Here Comes 2022!! (Patreon)

Hello Patrons,

It's Friday and New Years Eve!!!!!!!!! Just wanted to say Happy New Year to all you lovely people. :^)

2021 has been an incredibly smooth ride for the development of Astral Ascension thanks to all the support you guys have given us! Not being forced to release episodically in early access (which was necessary before to fund development) has been nothing short of a blessing and we have been able to make a no-compromise vision for this project! I figured I'd list a few of the accomplishments the team has done so far thanks to your generosity and what we can look forward to 2022!

On the art side of things, we had Sunimu make the most detailed Live2D models done thus far along with the most alternative outfits and hairstyles. To complement this, we hired a dedicated Live2D animator who has been making custom animations per character (previously we used some overlap for cost saving). This gives each character a more unique and personalized feel when multiple are on screen with a similar reaction! Another thing that we are looking into is possibly going from 60 FPS animations to 120 FPS animations. A lot of devices these days are higher frames and some phones are doing it too so it is something that is on our polish list that I hope we can get to!

On the BG side of things, we have gone all out as one of the major criticism we've had in the past is the reuse of backgrounds. We are basically trying to do zero duplicates unless it's a PixelFade tradition... *cough* hotsprings *cough*. Just to break it down into numbers, Ethereal Enigma had 19 backgrounds, Crystalline had 41. Astral Ascension has 38 so far and we are only about half way done all the required BGs!

Speaking of numbers, the word count of this game is also quite massive already given the three romanceable options + all the branching paths (horizontal scale) and all the story arcs (vertical scale). We are sitting somewhere around 135k word count with the game half way done. For comparison, Ethereal Enigma was about 145k on completion and Crystalline was about 155k.

Last on the list is our man Eric making the Astral Ascension OST! We got that nice sci-fi vibe going on with the tracks while still keeping it with an anime flavoring! We are currently sitting at 20 tracks (40 if you include the fact that each track has a unique variant) and we plan to at least do 10 more tracks!

The last bit of news is that we got accepted as a Nintendo development partner and a Xbox development partner this year! Our primary goal is to have Astral Ascension being a multi-platform release between PC, Mobile and console, the last beast we have to get through is Playstation approval. We have also been looking into porting some of our existing games for the console when the time and resourcing permits!

As for 2022, I know we have the August 20xx meme release date every 2 years for our major release. Truth be told that was our original intention with Astral Ascension as well however the scope and length of the game has been growing (which is a positive!) so if we need to push out the release a bit, we'd choose that option every time to maintain quality.

Now for some positive Patreon news, all our Live2D assets are almost done and our BG's are quite far along the way! I am predicting we will have no-voice version of the first 3 (maybe 4?) episode of Astral Ascension in early 2022! And as we draw closer to the script completion which stays ahead of production, we'll also be going into the phase which I'm sure a lot of you are excited for: looking for talented VO's for our cast!

That is all the news so far! I just wanted to say thank you again for all your support, Astral Ascension's ambitious scope would be impossible if not for your help. <3

Here's to a great 2021 and cheers to an even better 2022!

- Dishu