The House of Tesla News

[p]THE HOUSE OF TESLA LAUNCHES ON STEAM SEPTEMBER 23, 2025[/p][p]Our Electrifying Puzzle Adventure Brings Tesla's Greatest Mystery to Life. [/p][p]The full game delivers approximately 10 hours of carefully paced gameplay across six distinct chapters, each exploring different aspects of Nikola Tesla's remarkable life and set in unique environments. Players will engage with handcrafted puzzles inspired by Tesla's actual inventions, enhanced by a revolutionary device that allows them to visualise and manipulate the flow of electricity.[/p][p]The full game launches on September 23rd, with localisation in 10 languages, and voiced narrative in English and Czech. Priced at €24.99/USD, early adopters can secure a 15% launch discount. [/p]

[p]Hello everyone,[/p][p]During the recent Future Games Show, we shared an exciting new look at The House of Tesla. The new gameplay video offers a fresh slice of the experience – highlighting the evolving puzzle design, the layered atmosphere, and the overall tone we’ve been shaping over the past months. You may watch the video now:[/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Alongside the new footage, we’ve also updated the game’s Steam page with eight brand-new high-resolution screenshots. These showcase some of the environments, devices, and visual details we’ve been refining behind the scenes.[/p][p]You can see all new screenshots on game's Steam page. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]The House of Tesla has now been wishlisted by over 50,000 players. While we celebrate this amazing milestone, we invite all of you, who haven't wishlisted the game yet, to do so – this ensures you’ll be notified when the game is ready for release.[/p][p]Wishlist the game now[/p][p]And while we’re at it, our another upcoming title 'Dimhaven – The Lost Source' was also featured in the Future Games Show with new content revealed. If you’re curious, head over to the game’s Steam page and be sure to add it to your wishlist as well to stay updated.[/p][p]As always, thank you so much for your support. We’re back to pouring sweat and tears into making these games a reality as soon as we can.[/p][p]– Martin[/p][p]The Blue Brain Games Team[/p]

Hello everyone!

My name is Tomas, and I’m a music composer for The House of Tesla. In the last dev log, Jana talked about lightning, and how it creates mood and visual narrative. How it always begins with a clear idea of what kind of atmosphere a scene should have. I like to think of music in the same way. Allow me to elaborate further.

As I mentioned, it all begins with the idea. Usually, the idea is in the form of musical motive, instrumentation, or specific rhythm. Since I can start working on music quite early in the development, at the beginning, I'm not working with the playable demo, but with the visuals. Those give me a broad idea of what the given chapter is about, what kind of puzzles you are going to solve, and what mood it projects. Then I try to translate it into the musical form. However since we are working with interactive media, the music must also be interactive.



Interactive or adaptive music is a challenge on its own. It should fluently react to the player's input and progress. And if done correctly, you as a player wouldn't even notice it changed. Yet it fluently transitions between different pieces of music based on set parameters.

I had the pleasure of working with Blue Brain Games on all three previous titles of The House of Da Vinci. Previously, the music played more of an ambient function. Since it was implemented directly with the game engine, it didn't allow us to do a lot of adaptive work. In comparison, the music for The House of Tesla is a totally different story. Thanks to middleware (a piece of software managing all audio and talking to the game engine), I was able to finally realize all my ideas of how the music could work in this game.



So how does it work? I'm tempted to say: „Magiiiiic" like Shia LaBeouf, but it's actually much simpler, it’s a set of parameters, which talks to the aforementioned middleware. One parameter I'm mainly working with - let's call it „In Game Progress" defines what type of music is being played at what time. In the real world, it means that the further you advance in the chapter, the more developed music is being played - thus rewarding you for solving the puzzles. I composed the music specifically to meet its need for variability. There are many more things that make it sound natural and the music will never sound exactly the same each time it's being played. So, if you get stuck with solving some puzzle, you can rest assured that music won't be boring after some time!



Working on The House of Tesla has been one of the greatest privileges for me as a composer. I cannot wait to go to my studio every single day and start working on it. The musical palette is also much more developed than how it was in The House of Da Vinci Trilogy. We are working with electricity and that gives me a much broader use of synths and also, I can use an actual Tesla Coil. Oh yeah!!!



Not that I own the Tesla coil (imagine how high would be just the electricity bills!), but fortunately I had access to one. My friend has a performance group, and part of their performance is quite large and working Tesla Coil. So, I asked him if I could record some musical material. Then I created my own synth based on just the sounds of the Tesla Coil. I can tell you - it was a lot of fun!!

