2023 YEAR-END DEVELOPMENT UPDATE

As we gather to bid farewell to 2023, this seemed like a great (and long overdue) opportunity to provide an update on Anathema's development. Overall, 2023 was subjected to multiple setbacks and delays due to somber personal life-events that took precedence and attention away from Anathema, but we managed to exit the year nonetheless with some major milestones. Please read below for further details!

• All in-game audio has been completely remastered. This allows for more headroom in the digital audio spectrum and should produce far less "clipping" audio and artifacts that was present in the 2017 demo.
  
• The cover artwork is currently being drawn by our good friend Craig Daversa (his game can be found here). We can't wait to unveil it when it's ready; the work-in-progress updates we've seen have been fantastic.
  
• The polish phase has commenced. Below are select comparison screenshots from the 2017 demo to the 2023 pre-release build. Note that these are all still very much a work-in-progress and the animated version's resolution and color count have been lowered due to the service used to make the animated images.

• All in-game cutscene artwork renders have been completed and are now functional in-engine. This doesn't include the game's ending, which will begin production in 2024 after we reconvene to plan storyboards.
  
• The number of images in cutscenes completed total to a whopping 593 panels that took approximately 100 hours just to render the imagery.
  
• There are 28 cutscenes that span a 70 page script.
  
• Voiceover lines were recorded in 2017, but will have some additional voiceover recordings for minor NPC characters.
  
• Music, sound effects and voiceover lines are next to be added to cutscenes. The voiceover lines need final selection of best takes for each character, music will need to be scored for select scenes and sound effects where applicable.
  
• Below are some screenshot examples taken from cutscenes at various points throughout the game.
  Note that all dialog text has been censored to prevent any potential spoilers of the story.

For those that have followed the development of Anathema since it went live on Steam Greenlight in 2015 (remember Steam Greenlight?), we've firmly not set a release date until we feel confident it is a date we will successfully deliver on. Anathema's core gameplay loop of all 13 stages is fully playable and complete from front-to-back and combined with the below updates and milestones, we can confidently say Anathema will release in 2024. While we're not ready to nail down a specific date, we feel this window is more than reasonable, but we will share more updates on the release date as they become available.

Stay tuned for more updates in 2024! There's going to be a lot more as we ramp up towards the marketing and awareness phases leading up to release!