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!