ASYLUM News

Well, hello there! Allow me to dust off this forsaken corner of the internets. Yes, it's been a while since my last mega-update around these parts, so I'm looking forward to give you the full heads up about all the happenings with Senscape. We have a lot of catching up to do!

Just let me say right off the bat 🦇 that ASYLUM is progressing terrifically, and we're swiftly getting to a point in which we can start testing the game with fresh new eyeballs. That is, we throw disembodied eyeballs at the monitor and see what happens. Very exciting (but messy). There's a chance the owners of those eyeballs might get to play the whole game too! But before we remove their eyeballs, of course, otherwise playtesting might get complicated.

Anyway...



[h2]The lowdown[/h2]
The haunting, twisted, and monolithic asylum you all have been expecting to play has seen advancements all across the board. Now that the game is fully playable, there's a lot of balancing and adjusting that we're doing. The main game logic (or critical path) is being finalized, we added a wealth of documents, notes, clues to flesh out the story, and also the implementation of achievements is underway. This decaying and utterly foul place is being brought to life with a gazillion things to see and do: there's something to discover around every corner, from a curious item that harkens back to past life in the asylum, to historically accurate documentation about early and sinister health practices, to an unexpected flashback as you're playing that brings chills down your spine. Even completing the achievements might feel like playing a separate game! As you may recall, these were designed with context in mind, and discovering them will reveal more of your profile as a patient. Me, I especially like the Scavenger and Melancholic ones 😊



Why, look at that! We're now using Confluence to organize our work. My, are we fancy.



Another big consequence of this balancing act was the polishing and regrading of most environments in the game. The so-called beauty pass, which is resulting in gorgeous new 4K captures that we'll be using to update our store pages soon, some of which you are already seeing all over this update. ASYLUM has never looking this gorgeous — and I'm saying this in a truly deviant way.



(btw, there's an Easter egg for fans of Scratches in that image — can you find it?)



Something else we're doing right now —and I hate not being able to tell you more about this— is beginning to implement the last moments of the game. It's both exhilarating and scary to finally be at this stage after all this time. Playing through the entirety of ASYLUM, and experiencing what was designed ages ago, has provided us with a new perspective on what the game was always meant to be. I mean, of course we knew what we were trying to accomplish all this time, but let's say that we are now... connecting the few remaining dots somehow. Every detail in the game has a purpose, and even seemingly random details that we included during early stages of the project have now gained a revelatory new meaning 👀



I really love how the game unfolds, and how everything converges at the end. I think you will too! There are no more questions left — everything works as expected. But, as I said in the opening paragraph, it's time to let new people play the game and give us fresh feedback. And our first test subjects (now that is appropriate!) will be the lovely Mod team of our Discord community. They don't know what's coming to them, hehe. Poor souls. Bwhahaha! They shall experience THE MADNESS in all its gory glory!! Hehehehe... eh... but I don't want to lose my Mod team 🤔



Anyways, that's the lowdown on the status. There's been many other developments, such as the logic behind Lenny (who essentially behaves like a character in Interactive Fiction games, featuring an internal "schedule"), many explorable items were added, and so, so much more. I wish I could show you what a hugely complex game this is, but alas, that would mean spoiling the whole thing for you. Just take our word for it: there is no other game like ASYLUM in the industry. It's going to be very special ✨



[h2]Happenings at Senscape[/h2]
In other related news, it's been a rollercoaster of a year for us, and especially for me. Actually, mere months, which felt like a lifetime! Not too long ago, Senscape was only four people, a cozy little team that only needed a single Discord channel to organize their job. Yet since the beginning of the pandemic we have tripled our size. Yes, we're now a dozen folks at the company, with likely more coming! Reason for this growth of course was boosting the development pace of ASYLUM on one hand, and then forming a second team for a number of exciting opportunities that came our way. As you can imagine, I had to adapt to a whole new scenario at the company, at last needing to conceive something resembling an organizational structure. So we're slightly less scrappy than before, but still a cozy family who is super motivated to make great things together 😄



There's basically two branches at Senscape now: Video Games and Virtual Production. The game team is solely focused on ASYLUM and consists of 7 people (besides me). We never had so many folks working on the project at the same time! I've always been doing way too much myself: design, writing, programming, even sound compositing, and this larger team is relieving me of many of those responsibilities. I can focus on direction, management, and steering things forward, without becoming a bottleneck as before.



