ASYLUM News

Greetings from a dimension of ineffable cosmic hideousness! It’s about time I made this post as some of you keep asking this question, not to mention lighting torches and raising pitchforks. I’ll try to resume as best as possible our vision for ASYLUM, what we’re trying to achieve with the game, and why the darned thing is taking so long.

This is a long post, so grab a cup of coffee or beer and enjoy.



We’re a very small indie team —essentially three people— operating on a shoestring budget. We tried going with publishers several times but either we found they didn’t share our vision, demanded too much or gave too little. There’s definitely good people out there, but we could never find the right partner for the project.

Moreover, the conditions in Argentina, where we live, aren’t always the best. We’re fortunate to have struck a balance between our personal lives and work, but often it’s not that easy. Thanks to the generosity of Kickstarter backers, we were able to finance 50% of the project, the other half being self-funded from our own pocket. It’s very, very hard to finance a large game project, especially one as atypical as ASYLUM.



So we did what we humanly could throughout all these years, responding to industry changes and juggling with the circumstances. Of course we did mistakes, too. We truly regret the game has taken this long to develop, but one thing has never changed…



ASYLUM was born out of sheer love of adventure games and horror, as well as the experience with my first project Scratches. It was always meant to be a more ambitious take on the ideas introduced in that game, which miraculously took only three years to develop. ASYLUM is at its heart a classic point-and-click adventure, but feels different. Its ultimate goal is to be a modern and updated take on the traditional adventure game.



I’m even tempted to say Interactive Fiction. It recently became obvious to me how much companies like Infocom have influenced ASYLUM (and Scratches). The layout of locations and emphasis on exploration is very similar to your average Infocom game — in fact, the entirety of ASYLUM could be rewritten as an IF game and still work well.

So exploration is a key aspect we kept in mind when designing the…



Another goal was to give players the chance to explore virtual asylum that felt like the real deal. And yes, we went overboard:



Turns out asylums are rather big places:



Yeah. They have many floors too:



AND basements, but enough of these blueprints. Keep in mind that each one of those rooms have a distinct look and feel, as well as tons of little details to discover and cherish, as we don’t want to bore you to death. The whole location has been painstakingly designed and eventually you’ll have full liberty to explore it as you want. It’s huge, intricate, filled with spooky secrets, and we estimate you’ll spend several hours just exploring the whole place.



It’s no secret the game is a love letter to adventure games, with a twist. We iterated over the interface several times until we found the right approach and balance. At its core, ASYLUM works essentially like Scratches: it’s node-based with discrete movements.



This tried-and-true technique is ideal for adventure games as it allows us to create very detailed graphics for the game, as well as avoid repetition. While the presentation might be somewhat jarring for some players who aren't familiar with classic adventure games, we found that you quickly stop thinking about it after playing for a short bit. Case in point, Serena has been downloaded over 2.000.000 times with close to no friction when it comes to its presentation. Of course, fans of Scratches know the format can work very well.

But we aren’t just making a bigger and badder Scratches here — we went one step further by integrating actual 3D elements with these pre-rendered nodes, tweaking stuff as much as possible to make it seem as if you were playing a full 3D game, for instance adding breathe and walking effects.



(before you ask “why not go full 3D?”, we did consider it at some point and realized it was virtually impossible to do, not to mention that it didn’t “feel” right for the game)

So, imagine that we have these highly detailed rooms modeled with a 3D editor and each node is an actual cube. Fine, then we need to export 6 textures per node. Some rooms have up to 12 nodes. We connect the nodes together, add effects such as fog, dust, sounds… and this is just to move around the atmospheric locations. Interactions are a whole different story.



The nodes are flat textures (yes, really, people still don’t believe this), so any change in a scene has to be represented by another texture. When you pick something up, we must replace that portion of the scene with another texture patch. And of course we also need to define hotspots so that you can interact with stuff:



Every single thing you see in the game is a hotspot. Well, you don’t see the hotspot, but it’s there. It’s not like we can say “oh hey, when the player clicks on this painting…”, no, we need to manually define the interactive region. This is more straightforward in a 2D adventure game because there are proportionally much less scenes. But consider this: 80 scenes in a 2D adventure are already quite a lot — in pseudo-3D like ASYLUM with an average 4-5 nodes per room, those 80 scenes become 400. And this is in fact the amount of nodes we are estimating have been rendered for the game.



