The End

Dear users,

Today we mark the official completion of Umineko Project and congratulate everyone for the goals we completed and the results we achieved all together shoulder to shoulder over the last few years. Although the year after the episode 8 release was not a busy one for us, we spent some time polishing the game content and eliminating all the issues reported by players all over the world. We did not run into many problems, but we hope that the changes we made in this update will make the game even better and more enjoyable to play.

This year made us realise that we are not an island in the Umineko community, and that the author himself has not run out of ideas. Umineko received an extra story and will soon get a new console release. Thanks to our friends from 07th-Mod and @ooa in particular, our version got an unofficial Witch Hunt language pack bringing freedom of choice to readers. Furthermore, Knox Translations team finished all eight episodes in Brazilian Portuguese, reaching content parity for readers from Brazil, Portugal, and the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world. And our Chinese-speaking friends from the SNS Team also are very close to publishing the complete version of the game.

Our work inspired several people to play Umineko for another time, to post new media on the social networks, to even build their own work on top of ours, and we believe this is still not quite the end. In this sense, the project will continue to develop even after our retirement, and we are very glad to see this evolving. Happy New Year and enjoy the holidays!

Umineko Project

Episode 8 (β release)

Six years to the day from our first introductory trailer, the last episode of Umineko is now available in English and Russian. We hope you enjoy it!
At the same time, our colleagues from Brazil present a complete set of Umineko Question Arcs in Brazilian Portuguese for the first time.

This is not quite our final release (as you can see, the beta tag is still attached), but it does bring an end to our obligations.
What we promised ourselves we would do, we have now done.
The fundamental experience of the PS3 version of Umineko is now available for speakers of other languages to enjoy.

Of course, we would have liked to have done much more. The gamepad support leaves much to be desired and the menus are unpolished, to say nothing of the extra features we could have added — a more comprehensive music box was once imagined, and there is the content from Hane and Tsubasa, which will now likely make its way to consoles with the upcoming consumer release of Umineko Saku. There are endless TODOs left untouched under the hood.

However, we are a small team, and this project — which we took on for nothing other than personal satisfaction — has been long and tiring. The time is right for us to rest. If there is anything major that needs to be done, we now leave it up to others.

If any of you would like to build on our work, fix it, tweak it, expand it, tear it apart, rip chunks out and replace them as you desire — we now give you that ability.
The engine, as deficient as it is, is now open source.
The script and all the tools we built and used are now publicly available.

Thank you to everyone who gave us motivation over the years. We hope we helped to make an already great game even more enjoyable.
Please support Entergram’s upcoming PS4/Switch release of Umineko no Naku Koro ni Saku!

Episode 8 Private Alpha

Episode 8 is available for alpha testing.

This is…the final game, made just for Ange.
Listen, Ange.
This is what happened on Rokkenjima on that day.
It isn’t sad or painful at all………

Episode 7 (β release)

Dear reader,

After so long without news, we are pleased to present the seventh episode of Umineko in all its glory. In addition to that, our Brazillian colleagues’ efforts made it possible to read the second episode in Brazillian Portuguese. Please proceed to our downloads section to update everything.

The highlights of the update include our new attempts to deal with the censorship affecting the PlayStation release. We believe that the changes Alchemist made to certain parts of the story have a negative effect on its quality, and thus we tried our best to ensure that the key moments are restored as they should be in the second and seventh episodes.

We are currently very close to publishing episode eight alpha, and request our testers, who did their best as usual, to stay tuned and wait for an update, which should appear soon after a short break we would like to take between the releases.

Best wishes,
Umineko Project

Episode 6 (β release)

Dear visitor,

You are eagerly welcomed to dive into the depths of the sixth iteration of the story. We wish you a pleasing experience and have hope that what awaits around the corner will leave positive new impressions.

Umineko Project

Episode 5 (β release)

Dear visitor,

It took us quite some time to pull the trigger and make a public release of the fifth episode after an extensive testing made by our faithful Furniture. With this release we are happy to include the support for the first episode in Brazilian Portuguese by Knox Translations, who did great work in spreading Umineko worldwide! The rest of the technical details and improvements were outlined in our previous post, and at this moment we are working hard on getting episode six ready for testing. Stay tuned and enjoy the game!

Umineko Project

And the witch began to tell of everything…

Dear reader,

It is always hard to begin something or rather to get the first visible results after making a start. Even though Chiru actually was not our starting point in its true sense, it was a separate half that required us to go through many processes we did not touch since Episode 1. While we could have done things faster in theory, that would not have gone along with our principles, and it took as long as it took. To prevent you from waiting any longer, click here to sign up for α-testing of the 5th episode.

We hope that those getting tired of formal and fairly useless replies on the forums will feel relieved and satisfied.

As for the other highlights, we would like to thank and congratulate our colleagues working on the Brazilian Portuguese translation. In addition to 5 episodes in English and Russian we additionally include support for the 1st episode in Brazilian Portuguese by Knox Translations. We plan to continue our collaboration and will release the following episodes as soon as they are fully polished. If you are interested in getting our release in your own language and think that your team has enough skills and patience to make it possible, you are suggested to join our Umineko multilingua project.

There of course are several technical improvements targeting better compatibility and usability. The central part of the technical changes definitely is Android support. It was very convenient to be able to take the game anywhere by just copying it to an iPad, and we were asked multiple times to support Android tablets as well. Fortunately one of the team members got his hands on a suitable tablet, and as a result if you have a device that runs Android 4.1 or higher, supports at least OpenGL ES 2.0, has 2 GB of RAM or more, you will be very welcome to try our initial Android support.

Another bonus will be improved Windows support. We received several bug reports about OpenGL drivers not doing things properly on all sorts of hardware on Windows, and after a serious discussion added DirectX 9 and 11 backend renderer support via ANGLE. As a result this should make the game compatible with a wider range of hardware running Windows even if it did not launch before.

That makes it for the news post. Thank you for your continuous support, reviews, and comments which add to our motivation.

Umineko Project

Happy coming holidays!

Dear friends,

At this moment some of you are already celebrating end-of-year holidays and are getting prepared for 2017!

We did reasonably well in 2016. 2 more episodes published, 4 releases made, over 100 issues fixed and over 700 revisions committed. With all our optimism we are looking forward to our future collaboration, to the release of the answer arcs we are constantly working on, and of course to the completion of our goals.

Together we can patiently do it. But for now let us all enjoy some deserved rest and get ready for the upcoming events.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Umineko Project