The Virtual Production gang have been tackling a number of exciting projects that I'll share with you in the future. For instance, we've been involved in the production of a film creating virtual backgrounds in Unreal Engine for LED volumes (the so-called "Mandalorian style"). We made an actual movie, folks! And with cutting-edge technology, which is pretty nuts. We learned a huge deal too, and the team is looking forward to bring some of this filmmaking experience back to games. Do we have fans of FMV adventures in here? 😬



Another big upside of this growth is that the company is enjoying good financial stability. So fear not about the development of ASYLUM: it's all in solid shape.

[h2]Brand new faces![/h2]
OK, now let's talk about the new faces in the ASYLUM team! In our last update we discussed the inclusion of Manuel, who did an outstanding job doing internal QA and making note of every corner in the game needing fixing and polishing. More recently, Tobías Moscoso and Anabela Stankiewicz hopped aboard to join the fun. Let's give them a warm welcome! 👏



Anabela is a crazy talented 3D modeler and sculpter, and is taking care of additional set dressing we're doing here and there to enhance your future exploration of the asylum. She's already bringing a special personal touch to the game! Then Tobías, an auteur who participated in our latest Adventurous Game Jam, creating one of the Top 5 winners, the quirky and mysterious if, which I strongly recommend you play. It features some first rate (and incredibly challenging!) puzzles. Fans of old school adventures, you are in for a treat.



Tobías is handling the additional design and writing to ensure the ASYLUM experience is always cohesive. This includes the achievements and in-game documents featuring a wonderful backstory. Details count, and Tobías is very attentive to them. It's a pleasure to have them both in the team! 🤗



Look at all those happy faces! Well, serious looking-faces of people doing very serious work.

Not pictured here is Azul who couldn't join this particular Zoom meeting. She's getting close to finalizing the writing of dialogues, including the intricate branching that was featured in our public demo. I've always been apprehensive of having other people doing writing, but Azul and now Tobías have excelled in this area. They brought fresh perspectives and ideas, a diversity that is crucial in a huge game like ASYLUM.



[h2]What's next?[/h2]
Well, this was quite the read — there's much going on. We had another period of uneasy silence, but remember that we're always here. I keep hearing words of comfort and encouragement, you know, insisting that the game will never be released, that is vaporware, or that we are complete failures. Guess we must be very stubborn people because we're still working very hard to get this project done. To all of you that are sticking around, believing in us, and taking the time to say something nice, THANK YOU! The Senscape team is creating the horror game of your dreams... ahem, nightmares, intricately designed and painstakingly produced. And now that everything is coming together, we are extra sure you will love every moment!

Remember that we have a highly active Discord community in which Manuel has been posting weekly updates. It's the best place to remain in touch and be up to speed with the latest developments.



I'll see you next time, likely with decisive news and impressions after new crew members have played ASYLUM! 👋

Have a disgustingly beautiful weekend,
—Agustín

Salutations, you highly esteemed folks! We finally have an overdue and proper update for you. And a big one with all sorts of news. It’s not like we were that quiet lately: there’s been lots of activity and tidbits across our cozy little spots in the vast extension of the digital world, but it’s about time we summarized our status in a nice writeup. How about we get started?



[h2]It's in the details[/h2]

Our focus for the past few months has been to finalize the “critical path” of puzzles in ASYLUM and ensure the number of details in our scenes are consistent across the entire experience. This last bit means that there’s enough stuff to do or investigate in every location of the game, albeit not strictly necessary. If you played our demo, you know there were plenty of objects you could look at, receive a feedback, or perhaps zoom in, such as corkboard with a couple of easter eggs. This takes much time to implement, especially for a game of this size. The least thing we want is an experience that feels strong at the beginning but slowly becomes rushed and lifeless near the end. On the contrary, the whole game has been designed so that its conclusion shatters your mind, which means consistency and strong pacing. I dislike myself rooms without anything to do in adventure games – simply put, we don’t want to waste your time with lifeless locations.



