Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles News

Hey Oracles,

As I mentioned in the last announcement we are developing the post release updates of Astrea a little bit slower, I was sick in the last announcement and I'm still sick now, one month later, sadly. My back still hurts a lot and my burnout is not better and when for some reason I get some inspiration to get back to work in the game, my back start hurting in 1/2 hours of work, really frustrating.
I'm already taking care of myself and hope to get healed as soon as possible, hope after the holidays I will be better, I'm looking forward to work on the Daily Runs!
I will be on vacation for a whole month now and the rest of the team will have 2 week vacation during the holidays, but we will be around in case any emergency happens or a cool discussion appears xD
One last thing about this matter, I really want to thanks all the kind words that were posted on the last post and thanks for understanding that my health needed to be a priority right now, it really means a lot to me, I felt really relieved, because I was scared this could be a big problem for Astrea. Thanks so much for your patience.

Felipe is still working normally on the post release updates and will do his best to improve the game with QoL and bug fixes. But because he is only one person we couldn't tackle as many bugs as we wanted. But he did make a lot of improvements to the controller itself, please feel free to share your feedback about the controller changes, if guys have other suggestions that we can do it we will do it =D

Also in this patch I tried to make some balancing specially for Moonie since she felt too weak on high anomaly levels, I focused on buffing her starting kit, Enhance and Doom build, since the Hex build seems fine. We will keep trying to balance out Astrea until it feels super polished and all oracles and enemies feels fair.

And one super important thing, this patch brings a whole new proofread to Korean and Traditional Chinese, those two localizations were clearly with big problems where lot of descriptions were impossible to understand, but now we hope to have fixed those problems and they should be in a better state now. Please feel free to give feedback about the localization on those two languages.

[h2]Patch Notes[/h2]
[h3]General[/h3]

• Added a highlight to the current action from actions descriptions that changes the current action depending on a condition (Example: Eclipse Blast from Sothis).
  
• Now the graphics settings is saved differently for each specific device.
  
• Controller Improvements
  
  • Added a highlight to the current selection and improved controller navigation.
    
  • Now it is possible to hide Bottled Aurora, Astral Calling, Void Seek and Precision UIs to navigate through the battle UI (dice on hand, virtues, enemies, etc.).
    
  • Skip reward and leave shop button now changed to a hold input instead of having to move to the button.
    
  • Now whenever you select a reward or shop item, the controller highlight will move to the confirm button automatically.
    
  • Added an input for switching sentinel UI from sentinel die to sentinel sprite instead of having to select the Show Sentinel/Show Dice button.
    
  • Added an input glyph to open draw pool, open discard and end turn.
    
  • Now it is not possible to end player turn by pressing Select when the current selection is the End Turn button, to end player turn is necessary to press the input shown on top of End Turn button. Changed to this way to avoid player ending his turn accidentally.
    
  • Now when entering the map the current selection goes to the leftmost enabled node option instead of going to the leftmost node option even when it was not a enabled node option.
    
  • Improved blessings controller navigation when player has more than 12 blessings.
    

[h3]Balancing[/h3]
Neutral

• Buffed Trickster Cross-Staff Star Blessing Purification from 3 to 5.
  
• Buffed Protection dice values. Added Draw 1 to 2 die faces.
  

[h3]Moonie[/h3]

• Moonie starting Dice Pool reworked. Added a Minor Enhance. Removed a Minor Purify.
  
• Buffed Minor Enhance Starter Die, changed from 3 x Enhance 1, 3 x Corrupt 3 to, 4 x Enhance 1, 2 x Corrupt 3.
  
• Buffed Stellar Cleanse Starter Die, changed from 1 x Area Purify 1, 1 x Area Enemy Purify 1, 2 x Purify 1, 1 x Purify Enemy 1, 1 x Corrupt 1 to 2 x Area Purify 1, 2 x Area Enemy Purify 1, 2 x Purify 1.
  
• Buffed Research die values. Added a Risky Die.
  
• Buffed Dark Side Risky Die value from 10 to 12 Doom.
  
• Buffed Baleful Hoot dice values.
  
• Buffed Shadow Mastery dice values.
  
• Buffed Lunar Alignment dice values.
  
