Horrifying news rise from the Asylum!

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: Steam post image 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