ASYLUM News

Hola hola, my lovelies! Yes, we had a longer gap than usual since our previous update. Between the end of the year, some much needed vacations, and work as usual, I couldn’t get back to you earlier. But, I’m happy to report that everything has been progressing according to plan, and we have so much to tell you! ASYLUM is finally (yes, finally!) coming together and it’s becoming the game of our dreams. We have prepared a lengthy post filled with loads of new stuff to see.

But first of all, last time I told you that Epic gave us money via a MegaGrant and, as expected, in spite of my reassurances, there was a bit of discomfort. It was our most disliked update ever, even though it was the best news in a while. Look: the Epic grant comes with no strings attached. It’s an ongoing program that gives financial support to developers using Unreal Engine. They don’t ask anything else in return, except that we complete the game. And we all want that, right? 😬

So let me stress this again: ASYLUM is still coming to Steam and GOG on launch date. I don’t like exclusives. I won’t betray the trust of fans who have been supporting us for years no matter the amount of cash involved. We’re not in this for the money — only the power and glory.

Now that we cleared away the confusion…



ASYLUM is storming into the new decade with equal doses of hope and despair! The team has been keeping up with a strict schedule and meeting our goals. As you may know, the entire ASYLUM experience is roughly divided into hours or “chapters”. The first hour took a huge deal of work worth several months, as it involved lots of set up, many locations, events introducing the narrative, conversations with a character, etc. The second hour —which features a rather intricate puzzle— still took a lot of time, but relatively much less than the first hour. The third hour, though, was nearly a breeze in comparison. And now it looks like the fourth and upcoming hours will take even less.

As expected, the latter stages of development are proportionally taking us far less time. This is a rather common thing in adventure games, and especially true in the case of ASYLUM: the story is designed in a way that you get to meet several characters at first along with a slew of key plot elements, which requires a big development effort. You could say that we now have the entire structure of the game in place, both in terms of game logic and engine framework. In fact, we’re barely doing changes to the framework at this point!

This is good, folks. This is all good.



What this basically means is that we have around one third of the game in a playable and fairly polished state. There’s always going to be one final pass of bug fixing and tweaks before we can happily say “it’s all over” and cry tears of joy and resume our lives, but what we have now is already rock solid. This is because we’re being methodical and careful while implementing gameplay and, luckily, the amount of bugs we’re overlooking seems small. Backers who decided to try the game can attest to this. Moreover, we have feature parity —both in terms of performance and stability— across all announced platforms: Windows, macOS and Linux. If you knew all the stuff we must do to support Linux… For example, converting all our videos to sequences of JPG images. Ouch 🤦🏼‍♂️

How about we all go back to MS-DOS for our next game? You know, it was way easier back then. Would you play an ASCII adventure? Look, we could release 3 or 4 ASYLUMs per year if we do them in ASCII. I swear.




There’s not much I can tell you about the new sections of the game we’re working on as it’s delicate, spoiler-ridden territory. This might even complicate future updates too, as I must strike a balance between informing you without showing much. For now, let’s say the story and puzzles are coming together as we expected. We’re eager to hear feedback from backers to see if some game mechanics need adjustment, or for example tell us if a puzzle blatantly sucks. I don’t think so — I would love these puzzles as a fan of adventures, and they’re decidedly less obscure than what you found in Scratches. They’re challenging without being unfair, demanding wit and observation rather than logical thinking. There’s a few surprising environmental puzzles too. I’m sure you’ll love all of them!

What I can show you are the little touches we’ve been adding here and there, such as completely reworked and custom sky. It’s small things like this that can add so much to the ambiance of the game! Remember: these sorts of details are more tricky to add because we’re not working with full 3D. All the locations are pre-rendered 😅



It’s a fantastic and fun phase of development when you know the underlying mechanics are working and you can now focus on the atmosphere and soundscapes of the game. We have a lengthy list of details we’d like to add (and we’ll see how far we can get) but rest assured this is an environment you won’t ever forget.