• Buffed Knowledge Outburst dice. Changed Risky Die to Balanced Die with 2 x Knowledge Outburst + Draw 1, 2 x Knowledge Outburst, 1 x Area Corrupt 1, 1 x Player Self Corrupt 3. Buffed Epic Die to 4 x Knowledge Outburst + Draw 1, 2 x Knowledge Outburst.
  
• Buffed Cosmic Wisdom. Added Draw 1 to 2 die faces.
  
• Buffed Hollow Nest Star Blessing, increased Research gain from 1 to 2.
  

[h3]Cellarius[/h3]

• Buffed Twin Smash Virtue value from 3 to 4.
  
• Buffed Golden Tooth Star Blessing, increased Empower gain from 1 to 2.
  

[h3]Hevelius[/h3]

• Buffed Scrap Shield dice values.
  
• Nerfed Static Alternator Star Blessing from 3 Charged Body for each 2 Safe Die to 3 Charged Body for each 3 Safe Die.
  

[h3]Orion[/h3]

• Buffed Alchemist Missile dice values.
  
• Buffed Alchemist Combustion dice values.
  
• Buffed Alchemy Starter Die, changed from 1 x Alchemist Combustion 1, 2 x Alchemist Missile 1, 2 x Purify 1, 1 x Corrupt 3 to 1 x Alchemist Combustion 1, 1 x Alchemist Missile 2, 3 x Alchemist Missile 1, 1 x Corrupt 3.
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Fixed wrong minimum Sentinel Shop value after getting a reward Sentinel during the run.
  
• Fixed color text wrong on New Sentinel Shop after upgrading a sentinel.
  
• Fixed Uncaged Anomaly Boss Battle softlocking when their minions were defeated with Thundering Riposte by dodging Reality Disruption and Uncaged Anomaly tries to respawn his minions in the same turn.
  
• Fixed Astrea Level 0 not being tinted in blue when Anomaly Level 0 is defeated.
  
• Fixed Confuse Multiplier being removed even when Confuse action didn't crit.
  

[h3]Localization Fixes[/h3]

• Japanese, fixed many ponctuation bugs.
  
• Korean, a whole new proofread was done.
  
• Traditional Chinese, a whole new proofread was done.
  

Happy Holidays 🎄✨🎄

May Astrea bless you 💙 ❤️
- Leonardo Castanho, community manager and lead dev of Astrea

Hey, Oracles!

Steam Awards starts now and I want to pitch to you guys to vote for Astrea for Most Innovative Gameplay.

Steam Awards voting starts now! The Steam Awards are a community-voted celebration of the best games on Steam, announced every year. There are many categories that we can vote Astrea for however it is best we unite to vote on one category for Astrea!!

We're asking players to band together and vote Astrea for Most Innovative Gameplay.

Dual damage that gives players a difficult choice to heal themself or damage the enemy with purify or vice versa with corruption. Virtues reward players who can balance their corruption levels and bring more tools to the oracle. Every run you choose the weak by reliable safe dice, or the powerful but possibly devastating risky dice when building a deck.

These are just some of the sweet innovations that Astrea brings to roguelikes that we want you to vote for!

-Riv Otter

Hey Oracles!
How are you doing? Hope you are having fun with Astrea!

So... I wanted to take a minute to talk about Astrea post release development and why it's been a while that we don't send a new patch.
As I mentioned before we are only two programmers, where one is also working on XBox porting alongside some Astrea's features and the other one (myself) is also the lead game designer and producer of the game, which means that we have a lot to do and if one of us get sick, the development gets slower and guess what? I'm sick...
I've been overworking/crunching in Astrea for about 1 and half years now, working way more than 40hours per week (my notes says 65 hours per week average, with some weeks working 100 hours), skipping many weekends and holidays, trying to make Astrea as polished as possible and with as much content as possible. Maybe I could have slow things down before, I don't know, but I never felt that it was an option, the feeling was that I needed to give everything that I had to it. I guess I knew that it was a lot of work for the size of our team and the amount of time we had and I didn't see other option since I didn't want to make the scope smaller =P
But now this overwork is charging it's price. Since the release of the patch v1.0.197 that made the game much more stable my brain simply melted, I started feeling depressed and I've been struggling to even look at my work station since then. Honestly it was hard to even stay inside my house (I work from home). So I ended up working less than expected on the last weeks. I'm pretty sure I'm having a burnout right now, honestly...
Then this week I started to get a little bit better and decided to work normally and guess what? I started having a lot of pain in my back, I had to go to the emergency because of the pain. Now I can't sit or stand for too long or my back hurts a lot.
With all that said, I will need to slow things down and take care of my health (mental and physical). I'm not trying to make anyone pity of me or anything I'm just trying to be honest and open. I don't want anyone thinking that we abandoned the game or anything.
We will keep working on Astrea, we want to bring more content, more QoL, bug fixes and balancing, but in a slower pace.
I will take 1 week vacation now, will be back on November 27th. Other team members will be around in case you need help or have any questions.
And I will take another vacation at the end of the year (this time the whole team actually).