Critical path means that every major puzzle has been implemented and the game can be completed from beginning to end. And we’re almost there: only one puzzle needs to be implemented from scratch, while two others are in the polishing phase. They’re complex ones and for obvious reasons I can’t provide more details (spoilers!), but we’re really getting close. In fact, we’re already performing internal QA and, good news is, there’s a growing list of content that’s quickly falling into the “we’re not touching this anymore” category. We do have a wishlist of stuff that we’d love to see in the game, and the question remains how much time we’re going to devote to that. But for now, our mission is to bring ASYLUM to a shippable state.

We devoted this week to compile a thorough list of pending assets, meaning a video, an image, sound effect, text blurb, etc., either due or requiring tweaks. Absolutely everything that’s required to have a Release Candidate version, down to the T. We’ll use this list to come up with a realistic schedule and a tentative launch date that we can share with our community. We still do have a few gray areas that are very hard to estimate (namely pending cutscenes), but those are dwindling by the minute.



To address a particular request in the forums: the demo we released last year in the context of the Steam Festival was truly meant to be limited, key reasons being that it wasn’t 100% representative of the final game. Missing voice acting and sound effects for instance hurt the experience to some extent and were among the biggest criticisms we received. After the demo was taken down, we distributed keys to fans that kindly asked us to play it on an on-and-off basis, but we stopped doing that now. The game is in an even better shape than it was last year, thanks in no small part to entirely reworked soundscapes (more about this in a moment!) among other crucial tweaks, including lots of feedback you submitted. Yes, we know you’re anxious to play the game, and yes, we may re-release the demo with these upgrades and voice-overs, which we’re hoping to being recording soon.



[h2]Increasing the family[/h2]

OK, now let’s proceed with news about our team because, trust me, we want to finish ASYLUM as badly as you want to play it! Our newest addition is Manuel Jofre Poza, student of a filmmaking career in a public university (UNSAM) who brings a fresh new perspective to the project and happens to be a longtime fan of… Scratches! Which is super cool because he’s incredibly talented and attentive to detail, exactly the kind of role we needed at this stage. Manuel is doing thorough QA (and I do mean thorough) pointing out each thing that seems out of place. His first playthrough was a big success as he was able to complete a large chunk of the game in one go and without any hints. Yay! I love when he posts in our Discord group quick progress reports with our logo and cool info. Very professional.





It’s interesting to see the process here, identifying anomalies in a scene and quick ways to improve the atmosphere. For example, Manuel’s initial plan for the Boiler Room was to bring a sort of hazy look and volumetric light to the fire, but that’s easier said than done because this is an animated video on top of an image.



The faster workaround was to spawn a warm point light in that area, and voilà, more immersive flames! I really like it. I mean, you can almost feel the heat coming out of that thing.



So, big round of applause for Manuel, our newcomer who by the way just got married!

Next, I’d like to mention the involvement of Cornelis Sjöbeck, who happens to be a Kickstarter backer. Cornelis approached us a short while ago with a neat proposal: as a student in the final stages of a career in computer science, he needed to work on a master-thesis which he wanted to orient to composition/audio design and kindly picked ASYLUM as his subject matter. So, after a few meetings, Cornelis put hands to work on several new sound effects, as well as redesigning current ones. The improvement is shockingly good: beautifully balanced and mastered soundscapes bring a whole new level of immersion to our environments. Waterdrops, crumbling debris, gurgling sounds, buzzing lightbulbs, distant machinery, and a variety of ambient noises among a plethora of new sound effects. It’s a brilliant work and we couldn’t be more grateful for his involvement.



