Astra - Mini Update + Faster Playable Content (Patreon)

Hello Patrons,

Hope everyone is having a fantastic week so far!! I just wanted to provide a mini-update regarding how things are going as well as a brand new method of content delivery that will make the waiting easier!

To kick things off, I know I mentioned we were going to have a December update near the end of the year which got caught up with the dev stream and New Years timing. I think it might have been my wishful thinking we'd be able to sneak in an update during that time so sorry about setting that expectation.

Speaking of the holidays/new year, things are finally returning to normal and we are getting back into the full swing of thing! At this point, we are so close to the January update, we might as well just push things out one week for a juicier update. We have shared some bits and pieces on Discord if you're super curious however they'll be available here soon enough!

Now the big update is how we will be doing releases for you guys. We've always had episodic releases because it was fundamentally how we did Steam Early Access releases as well. We came to the realization that instead of just waiting for full episodes which usually spans a couple months, it would be more streamlined to do 'acts' of the episode as releases on a per month basis. What this basically means is that episodes are split into acts, and those playable acts get into your hands a lot sooner. That way, there is a more predictable schedule of playable content and less of a big drought between updates!

Here is an example of Episode 5 along with the 'Act' splits. I've removed the scene name to avoid spoilers:

Act 1 writing is currently done and will be available to you guys as early as next week (our Unity Dev is going through it now)! While you guys play that, we will be working on Act 2 which should be done for mid February.

Honestly, I'm surprised we didn't do this earlier cause I think it's a much more consistent way of doing things and having mini-goals has been working great so far from a development standpoint! We'll try this format out and see if you guys like it. Acts will be about an 1-2 hours of content depending on if you explore every route with every permutation!

Thats all the news so far for this mini-update. Please look forward to Act 1 of Episode 5 releasing next week along with the actual Patreon monthly update and content posts!

As always, thank you for your support and feel free to share your thoughts below. :^)

- Dishu