Haha, see? See why we’re losing our minds with this project? But wait! You don’t know everything yet. Because I hate repetition in adventure games; I really dislike when you click on a hotspot and get the same canned response over and over again (i.e.: “The ocean looks serene and comforting.”). It especially feels artificial when you click a couple of times to check if the protagonist has something else to say and turns out the feedback is exactly the same.

So, we implemented a complex system to avoid that and wrote up to 12 different responses per hotspot.



Not just that, but a number of responses are tied to the mood of the protagonist (optimistic, somber, desperate), so some responses will be triggered after certain situations occur in the game. Imagine going back to a room and discovering that the protagonist has a completely different perspective on stuff. That previous line about the ocean turns into “Just as we came from them, one day we’ll all return to the eternal waters”. Cheerful.

The sheet where we are keeping all this is BONKERS:





It’s estimated that just the modeling, texturing and rigging of a character costs $8000 in the industry. That is excluding animations. We have 4 main NPCs here, and 5 minor roles. Considering the animations, the "pro" industry price for our complete cast would have been the entire budget of the game. Games. Are. Expensive.

As an indie team we have options, but still, our inability to afford such industry costs resulted in a huge deal of time and headaches creating these characters alone. They may not look AAA, but they more than get the job done and we are happy with the results.



In fact, we estimate that the Hanwell Mental Institute alone, where the game takes place, took us 3-4 years to create, and then another 2-3 years for the characters. There’s many other aspects of course, but location and characters by far took us the most time of development.



The final piece of the puzzle is the story. Writing down the script was the first task that was ever done for the game many aeons ago. It’s thorough, twisty, and full of surprises (and we somehow managed to keep it secret for 10 years!). Our undying confidence in it is the reason why we spent so much time and effort working on this project. It’s the ultimate requirement to fulfill that original vision, to ensure the game does justice to the story that was written in the first place.



It’s far more ambitious and engrossing than Scratches, which was praised for its story — case in point, Scratches was designed to make sure you never get to see any characters, with conversations always happening over the phone. However, this meant that great part of the plot always felt detached somehow, since there’s this rich array of characters you never see. The story in ASYLUM simply wouldn’t work that way. You need to see these people and even the past inmates through flashbacks. Come think of it, that’s yet another aspect that took us a great deal of time: ASYLUM has countless of cutscenes everywhere with characters and drama, many times more than Scratches… but I’ll stop here.



That was merely a general overview. There’s tons of angles behind the development that I’m not discussing here, but hopefully you’ll understand a bit better our position and why this is taking so long. Ultimately, we don’t want to make a passable game but one that surprises you and is never forgotten. Turns out making that sort of game today implies a vast amount of work.

But still, we keep making strides and enjoying a great momentum: as the game keeps growing in popularity (27.000 wishlists now!), we’re eyeing to have a complete playable build (beta) within 2-3 months. The vast majority of assets are ready and we're now focused on implementing puzzles and interactions.



As expected, this phase of implementing game logic is comparatively happening much faster than all the previous years of production. To put it into perspective, imagine that we spent 90% preparing stuff and 10% putting everything together. This happens often with adventure games that depend a lot on narrative content and not so much on prototyping, AI, randomly generated content, etc.

As for the big question of when it will be ready, we're looking to confirm a release date when we hit the aforementioned beta milestone. However, it does look like we can make it this time and ship the game later this year. For the past several months, we've managed to meet every goal that we set for ourselves. Indeed, things are looking great!



Meanwhile, I’ll stick around updating, appreciating your patience, and answering questions. Let there be no doubt that we remain fully committed to this project and making sure it’s released as soon as humanly possible. And I can tell you this: it’s thrilling to finally see the script coming to life, which is working as we hoped, equal shares of horror and mystery that hopefully you won’t ever forget!

