Hey everyone,
It's Nareice here from the Miami Avalon team!
First off, a massive thank you to everyone who played Ascend during Steam Next Fest. Your support, kind words, and feedback meant the world to us. We’ve been going through all your comments and bugs you've been posting, suggestions, and we're doing our best to prioritise what we can fix while continuing to work on the full game coming this August!!
As a fully unfunded, micro indie studio working on Ascend in our spare time, your encouragement is what keeps us going. We can’t patch everything all at once (though we wish we could, honestly!), but with each update, we’re aiming to make the game more polished and the experience we set out for Ascend to be.
Update 1.4 includes improvements to the Leo and Sagittarius puzzles, controller fixes (though we're working towards full controller support), and a whole bunch of animation and sound design polish that makes the mountain feel more alive than ever.
Here’s what’s new:
Leo
You couldn’t move the camera when holding the Leo mirror. This is now fixed.
Spark didn’t appear anymore on the telescope, indicating it’s broken.
The Twilight interaction cutscene was adjusted slightly.
Updated the Twilight setting to UP on the controller.
The telescope had no interaction.
Mirror rotation continued to play if left and right are spammed. This should now be fixed.
Implemented the Leo puzzle, and all sounds are now completed.
Shortened the time between mirror hit sounds.
Sagittarius
Candle lamps in the library posed an immersion issue. The candles have been moved away from the books!
You drift left when using the controller on the blue bookcase. This shouldn’t happen anymore. Interacting with the Sagittarius Bow has been corrected.
Added floating dialogue when near Sagittarius bookcase, which are riddles connecting to the books you should place.
General
End-of-demo menu was broken.
On the demo end screen, none of the options on the UI could be pressed.
Added an interaction on the crystal for the Leo puzzle hint.
Added player footsteps to animations.
You couldn’t move the tarot cards with the left analogue stick.
Aurora's eyes needed some adjusting. Our girl was looking at the sky all the time! Cleaned up the level so the mountain came back into view in the background.
Switched the close button to the B button on the controller.
You can't rotate objects with the controller's left analogue stick.
The controller is uneasy to control when moving the mirrors
No controller support for NPC interaction. Now fixed.
You have to press the left face button to interact with the NPCs.
The icon for top face changed to Xbox controller.
Quest UI now doesn’t show up in the cutscenes
Updated footstep system.
Added cloth foley sounds to animations
Added hover/unhover to inventory UI.
Stopped Tarot Card Hint sound being triggered.
Quest bar and book updates.
An update to the final animations.
Jump is less floaty.
Idle adjusted on animations.
We've added Credits! Thank you to everyone who worked on Ascend so far! <3
That’s everything for this update! We'll land one more big demo update before the full release or any hotfixes as needed. Thank you again for climbing with us and being part of this journey!!
It means more than we can say.
If you come across any issues, feel free to reach out via the Steam boards. We're working on having Discord up and running soon. We're always listening. <3
Nareice