A big upgrade worth mentioning is a higher quality format we’re using for our textures. The difference is very noticeable in-game, especially in darker areas, and there’s no trace of pixelated regions now. I’m testing ASYLUM on a Retina display and, let me tell you, it looks stunning:



Finally, I prepared a short video showing you how the in-game menu works and a nifty feature: near instant resume of gameplay. It’s so quick and sudden that we’ll be adding some sort of pop-up, indication, something to let you know that, yes, this all normal, you can just keep playing:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


We believe we’re still on track to wrap up the game later this year. You know the drill: I honestly can’t confirm this and I’d like to be extra careful when announcing a solid launch date. Given the size of the project —as well of our team— and its unruly, atypical nature, it’s incredibly hard to assess the pending volume of work. But, every passing day is less work, and a firm date gets closer to reality. When the official date is announced, it will be set in stone. For now, we’re eyeing late September. But remember: it’s an estimation.

Among our plans is welcoming a new team member soon (thanks to the Epic grant) to assist us with pending assets. We now have all programming aspects covered but are noticing a potential bottleneck in our assets workflow (it was the other way about a year ago). This will give us another big boost 💪🏼



Throughout March, we expect to have 50% of the game completed. We hope to be distributing three builds of the game soon with varying degrees of content: all backers (3000+ people) will have access to the near-final version of the 8:00 PM chapter, the most polished and releasable content (which may become a public demo eventually). VIP backers (~100) will be able to play from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM. We’re also producing a special version for the press featuring from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM as we feel it presents a more interesting cliffhanger for previewing purposes and less chances of leaked spoilers. Remember that those game hours have no correlation with real life hours: the VIP build is already worth 5-6 hours of gameplay. That’s as much as many finished games!

It will be really exciting exciting from now on as you’ll be hearing about ASYLUM from many more sources. We’ll let everyone post captures of the game up the 9:00 PM chapter mark. ASYLUM everywhere! 😄

Speaking of which, we’ve been doing great in the hype department. We now have 7000+ followers on Steam and close to 38.000 wishlists. I can’t stress how positive this is! It would be amazing to reach 50.000 wishlists by the time the game gets released, so if you haven’t spread the horror--I mean, word, we’d be delighted if you do so!



It’s been a long time, yes, we know. I want to assure you that we’re working hard on the game, making solid progress, and our vision is coming to life as we expected. The playable content feels great and you’ll be both entertained and creeped out for a long time once it’s ready. I want to thank all of you again for your patience, kindness, and support. We couldn’t be creating such an ambitious project without you 😊

I promise to keep you apprised of further developments soon. Until next time,


—Agustín

PS: I collected all the snippets from this update in a higher quality video with full frame rate. Talk about service!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hello, Steam friends!

In this short and sweet update, the last one before the end of the year, I'm sharing exciting news with you:





But wait, because whenever you hear 'Epic' around these parts, there's immediately talk about exclusives, and screaming, and riots, but calm down: this has nothing to do with exclusives! Please put down your pitchforks 😅

The grant is money with no strings attached and is happening at the best possible time for us. We're going to use this cash on booze and drugs because we really need them to complete the project, but maybe better salaries for the team too, as well as upgrading hardware, a new member for extra polish and meeting our remaining deadlines, as well as other things, such as better chainsaws and sharper axes.

It's truly fantastic news for the end of the year and an important acknowledgment for the team. While the game was progressing great, finances were tight and we were running on fumes. This will allow us to complete the game with less stress and more happiness, and extra happiness is always good. I think this is really good news for the adventure genre too because Asylum may be the first true point-and-click game to be recognized with an Epic grant.

So, we're ending this year on a high note as I'm wrapping up a polished and feature-complete demo for our Kickstarter backers, including settings, saving/loading, and all the stuff you've come to expect in a finished game, for every platform we promised: Windows, macOS and Linux. Our schedule looks good and we're looking to complete this monster in the coming months. Still lots of pending details and testing, but we're eyeing a release around Q3 2020. I'm truly sorry that it can't happen earlier, but we want to give you a lovingly crafted experience without a single bug (well, except disgusting insects you'll find inside the asylum).

Exciting times ahead. Thank you so much for sticking around while we conclude this epic horror adventure 🙏🏼 We won't disappoint you!

