Greetings from a twisted plane in the further regions of experience! Wow, that last update was quite well received. It’s safe to say it was our most popular post ever. There’s no chance we can live up to that… but we can always try!

There’s a great deal of stuff I’m going to discuss today, so expect a rather neurotic writeup. But let’s start with the major bit of news this week…

WE HAVE A GAME!

ASYLUM is now playable from beginning to end, a milestone that understandably makes up very happy (and relieved!). We’re anxious yet afraid to perform a full playthrough — consider we’ve been working on this project for 10 years and how intimidating it will feel to play it for the first time. No matter how we feel, though, that playthrough is happening soon, and I’m thrilled to report the individual portions we played are terrific and up to the standards we set for ourselves.

Keep in mind we don’t consider this beta yet, just the implementation of the whole game logic. Some portions still have mockup assets and we’re now swiftly working to replace them with the real deal. I mean, while it would be a decidedly unique experience, we won’t release the game like this:



Haha, imagine your face if we did… and our severed heads in retaliation.

OLD SCHOOL ADVENTURE GAMING

So, all puzzles are implemented! During this process, we took a bunch of days to revise the entire game design, balance things up a bit, and make sure pacing is tight. For instance, we decided to keep the first third of the game fairly linear, after which it becomes more challenging and hugely non-linear. Reason is that we want to make you feel acquainted with the environment and mechanics before leaving you to your own devices. One thing I learned from Scratches is that people don’t like wandering aimlessly, so we’ll only open up the entire asylum for you once you have a good sense of direction and what to do next.



Interestingly, the game is far more puzzle-oriented than we originally anticipated. It was only recently —after taking a step back and looking at the big picture— that we realized the puzzle density is fairly high, without ever being overwhelming. We’re positive fans will love the brain teasers we designed here — a few even feel like throwbacks to classic adventures. I spoke about this a bit last time: ASYLUM combines the design philosophy behind Infocom adventures with modern game design sensibilities. It may be the closest you’ll ever play to a graphical text adventure (without dead ends and sudden deaths, that is).

Check out the flowchart sample to give you an idea of how the game branches in later stages, and keep mind this is just one tenth of the whole chart!

WHAT NEXT?

Besides concluding the game logic, recent areas of work included the dialogue system, inventory, and interface in general. We consider all of these aspects final now, though we expect another wave of feedback from Kickstarter backers. There’s always room for more tweaks, but the “shell” of the game is pretty much done. Keep reading for interesting glimpses of what we did.



From now on, we’ll focus on implementing the last critical assets required to reach beta. Beyond that point, the greater volume of work will involve adding further non-essential details (readable stuff, easter eggs, feedback lines, etc), sound effects (many are still missing) and more music. As soon as we reach beta, we should be able to confirm that mythical release date.

All in all, things are pretty good! The game is getting done and will feature a consistent and thorough quality level. I guarantee you an engrossing experience: we took great care to ensure everything is consistent and makes sense. No matter whether you’re cross-referencing clues, understanding the layout of the asylum, or figuring out stuff, ASYLUM will reward your observation and intuition. To give you an idea of our dedication and attention to detail, we have designed entire piping and wiring systems. In fact, we spent a full morning deciding where to include a drain in this restroom:



If the game doesn’t sell well, we’re ready to become constructors! Just please, bear with us while we work on this last, very demanding phase of production 😅

INVENTORY RELOADED

This is one of the changes we implemented following invaluable feedback from backers, turning the journal into your hub to keep track of everything currently happening in the game: people you’ve met, items you're carrying, topics you should investigate, and concrete tasks you must complete.



It's more clear and friendly now to understand which item you're holding along with a sweet feedback. Thanks to your trusty journal, you can quickly see the full list of stuff you're carrying and how it looks. It's minimalistic, immersive and useful!

MENU RELOADED

If you liked the journal, wait till you hear about the menu! We strive to maintain the immersion, even when you’re perusing the game options. But this is more than just an everyday menu — one of the last tweaks we did is give you the ability to review essential documents that you find in the game. We don’t want to have you backtracking to reread a clue or recall a key plot point, so we basically turned our achievements system into a collection of documents and cutscenes that you can review anytime you want… all from within the same book!



There’s many pages like this and several stuff you can collect. Even the achievements themselves maintain the mood: is your memory good enough to recall all flashbacks while you were a patient of the Hanwell Mental Institute? Then you will unlock the Retentive achievement!

We can’t tell for sure if ASYLUM will be a great game, but its menu is gonna be AMAZING.

MATRIX RELO... NO WAIT, WISHLISTS RELOADED

The other bit of exciting news we wanted to share with you is… 30.000 WISHLISTS ON STEAM!!!



That’s a huge lot and extremely good news because it positions the game as a potential indie hit. And frankly, we never even expected to achieve this much! 30K was my very best case scenario.

ASYLUM is getting far more popular than we ever imagined, and believe us when we tell you that we want to finish it as badly as you want to play it. Of course, we couldn’t have reached this astounding goal without your staunch support 🙏

It’s a specially meaningful achievement for us because we managed all this without a publisher. Even better, we still have room to grow as we need to do more PR. Speaking of which…

CALLING ALL REPORTERS!

Curators, journalists and producers among you: we’re finally getting close to sharing a preview build of ASYLUM with you! There's a chance you're already in touch with us — we got tons of requests over the years and we’ll get back to you (provided you’re still alive).



If we never spoke, ping us at team@senscape.io or use distribute() to request a key: dodistribute.com/access/DgpZCR20PR

We’ll give priority to stream the game to people who have supported us from the beginning, including backers, but eventually all publications and creators, no matter how big or small they are, will receive keys. Also, we’re totally OK with creators monetizing their streams — we love supporting you too ❤️



And that’s it for today. We should have many more cool news to share with you next time. Thank you for sticking with us, and hope you have a stormy and sinister weekend!

—Agustín