Salutations, inmates! It’s been a while since we exchanged words, so there’s a lot to tell you. Hard to believe it’s already October — or is that easy to believe? I honestly don’t know anymore. 2020 has been the strangest year in a long time, feeling equally eternal and ephemeral. Time has ceased to have any meaning. I think we’re all just hoping to get through to see what 2021 has in store for us. Surely it couldn’t get any worse than this, right?
Right?I do know about the question that’s looming over your heads, though: what about ASYLUM?! We’ve been quiet, yes, but working steadily since the demo. In spite of all the ongoing hurdles, the team is super motivated —especially thanks to the enthusiastic response we got from our community in the past few months— and making solid progress every day. There’s many more hours of gameplay wrapped up and we’re eyeing the next crucial milestones 👀
Let me tell you all about it!
[h2]And now… the thoroughest status report yet[/h2]
First, a quick recap: the main task at hand is to finish implementing game logic, namely puzzles and many optional interactions to bring life to the environments. For instance, a room may need an additional node or two to make it easier to navigate, or perhaps the lightning needs adjustment so that we’re able to distinguish key areas with interactions. Just as well, we’re missing a few more “zooms”, that is, intriguing things you can look at closely. The paintings are a perfect example — if you recall Scratches, spooky paintings were crucial to give you the chillies. We got that covered.
And the drawers, of course. Many fans told me, “I
loved opening every drawer in Scratches! Please tell me there are many, many drawers in ASYLUM!”. Yup, we got that covered too.
The amount of drawers in the game boggle the mind, and we’re making sure most of them will have something interesting to see!
This iteration we’re doing to the whole game is intense and focused. There’s no room for “what ifs”. We’re very restrained during this phase — do only the strictly necessary to complete the game as planned. We’re very anxious about hitting our next milestone (looking at you, Beta 🙏🏼) when we finish this iteration. The good news is that this is happening fast. In fact, let me show you where we’re standing.
(Black means locations that won’t be playable, blue means locations with fully implemented logic & assets, red means locations with pending work)
It's quite encouraging when you see it like this, eh? There’s one additional floor that we haven’t shown yet —the basement— which is 90% complete as we speak. Work and schedule are well organized too: Rocío is spending most of her time beefing up the drawers, paintings and exporting assets whenever needed. She’s doing some modeling to improve locations that were a bit barebones for our taste, such as the Museum. It looks incredible now, filled with macabre and nasty details.
Sofía is performing heavy maintenance across every location in the game, ensuring all required hotspots are in place, database entries for the feedback strings are correct, and tweaking lighting as required. It’s super cool that the sisters live together: whenever Sofía needs an asset (say, an item must be picked and we’re missing an image of it in one of the nodes), she asks Rocío directly to export it, and bam, a few moments later it’s implemented. They’re both on a roll!
This has alleviated Pablo, who can now focus on cutscenes, characters and some tweaks here and there. He’s just about to conclude work on the basement and will immediately head to the third floor afterwards. Meanwhile, the sisters are expecting to finalize the second floor next month, after which they’ll join Pablo on the third floor. Agustín (the other Agustín) makes minimal and rare modifications to our Unreal Engine C++ framework whenever needed and is working on the core puzzles. As for me, I can devout my time to complete writing and overseeing the project.
The best moments are when we press “Play”, everything works as expected, and ASYLUM looks more and more like a finished game. There’s lots of new content I could show you, but we want to be extra careful about spoilers from now on. One wrong screenshot could mean one less effective plot detail or twist. Just rest assured: it’s all coming beautifully together.
[h2]What next?[/h2]
That is the plan and, even though this is the most adverse year we had to face during the development of ASYLUM, things are coming along pretty well. We’re hoping to reach blue in all the locations by late November, meaning that a release date this year is unfortunately out of the question. But, wrapping up 2020 of all years with a successful public demo and beta milestone achieved would be glorious, and the whole team is working non-stop to make it happen.
