Astra - Monthly Update (August 2023) (Patreon)

Hello Patrons,

Happy PixelFade Day!!!!!!! August 22nd is usually when we do major release every two years from ACE -> Crystalline -> Ethereal Enigma. With that being said, Astral Ascension was the combo breaker just due to the sheer size of the game. On a positive note, Astral Ascension might start a new trend when it releases this year? :^)

The update for this month is short but sweet, so let's get started!

WRITING

>> CAUTION: SUPER ULTRA OMEGA INSANE SPOILERS IN SCENE TITLES<<

Act 1 is almost fully done! Since this act had Iris's character arc as well as some of the more steamy romance events, we ended up spending taking extra time and care to craft them. The good news is that the first couple scenes are already green so they are being worked on by the narrative developer already!

One point I would like to bring up is based on feedback we received. This was that people really liked how in ACE/Crystalline, other characters recognized your relationship. We've been having a steady stream of that however a good chunk of it was related to if you were trying to date multiple girls. To reward those who did a "pure love" (only flirting and romancing one lady), we will have a fun and cute scene at the end of the hotspring act (scene 14).

The last note for writing is that the epilogue has actually grown much larger than we thought. It's at the point where it has like a mini-character arc for EACH waifu which on the storyboard is quite a lot. Based on this, we are actually going to split the epilogue into its own episode 7.

It's no mystery that Astra Ascension is a huge game compared to our other projects. Not only will it have 2 more episodes than previous projects, the episodes themselves are also the length of 1.5 - 2 episodes! What this all means is that there is a lot of horizontal content to explore while still having a solid main path. I am confident that the wait due to ensuring the absolute best quality will pay off!

CHARACTER ART

Sunimu is enjoying his long deserved break! Once he is back, we are planning to see where we could round out the game with a couple more CGs as well as any other secondary character that could benefit from a NPC portrait.

BACKGROUND ART

Background is also quiet for this week as we've been spending majority of our time focusing on the writing. With epiosde 7 (the epilogue) expanding in scope, there will definitely be some BGs to make!

ANIMATION

Animation side, we've just been making a couple UI tweaks and optimizations. 

PROGRAMMING

The narrative developer is working hard now on Episode 6 - Act 1! That should be pretty busy since by the time that wraps up, the next act will be ready to roll. In other words, programming is on a pretty nice flow state!

In terms of engine, we identified a texture optimization issue with NPC portraits where the compression wasn't working properly. Long story short, the output resolution wasn't divisible by 4 which severely limited compression methods in Unity. Thankfully, that is fixed which has SIGNIFICANTLY reduced the game size as well as a small performance boost when portraits appear on screen. The other nice thing is we retroactively fixed the portraits for the other games as well! They haven't been pushed as an update since we'll do that when the next Google Play mandatory update comes down the pipeline.

AUDIO

Eric is working on the final BGM for Astral Ascension! It is the epilogue track that is added to this post for your listening pleasure. That will make the full OST 28 songs, and then it should be +2 (one for the OP, one for the ED). Apart from that, we are also populating the SFX list and ambience list which will be part of the games final polish.

That's all the updates. A bit light in terms of visual things to share since the focus has been on writing and that the game is in its final stage!

As always, please feel free to share your thoughts below! Thank you for your continued support. <3

Cheers,