Astral Ascent News

Last month we shared many design updates and a lot of changes all around the place and this month makes no exception: we did it again! And what better way to discover last changes than to discover them yourselves?



It is now possible for you to play the game right now through our Playtest versions of the game on Steam.

We are making it available for backers and playtesters only (if you are not a backer yet you can pre-order on our Backerkit shop then contact us on our Discord Server) to get your feedback on the new mechanics and how you feel about the game even if it has a lot of work-in-progress elements. For now it is focused on an improved version of our demo but we hope to maintain these Playtests open during the coming months to share with you more content and get your feedback about it.
Embark now for playtests!

HOW TO PARTICIPATE
First, join our Discord Server. Once you claimed your backer role, you can see #playtests-register channel and get a special playtester role there that gives you access to private #playtests channel where you will be guided and receive a Steam Playtest key.


We are now working on Astral Ascent for more than 2 years and it became clear to us that rogue-lites fun comes from the variety of situations you can find and this variety comes from iterations. We keep improving every aspect of the game and it turns out absolutely great! Most team members are playing the game on their free time because they are loving the how the game evolves so we think we are on the right track.

Here is a selection of our recent work:

Virgo animations are complete, she will be a very fast boss, be prepared!
Virgo - one of the 12 Zodiacs!

We have reworked the hub currency, it is now called "Sun Pieces" as we thought it would be easier to talk about it if it has a name and an unique shape and color. It comes with a new currency named Yalee Tickets for the stylist. As the stylist upgrades are only visuals it felt weird to use the same currency than the one that improves your gameplay. Yalee tickets can be found during your runs!
Debug to test new currencies

Stress-test of the reworked version of the freeze effect. It is now slowing down enemies before reaching the 10 stacks to freeze!


Burn effects now set stacks on nearby enemies when exploding and it can become very devastating!


We have also created balloons for merchants as it felt like a perfect way of locomotion in this aerial world (and also because we thought it was cool!).


We did not remember this narrative piece and even our Narrative designer did not remember it writing it but who wants to play Chesskers?


We are on all fronts as we now have all enemies from worlds 4 designed and all enemies from world 3 coded. We think that we will need to work on a lot of different matters once we release the game in early access and we want to deliver frequent updates with new content so it is important to us to start making this content before the early access release.
Concept of world 4 enemy

We have created a lot of new effects to add the variety we talked about earlier. Here are 3 of these new effects :

1. yalee madness: every spell launched spawns a yalee for a short period of time
   
2. transe: spells cost no mana for a short period of time
   
3. movespeed: player moves faster for a short period of time
   

There is more effects and the most interesting part is of course the combinaison and builds you can create by mixing them!


New work-in-progress elements for The Garden
Papa Yalee new background

This is secret for now!

We hope you like these monthly updates! On our side it is always great to look behind and see all the progress that has been made recently.


Don't forget about our Backerkit shop and our Discord Server to discuss about the game development,

Have an excellent day,

- The Hibernian Workshop Team

Last month we mainly focused on new enemies and a new boss fight but this month contains a wide range of improvements, this bouncing toad fellow is very excited:
We really love this world 3 enemy, it has became one of our mascot!


We have added a giant crystal you can destroy to gain crystals money, it feels very satisfying to do.


We have also reworked the Shards Altar. Old behavior: it used to give you 1 shard for free 3 times when holding button. It took a lot of time and it was slowing run pace.
New behavior: you only need to interact once to get the 3 shards but they now cost you crystals to get. You can purchase as many as you want but these altars share a crystal counter price that increases for your whole run!


The altar also has a new look that we did not implement yet

One more mechanic we added is related to Fight Rooms (waves of enemies) where Zodiacs can appear and give you extra challenges (more elites enemies, don't get hit during the fight etc). If you success you will get even more rewards but if you fail you won't get anything so be careful!


Finally, we added a new enemy that will try to run away and escape, if you can capture it, you will get special rewards!



We have done an important rework with difficulty points. We wanted to have it in our Kickstarter demo but had not enough time to implement it.

First thing is that difficulty points that used to be red skulls in the demo are now blue stars and instead of being limited from 1 to 3 points they are now from 1 to 6 and display the actual difficulty of the room instead of a difficulty based on current progression like it used to be. (it was confusing because a first room difficulty 3 was much easier than a last level difficulty 1)


These difficulty points can be used in dedicated altars that can give you crystals or astral keys (we explain keys very soon). You can find these altars in merchant rooms and in first rooms of each new worlds.


