It Came from the ASYLUM! On Friday!

Salutations, you highly esteemed folks! We finally have an overdue and proper update for you. And a big one with all sorts of news. It’s not like we were that quiet lately: there’s been lots of activity and tidbits across our cozy little spots in the vast extension of the digital world, but it’s about time we summarized our status in a nice writeup. How about we get started?

It's in the details

Our focus for the past few months has been to finalize the “critical path” of puzzles in ASYLUM and ensure the number of details in our scenes are consistent across the entire experience. This last bit means that there’s enough stuff to do or investigate in every location of the game, albeit not strictly necessary. If you played our demo, you know there were plenty of objects you could look at, receive a feedback, or perhaps zoom in, such as corkboard with a couple of easter eggs. This takes much time to implement, especially for a game of this size. The least thing we want is an experience that feels strong at the beginning but slowly becomes rushed and lifeless near the end. On the contrary, the whole game has been designed so that its conclusion shatters your mind, which means consistency and strong pacing. I dislike myself rooms without anything to do in adventure games – simply put, we don’t want to waste your time with lifeless locations.

Critical path means that every major puzzle has been implemented and the game can be completed from beginning to end. And we’re almost there: only one puzzle needs to be implemented from scratch, while two others are in the polishing phase. They’re complex ones and for obvious reasons I can’t provide more details (spoilers!), but we’re really getting close. In fact, we’re already performing internal QA and, good news is, there’s a growing list of content that’s quickly falling into the “we’re not touching this anymore” category. We do have a wishlist of stuff that we’d love to see in the game, and the question remains how much time we’re going to devote to that. But for now, our mission is to bring ASYLUM to a shippable state.

We devoted this week to compile a thorough list of pending assets, meaning a video, an image, sound effect, text blurb, etc., either due or requiring tweaks. Absolutely everything that’s required to have a Release Candidate version, down to the T. We’ll use this list to come up with a realistic schedule and a tentative launch date that we can share with our community. We still do have a few gray areas that are very hard to estimate (namely pending cutscenes), but those are dwindling by the minute.

To address a particular request in the forums: the demo we released last year in the context of the Steam Festival was truly meant to be limited, key reasons being that it wasn’t 100% representative of the final game. Missing voice acting and sound effects for instance hurt the experience to some extent and were among the biggest criticisms we received. After the demo was taken down, we distributed keys to fans that kindly asked us to play it on an on-and-off basis, but we stopped doing that now. The game is in an even better shape than it was last year, thanks in no small part to entirely reworked soundscapes (more about this in a moment!) among other crucial tweaks, including lots of feedback you submitted. Yes, we know you’re anxious to play the game, and yes,