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…

THE CLOCK IS TICKING

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.

ATMOSPHERE WITH A CAPITAL 'A'

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:

LOOKING FORWARD

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!