iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

Perhaps since any status updates on Astralathe for a while would likely just be "Yep I brought over some more code, still going well", maybe I'll take the chance to make some threads about this sidequest talking about some of those discoveries in a bit more detail? Perhaps? Potentially? Mayhap?

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

I've been doing the responsible thing and making sure to update the TCRF article with many of these findings, of course. Although...

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

However, in a very short time both this tool and my understanding of the game have improved significantly. Most importantly, it actually *works* now, and I've already been learning a LOT of interesting quirks and oddities about the game that I'm not sure were documented before.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

This, as it turns out, would not be the last time this game would manage to scare the hell out of me while researching or working on this. I'm quite certain the most recent time won't be the last either.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

For some reason one of the first things I ended up working on was making a level select tool to teleport around the game. My first attempt at this... was not exactly a success but the ways it broke the game sure were interesting. (Why yes I did jump when I first saw this horrific thing)

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

Silent Hill 4 is another one of those games that's actually *really* convenient to reverse engineer, and a large part of this is because there's a near-final E3 build with debugging symbols intact! It's for the PS2, of course, but the SH4 PC port pretty much matches the PS2 code.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

In returning to it, I gave it a bit of a similar treatment to Astralathe. I ported the hooking system to safetyhook, brought over a bunch of other infrastructure from my time on other projects, and then just kinda did whatever I felt like.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

That ImGui implementation would actually end up being how I finally figured out how to actually make ImGui work in a project like this, and x86Sacraments' D3D hooks would end up forming the basis for Astralathe's D3D hooks and ImGui implementation.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

Aside from having what might be the best thematic project name I'll ever come up with, it's actually a somewhat important project! Last time I worked on it, it was a fairly barebones thing that would simply show an ImGui debug display over the game.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 13/08/2026

Progress on the Astralathe refactor is still going well, but to keep myself sane I have been making sure to occupy myself with other projects inbetween. Most recently, I decided to revisit a project I've had on the backburner for a very long time now, a Silent Hill 4 project named x86Sacraments.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

After all, I think that if I hadn't started publicly documenting my Psychonauts-related efforts years ago, I wouldn't have made it this far along. So, it's a tried and true method. I've said it a few times, but thanks again for following along. It means a lot.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

I'm feeling quite good about it overall. I'll likely post more updates as I make progress, as I've found in the past that doing so tends to make it a bit easier for me to maintain work on a project.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

I've tried this whole refactor thing a couple times in the past. I even started on a blog post about it, but each time I've found myself unable to muster the motivation for one reason or another. This latest attempt is making it much further though.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

Mind you, I'm not literally scrapping everything. There's certain parts of the Astralathe 2 codebase that are perfectly fine and can be brought into the new one with minimal or no tweaking, so that's convenient.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

Once that's done, I expect progress to start moving along a bit faster as it becomes the fairly simple matter of just going through all of the hooks and bringing them over into the new codebase.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

It's not super far along at the moment, but that's to be expected, because all my efforts thus far have been focused on laying the sorely-needed foundation to do the whole thing right. Figuring out how to structure things, and so on.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

Which does mean that yes, despite the flashy 3.0 naming, Astralathe 3.0 probably shouldn't be expected to have any big new features or anything, unless I get particularly ambitious. But, it will make working on new features much easier down the line.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

In fact, ideally, from an end-user perspective, using the first release of 3.0 should be functionally identical to the latest Astralathe 2 build.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

If none of what I just said means anything to you, that's fine. At the end of the day, this change shouldn't actually have any real user-facing difference.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

I've been using safetyhook on a different project for a while and I must say I've grown quite fond of it. PolyHook2 isn't bad, but I've personally been finding safetyhook just a whole lot nicer to use. The way it does things works better for me.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

Another large part of the rewrite it moving to a new hooking library. At present, Astralathe primarily uses a cursed combination of PolyHook2 alongside a seperate library for handling mid-function hooks that PolyHook2 isn't suited for. The new library, safetyhook, can handle both cases on its own.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

For "Astralathe 3.0", I'm going to be applying a lot of the lessons I've learned since starting. When I say it's a ground-up rewrite, I do mean it. My first step was deleting every single file in the codebase to start fresh.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

The cumbersome nature of this codebase, wherein I usually need to find a place within said god file to put new code, has made it a nightmare to work on, and that alone is a large part of why I've not been working on it as much.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

Those decisions have, at this time, made the whole thing nigh unmaintainable. A truckload of the core logic, hooks, and so forth are contained in a 2123 line god file which has no right being as huge as it is.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

The earliest versions of Astralathe were build to be purely functional. I did things in the most direct, messy way possible just to make it *work* first. Which is a good approach, sometimes, and it worked well for me, but we've far gone past that point.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

Anyway... Astralathe is kind of a long running project by this point, and as time has gone on it's accumulated a lot of dust, silly design quirks, and generally gotten a bit too big for its britches. It started out very small, when I was much less experienced, but a lot has changed since then.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

Now, if you happen to recall seeing an earlier version of this entire thread in which I flubbed my own versioning and mistakenly, repeatedly said "2.0" instead, despite 2.0 releasing over a year ago... You're definitely mistaken, that was another timeline. Never happened!

