Hello. Happy Friday. This is a new ASYLUM update.
BUT! Contrary to the past few ones, this joyous new collection of words is meant to hype you. Yes,
you wonderful people -- we're very appreciative of the strong reception to our previous write-up, and we're going to increase the rate of communication as the release date draws closer. So here's what you can expect in this mélange of tidbits:
- Fewer words than usual (I'll try).
- Eye candy and mood. Lots.
- Some cool technical wizardry.
- Next steps and tentative timeline of major events.
Read on for the goods!
[h2]The good things always happen with the rain[/h2]
One of my favorite quotes in a movie, it's from John Frankenheimer's
Seconds. A poetic line by itself, but has a special meaning in the context of the film. In
our context, though, it would be more like the horrific things always happen with the rain.
Anyway, a critical goal in
ASYLUM is to ensure the environments feel engrossing, you know, as in the moooood and the feels absorb you.
Scratches had a good dose of ambiance, yet everything felt somewhat static and lifeless (in a way, it kinda fit with the style of the game). But, we've always aimed for a big boost with its successor -- ensuring the passage of time is well represented during the night you spend in the Hanwell institute, with as much detail and movement as we can. Different stages of weather are an excellent way to establish a notion of urgency and dread. For example, rain:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Really dense rain, gloomy clouds, distant lightning, raindrops hitting surfaces, both inside and outside, all combined with a cared-for sound design. Remember, this is pre-rendered graphics -- there's arcane knowledge applied here to put those splashes of raindrops on top of the car.
Speaking of sound, we finally have a full-time, dedicated sound designer (Nico Franza, who worked on some of the spookiest scenes from
Silent Hill: Ascension) enhancing all the gloomy places you'll visit. This was a big note from beta-testers, that audio ambience overall needed an extra kick. Well, people shall be happy:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Moving on, I mentioned characters are being polished as much as we can, and testers also mentioned inconsistencies, such as Lenny missing while you open the door and move from one room to another. Again, this isn't regular 3D in which you seamlessly move between real-time geometry, you must render separate videos with and without Lenny. It's a crazy amount of work but we're doing this out of sheer love.
And before I close this section, here's some more footage with visual effects being worked on, such as flying leaves and puffs of dust as dusk falls, or heat haze near a menacing boiler. We know fans of
Scratches like boilers very much, so we must get them right.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Oh, yeah... and FIREFLIES!
What kind of sorcery is this
This is my favorite recent development, because it's a feature we briefly explored but left behind. With an old-school style and pre-rendered adventure, there's so much movement and sense of depth you can have... unless you have a stellar team with great ideas
and skill. The theory worked, but we never got around to establishing a pipeline that would allow us to scale this visual treatment across many environments. It's pretty wild. Let me first show you this old video how it's meant to work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF0uAUgyHNg
You see what happened there? It's four flat images projected on the sides of a cube. But then I put a light inside the cube, move it around, and the flat geo projects... shadows? How on Earth?
Well, as they used to say, learning algebra is important. And I finally found a good use for it! Look, it's like this:
That's the diffuse map (the very same texture you see in the game, as part of the cube) and a normal map. You're likely familiar with normals -- they're additional information for diffuses, so that a game engine like Unreal knows how light is meant to propagate across the texture. That's what they call Physically Based Rendering or PBR. Normals are used to bring an extra dimension to a flat texture without adding costly additional geo, such as cavities, cracks, holes in a piece of fabric, and a looong etc.
Well, in this case, we're using the normals to tell Unreal how the light should propagate across the "fake" room. There's more than just applying the normals, they have to be rotated in a certain way to avoid artifacts and some obscure magick that goes over my head. The result is that we can do stuff like this -- pay attention to how parts of the room react to blinking light, as if they were distinct surfaces:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
It's a darn clever implementation, if I may say so. Credit for the original idea goes to Fran Tufro, and then Pablo Forsolloza for the 3ds Max scripts. I worked on the Unreal shader, then more recently Dani Herrera and Tomás Fernandez established the pipeline. Great job, guys 👏 We exaggerated the effect for the Infirmary, a larger area with plenty of stuff that serves as a good example of how this works. Take a look at the jars, different parts of the walls, beds... there's *depth* where there's not supposed to be:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
I don't believe any game has done this kind of lighting before. As a bonus, that video features a new music track from Pablo Cordes. The soundtrack is now clocking at 50 minutes, and it's quite reminiscent of
Scratches and John Carpenter. I'm deeply in love with it.
[h2]Closing words[/h2]
Holy crap, I said fewer words, but I can never help it. OK, so here's the summary:
I'm thrilled with the overall status of the game, and the team feels the same. The past few months have resulted in a huge lot of progress and stuff that we consider final. Seal of approval and ready to go. But there's still work left to do. Early October we'll share another build to beta-testers with most feedback addressed. The big pending before submitting that multiplatform build (Win, Mac and Linux) is me -- I need to review the script, prioritizing dialogue lines so that actors can start recording.
We're definitely close. Mood-wise, it's pretty much there.
ASYLUM is stubbornly anachronic, but plays well, like any modern game. The best way I can describe it is that lets you feel what it was like to play an Infocom text adventure, without dated design annoyances such as dead-ends or sudden deaths and in glorious (pseudo) 3D. All while harkening back to a particular era of the adventure genre in which experimentation and ingenuity were common, as 2D was transitioning to 3D. It's a heartfelt love letter to the genre.
It still needs the cherry on top, which is the well-executed story, and that's entirely on me. There's still some of that glue missing in key moments, and I can't tell right now how long that will take. But, our goal is to release a new teaser or maybe even a full-blown trailer by Halloween, also update our Steam page, and settle on a launch date by then. I have my producer Fafa Cabrera breathing down my neck to make that happen. So there, that's solid news. And no, we're not going to show up in Halloween announcing a launch date in 2274. I'm talking about a handful of months at most.
In more conclusive news, we're going to have a new game jam during October! And I think it's going to be fantastic. Previous instalments yielded excellent games, even very well-reviewed commercial ones such as
Partum Artifex, so we're hyped. Keep an eye on our
Discord community if you want to participate.
OK, hope you liked the update. Time to eat pizza and watch an obscure horror movie. See you soon!
—Agustín
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