Tenebrae et Mors
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
A roguelike in the spirit of Nethack, explore the dungeon underneath an Italian villa in the 15th century. The condottiero Perin Nazana has gone mad, locking himself in his massive dungeon containing vast treasure and deadly foes.
Build your character and adventure through over 30 levels.
Who are you?
Live your character's life before your journey into the dungeon. Choose a background and stat, then live your character's life 5 years at a time. Follow the path of a peasant turned soldier, or choose a life of contemplation and prayer. Be a craftsman, an alchemist, a knight, an inquisitor. Your choices decide your skills, and your skills protect you through the dungeon!
What do you do?
Choose your approach. Kill any in your way, or charm your way through the dungeon. Craft deadly potions as an alchemist, convert hostile foes as a priest, or bribe those foes as a merchant. Gather a group of protectors or finish it solo. Use magic, might, charm, or money to reach Perin!
What's to come?
More monsters, more loot, more magic! In short, more content and challenges to overcome.
The current version of the game is an "alpha" version: beatable, nearly feature complete, somewhat untested. This is currently a Windows only game, though macOS and Linux are certainly possible in the future.
Hardware requirements
- A PC built in the last 20 years
- A keyboard and mouse
- A recent version of the .NET runtime
Special thanks
Tiles by Kenney.nl
DawnLike tiles by DawnBringer, DragonDePlatino
Built using the RogueSharp and SadConsole libraries
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Alpha 1.0 ReleasedSep 22, 2023
- Alpha 0.3 ReleasedNov 06, 2019
- Alpha 0.2.14: New spells and creaturesOct 20, 2019
- Alpha 0.2.13: New branch and monstersOct 11, 2019
- Alpha 0.2.8: Lighting and blood effectsSep 20, 2019
- Alpha 0.2.7: A month on itch.io!Sep 11, 2019
- Alpha 0.2.5 - Bug fixes, weapon quality, memorized spellsSep 05, 2019
- Alpha 0.2.3: traps, infighting, monster modsAug 30, 2019
Comments
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Author of SadConsole here. I would love it if you could share the source code, privately of course. If it's not terribly big, I would love to modernize it to the latest SadConsole and GoRogue libraries, then give the source back to you as a gift.
Hey Thraka, thanks for reaching out. Big fan of your library, much respect.
That is a very generous offer. I took an extended break from working on this project for a variety of reasons, and one of the other things I've been working on in the meantime is a different roguelike (really more of a toy/engine) using a newer version of SadConsole (9.1.1, though I'm quite tempted to get the newest version). This includes using GoRogue, another terrific library. I've actually really jumped back in the past couple months or so with the intent of porting this game over to that "engine". It's quite embarrassing that I mentioned this a year ago (!) but have only got to it in earnest recently.
All this is to say that I intend on pulling this game out of "abandonware" status if my circumstances continue to allow it. Like many here, gamedev is a hobby for me, so "how long will it take" is an open question haha. If I ever do decide to truly move on, I'd hand this over to you in an instant.
Sounds good! Please do join us in discord for motivation and Q&A :)
This roguelike had great promise - are any updates planned?
Thanks for asking. Regrettably development on this, and all of my personal game projects, has stalled. It really did not occur to me that anyone might be anticipating updates. This game only gets a few downloads per week.
If I started back up, I would migrate the content to a newer (unpublished) engine I've partly built. Benefits would include cross platform support, vastly improved performance, and a simpler, more robust content pipeline. I considered putting it on Steam as well I think roguelike players are spoiled for choice these days, though.
This is an incredibly impressive Roguelike in it's early alpha stage! Is there perhaps anyplan to release a scaled back version of sourcecode/framework? I ask this because I too am a struggling roguelike developer that has been using Roguesharp for a while and I have been banging my head against the wall with my sorry attempts at porting my game to the likes of monogame and sadconsole.
It would mean an awful lot if you could help get basic footing on this endeavor. Sadly, there are very few good online resources for it. I don't want to copy any of your gameplay.
I don't have any plans to release the source code at this time. Basically I use SadConsole to render and build menus, and Roguesharp to do all the fiddly work I didn't want to write myself (FoV, probability/rolling, ICell). The bigger stuff like map generation, game systems, saving, and content I created myself. For what it's worth, I moved into using SadConsole very early into development. The creator of that library is very friendly and can probably answer any questions you have about it. He actually posted in this comment section below!
If you have more specific questions, I might be able to help. Thanks for checking out the game.
I see. How did you learn about saving in a roguelike? That's another subject I rarely see covered online and a feature I would like to fully implement myself.
