It's here! A whole month after the changelog was posted the full update is finally done, so if you want to go play it then now's the time.

Now that the big news is out the way, let's talk a little. Initial testing for the Demo 2 beta was going pretty fast but we hit a wall where we ran out of people to try the game, and that's why it took so long to get this update out. Even now the version that has been released isn't actually fully tested... truth be told, it's a beta build that I've made look official. There may be some serious balancing issues or hidden bugs that we missed, and there's not a whole lot I can do about that... for now anyway.

My plan with releasing the beta build as the official demo release was to simply get it out so I can move on to the finishing the end of the game and finally, finally, getting this project finished. We're approaching the 5 year deadline and the game isn't done, and at this point I don't think it will be finished before 5 years is hit.

If you do find any serious issues or have any difficulty with certain fights towards the end of the demo, please start a discussion about it. Demo 2 is effectively an open beta and anything you want to discuss in regards to the game is still open to change before the full release, and I can guarantee that there will be additional balance changes when the game is finally done.

While I've been waiting for playtests that never happened I've been continuing to plan a new system on a new engine, and I can happily announce that once Tenebris Dominus is done I'll be, firstly, taking some time to plan my next move... but after that I will start working on a complete reimagining and rebuild of Tenebris Dominus.

Yep, the next game will be a remake with a completely new engine.

Why?

Well, why not?

I ran into a lot of issues and technical problems with making Tenebris Dominus early on. Those could have been avoided but it ultimately ended up changing the design of the game in ways I didn't want, and resulted in me cutting back on a lot of what I wanted to do. With a complete rebuild of the game my hope is to make something more akin to what I originally envisioned and by starting from scratch I have a chance to fix a lot of the issues that plague the game today solely because of small decisions I made 5 years ago without thinking about it. Technical debt, yada yada. The internals of Tenebris Dominus are incredibly patchy and break very easily if you do anything slightly outside what the game wants or expects.

So, with the eventual remake... what is going to happen? Well, my plan is to bring on a couple other people to do a few things - first I'm going to bring someone on to do some visual design. The logo and maybe some concept art, primarily. The second person is going to be responsible for the soundtrack and I'll be working fairly closely with them to get the feel exactly how I want.

"But wait, can't you make music?"

You're right. I can, and I even have for some parts of Tenebris Dominus. But I trust this person quite heavily and know they will be able to do a better job than me, and if I assist them with it to make it exactly how I want it'll be way better than anything I could produce. The remake is going to be a quite large step up in terms of scope, but due to this it'll likely take quite a few years to ever come out or even be public at all.

All I'll say for now is that the title will be Aretisia: Resurrection, and that is where I'm going to end this (rather long) post. If you read this far, thank you very much, now go try Demo 2!