I’m not going to start another post by saying that we’re returning from a brief hiatus, but things are coming back to normal in Slightly Deranged, seriously. The last few weeks have been truly insane (in many senses) so the blog had to be put on hold until now. If you somehow missed the news, my company Senscape revealed last week the name and nature of our upcoming horror game – Asylum – and all Hell broke lose. This was announced along with a trailer that has been making the rounds pretty much around the entire web and thus Asylum instantly became an anticipated title.

Not much is known about the game and, of course, we will be keeping the mystery on for a while, at least until things cool down a bit and we return with another striking blow. I will keep you readers updated about Asylum from time to time and, yes, I am intending to partly use Slightly Deranged as a developer’s diary of sorts (don’t worry, you will be able to filter these updates if you couldn’t care less about Asylum and want to stick to the cult movies and retro games).

Now, as I said, this announcement was huge and carefully planned, and we honestly couldn’t have made it without the invaluable help of many, many people. You might have heard about the viral marketing campaign involving a fake institution named the Hanwell Mental Institute accusing a fake character called Leonard Huntings of fabricating videos with yet another fake character by the name of Bertrand Laroche. This sort of meta-narration, as have been put by some, kept many folks on the edge of their seats wondering about the outcome. This all went for exactly one month and culminated with the Asylum trailer, allowing everybody to catch a glimpse of the Hanwell institute for the first time. The impact was huge: nearly 10.000 views on YouTube in less than one week, 25.000 views at GameTrailers and hot discussions everywhere. Therefore, I’m going to mention and thank all the people who helped us in this long path towards the announcement, each one of them in their own way.

(brace yourselves)

First of all, of course, the incredible team at Senscape who have been working non-stop on Asylum for countless months: Pablo Forsolloza, Juan Caratino and Pablo Palomeque, each taking care of the sinister and detailed environments of the Hanwell institute, the striking characters and the concept artwork that has held all of this together from the early stages.

Next is Daniel Pharos, our newcomer to the team that delivered an impressive soundtrack in record time and became the crowning jewel of this trailer. We can expect much more scary sounds from Daniel and in the meantime be sure to check out the incredible work at his homepage.

The omnipresent entity known as Vlad K. who has always been with us (you may remember him as Cellar Of Rats, who did the soundtrack for Scratches). Vlad assisted me in creating all these websites (the new www.Senscape.net, the fake www.Hanwell.org and the promotional www.FaceTheHorror.com) and I can’t thank him enough for that. There’s a reason why he got into web development with his new company, Haron Media.

And of course, all the people that helped to distribute the Subject E14 aka Bertrand viral videos and promote the game:

(in no particular order)

Randy Sluganski and Karla Munger from Just Adventure+

Ana, Carla, Becky and Marita from GameBoomers

Konstantinos Dimopoulos from the Gnome’s Lair

Sebastian Grünwald, Ingmar Böke and everybody else at Adventure-Treff

Jack Allin from Adventure Gamers

Sarah Crisman from the Retrochick Retroblog

Chiara Bagnoli from Join The Adventures

Igor Hardy from A Hardy Developer’s Journal

Jonathan Davies and Steve Owen from Games Press

Maximiliano Ferzzola from NeoTeo

Silviu Gheorghe from Gamershell

Barts from Barts News

Santiago Sanguinetti and Andy Nebular

And last, but not at all least, our dedicated group of beta testers, and they know that Senscape wouldn’t be the same without them:

Alkis Polyrakis, Andis Anastasis, Astrid Beulink, Eric Arevalo, Eva Forsom, Eric McConnell, Jeko-Bogoslov Bogoslovov, Michal Necasek, Panayotis Pantazis, Scott Clark, Susan Eder, Santiago De Matos Lima, Terje Kjensli, Tommy Joulin and Valerie Davis

I’m sorry I forgot anyone, but please do let me know if you believe your name should be here!

This is it for todays long post and remember that we will come back to normal next week with more movies, games and just plain deranged stuff as usual!

UPDATE: As it turns out, Asylum is enjoying over 35.000 views in YouTube thanks to an upload by IGN. Groovy!