Hi all! 👋

This is a brief update to show you our new gameplay video. A collection of greatly improved, familiar locations and new ones, focusing on interactions and things to do — including speaking with the mysterious denizens of the asylum! Take a look:

https://youtu.be/2-YgD6FhsmI
The game is working remarkably well. In fact, any stuttering you may notice in the video was our recording software behaving erratically 🙄

But, what you see here is 100% in-game stuff, no processing, no tricks. Asylum is running with a stable 60fps in fullscreen High quality on a 3-year old computer. It's even perfectly playable on Very High quality with extra sharp graphics!

So this is how the game looks and feels, and we hope you like it 😊 Just a tiny glimpse of many more locations you'll have to explore!



I'm really sorry about this one. I should've posted more updates here. The promised livestream was postponed due to an incredibly nasty acute bronchitis I got a few weeks ago. It was sheer Hell 🤢 And all because I didn't get a flu shot 💉

Thankfully, I'm back in action and the livestream is totally happening this Friday 22 at 8:00 PM (UTC) on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/Senscape



If you can't make it, don't worry, I'll record everything. It would be great to see you there! I'll be happy to answer all your questions.

And that's it for today, but hopefully see you soon!

—Agustín

Grrrrreetings from a nefarious place where unholy creatures dwell in the shadows! I'll make it short and quick today because I have quite a lot to tell you. Horror month is here and, while Asylum isn't quite ready yet (sorry, sorry, I know), we did prepare a whole lot of fun things for you.

Let's start with a progress report...


You may have seen this already as it went viral a few days ago. It's a feature that's been on our wishlist for years — in fact, one the earliest things we discussed for the game. We knew it could be done in theory, but never thought the resulting effect would be so uncanny. Have a look for yourself:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
It looks even better in the game itself! Like a seriously detailed 3D scene with dynamic lighting and all the bells and whistles, except it's just a bunch of flat images. It's the cherry on top of our quest to bring you the most immersive adventure ever made 💪

Even better, this works just the same on older computers. It's hard to believe when you see it in the game itself. Look how the ceiling behaves:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Wooooooooooooooo 🤯

Of course, we won't include exaggerated lighting effects such as this in the game, but imaging malfunctioning lights, a throbbing ambiance, and all kinds of gorgeous moody effects. It will be an atmosphere to die for.


Yes! This one has been a long time coming, but I'm ready to do a big livestream for the game. We did have some short, casual livestreams before, but nothing like playing the actual game and answering your questions live! Take note:

• WHEN: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29 — 6 PM (UTC) / 11 AM (PST) / 2 PM (EST)
• WHERE: http://twitch.tv/senscape

Don't miss it! I'll take the opportunity to discuss the status of the project and potential release date in greater detail 😬


Please give a warm welcome to Tais! She joined the team just recently. A brilliant student of Unreal Engine who's just getting started in the industry, her class project after just a few months of learning the engine blew me away. Far better and more entertaining than many games you see on Steam.

Tais will be mostly focusing on the addition of new hotspots, including videos, interactive items, general polishing, and lighting effects. We're thrilled to have her talent and attention to detail in the project 😄




And here's when I start rambling. Let's see, in addition to implementing the usual stuff in an adventure game (puzzles, hotspots, secret details, etc.), we achieved some important milestones:

• macOS & Linux are in the bag! Yeeeeeey. While the game was running on macOS pretty well, we had some lingering bugs that hampered the experience. Luckily, we've been able to squash them all and the game now runs as smoothly and polished as Windows. Linux was another story: technically, the game was running, but none of the videos would load (which in turn crashes the whole game, usually a bad thing). Following an inordinate amount of testing and experimenting, we managed to come up with a usable alternative for the videos. I'm happy to report that now everything is working as expected on Linux as well. We're even supporting Windows 32-bit for those of you who can't upgrade 😊
  
  

• We can now save and load! Yeah, so we figured this was an important feature for a 15+ hour long game. You can save in up to 12 slots anytime you want and load anytime you want. Cutting edge technology, just one click away!
  
  

• Doors! Thanks to dozens of different sound effects, FMOD, subtle randomization, and a lot of goodwill, we can ensure a different sound effect for every door in the game. This is how much we care.
  
  

• Transparencies! Not that transparencies are terribly exciting per se, but they allow us to do nifty things. For example, show you interesting stuff happening outside the asylum as you explore the interior (passing clouds, distant thunderstorms, etc). A GIF doesn't do justice, but this surely sets the immersion factor all the way up to 11! Such is the kind of things we're doing as we go deeply into the polishing phase.
  
