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!

SYSTEMS. SYSTEMS EVERYWHERE.

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.

TALK, IT'S ONLY TALK

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?

ASSORTED THINGS!

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!

READABLE THINGS!

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.

CONFIGURABLE THINGS!

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 🙄

I RAN OUT OF IDEAS FOR THESE HEADER TITLES

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.