Astral Ascent 1.1.0 is live!

Let's dive into the details of what is new in this new update! You can see the complete Patch Notes here https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1280930/view/3900744344840803063

Japanese voice-over

We just loved the community calling us an "anime roguelite" (some of the late-game cinematics are really inspired by some animes!) and we decided to make a Japanese voice-over version of all the dialogs. It was a lot of work with the 7800+ dialog lines and 27 voiced characters but we assembled a great team to deal with this task and we are super happy with the result. Each character has so much personality and it is an always renewed joy to discover all the dialogs in a different language. You can listen to some of these new recordings below - [previewyoutube=sVg9HNcXcv4;full][/previewyoutube] You will have a launching screen to choose the voice-over language one time now, we were afraid all this work would go unnoticed if we did not add a specific screen for it.

Brazilian Portuguese Translation

Having members of our team from Brazil, we are very happy to have the game translated in Brazilian Portuguese!

Small Astral Dragon

We pay a very close attention to the community feedback about the game and one of the most requested change is being able to have more control over the builds we are creating. With this in mind, we added a new Zim-Zim upgrade named "Small Astral Dragon". (also works in co-op!)

At first rank you have the choice between 2 Common Auras and at last rank you have the choice between 2 Mythic Auras. Everytime, Auras have 20% to be of an higher rarity level so you can sometimes start with an Astral Aura. Though we did not want to encourage what we consider being an unfun behavior - relaunching the game many times to get a different Aura - we made the game remember which Aura should appear. We placed this Dragon at the very beginning of the first intro room so you can have an aura before taking the level up statue and have an initial target build to focus on. But do not forget, this is a simple first step into your build, if you started with a poison Aura and only find freeze oriented elements you can switch to it! As Bear Grylls said : Improvise. Adapt. Overcome! As an addition for easier builds, we have added another gambit slot at the merchant in Andromeda's bar. It is not fun to reset many times the choices in order to find the right affinities and it should be a little easier now!

The Telluric Yalee

Another feedback we received was not getting frequently enough the spells you prefer. Instead of garanting certain spells or banning some others, we implemented a Yalee in the Telluric room, this Yalee appears when you defeated the Master once (in Destiny Level 0) and can reset the spells choices for a small amount of Sun Pieces. We kept the amount low so it always feel fine to use and not frustrating.
We have been looking for a moment now on what could we do with extra Sun Pieces collected. It was supposed to be the Small Astral Dragon for a large amount of Sun Pieces but we felt like it was too important to have it unlocked early and to have this starting Aura in all runs so we reworked very recently to implement it as a Zim-Zim upgrade and we will try to find something else to do with the Extra Sun Pieces in the future!

New Explorations Room

We added 10 new exploration rooms level design variations for each world in this update We have made a poll on our Discord Server to know what you would like to see implemented in the game and the results really surprised us!
We created a Roadmap (see below) to take these feedback into consideration.

• A - Metaprogression content - making more heroes spells as soon as possible for February 2024 update, we have already created some and we tried to focus on making as many spells as possible focusing on creating gameplay like moving enemies or heroes etc as you feedbacked us.
• B - Ingame content - nothing planned for now given the poll results
• C - New games modes - PvP is planned for February 2024 and a new very cool mode is coming for Q4 2024, giving it a low priority given this poll
• D - Harder challenges - nothing planned for now given the poll results
• E - Exploration runs variety - 10 new exploration rooms level design variations available now! We made it a priority due to the poll.
• F - Combat runs variety - we planned an altervative world to come alongside Yamat update on Q3 2024!

Talking a bit more about the future below.

Damage Meter System

This is the most biggest change of this update, it registers all the damage you input to any enemies for your current room and globally (also works in co-op). You can pause the game to open the "Damage Meter" option in the menu to see this -
There is also an overlay option that is "Off" by default and you can activate it to show the top 5 elements of either the global damage of your run or of the current room and it looks like this -

For those worried, it's not overlapping with much elements from the interface, we limited it to 5 elements showcased at once. This new system is inspired by mmorpg addons making it possible to see what causes damage at any time in your build. Our goal is to make you fully understand your build, how it works, how it synergies and what deals damage in it. We think that's not something very common but we have a lot of synergizing elements that we think it's really important in our game. Even if we made our very best during the development, this new tool is probably going to show a lot of unbalanced elements so you can expect changes based on our observations in the coming months.

Lisibility and Readability

Among the reported feedback from the community, lisibility is something that we see a lot, we made so many changes regarding this during the development but we are still not there yet. Most of games similar to Astral Ascent use a dark background because it makes everything stands out instantly but we really wanted the game to be colorful, it is definitively more work though! In this update we increased lisibility again, we reduce some visuals FX, we set as many as possible behind everything, add some transparency on elements and so on. We have also added an option to remove Damage Numbers if you don't want them being visible on the screen.

What is next ?

We hope we will enjoy this update, as a reminder here is our 2024 Roadmap if you missed it -
We are going to take a well deserved break for the holidays season! Things have been really intense during 2023 with frequent major updates. You can check this link to see all the newsletters we released on Steam since 2020 to see how much the game evolved and how much we progressed as a team! For now the game keeps selling well and for now it gives a nice future for the game and for our studio and we really appreciate players following us as developers and not just for a specific game, that goes right to our hearts! That's the last news of this very intense year, 2024 should be easier for us. I will sound like a broken record but thanks again for following us, sharing and caring about Astral Ascent and we will keep you updated about what is next for the game in January! Have an excellent holiday season everyone and thanks again! - The Hibernian Workshop Team

[ 2023-12-21 15:57:47 CET ] [ Original post ]