  

In short, it's all looking great! I know I've been saying this a few several gazillion times, but we're thrilled with how things are coming along. Asylum is exactly the kind of game we wanted to make, and we're 100% sure you'll love it. Thank you for hanging on in there as we do our best to wrap it up as soon as humanly possible 🙏


OK, but to wrap up this update, two more news: our Discord community is getting ready to start group playing Scratches tomorrow, Saturday, October 12. Does that ring a bell? It should! It's the day when Michael Arthate arrived at Blackwood Manor and the story began 😄



What is a group play, you ask? Basically, dozens of fans gather to play a game at the same time, but promising they won't use a walkthrough. Each play lasts around one week and they tend to be incredibly active and lively.

In the case of Scratches, we've been preparing loads of fun activities. For example, fans have been writing Michael Arthate's bestseller "Vanishing Town" together, there's been quizzes, and starting tomorrow I'll be around posting rare trivia, insider details, and stuff you've positively never seen or heard before. It's going to be a mandatory event for fans of the game!

And last, but not least...



Tomorrow, Jonathan Boakes of Dark Fall fame (and also Jerry's voice!) and Matt Clark of Barrow Hill fame will be asking me uncomfortable questions live about the game on Discord! Of course, we'll be happy to answer your questions too. Take note of the event if you want to participate:

• WHEN: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 — 6 PM (UTC) / 11 AM (PST) / 2 PM (EST)
• WHERE: https://discord.gg/senscape

Sorry about the somewhat haphazard update but it's been an intense week and I'm dying to turn off the computer and watch a horror movie 😅

But really, we have some fun moments ahead of us and we'd be delighted to see you around! Remember, though: Asylum livestream coming soon and loads of more concrete news. We vow to amaze you 🙌

Have a sinister weekend,
—Agustín

Salutations from a desolate place in which sinister shadows crawl as if they were sentient creatures from unhallowed spheres of existence! Yes, it’s been a longer pause than usual since our latest juicy update, but there’s two important reasons behind this: first, we’ve been working very hard on wrapping up spoiler laden sections of the game, including its crucial and secretive final moments. Quite simply, we had little to report as we’re adamant about inadvertently leaking key plot details. Second, we love torturing you with these periods of unnerving silence. Yes, it’s true — we’re horrible people.

Anyways, we have lots of ground to cover today, so grab a cup of coffee or drink, depending on the time of day (or hell, maybe just a drink *regardless* of the time of day) and enjoy the read. Suffice to say, we’re having an amazingly strong momentum and beginning to savor a gloriously finished game!




As you may recall, the first segment of ASYLUM has been thoroughly tested (roughly 2 hours of gameplay) and we gathered invaluable feedback, which we put in practice to finalize the far more intricate and ambitious second segment. It includes a puzzle that, while not the most challenging, it was possibly the trickiest one to implement as it involves a lot of factors and is highly non-linear. It pushed the tools we developed for the game to their limit, and I’m thrilled to report we came out victorious!

We now have close to 5 hours of continuous, super-polished gameplay that our VIP backers will be testing soon. This is truly exciting as it’s when the story of the game begins to take flight, and it features our second NPC, a security guard called Bruno.



We used the dialogue with Bruno to improve our postures/gestures system for all characters in the game. The conversation you have with him also happens to be remarkably twisty in the background, as his potential responses depend on a large number of decisions you, the players, can make. It’s almost RPG-ish in nature. While it can’t compete with AAA titles, I’m very happy with the quality, especially when you consider we’re just 3 guys on a shoestring budget. And there’s room for improvement yet, especially when it comes to the animations.

Now, the real interesting bit happens in the background:



Even though we’re using Unreal Engine, we developed a large framework for the game, which is rather atypical in nature. It’s almost like we brought our own engine and are using Unreal merely as a renderer. That’s how crazy we are, but it paid off: we have complete control of characters and texts in the game by using simple spreadsheets. For example, we can trigger postures and gestures with just a tag, even combining them as we please. And there’s a lot of magical things we can do, as I’ll show you next.


OK, disclaimer: this is purely for testing purposes and the result is a mood killer. However, I’m proud of this recent development because of what it implies: using that spreadsheet and leveraging the scripting and text-to-speech capabilities in macOS, we managed to export audio files for the entire dialogues in the game… with just one click.