I mean, the guy went as far as using actual bones to produce a particular effect (I didn’t ask about the source of the bones, nope, don’t want to know).



Thanks again Cornelis for contributing to the project! You rock!



And the final but very important bit of news is the promotion of Elizabeth Burner, more commonly known across our networks as McQuigan, as the official Community Manager of Senscape! You’ve probably seen her doing the rounds on Discord and Steam, addressing all kinds of inquiries and topics, organizing activities and so forth. Senscape owes her a big deal, and this is an overdue promotion. Beth is closely aligned with the vision and ideals that make our community such a friendly place to be, so we’re all super happy to have her in the team.



All of this means that, yes, we’re growing and it’s an exciting time for the company. The most exciting times are yet to come, of course, as our mammoth project begins looking like a finished game. There’s never been a team this large working on the game (six people now!) and each passing day fewer tasks remain. I want to thank you all for your patience and support. Contrary to some things being said around, we are working on ASYLUM, and it will be released. I’ve always encouraged and addressed constructive criticism but for some reason, perhaps the times we’re living in, you often read comments that are downright cruel and hurtful. But for each one of those, there are many more words of encouragement that still remind me why we love and believe in what we do.

Anyway, I promise the next update will come sooner, hopefully with more decisive news. Until then!

–Agustín

Greetings, everybody! I hope you’re enjoying, so to speak, the last days of this decidedly bizarre year. Here we are giving closure to one of the most turbulent periods this forsaken planet has had to endure in quite a long time. Just please stay put, don’t touch anything, steer clear of ancient artifacts, mysterious African masks, or big tomes covered in human flesh, at least until the year is over. You never know what kind of hideous curse you could unleash. Yeah, it’s been quiiite the journey.



People experienced 2020 in different ways. For many it was a year of economic woes. In our case, the whole Senscape team was very fortunate to enjoy financial stability and little change in our work. However, for some of us with small kids, the pandemic was extremely stressful, especially during the months of stricter quarantine. And I mean stressful to the point of nearly murdering each other while being locked up at home. I seriously hope all those upcoming vaccines are effective, for the sake of our well-being 🙏

When it comes to Asylum, the year fared much better than I initially expected: the time-limited demo we released back in June was a crucial milestone in the project and a resounding success! Many people played it, gave us invaluable feedback and most importantly, really enjoyed it. After so many years, it was quite a relief to learn that, yes, this is a game folks do want to play. The team kept working steadily afterwards and the overall balance is very positive: all major puzzles, except one, are now implemented. We got the most complicated and challenging things out of the way, and I mean stuff that made us ponder “how the hell are we going to do THAT?”. We’re beginning to get into the details now, ensuring there’s tons to see and do, just like in the demo, besides the main path required to complete the game. In true 2020 fashion, the balance of our latest Zoom session showed much progress in so many areas 💪



Not just that, but the team grew even bigger: Azul Mousseigne joined us recently to work on pending dialogues and backstory in the asylum. Azul participated in our Adventurous Game Jam with an entry that truly surprised us with its amount of polish and attention to detail, so we immediately thought she was right for the team. And she is! You can play the still in-progress Umbra here (developed in just 2 days) and, let me tell you, some of the ideas Azul have brought to complement the environments in the game will downright creep you out!



So that was a successful demo, two new hires, and lots of progress in one of the most adverse years in recent memory. Not bad! We’re very excited, working hard and eyeing a beta that seems around the corner. There’s much more we’ll be showing you soon, besides all this disgusting and horrifying imagery, but I wanted to keep the update short and focused today. I hope you’re all doing well and earning a much-deserved rest. I’m taking some days off to recover myself – I have the tablet loaded with 50GB+ of ScummVM adventures and I’m very much looking forward to deactivating my brain until 2021. Surely it couldn’t possibly be worse than 2020… right? 👀



In any case, you already know this: whether it’s a pandemic, a giant lizard trashing the city, or aliens invading the planet, Asylum will get released. No matter what.

See you soon, and happy holidays! 👋

—Agustín

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