—Agustín

Greetings, esteemed Steam community! We hope you're off to a terrific 2019! As promised, we come bearing a series of exciting news from the sinister corridors of ASYLUM (and of course eye candy, because we know you love it).

Here we go!



Things are progressing speedy and smoothly, so we feel comfortable to disclose our plans. To recap, since December hundreds of Kickstarter backers have been playing a good chunk of the game with overwhelmingly positive reactions. We can confirm ASYLUM is performing great and no major issues have shown their ugly face. Even better, we seem to have hit a stride, meeting milestone after milestone: we're wrapping up an even larger segment of the game now, and expecting to hit beta around May.

A beta in May means our goal to release the game later this year is doable. We're not officially confirming this yet, but you'll be the first to know. So this is really happening after all this time, and we couldn't thank you enough for your understanding and support! ASYLUM is exactly the kind of game we wanted to make, and the follow-up we just know fans of Scratches will love 👌



And speaking of support, wow... We're now at a whooping 23K wishlists milestone, and it feels 30K may be just around the corner.



This is all very, very exciting! For reference, only the top and most highly anticipated games in all Steam reach 50K and beyond. It's an ambitious goal, but what if we can make it? What if?! 🤞



We're thrilled (so to speak) to have wrapped up work in one of the scariest environments of the game, the High Risk corridor where the most dangerous inmates are kept, fondly referred to as the "Tunnel of the Damned". And yet, it's not even one of the top 5 scariest locations you'll find 😮



For now we'll keep working on this lovely basement concealing dark secrets. Yes, of course there was going to be basement in the game!



We've also prepared some charming night scenes for you. There's people who swear they see hidden scary faces in this gloomy sky, but we did nothing of the sort (at least not yet):



And since we can't get enough GIFs, let us show you the kind of visual trickery we're doing to maintain that old school adventure tone and feel in ASYLUM:



Yes, that's cute... but what if we told you the record, arm and knob are the only 3D elements in this scene? Just think about it: the whole background and turntable are FLAT 😮



Finally, we got access to a fairly pro MOCAP installation in Buenos Aires yesterday and did some tests for the game. If this works out, the amount of work for remaining animations we need to do will be dramatically reduced!



It would be quite exciting if we can include this technology in the game. Not that our handmade animations are bad, mind you, but this would certainly make our lives much easier. It's pretty fun, too!



Of course not, there's lots more coming, but we're concluding this update for now. We hope you enjoyed it, and let us know in the comments if you have any questions. We're thrilled that things are progressing so well, and we honestly can't wait to see you finally playing ASYLUM!

Have a spooky weekend 👻

Phew, following a couple of very intensive weeks, we're happy to announce that we have a playable and fully featured demo of ASYLUM working great with top-notch performance and minimal loading times! It's a huge milestone after all this time!

This is an internal demo that we're sharing with Kickstarter backers, and so far initial reactions have been hugely positive: players are in love with the atmosphere and agree that, even after this short glimpse, "what we can expect was worth the wait" and they are "very excited to delve deeper into the dark, decaying corners of ASYLUM!".

Did we say short? Yes, it's only a fraction of the final game, yet backers reported playing 60 minutes, as much as 90! This means our estimation of 10-12 hours for the final game is either spot on or quite conservative. Fans will also be happy to hear that performance is solid even on older computers, and we still have more optimizations to do!

All in all, the outlook is very positive as we now work towards beta status and get ready to suggest a release date. We just ask you a bit more patience, but rest assured: ASYLUM is happening!



Of course, it wouldn't be a proper update without sights and goodies from the game! First, we'd like to share with you this extended gameplay video that we showed last month in the Argentinian game expo EVA 2018 and got great reactions from the audience:

https://youtu.be/KwaPvJiGPgs
(please note it was recorded in 720p, hence some blurriness in the video)

Improvements to the game include tabs in your trusty notepad, so that you can clearly keep track of the stuff you must know, from tasks to inventory items:



Speaking of which, can fans of Scratches detect the Easter Egg in that scene?