Speaking of the demo, we keep getting requests to bring it back. A lot. So that’s going to happen, yes, but you know we always like to do things with a bit of flair. The demo will return featuring every improvement you requested, plus voice acting so that you can see and
hear final content, and a few more surprises. My goal is to re-release the demo with a launch date in sight as well. We might even do new demo + new trailer + release date announcement to make things even more exciting. Yes, we’re really getting to that point 🙏🏼
In the meantime, we’re almost ready to share an extra-large build for our VIP backers as we’re dying to hear their thoughts. The goal is to deliver a polished build to them so that they can get into the story and the atmosphere without worrying about bugs. Knock on wood, we’ve been lucky so far as very few bugs are introduced whenever we make changes. I’m planning to write an in-depth article about our approach to developing and structuring ASYLUM because it’s rather unusual: at a high level, the entire game is mostly implemented in a
declarative manner. In broad terms, we
describe to our framework what each hotspot does, how some of them should react with certain items, we establish relationships between different objects in the game, and then simply let the framework figure out what to do on its own. In other words: since we barely do things “by hand” when implementing our game logic, we rarely introduce bugs ourselves. Most bugs come from the framework, and that’s not changing much at this point.
Anyway: the outlook is extremely positive. I sure wished we could commit to a release date today, but we sincerely need more time. Perhaps when 2020 is finally over (if we all manage to survive the year, that is).
[h2]Video woes and state of Linux[/h2]
Another positive development during these past few months was the overhaul of our video assets. Long story short, up until this point we had to export
three different sets of videos, one per each platform: Windows (MP4), macOS (MOV) and Linux (sequence of JPGs). Yeah, it sucked. To make matters worse, integrating these videos in Unreal wasn’t straightforward. We needed
four assets per each video: that is, 1 Platform Media Source that decides which video to play depending on the platform, 2 File Media Sources (MP4 & MOV) and then 1 Image Media Source (for the JPGs). Consider that we have hundreds of videos in ASYLUM, also that we had to package different sets of videos per platform, and you can see how this was a nightmare.
We were dealing with two problems here: first, we couldn’t produce an MP4 that looked exactly the same on Windows and macOS, which both support the format. This is why I had to rely on MOV for macOS. Problem was, colors and gamma looked very different, and this had a particularly nasty effect in ASYLUM:
Second, Unreal on Linux can’t handle videos out of the box, so resorting to MP4 or MOV was out of the question. Our best bet was an outdated VLC Player plugin for Unreal, which brought a whole new world of problems on its own.
We
seriously needed to do something about this. And we did. While Agustín (the other Agustín) got into the age-old, unmaintained code of the VLC plugin, I spent two weeks studying the MP4 format, trying to understand why a video can look so different between different systems and players. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Bizarre colorspaces. Strange, undocumented ffmpeg options. A decade-old bug in the VLC player. We almost lost our minds in the process. But we did it. We really did it:
A single MP4 that looks exactly the same on Windows, macOS and Linux.This might be an industry first, I’m not kidding. Devs usually pay $10k+ for this kind of solution, and we did it for free. Well, free besides all the neurons we lost in the process. I’m working on a more technical article with all the nitty-gritty for those of you interested, but still: this has saved us a
lot of headaches. It’s a huge relief to just convert a video to one format, quickly bring it to Unreal, and be done with it. I mean, it may not the most exciting news in the planet, but I guarantee that it was a breakthrough for us. Agustín (the other Agustín) is still insulting me for having to deal with that dreaded VLC plugin, as well as a few eyebrow-raising hacks in our own code, but it works. It really, really works ☺️
And this means the Linux port is now 100% on par with Windows/Mac in terms of features and performance. I spent many days testing things myself on an actual Ubuntu machine, and yup, it all works flawlessly. Linux fans will be very pleased when they play it.
[h2]An adventurous conclusion[/h2]
We wrap up this monumental update with news of our Adventurous Game Jam, which is officially sponsored by Epic Games! It’s pretty interesting how this project came to be, and our thriving
Discord community was instrumental to make it happen. Many experienced and novice developers are actively participating every day, even introducing their projects for the first time in Senscape’s Discord. And since we’re using and often discussing Unreal Engine ourselves, there was a growing interest to do something with it. One thing led to another and we’re now hosting a game jam on itch.io. Yay for serendipity!
And let me show you how
exciting this is. We’re already seeing a diverse selection of adventures produced with Unreal, with solid quality across the board. I think all the submitted games so far have potential to become full-fledged, commercial adventures in the future. Here’s the latest gameplay videos participants have shared:
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Feel free to follow the jam to learn when you can play these exciting projects: https://itch.io/jam/senscapejam. It’s coming to an end next week and a few days later we’ll be deciding winners. I think it’s been a wonderful experience for everyone involved, so I’m sure we’ll be repeating the event next year. We may even participate with a project of our own!
And that’s it. This was probably our lengthiest update ever, and I trust you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for your support while we get ready to open the doors of the asylum and finally let you explore its innermost, dark secrets. Until next time! 👋🏼
—Agustín