Thanks to FMOD, the middleware we are using to mix music and audio effects in the game, we were able to import all those files into ASYLUM in a heartbeat, and start testing the game as closely as possible in its final form. Why all this trouble, you ask? Because the dialogue scripts aren’t quite finished yet and it’s never a good idea to start recording voices until they’re fully proofread and ready to go. I learned the hard way that even during later stages of testing you realize the game needed a new dialogue line or pesky misspellings are found. So voice recordings is the very last thing you’re supposed to do.



In the meantime, though, these audio files are extremely useful as we can get a feel of the script, pacing, tweak our lip sync algorithms and perform accurate testing. Keep in mind that all we need to do when the voice recordings are ready is simply replace files!

Here’s an excerpt of the conversation with Bruno, but please remember it’s very WIP and for educational purposes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZyxEx8M5i0
Or maybe we could release the game right away! Surely nobody will realize about the text-to-speech. Right? RIGHT?


There were too many improvements and tweaks over the past two months to mention in our quest to put ASYLUM in releasable status, but I’ll show you a couple of standouts. Quality of life improvements, as they say. First, visual cues to quickly identify hotspots in nodes. Hit spacebar and BAM! interesting things shall be revealed to you. Hit spacebar again to bring back the deliciously creepy immersion in ASYLUM.



The next one is admittedly minor but it was annoying the hell out of me. The crosshair now elegantly hides whenever a hotspot becomes active. It’s super-minor, I know, but it’s small details like this that give a game that cherished final, polished look.



As for mandatory and disturbing imagery in a horror game update, I can give you this intriguing… contraption. Nobody knows what it does, but it doesn’t look inviting.



Also, someone suggested we should include cats in ASYLUM as they’re popular these days and highly meme-able, but the only cat we could fit in the storyline is a rotten, decomposing one. But hey, a dead cat is still a cat!




However, this update was meant to be focused on technical improvements and internal tidbits. It always pays off to invest time on developing custom systems that fit into your workflow and operate exactly as YOU intend. For example, I do all my writing in plain text and tend to do several revisions over time. Usually, it’s not that straightforward to import texts into a game, especially if they need some sort of special formatting. So we devised a custom workflow in which we merely feed plain texts files to the engine, which then does the following… all by itself:



By the way, that’s one of the journals by James Blackwood that you find in Scratches. Let’s try updating the text file, and certainly, we can change the font as well as the line spacing. This is the result:



Same 3D asset, different content. This can be combined with other books in the game, even loose papers. The system even automatically places the text across an arbitrary number of pages! Magic, I tell you!

You can see a more detailed video with different settings here — and please, note the exquisite typography:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hO42lhCiE8
This system has an added benefit too: translations will be a breeze as all we have to do is replace text files! And yes, we’re planning to bring ASYLUM to as many languages as possible.


When I say that I want an immersive game, I bloody mean it! All the way to the settings menu, created with the collaboration of our esteemed Discord community:



See if you can figure out what each thing does. Now, we know we’re playing with fire here as settings should be crystal clear and accessible. Then again, this is still WIP and there are plans to make these pages easier to understand in case you can’t figure them out.

Do note as well how we’re willing to sacrifice our creative vision to let you fiddle with the look and feel of the game as you please, even if that means removing the incredibly awesome vintage film grain effect that it took us so long to create 🙄


My goodness, look at the word counter! I guess it’s time to say goodbye. But first, the usual thanks for your unending support and positive comments! I read all of them and few things are as encouraging as hearing that you appreciate the time we’re investing on this project, including these updates: when you take the time to read through these lengthy write-ups (which require quite a few hours to prepare, trust me), and comment and ask questions, it makes it so much worthwhile to spend time writing them.

That’s a good analogy, I think, to capture the kind of game we’re making here: ASYLUM is going to be a lengthy, engrossing experience filled with details, small things you can discover everywhere, a riveting storyline, and much, much dread. Just as I take the time to prepare these updates and you take time to read them, when ASYLUM is finally completed after all these years, it’s going to be a game that will remain with you forever. I promise that. I’m also hoping to comment a bit on its release date in the coming update.

And now… let the torture begin.