First of all we have a big announcement to make: we have been in contact with a lot of publishers for Astral Ascent because of the obvious potential of the game. Some of them were major indie publishers with very nice offers and we took time to think about these offers. With time and reflexion we declined all the offers as it became clear to us that we wanted Astral Ascent to be our first self-published game. At this point the project has been funded by French public help, our previous game revenues and of course your incredible support so this is a great opportunity to release the game by ourselves!
It will make development a bit more complicated as publishers provide things such as porting, localization, marketing and financial support but we are very confident about our capacity to overcome these challenges! From sharing the word to making suggestions or reporting bugs, your support has already been precious and will be even more precious in the months to come so thanks again!
This support already gave us extra energy and we have made great progress since the end of the campaign as you can see below:
Global improvements
The playable demo was a great time to see you play (Youtube/Twitch) and collect your suggestions on our Discord Server. It was a fire trial for most of our design ideas and an opportunity to see how solid they were. What we saw was very promising and hopefully we still have room for improvements so here is a list of things we have already added:
- Jump attack: Similar to Dead Cells one (jump + down input), this was highly requested to increase global movement, we made sure that it has a recovery time and moderate damages as it is more a movement action than a direct attack.
- Dash momentum: When you finish a dash your movement speed was resetted to 0, your speed is now set to maximum after a dash if you are pressing a directional input.
- Skip to next spell button: By far the most requested by community feature. Our Spell system allows you to have 4 different spells at the same time but sometimes you may end up forced to use a spell you don't really want to use or that will be very unefficient in the current situation in order to get the next spell. We thought about having a skip to next spell button for a long time but we thought it would lead to have players optimizing one of their spells (and use skip spell button to only use this spell) and letting down the others which would break the spell-building system we are aiming for. Hopefully we found what we believe is an elegant and great design solution to this problem! You now have the skip to next spell button and you can use it as much as you want without cooldown or restrictions BUT you need to use the 4 spells once to make them available again, this way we make sure you still need to use all your spells but you decide the orders depending of the situation, for example skip your single target spell when you are fighting 5 enemies at once (of course this is optional and you can totally play the game without it).
- Spell swap in inventory: We wanted to add this since the beginning but you can now swap your spells from inventory very easily if you ever want to change your spells basic order (You used to need a spell on the ground to do so).
- Spell not consumed if cancelled: During the demo your spell was consumed (rotate to next spell + mana used) if you were hit by enemies, dashed or jumped before the spell actually launched: it felt unfair and frustrating. We made changes and spells are not consumed until they are launched now and it feels much better: you can cancel your spell before it's launched and not loose anything.
- Spell Rarity System: Looting spells feels good but our community thought it would add spices if spells have different levels of rarity and we could not agree more! We spent time to rework our spell loots and now instead of having a fixed list of gambits and locked/unlocked slot on spells we have a list of potential gambits and each gambit now has a value depending of its power, then each spell has randomness on the locked/unlocked slots. Mixing the total value of gambits and slots give us a rarity score to attribute to the spell. We created 4 rarities: common/rare/epic/legendary and it adds a new flavor to each of your drops!
- Magnet attacks: By watching you play the game, we noticed it was sometimes hard to hit enemies (in particular the flying ones). We play the game everyday and did not realize that until now. We have added a "magnet" to closest enemies when auto-attacking. This way it becomes impossible to miss if you were very close to be in range of your auto-attack. This feature is only working if you are pressing directional input toward the enemy and if you are already pretty close to it. It is a bit complicated to explain with words but it feels very good and do not worry, it does not make the game too easy it simply makes you focus on more important things than trying to know if your basic attack is pixel-perfect.
- Astral Keys: Finally, this is something we did not have time to implement in our demo but a very important feature. It is the only feature not done yet but we are currently actively working on it. It will be a new currency that will balance fight and explorations room by connecting them together. This new currency will also add choice and strategy during your runs. But don't worry we will also improve the existing Crystals currency which is not exploited enough in the current version of the game. As we are still working on the Key system we will wait before explaining everything about it but it will be an important and nice change to the dynamic of your runs progression.
Jump Attack
Skip to next spell Button
Spell rarity system (common/rare/epic)
Magnet Attacks
Astral Keys - Work-in-progress feature
From our point of view, game is feeling and playing so much better with all these recent changes. We took opportunity to have fresh feedback to make the changes and we could not be more happy about it. We will try to add these changes when demo is available again (we do not know when yet).
The Red Barrens (🔥 world)
You could see a quick preview of The Red Barrens in our game demo but this was simply a placeholder scene with temporary assets. Creating our 2D worlds require a lot of efforts and various elements:
- Tilemap: A tilemap is the asset pack of all blocks to create a level, it has to handle a lot of different cases of transitions between ground and walls types. It must include seamless variations and in addition to the technical complexity to create it must also take in consideration the lisibility with characters and enemies.
- Assets: We can create the architecture of levels with tilemap but levels would be empty so we need to add different elements on the ground (in addition to nature).
- Backgroud: Finally we need to have backgrounds with variations so it does not feel too repetitive.
The Red Barrens - tilemap
The Red Barrens - lisibility test for enemies
The Red Barrens - Asset list
The Red Barrens - Background example
Once you have all these elements together it creates lively world to explore:
The Red Barrens - Preview
We have also created and integrated 6 (nearly 7) of our 8 new enemies for world 2 and they are so cool to fight! We want to show you 2 of our favorites so far:
This enemy throws red and blue fire balls with different patterns
Work in progress - this enemy will move toward you while making its fire spear rotate around
We want to keep some surprises for later but the world 2 is already a bigger challenge than world 1 for sure! Enemies are more agressive and deal more damages, you will need to improve your builds and character stats during your run to defeat the challenges ahead!
Planning update & Early Access poll
Right now we are developping the game at a really good pace (it will obviously be slower when we will enter the debugging/polish phase) and, to be transparent with you, we want to start world 3 and 4 as soon as possible. The goal is to have a very basic complete game with the 4 worlds in order to balance things with the complete game in mind and not having to re-balance everything at each new world addition.
Building structure of world 3 and 4 now does not change our announced plan of releasing game in Early Access on Steam early 2022 with complete world 1 and 2 available but we would like to have your opinions on what we features you look the most forward for the Early Access release.
If you have some minutes to spare (2-3mins) we made a poll to collect your opinion about the features you want the most in the Early Access: https://forms.gle/o7GBMHCshc1iHPFdA
Be sure that this does not change the final game content knowing better your expectations will also us to focus more on what you want to have specifically for Early Access release.
Don't forget about our Backerkit shop and our Discord Server,
Have an excellent day,
- The Hibernian Workshop Team