ASYLUM News

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

Hi everybody! 👋🏼

I just wanted to get in touch with you after the period of demoing ASYLUM. Last week was pretty intense and exciting, the biggest week yet in the entire development! We got so much feedback and suggestions that we're still filtering your impressions and reports. It's been hugely fun to share the first glimpse of the game with you.

The balance of the demo is overwhelmingly positive: exceptional performance in general, very few bug reports, and many happy players. Of the platforms we're currently supporting, Linux clearly needs the most work and rest assured we'll get to it. Everybody will be able to enjoy ASYLUM without issues. Most importantly, you really seem to have like the game so far! Which is a relief as it looks like we didn't throw 10 years of our lives down the drain 😅

No, seriously, I must confess that I wasn't expecting such an outstanding reaction — after all, ASYLUM is old school, it can be a bit of an acquired taste, and shouldn't be the kind of game that has mass appeal. But it did! Thousands of people played the demo and it was extensively featured on YouTube, even by prominent streamers. And I swear, the reactions have been nearly unanimously positive! This is clearly the game you wanted to play and the one we wanted to make, so it's a match made in heaven (well, or hell, given the subject matter).

Two aspects stood out: first, we all agree about the kind of game this should be. From the moody intro to a prevailing sense of strangeness, as well as a few occasional jokes, nobody said "I wasn't expecting this". Or "I thought it was going to be survival horror". Even though the demo is brief and not much happens story-wise, we got to test the mechanics, dialogue system, atmosphere, puzzle design, etc. and it all works. No major changes are needed and this is very good news. All your requests are queued now, crucially the skipping subtitles behavior which isn't consistent when you're exploring vs. dialogues, so that's a priority. But the takeout is: the game works.

The second aspect is how much the game reminded you of Scratches. And that's a very good thing because we've been touting it as its spiritual successor. Scratches became a beloved title so we have much to live up to, and so far so good. Whether they where playing the demo or watching it on YouTube, people said that ASYLUM nails the "Scratches feel". It's going to be 15 years since it was released, so I'm very glad that we managed to reproduce that feeling 😊

One final bit of good news is that we reached 40.000 wishlists on Steam. Which is quite a lot, especially for a point-and-click adventure. Based on the metrics from the Steam Game Festival, this is easily one of the most anticipated horror games right now, which is both exhilarating and intimidating 😬

In short: the ASYLUM demo was a trial by fire and we passed the test with flying colors. The whole Senscape team wants to thank you very, very much for your enthusiasm and support 🙏🏼 We're back to work to finish the game as soon as we can, knowing it's something you'll want to play. I can't stress this enough: the demo was a mere introduction. No matter what you expect or think you may have figured out about the plot, we will surprise you. The story, the atmosphere, the puzzles, the horror, everything that comes next is better in every regard. And we can't wait to share it with you!

So from the darkest bottoms of our cold and twisted hearts, thanks again. I'll be sure to keep you posted of our little odyssey, and yes, try and decide on a launch timeframe soon. Stay safe!

—Agustín

ASYLUM is a first-person adventure developed by a small and dedicated team with a style reminiscent of early 80s grindhouse videos. It draws inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft's atmospheric stories, the memorable Hammer Films gothic series, as well as twisted Euro Horror from the likes of Lucio Fulci. As players traverse the halls of the massive, decaying Hanwell Mental Institute, they will unravel a mind-bending story and solve puzzles taxing their wits and intuition rather than quick reflexes. Over 10 years in the making and featuring 15 hours of gameplay, ASYLUM is an epic love letter to the point-and-click genre and the spiritual successor to beloved cult classic Scratches.