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 26/06/2026

It's been a while since I posted anything pertaining to Astralathe, because there's not been much news. Well, there is now news. I've been working on a complete ground-up rewrite of Astralathe, which I think I'm going to end up calling Astralathe 3.0.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 19/06/2026

Still, I'm always a bit torn up that we don't have the original unedited render with Dart.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 19/06/2026

It wasn't until a bunch of texture sources were accidentally released that we got this image in full, but we did have part of it: It was cropped to use as Raz's profile picture on Raz's *official MySpace account*, which was a thing the characters had. web.archive.org/web/20130306...

web.archive.org

Razputin

Razputin's profile on Myspace, the leading social entertainment destination powered by the passion of our fans.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 19/06/2026

When they switched the protagonist to Raz, they kept this art but humorously edited to feature a polaroid of Raz taped over Dart. This, we *do* have.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 19/06/2026

The background being used here has some fun history. I've talked about it before, but I'll gladly do so again. Originally, this had been a render of D'Artagnan fighting some enemies in Gloria's Theatre. We don't have the original render, but it was based on this concept art.

Concept art of D'Artagnan fighting enemies in Gloria's Theatre.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 19/06/2026

This one from the gallery is fun though! This is the debug level select screen. It's extremely difficult to make most of the entries out, but it starts with a couple entries prefixed "FRED". There's references to "FRED" all over the place in many of the game's scripts.

Another photograph of an early development build of Psychonauts being played.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 19/06/2026

This one shows up in the actual article. It's clearly in the "Nightmare" level (which evolved into "Brain Tumbler Experiment") and it's on "build 0175". Too blurry to make much else out though.

A photo of a man in a paper bag mask holding a controller in front of a TV. On the TV is an indistinct screenshot of an early build of Psychonauts. The text "Li-Po Build 0175" is visible.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 19/06/2026

In this article, they link their 2002 "Return to Double Fine", wherein they visit the offices of Double Fine. It's a nice article, but the images and gallery are noteworth because they have a couple of very blurry photos of a Psychonauts build running!

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 19/06/2026

Apparently the Mojo Psychonauts screenshots page was broken at some point but is fixed now, which is great because it's a nice source of old P1 screenshots (all of which I have archived already and many of which are watermarked, but still!) "What’s that brain truck all about?!" That's Telekinesis!

The raw image file for the same brain tow truck icon.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 24/04/2026

I had this thought too, with each location being a candidate location for the fight. I was going to posit this but ended up deciding against it because some thought makes it seem unlikely. The "hidden" arena for instance definitely seems like an area you were expected to navigate the level to reach.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

On the off chance any part of this actually *did* get built, it'd be cool to see it some day. Otherwise it's a shame, but understandable.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

This whole thing just really has me wondering what you would've been doing in this design. A version of the asylum that you could fully explore in a manner more akin to the campgrounds would've been really cool but I cannot imagine what there would have been to see.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

And of course in the final game it would appear that "Gloria's Trellis" was also moved onto this path.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

The only thing I can possibly point to is the fact that the art shows a path going around the right of the asylum building, which is somewhat similar to the path to the courtyard in the final game. In this art though, a "small topiary garden" is taking the place of where the courtyard would end up.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

Pretty much all the documentation we have points to a structure akin to the final game's. The playtest walkthrough for the asylum dated February 2002 (though last modified in 2003) already splits the Asylum into the areas seen in the final game.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

I wonder if any of this ever made it to the point of being tried out in-engine. There's no evidence for it, I don't think, but there's also very little concrete information on this era of development in general.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

I don't think I'm confident in subscribing to any interpretation without official word on what the original plan actually was for this area of the game. The "hidden arena" at the end of the hedge garden is interesting too.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

What confuses me quite a lot thought are the different marked "arenas". I have no idea what these might be for. The most natural interpretation is as combat arenas but that would be pretty unusual because, well, combat isn't really ever a factor in the real world in Psychonauts.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

This is a pretty big revelation, and I had no idea that this was ever planned to be the case. I think this concept art may be the first time this concept has been known, unless the developers mentioned it at some point elsewhere?

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

The most straightforward interpretation is that once upon a time the Asylum may have been envisioned as a true second hub, more open in a manner akin to the campgrounds. The art shows a big, interconnected area in which the Asylum itself is just the central landmark.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

It's a VERY different variation of the asylum grounds from what they ended up going with, and it has a lot different going on. That being said, it's actually a bit tricky to interpret and I'm not 100% sure what to make of it.

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Jill @jill.scrungus.club · 22/04/2026

I didn't have time to comment on it when it was posted, but this concept art that was posted by DF on this site is quite interesting. Not sure I've seen it before?

Concept art of the Asylum Grounds from Psychonauts. It shows a very open area, with various parts labelled.

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Reposted by Jill

Double Fine @doublefine.com · 19/04/2026

🥳🎂Happy 21st Birthday to Psychonauts!🎂🥳 Snuck into the vaults and grabbed some original concept art (by the amazing Peter Chan) to share—what's YOUR favorite mental world in Psychonauts? 💚🧠🌀

Colorful concept art sketches for the Running of the Bulls area in Black Velvetopia (a level in the game Psychonauts). Patterned narrow alleys with tiny figures, posters and a rolling cart are featured.

Concept art of the Asylum Grounds from the game
Psychonauts, showing an asylum building, paths, ponds, green gardens and labeled points of interest.

Concept sketch from the Milkman Conspiracy level in the game Psychonauts. Suburban houses on curved and twisted elevated roads float among clouds.

Comcept art of the finale for Mills's Dance Party from the game Psychonauts. Stylized figures dance on glowing yellow-orange discs around a central pink orb with two figures.

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