Astronomical and adventurous update with reports, schedule, plans and more!

Salutations, inmates! It’s been a while since we exchanged words, so there’s a lot to tell you. Hard to believe it’s already October — or is that easy to believe? I honestly don’t know anymore. 2020 has been the strangest year in a long time, feeling equally eternal and ephemeral. Time has ceased to have any meaning. I think we’re all just hoping to get through to see what 2021 has in store for us. Surely it couldn’t get any worse than this, right? Right?

I do know about the question that’s looming over your heads, though: what about ASYLUM?! We’ve been quiet, yes, but working steadily since the demo. In spite of all the ongoing hurdles, the team is super motivated —especially thanks to the enthusiastic response we got from our community in the past few months— and making solid progress every day. There’s many more hours of gameplay wrapped up and we’re eyeing the next crucial milestones 👀

Let me tell you all about it!

And now… the thoroughest status report yet

First, a quick recap: the main task at hand is to finish implementing game logic, namely puzzles and many optional interactions to bring life to the environments. For instance, a room may need an additional node or two to make it easier to navigate, or perhaps the lightning needs adjustment so that we’re able to distinguish key areas with interactions. Just as well, we’re missing a few more “zooms”, that is, intriguing things you can look at closely. The paintings are a perfect example — if you recall Scratches, spooky paintings were crucial to give you the chillies. We got that covered.

And the drawers, of course. Many fans told me, “I loved opening every drawer in Scratches! Please tell me there are many, many drawers in ASYLUM!”. Yup, we got that covered too.

The amount of drawers in the game boggle the mind, and we’re making sure most of them will have something interesting to see!

This iteration we’re doing to the whole game is intense and focused. There’s no room for “what ifs”. We’re very restrained during this phase — do only the strictly necessary to complete the game as planned. We’re very anxious about hitting our next milestone (looking at you, Beta 🙏🏼) when we finish this iteration. The good news is that this is happening fast. In fact, let me show you where we’re standing.

(Black means locations that won’t be playable, blue means locations with fully implemented logic & assets, red means locations with pending work)

It's quite encouraging when you see it like this, eh? There’s one additional floor that we haven’t shown yet —the basement— which is 90% complete as we speak. Work and schedule are well organized too: Rocío is spending most of her time beefing up the drawers, paintings and exporting assets whenever needed. She’s doing some modeling to improve locations that were a bit barebones for our taste, such as the Museum. It looks incredible now, filled with macabre and nasty details.

Sofía is performing heavy maintenance across every location in the game, ensuring all required hotspots are in place, database entries for the feedback strings are correct, and tweaking lighting as required. It’s super cool that the sisters live together: whenever Sofía needs an asset (say, an item must be picked and we’re missing an image of it in one of the nodes), she asks Rocío directly to export it, and bam, a few moments later it’s implemented. They’re