[h2]Astrea Post Release Development Update[/h2]
Now update about the development itself, these are our higher priorities.

[h3]Controller Support Improvements[/h3]
Inoue (the other programmer) has been working on XBox porting, but also he is improving the controller support.
The first thing he is working on and I think the most important one is the controller selection highlight, now there will be a highlight showing where the controller current selection is, here are three screenshots on how it is looking at the moment:



We also plan to make the input for leaving the shop, confirming rewards/shop items and skipping rewards easier/faster.
Also will add support for looking your hand when using Astral Calling, Void Seek, Bottled Aurora, etc.

Will try sending a new patch with the controller improvement in 2/3 weeks.

[h3]Daily Runs[/h3]
I started working on Daily Runs! The first draft of Game Design is done and now I started programming it, I got sick in the middle of the process of the programming the Daily Runs sadly. But when I get better I will get back to work on it and when it is ready I will send a patch into the beta branch to be playtested by players =D

[h3]Balancing and Bug Fixing[/h3]
This is a topic that I will keep working on it! There are some minor reworks (One or another action, effect, blessing) that I want to rework that were suggested by the community.
Examples of Balancing and Reworks:
- Change Stunned to let player Reroll only 1 die and then decrease Stunned by 1.
- Corrupted Moonie is too strong when compared to other Corrupted Oracles. I will nerf her.
- Moonite starter kit need to be stronger. I will buff it.

Reworks will pass through the beta branch as well. Probably I'm sending the reworks on next beta branch patch and before the Daily Run.

[h3]QoL: Damage Projection[/h3]
This is one of the most requested features and we will implement it eventually. Sadly it is not an easy task. So it will take a while, but it is one of our priorities. But we felt that improving the controllers and adding Daily Runs were more important, but after these topics we will tackle the Damage Projection.

Thanks for all your support and kind words. They are very heart warming and give us strength to keep working in the game.

May Astrea bless you 💙 ❤️
- Leonardo Castanho, community manager and lead dev of Astrea

Hey Oracles,

I have a pair of exciting announcements for Astrea!

[h2]Turn-Based Carnival[/h2]
First off Astrea joins the Turn-Based Carnival!

The Turn-Based Carnival showcases a variety of games that are… well turn-based if the name didn’t give it away. To celebrate, Astrea is currently 10% off!

If you love turn based games be sure to check out the carnival! Now it is your turn. What are you hoping to roll?
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/turnbasedcarnival2023

[h2]Astrea USB Cassettes fully funded[/h2]
Last but not least, the Astrea USB Cassettes are fully funded with 15 days to go!

Thank you all for the support on the project and helping fund it! We are excited to make these a reality!

These Collectors Cassette includes
DRM-free version of Astrea for Windows
Astrea artbook PDF
Astrea soundtrack

You can check out the project here!
http://tinyurl.com/cassette014

Again thank you for the support. It means alot that we can make these a reality.

- riv otter

Hey Oracles!

We’ve partnered up with Huey to bring you the Astrea USB Cassette Kickstarter!

The Collectors USB Cassette of Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles comes shrink wrapped in a genuine cassette jewel case with color printed labels and inlay - exactly like your classic cassette games.



The Collectors Cassette includes

• DRM-free version of Astrea for Windows
  
• Astrea artbook PDF
  
• Astrea soundtrack
  

The campaign needs to be fully funded for these to be made. Check out the campaign here!
http://tinyurl.com/cassette014

- riv otter