- We're back! - 7 August 2026
After two years of being on hold, the project "Tenebra" is finally back in development. We want to apologize for the long silence and say a huge thank you to everyone who stayed with us.Now — on to the main thing. What are we working on right now?The texts for William's and Silvan's routes are fully ready for Early Access. We've completed fact-checking, implemented hidden scenes, and polished all the branching paths. Right now, our artists are finishing the last illustrations for these routes — so you can see them exactly as we envisioned from the very beginning.At the same time, we're working on the final third of the backgrounds for the full version of the game. The city where Beatrice lives is gradually taking on its true shape.There's still a lot of work ahead. But we're hoping to finalize the Early Access release date for "Tenebra" by the end of this year.Thank you for being with u…
- Report article: December 2023 - 8 January 2024
It was a slow month for development, but we were able to hit a couple of major milestones and make contributions to improving the project. We have big plans for 2024, which include reworking the prologue by February, testing an updated build, and early access near the end of the year. But for now, we'll tell you about what's already finished. Visuals After finishing the characters, we made a few more edits. For example, William let his beard go a bit. He was our first character to be drawn, and we were afraid to experiment with him. But now that our artist has already created some amazing bearded men, we've added a little spice to Will's look. In January we just need to transfer the last sprites into the engine and then we can concentrate on everything else. We haven't drawn any new illustrations in December, but we have improved the quality of three images that were included in the dem…
- Report article: November 2023 - 7 December 2023
Characters We have finished working on the characters. There are twenty-one altogether, making a total of forty-seven poses with variations. The artist's work took two and a half years. The result is impressive and inspiring. This is a very important stage in the life of the project. Locations We continue working on the backgrounds. We have finished stylising another location. It was not originally part of our plans, but the story was so often based around the kitchen that we had to make one more background. CG Arts After a long pause of a few months, we have picked up a very good pace and are keeping it up. This month we drew a new sketch for an illustration, finished several lineworks and completed three renderings. In addition, we had time to spend on some old illustrations: we prepared a plan for revision and brought one of the arts to a common style. Plot We worked hard on the prol…
- Report article: October 2023 - 6 November 2023
Art Department We ran a recruitment to the Tenebrae team for two vacant positions: background styling and rendering multiple illustrations. The recruiting was run fairly quietly, but we got a lot of responses. The new artists we've welcomed into our warm family are already hard at work on new content for the game. Now there should be more development news, at least in the reports. Characters In two months we managed to draw all three poses for the awesome Young Crowley. The man is worthy of a separate romance line, but his heart belongs to a different lady, one that Beatrice won't be competing with. We are currently in the process of drawing a new character and hope to show him in the next report. Locations During the silence we managed to put together 2 backgrounds in 3D and finish the stylisation for one of the locations that will be included in the early access release of the game. T…
- Report article: August 2023 - 11 September 2023
Unity Work continued to be centred around technical solutions and challenges with Unity. We finished a voluminous job with character controllers, avatars, abandoned the inbuilt animator and wrote our own very concise solution that reduced the load of the app. We also achieved the incredible result of compressing 4GB of content down to 500MB. This is not the final weight of the build, as voice acting, illustrations and a few characters will be added. But the final build is not expected to exceed 2GB when we add all the necessary content. We've restored the game's main controllers, linking them to the spreadsheets where the game's texts and events are stored. These systems are now conveniently set up, giving us more flexibility when designing and scripting the game. Experimented a bit with fonts to find a good option and integrate the styles into the engine. Slightly updated the textbox l…
- Report article: June 2023 - 16 July 2023
This month was dedicated to deep refactoring of our technical solutions, making code lighter, putting the project architecture in order, updating documentation, improving interface layout, responsiveness and clarity. Without further ado, take a look at what we have achieved: Think of it as working almost from scratch. We ported the game to the latest version of Unity. Going from a 2020 version to a 2022 version as we faced the challenge of supporting Web, MAC, Android and IOS versions due to software getting outdated. It's a great topic for ironic jokes about how long game development takes. The new version required fixes for all the scripts we had written, and some support assets were not updated in the shop where they were purchased. In the end, we only ported over the supporting parts, heavily modifying them, tweaking them, and writing new logic for them. This is an important step ca…
- Report article: May 2023 - 6 June 2023
It has not been an easy month for the Tenebrae team. We were swamped by the daily routine unrelated to the project. Important life events and various activities distracted us from our work. Several artists went on extended leaves for various reasons, and some were on sick leave unable to carry out their tasks. Undoubtedly, all this will have an impact later, closer to the game's early access release, when deadlines start to loom. But despite all the challenges, we're still on track to meet our goal. Characters At the beginning of May we finished working on Walter's sprites. Patreon subscribers, to whom we have already shown the result, are lamenting the fact that a handsome older man is not a romantic interest in our game. But we do have a great series of stories on his behalf as additional content to the game. Right now we're drawing sprites of Jane Holland – the mother of our protagon…
- Report article: April 2023 - 3 May 2023
This month tested us to the limit, and we made it through. We had to veer slightly off course to pay attention to issues that should have been addressed a long time ago. For example, creating a video presenting the voice acting of our characters. Be sure to take three minutes to watch and listen to the stunning voices to the suspenseful soundtrack. Script We had a big goal: to finish the script for Early Access during April. It seems we didn't achieve that. But we've done a lot of other work, also related to the script: - A lot of clarifying lore details, character biographies, character motivations have been added to the documentation, and we've made it even more clear who was doing what along the timeline of the entire game's story. - With that in mind, we corrected a few details in the finished texts to make them as authentic as possible and completely rewrote one scene. • A flowchar…
- Report article: March 2023 - 3 April 2023
We have prepared a roadmap, planning our objectives for the rest of the year. We would like to share this list with you and discuss it a little. Roadmap While actively creating content for early access, which includes working on the script, text, visuals and soundtrack, we are busy rethinking the demo, thanks to the feedback we have received from the audience. In the first half of the year we plan to improve the controls, add controller support and key reassignment to make the gameplay more comfortable for you. Many players had difficulties with button designation in the game's interface and it was hard for newcomers to the genre to understand what function the settings perform. Therefore, we will add hints so that any player will get comprehensive information about the buttons and settings. In the early version of the game, which we plan to release at the end of the year, you'll be abl…
- Report article: February 2023 - 27 February 2023
Development report for February 2023. This month we have been working on the visuals and texts for additional content, making new useful connections, improving our own skills and carefully processing the feedback we received from the demo players. Next month we want to show you our road map, but for now let's see what we have so far. Characters We would like you to meet a girl named Lucie. Maybe you will already notice a resemblance to one of our characters, at least because of the colour of her hair and eyes. We have an entire chapter dedicated to her in our storybook. We also talk a lot on our social networks about the fact that we plan to make DLC after the game is released, and there will be three new love lines. Lucie is one of the characters we're going to feature in the DLC. We have already chosen the voice actress for this girl. The voice of Lucie will be Jenna Oliver. Illustrat…
- Report article: January 2022 - 31 January 2023
A progress report for the first month of 2023. 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 v…
- Demo version is already available! - 3 January 2023
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…
- Report article: October 2022 - 31 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 wit…
- Report article: September 2022 - 3 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 loo…
- Report article: ~September 2022 - 4 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…
- The results of 2021! - 31 December 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 p…