So, it's about time I got back to composing in my favorite place on earth—my studio. I can't wait for you to hear the results! And keep your ears up for the official soundtrack release!



Cheers!
Tomas

Hello friends, my name is Jana and among other things, my responsibility has been creating the lighting for The House of Tesla. I’m here to give you a peek into my take on the general workflow.

As you may have gathered from the previous devlogs, creating assets and assembling them into a playable chapter requires complex collaboration across the whole team. But the work doesn’t stop once the environment and gameplay is all put together in the game engine - this is where lighting comes in to unify everything into a cohesive visual experience.

My favorite role of lighting in games is creating the mood and visual narrative of the environment. A lighting workflow always begins with a clear idea of what kind of atmosphere a scene should have - a base color palette, the time of day, and even aspects of the story will drive the decisions behind initial blackouts.



Once we’re happy with the mood, we can start adding some fill lights and accents to brighten areas that need it. Top priority in this stage is to ensure overall readability and guide the player through deliberate placement of highlights and shadows.
Lighting is all about slowly building up in layers and trusting the process - even the most subtle of tweaks can greatly contribute to the final feel of the environment.



Finally, when we’re finished with the fill and accent lights, we can zoom in on key areas of the scene and add detail lighting. This is where we make sure to put focus on all the beautiful assets created by the 3D artists, catching all the reflections and hand-crafted detailing.
And, of course, we push the player’s eye toward visual cues and interactive parts of the level.



Then, the lighting is thoroughly examined during gameplay testing and iterated on. Once we can’t think of any more improvements, it will leave my hands to be optimized and properly implemented into the game.
Lighting up the beautifully crafted world of The House of Tesla has been such a rewarding journey. Thanks for taking this quick behind-the-scenes dive with me! There’s more where that came from! For now though enjoy this glamorous glow-up of our demo chapter, which I had the honor of contributing to.



Jana
3D/Lighting Artist
Blue Brain Games

Greetings, everyone! My name is Alina, I am one of the concept artists from The House of Tesla team, and today I would like to delve deeper into the processes surrounding my field of work.

As you may remember, my colleague Sari introduced you to the standard process of concept creation, where we receive text descriptions, a 3D block-out, or sometimes charming scribbles from our game designers, and can start concepting from there.
At times, however, game designers have an idea of the functionality of a puzzle - a kind of initial spark - but they need visual input from concept artists to help finalize their idea and crystallize the design. This form of collaboration is not typical, but it is refreshing and intriguing. We get to help design the puzzles themselves, and it is always motivating to work with people from different departments within an organic, evolving, and flexible process!



Alright, let’s now take a specific example from the game. Our game designers needed something that would function as a compact object enabling electrical connections between parts of a small electrical device. Sounds like PCBs (printed circuit boards), right? Yes, indeed! Only… there weren’t really such things during Tesla’s time! Not to worry, though - we can make this work!
As our main goal is to create believable, functioning and visually appealing concepts, we rely on research and historical evidence so that our players would feel that all of what we created could indeed be plausible.
Thus, we begin our dive into the world of possibilities (read: research and brainstorming). During this journey, we learn that although PCBs did not exist yet, there were viable alternatives, such as “breadboards” - wooden boards used as a base to connect electrical parts with copper wires; ceramic elements, like lightbulb sockets; and various brass terminals and switches. Here is a screenshot of part of the research moodboard:



After gathering all these references and ideas, we can now work out a concept for this intriguing item. We can use the available materials and arrange them in a way that fits the technology of the time. When coming up with such hypothetical designs, it is helpful (and fun!) to imagine yourself as Tesla, inventing new things, pushing science forward, proving to people that your ideas might work, but also staying close to what is actually possible. Here you can see some initial sketches based on the mentioned research:



Eventually, after some iterations and consultations, we present this research moodboard and concepts to the game designers. At this stage, they can start visualizing more specifically which elements they can use to create amazing puzzles. Once they have refined their ideas, they return to us with their wonderful charts and scribbles.



I hope you have enjoyed this detailed description of the concepting process. As I mentioned before, it is always refreshing to find new approaches to your work and collaborate with colleagues in new ways. This way, we can truly help each other bring our ideas to the next level. If you have not read the previous devlogs, do check them out, and stay tuned for more insights into our processes!

Alina
Concept Artist
Blue Brain Games