I used Monogame's IntermediateSerializer library, which I don't really recommend. Look up game serialization, object serialization, etc. Lots of solutions out there. Your goal is to get all the objects you care about saved into like an XML or binary file that you then load into your game later. It is one of the more annoying things to build yourself, though.
No kidding, I have been struggling with it for a while and it's infuriating that their aren't many good tutorials on them. I will just have to persist till I manage to build something acceptable.
Another thing that immediately caught my attention is how in tilemode your tiles are a different size then your text. How is this exactly possible in sadconsole? In theory it should be breaking the gamewindow.
The game is really multiple console objects, and the dungeon map window is really a "viewport" that limits what the player sees. Each console gets its own font, etc. The way I did it is probably different than the way it's done in the current version, since IIRC there were some big changes between major versions. I recommend reaching out to the SadConsole guys and checking out their documentation and demo projects.
I'm having an issue where the game goes black and won't proceed to the next screen. Any advice? I'm on Windows 10
There should be a debug log file in your game folder. You can open it in any text editor, like Notepad. If you want to post the content here, I may be able to help more.
Hmm, don't see anything (no files updated more recently than the install unfortunately).
I made alpha 0.2 available for download again if you'd like to give that a go. I'm away from my dev environment for the holiday weekend. I may be able to debug this some more for you later if you can give me a few more details about your issue. Can you get past the title screen? Click 'New Game' > 'Premade' > pick some character type. This is the fastest way to get in the game.
thank you! I will try the alpha and report back. I was able to get through to a premade character once and then selected stats, then it went black; all the other times I goes black after I select the profession. I’ll report back.
The alpha 0.2 works like a charm! Thanks again
Cool. I’ll try to reproduce your issue in 0.3 to get it fixed. Thanks for playing!
Would love if there was either mouse play or a way to rebind the keys.
Mouse controls would be a bigger task, but I’ll put it on my list. There’s no in game key rebinding, but you can edit Keys.config in your game folder to change them.
Neat to see my engine used for something fun! Please join us on discord. Information available at http://sadconsole.com
I really like working with SadConsole! You should be proud of the excellent library and documentation you created.
Is there a list of controls for the game? I'm not familiar with ASCII roguelike controls.
If you type ‘?’ while on a dungeon screen, you’ll get the controls list. There’s also a “keys.config” file in the game directory where you can change the keys to whatever you like. It’s just a text file, so you can open it with Notepad or another text editor.
One thing I know that isn’t obvious from reading the key list is that you can attack a hostile monster by walking into it.
Adding an in-game key setting configuration is on the to-do list. Thanks for giving the game a go!
Greetings, gym. I would like to know one thing about this roguelike. Does it work with 32-bit Windows systems? I happen to have an older laptop (32-bit Windows Vista) and I hope to potentially run this game on my machine.
Hi, Asin. After a bit of research, unfortunately I don't want to claim support for Windows Vista as the last .NET version on Vista was 4.6. One of the libraries I use, SadConsole, requires 4.6.1! Here's the official MS .NET requirements matrix: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/get-started/system-requirement...
Having said that, .NET 4.7.1 (the version the game currently targets) may work on Vista anyway. I don't have anyway of confirming this, though.
As for 32 vs 64 bit, the game should run on either. Sorry for the bad news, but thank you for checking out the game anyway!
Thank you for your response. I may not be able to play, but I hope others enjoy it. Is there a place where information is collected about the game, such as a wiki, yet? Perhaps if such a place exists, I will get my Tenebrae et Mors fix from gaining knowledge about the monsters and weaponry and the like.
There is a page on RogueBasin: http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Tenebrae_et_Mors though I have not added too much info to it. I have considered turning this comment section into an itch.io "forum", but I believe that hides all the posted comments.
Keeps crashing after character creation/selection :(
Sorry to hear. Are you playing 0.1.13? And it happens for both the premade and user made characters? If you go to the game folder, then drill down to the "Data/Save" directory, are there files in there?
One possibility is that you either don't have .NET installed (not likely since the game wouldn't run), or you need to be on a more current version. Locally I have .NET 4.7.2 installed. You can get the runtime from Microsoft: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-framework/net472 Just one idea!
Going forward from version 0.1.14, which I just uploaded, the game should generate a 'debug-log' file in your game folder if/when your game crashes. I'll figure out a way to share this file with me, probably just by emailing it.
D'oh! Looks like even the title is in alpha! Oddly enough I got it right on the banner for this page and in game. Just messed up my URL.
Thank you, though I take no credit for creating the tileset. That was done by the fine people at kenney.nl