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!