s overall atmosphere.
Also, The Tartarus Key is a first-person game, and those were relatively uncommon back in the PS1 era.
This led to adapting the art direction in interesting ways. Using Resident Evil as an example, let's take a closer look. Resident Evil has fixed cameras, sometimes encompassing a fairly large area. Characters had to remain recognizable at low resolutions and great distances. Capcom did this by making character models realistic but chunky, ensuring they'd be visible at a distance. As is common with early PS1 games, each character was made up of discrete, separate models—for example, thighs were separate from calves. This was easier to animate in lieu of joint-based systems, which were new at the time. The lower rendering resolutions of consoles at the time gave characters a distinct capsule look while making it easier to hide the disjointed body parts that made up each model. Texture-wise, all objects are meant to be realistic to visually match the prerendered backgrounds.
However, we took a more stylized approach with The Tartarus Key. Our character models are sleeker, as we expect the player to see them up close and personal. This meant we could worry less about how characters look from a distance. We opted to have characters be made up of one mesh; our models are slightly higher poly than the average Resident Evil character, so we felt a joint-based animation solution would look nicer. Our textures are also more stylized and painterly, which was a purposeful decision so that characters will more closely match their in-game dialogue portraits.
That’s it from us for now. Thanks for reading! Now, why not kick back, relax, and forget about the fact you’re trapped in a big, spooky mansion with this relaxing Tartarus Key holiday yule log?
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The Tartarus Key Demo Update
As we enter the final day of this Steam Next Fest, I wanted to thank everyone who has played The Tartarus Key demo. We hugely appreciate the feedback we've received over on our discussions page as well as on our Discord server! We're listening!
The demo is still available to play, so jump in! We've even taken the chance to update the demo with the following changes:
Added PS3 & PS4 controller support. If you're not using Steam Input, you'll no longer spin in circles.
The detective who was once suspiciously missing for a cutscene has returned.
Fixed some spelling mistakes; thank you to everyone who has pointed them out!
Thank you again for all the support! Don't forget to wishlist the game on Steam if you haven't yet.
