Hello everybody, I have some very interesting news to share about the remastered story!

It's been a while since I wrote, back before Christmas when I released the Escape Update. It could seem from my silence that I have been passive in any further development, but I assure you that I have been anything but passive.

During the past year, I have been rewriting the entirety of the story in A-Star Theft, only keeping the general premise and characters, while completely rethinking how to tell it. As I have earlier explained, I was never happy with how the original story turned out. I have since then finished the script and worked on better character development, and it is looking promising so far.

BUT NOW -

- I am very happy to announce that all new missions have finished their level design phase. This means that every map is playable and functional as individual levels, somewhat like Freeplay mode. The next step is to connect them all through the story and dialog. This will work like the current story, with a safe house for preparing and conversing with your crew. One of the most exciting things for me is to get an opportunity to make actually identifiable characters. I think that the current characters all feel the same, like I took a set of traits and randomly assigned them to a character depending on what I felt like on any given day. A brown sludge of generic goons. The new dialog written so far will much better portray everyone as unique and interesting individuals, with mannerisms and opinions worth remembering.

The remastered story also has an added benefit of giving you much - MUCH - better designed maps to play. While the primary motivation for doing this is to create an emotional experience I think the game currently lacks, my experience as a level designer has drastically increased since 2020. There is no doubt you will see an increase in level design quality in the new story missions.

To get all of this working, I have had to redesign several major systems, including the Dialog, Objective, and Save file systems. The Dialog and Objective systems now operate with JSON files for maximum flexibility, and will support localization in the future. These changes also allow me to work faster and be more organized, as JSON code is more easy to read than my stinky ten year old self-made garbage.

So how is it going? Very well, I would say. Most of my current focus is on making a great first impression, with an enhanced introductory mission that involves more story, better set dressing, and dynamic help texts. I intend to release this map as an early showcase of the new story once it's ready for testing.

PLAY TESTERS ARE WELCOME
I will prepare for this in the coming weeks, and update you once it's time for beta testing.

A new Freeplay map is coming

Beyond the remaster, I am still creating new content for Freeplay as well. The Silver Spoon Casino will be the 15th Freeplay mission, and will join the 4 other expert maps in the next few days. This map is a colorful and luxurious Casino and Hotel with a lot of opportunities for strategizing and experimentation. It will feature one of the highest security vaults yet created for A-Star Theft - hopefully an exciting puzzle to solve for all stealth enjoyers.

I look forward to showing you more as the story gets developed further!

Thank you for reading.