A huge, mean Friday update. With videos.

BUT! Contrary to the past few ones, this joyous new collection of words is meant to hype you. Yes, you wonderful people -- we're very appreciative of the strong reception to our previous write-up, and we're going to increase the rate of communication as the release date draws closer. So here's what you can expect in this mélange of tidbits:

- Fewer words than usual (I'll try). - Eye candy and mood. Lots. - Some cool technical wizardry. - Next steps and tentative timeline of major events.

Read on for the goods!

The good things always happen with the rain

One of my favorite quotes in a movie, it's from John Frankenheimer's Seconds. A poetic line by itself, but has a special meaning in the context of the film. In our context, though, it would be more like the horrific things always happen with the rain.

Anyway, a critical goal in ASYLUM is to ensure the environments feel engrossing, you know, as in the moooood and the feels absorb you. Scratches had a good dose of ambiance, yet everything felt somewhat static and lifeless (in a way, it kinda fit with the style of the game). But, we've always aimed for a big boost with its successor -- ensuring the passage of time is well represented during the night you spend in the Hanwell institute, with as much detail and movement as we can. Different stages of weather are an excellent way to establish a notion of urgency and dread. For example, rain:

Really dense rain, gloomy clouds, distant lightning, raindrops hitting surfaces, both inside and outside, all combined with a cared-for sound design. Remember, this is pre-rendered graphics -- there's arcane knowledge applied here to put those splashes of raindrops on top of the car.

Speaking of sound, we finally have a full-time, dedicated sound designer (Nico Franza, who worked on some of the spookiest scenes from Silent Hill: Ascension) enhancing all the gloomy places you'll visit. This was a big note from beta-testers, that audio ambience overall needed an extra kick. Well, people shall be happy:

Moving on, I mentioned characters are being polished as much as we can, and testers also mentioned inconsistencies, such as Lenny missing while you open the door and move from one room to another. Again, this isn't regular 3D in which you seamlessly move between real-time geometry, you must render separate videos with and without Lenny. It's a crazy amount of work but we're doing this out of sheer love.

And before I close this section, here's some more footage with visual effects being worked on, such as flying leaves and puffs of dust as dusk falls, or heat haze near a menacing boiler. We know fans of Scratches like boilers very much, so we must get them right.

Oh, yeah... and FIREFLIES!

What kind of sorcery is this

This is my favorite recent development, because it's a feature we briefly explored but left behind. With an old-school style and pre-rendered adventure, there's so much movement and sense of depth you can have... unless you have a stellar team with great ideas and skill. The theory worked, but we never got around to establishing a pipeline that would allow us to scale this visual treatment across many environments. It's pretty wild. Let me first show you this old video how it's meant to work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF0uAUgyHNg

You see what happened there? It's