And then there's the gorgeous menu system, essentially a patient record (the patient being YOU!):



Yes, we always try to maintain the mood of the game. Even on the menu.





We know it's a bit late for Halloween, but we sent our previous update just before Halloween. Anyway, we're still giving away Scratches keys to all Whisperers in Darkness of our Discord community: https://discord.gg/senscape

Rumor has it it's quite easy to become a Whisperer (mere minutes, in fact) — but hurry up, this won't last longer.



And last but certainly not least, a big THANK YOU from the whole Senscape team for your patience and understanding as we strive to complete this game. Things are looking extremely good and we hope to be sharing more exciting news soon. For now, rest assured that ASYLUM ACTUALLY EXISTS and PEOPLE ARE LIKING IT.

Salutations to our wonderful Steam community!

It’s been an exceptionally busy month for ASYLUM and it’s not over yet. Things are progressing fast and we’re happy to report that we’re just about to wrap up a big playable chunk of the game — in near final form, truly polished and ready for public consumption. Exciting times ahead, and the momentum on Steam keeps getting better! We’re now nearing 14.000 wishlists, mere days after we reached 10.000. Wow, just wow!



Most work on the project now amounts to adding interactive stuff and implementing the remaining puzzles. It’s taking time, though, because we’re going out of our way to add as many details as possible. We plan to reward your observation as you unlock the mysteries concealed by the dreadful Hanwell Mental Institute.

For instance, we created a full maintenance schedule for our janitor, complete with an easter egg for fans of Scratches:



If you pay attention, you’ll find that every element in the game is very consistent with each other. There’s a huge timeline of events and intertwining storylines leading to a big finale you won’t forget, and every detail counts. We really can’t wait to share our monstrous baby with you!



We also added a crosshair to the game. Yes, we wanted to avoid it because it breaks the immersion, but it doesn’t hurt as much as we expected and greatly improves the gameplay. Don’t worry, ASYLUM is still a classic adventure game and you don’t need to shoot zombies! Inmates maybe, but not zombies.

(just kidding)

https://youtu.be/MOa3nFaOnIE

Please note the mouth-watering atmosphere complete with subtle fog. And yes, there are tons of items you can pick and investigate in great detail.

Of course there's been more progress on this front and we're happy to report that its interface and overall presentation of the game are pretty much done. We'll need to do testing and tweaks but it's already playing smoothly. Yay!



We also had a bit of fun doing promo materials:



Funnily, a lot of people asked where they could buy the book. We wish!



Regarding our previous update where we showed a glimpse of the dialogue system, we want to clarify that there will be voice acting in the game. We just haven’t recorded voices yet, but that’s planned.

As for the eternal question (is ASYLUM ever going to be released?), we must quote Jerry Dandrige:



Thank you for your continued support and patience, and have a spooky weekend!

—The Senscape Team

Greetings, dear followers! We trust you're enjoying your weekend. There was a huge deal of positive reactions to our latest progress update —especially that glimpse of our dialogue system— so we decided to share more:

https://youtu.be/QhzGV36uLWI

That's right, this is exactly what happens when you enter the foreboding Hanwell Mental Institute! It's finally possible to complete a first big chunk of the game, conversations included, which is a big milestone for us. While we haven't recorded voice overs yet, this should give you a good idea of what it feels like interacting with denizens of the asylum.

And since we're here, let us show you a glimpse from one of the most menacing rooms in the game:

https://youtu.be/qGDCnCEPN5o

This screams ATMOSPHERE, right? You'll be screaming too, trust us. We hope you like it, because we're doing this game with much love.

And speaking of love:



THANK YOU for pushing us over 10.000 wishlists! (actually over 11.000 as of this writing). ASYLUM is enjoying a great momentum and development is progressing fast.

We hope to be sharing more news with you soon. In the meantime, thank you so much for your patience and support as we conclude this monstrous adventure game!

—The Senscape Team