Astral Ascent News

Hello everyone,

Time has come, we can finally share with you the Reveal Trailer of the game!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We have recently worked hard to prepare the big event ahead of us and we really hope you are as excited as we are.

To celebrate we will have a FREE DEMO for you to try the game (PC / MAC) on Steam. You will be able to play online or with a friend in local co-op if you want to.

We will be showing a lot of development elements during the coming weeks, until then, see you next month for Astral Ascent's FREE DEMO!✨

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

Louis

Hello everyone,

This is our first update of 2021 so all the team joins me to wish you a very happy new year!

We are very excited of what is going to happen, it is going to be the year of Astral Ascent !✨

Our team new year resolutions:

• Resolution 1 - improve our Steam Page
  
  
  Maybe we did it again and improved once more everything up visually, we are now very happy about the quality level and decided it was time to show it on our Steam Page that had very old graphics on it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Resolution 2 - improving playtests
  
  We started a new playtest routine by making new version of the game every friday to make a playtest session with the team. It is very important to make we keep an eye on the game quality and to train ourselves making frequent updates when needed!
  
  Playtest sessions are captured to be sure we have all bugs recorded and ready to be eradicated!
  It is also a great opportunity to witness the progress we make and capture gifs and screens!
  
  
  
  
  
• Resolution 3 - have a great logo
  
  
  
  How to start better new year than with an updated logo?
  It has been a collaborative and iterative effort in the team before everyone agreed on this version.
  It really reflects a lot about the game and its intention and a few secrets are hidden inside. We will use it more and more in our communication.
  
  
• Resolution 4 - make intense teasing
  
  
  So... we clearly have big news on the way for Astral Ascent and we cannot wait to share them with you but we still need to wait a bit, we promise that you will not wait too long!😊
  

If you want to talk about these news with community, you are more than welcomed to join our kind community on our Discord server.

If you have not already, you can wishlist & follow the game on our Steam page.

• Wishlists give us more visibility and help the game get known
  
• Follow notifies you when we release updates and news for the game
  

As a small indie team that wants to self-publish, this help is very appreciated, thanks a lot!

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

Louis

Hello everyone and let's see what are the most recent news on Astral Ascent !✨




Development goes well and our team is more motivated than ever mainly because we can see the potential of the game and we actually have ton of fun playing the current prototypes.

Also, we now have a good idea of every game mechanics we want to have in the game, it means that our game vision is strong and that we know toward what kind of content we want to aim.

This seems like something basic but it actually takes a lot of time before finding all the puzzle pieces and the right way to assemble them together to make a coherent and innovative game.




In the game you will be able to collect a vast variety of spells, we actually aim to have a hundred spells!
The different types of spells are:

Defensive spells:

you can only have one at a time that works with cooldown without using mana
Example of defensive spell that groups all enemies together

Classic spells:

You will always have 4 at the same type but you will be able to find a lot of different ones while exploring during your runs. It will be your job to find the best synergies between all the different spells to create the most efficient combos.
Spells are either common to all characters Ayla launches a classic spell: 8 fireballs that explode at impact! This

Or they are linked to a specific character (in that case, only him/her can equip it but do not worry you won't find spells of characters that are not playing, even in coop!)
Kiran specific spell: lighting punch!

Ayla specific spell: ethereal knives go directly to nearest enemy in range!



It is a long progress to find the final artistic direction for a game, even if we now have a bit of experience after releasing Dark Devotion, it remains a very time consuming task.
It takes effort from the artists and the developers that integrate the art to confirm it is looking as desired.

Some elements are good on first time and some other need a lot of iterations before being at the standard of quality we expect for the game.
OLD TREES of the game, made by Alexandre!

NEW TREES of the game, also made by Alexandre!

It has also been the case with our background assets that evolved a lot since we started it
Mixed assets of the game, made by Gaël!

These new assets with our new light system are trully awesome, you can see it there.

But this rule also applies to more generic systems, in particular progression for design and interface for art so when you mix both for our hub ( The Garden ) you have some of the most spectacular iterations progress we have done since the start.
OLD MERCHANT INTERFACE to unlock skills.

NEW MERCHANT INTERFACE to unlock skills.

And it's even more impressive once in movement but we cannot unlock too big gifs there and let's keep some secrets for now!

Even if some things still have room for some extra polish we currently pushed every aspects of the game to reach this new level of quality that we aim to get for the game release.



As previously announced, we are collaborating with the talented Dale North for the musics of the game and we have received some of the musics and they are absolutely perfectly our aerial, fantastic, nature oriented game vision! If you want to listen to a sneak peak of our hub ( The Garden ) you can listen it here!

We also have another surprise with the great Romain Rope, our sound designer on the project, that started to give life to our enemies and playable characters: things are shaping up!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoKLQAHiVC4



There is obviously a LOT of things that we are not showing because we want to keep as much surprise as possible on some key features but I could not resist sharing this:


Can some of you guess what is the purpose of this? I am very curious of your ideas!




If you want to talk about these news with community, you are more than welcomed to join our kind community on our Discord server.


If you have not already, you can wishlist & follow the game on our Steam page.

• Wishlists give us more visibility and help the game get known
  
• Follow notifies you when we release updates and news for the game
  

As a small indie team that wants to self-publish, this help is very appreciated, thanks a lot!



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

Louis

Hello everyone and welcome! ✨

This is our first news post for our new game project named Astral Ascent which we are really excited about!

If you are not familiar with the game or our team we made an introduction newsletter that you can find here.

Don't hesitate to register to our monthly newsletter to get more frequent news about the project. Or visit our Discord server to see the newsletter-archive and be part of our lovely community!



Things are moving really fast recently and we are really happy about it.
We finished a long pre-production phase and a slow start as we were building our main systems and polishing our art style and direction but now we reached an higher velocity with a better synergy within the team.

This news will highly focus on our first world visuals and artistic direction.


Basic combo execution for Kiran attacks




The 12 Zodiacs you will face are splitted among 4 different worlds :

Earth
Fire
Water
Wind

​We decided to start our adventure with Earth world as it gives a really positive and fantastic tone to the game.

You can see Earth World concepts made by Gaël below :
Earth world concepts by Gaël


We made a collective effort to have a very natural and aerial first world to explore.

The concepts made by Gaël were really fitting our common vision of this fantastic world we had in mind.



Alexandre improved our art direction with more detailed assets


Gaël created more props for the game for special rooms(old trees before rework there)


Relixes took time to implement more natural grass movements when walking over


The Garden peddler provides new spells to unlock for your characters




You will face many dangers during your astral journey and you should never let your guard off because even basic enemies can decrease your health and get you closer to death.


Wildgrass teleport animation by Alexandre


Wildgrass teleports when far away and performs an attack




Sometimes things to show do not really fit any categories so here are some bonus gifs below:



Created level design ingredients such as this timer platform

Looting a lot of crystals to verify collisions with walls & ground


The Garden peddler has acolytes you will be able to meet during your ascension


If you want to talk about these news with community or with the devs, feel free to join our Discord server.

Have a great day 😊

Louis