You can also unlock the astral keys when defeating fight rooms:


But what to do with these keys? At specific moments you will be able to spend either one key to have a small reward or three keys to have a stone altar or relic altar.

This looks a bit complicated on paper but it plays really well! The design decision behind this change comes from our will to create a link between different room types. We want main rewards to be in Exploration Rooms but we think Fight Rooms (waves of enemies) are really fun too so now to maximize your explorations you need keys that you can find in the other room type. It makes room choices even more strategic too.




Our art team thinks that world 1 is visually outdated in comparison with next worlds (all worlds are nearly complete) so we started to improve the first assets. Constance, our first intern since the creation of the studio, is making great work about it:


We are also working on "defensive spells", we had gravity ball & 2 more in the Kickstarter demo but they were not good enough but really few people used them so we are completely reworking them.

First spell we made is a teleport:


We call them defensive because they do not deal damage to enemies but it can be movement spells, adding effects stacks to enemies and even more: anything that does not deal damage. Also they use cooldown instead of mana points. If you have any suggestions for these spells we would be really happy to know about it in our #suggestions channel on our Discord Server.

We are also making a lot of new gambits and relics for Early Access, we know some were not good enough on Kickstarter demo so we removed them and we are working on new ones like these auto-target missiles:


Last small element we added is a "snap-jump" when jumping on platforms: you will get on it much easier.



We aim to have most of these new mechanics in our new demo of the game that should be up around October 2021. Your feedback were very useful during the Kickstarter demo and we really value having your opinion on the game so we created a new channel on our Discord Server. Once you claimed your backer role (directly contact an admin to get it if you backed on Backerkit shop), you can see #playtests-register channel and get a special playtester role there that gives you access to private #playtests channel where we will ask people to join exclusive playtests sessions during the coming months.


Don't forget about our Backerkit shop and our Discord Server to discuss about the game development,

Have an excellent day,

- The Hibernian Workshop Team

Time for a new update, we will trying to keep the pace of a new update every month to keep sharing with you what is happening on our side for Astral Ascent.



This is it, all Red Barrens (world 2) enemies are implemented and they are amazing! We learned so much since the Fragmented Plains (world 1) and made enemies with better patterns and better feelings as you can see below:

Be careful of his fire spear, it does not only hit once.

Complete rework of the Wrath Spirit

It took us time and dedication to reach the level of quality we wanted to have and we think it was really worth it when we see the results and how fun and clear these enemies fights are.

It is obviously a great news but it made us go back to first world to improve the existing enemies. We mostly did visual improvements but not only as we even reworked a complete enemy as you can see below:

We improved a lot the visual elements on the projectile and the enemy for the Log-bear.

Wooden Guardian now spawns several Black Seeds at once but has a limit of simultaneously controlled minions. Also, his laser timing remains the same but the visual feedback appears a bit before and follows you for better comprehension.

We reworked 2 of the 3 attacks of the Sylvanian Protector as we felt his attacks were as good as they should be. He is a bit more dangerous than he was and he is better feedbacked.

As we said in previous update, we are currently aiming to produce a lot of content very fast before polishing everything at once before the Early Access release so it means new worlds, new enemies, new bosses and new features. For example, we have already all our enemies concepts for World 3, you can see 2 examples below:





These new enemies are very nice and we have great mechanics ideas for them, we cannot wait to show more as we are going to code them in the coming weeks!


World 3 is also our most beautiful world to date and we are going to work back on first world to improve it so it can be as beautiful as we initially wanted.

This water world makes us experimenting new things such as dynamic water and water reflection for background elements.

Water reflection concept

Dynamic water concept


Apart from his giant axe, the most disturbing thing when fighting Leo is how much he is enjoying it.

Leo attack animation

Same attack implemented

But take care, if he starts taking the fight seriously well... there won't be much you can do to survive.

Leo ultimate animation

As we still very much ahead of our planning, we are making exciting new features and improvements all around the game. We have so much more to show for next updates.





Don't forget about our Backerkit shop and our Discord Server to discuss about the game development,

Have an excellent day,

- The Hibernian Workshop Team

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:



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).



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!

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

Last 48h to grab your physical copy & support us & to try our free demo if you did not already!

Click here to know more ☄️

If you play the demo, don't hesitate to come on our Discord Server to share what your thoughts about it.

Thanks for being part of this journey and have a great day 😊

Louis