Astra - Monthly Update (August 2024)

Hello Patrons,

It's Wednesday my d00ds, hope everyone is having a great week so far! Thank you for your patience regarding the August update, we've been swarmed with a bunch of unexpected work (explained below) which are actively being worked on.

So without any further delay, let's get started!

WRITING

Mainly just fixing line inconsistency between voice and text. All the reported continuity bugs have been addressed so writing updates will be fairly small in these updates!

CHARACTER ART

Character art is all wrapped up for now! We don't foresee any additional work being added but that may change based on feedback. [SAME NOTE AS LAST MONTH]

BACKGROUND ART

The final two BG's for Astral Ascension!! One is a graveyard (who dies/died? O_O) while the other is a LARP event at a park. Seeing them next to each other line this is super jarring, haha. Thankfully, in game they are vastly different scenes in different acts of the game!

ANIMATION

We've been poking away at the UI update which you can check out here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/astra-ui-upgrade-109902806

Additionally, this is the WIP of the new CG screen:

Please ignore Iris and Celeste being upside down, LOL. We were doing a quick test on positions and this "stairs" approach looked the best in our eyes. :^)

In keeping with the stairs, we were thinking about an elevator theme for the CG however it does feel a little tacky. We might just make it page numbers on a terminal instead of a "elevator". This stuff is all WIP of course!

PROGRAMMING

This is actually making me cry right now. So basically what happened is the current version of Naninovel (our framework within Unity) had a voice bug which we of course didn't know about until we've been implementing it on a large scale.

The bug is fixed in the latest version of Naninovel:

https://github.com/naninovel/docs/releases/tag/v1.19

This is the fix we need:

"Added Stable Identification option to script configuration menu; when enabled, Naninovel will automatically write unique persistent IDs to each localizable text parameter on script import. This allows preserving text association (eg, for localization or auto voicing) while editing text content."

But the problem is this update forces:

"All the custom UIs built with legacy uGUI text have to be upgraded to use TMPro text instead"

What this basically means is that we HAVE to upgrade to Naninovel 1.19 to fix voice, but to upgrade to 1.19, we have to REDO OUR ENTIRE UI PROGRAMMING (>_<) which is a lot of developer work. It's frustratingly annoying and we've been looking at workarounds but to be in-support with Naninovel (in case other things come up), the upgrade is basically mandatory. This is the fun adventure we've been on during this month!

AUDIO

We are working on the ED track now! Eric has finished a vocal guided version and our vocalist/lyricist and working on the song now! Will share as soon as it becomes available.

VOICE

On the voice side, the great news is ALL VOICE OVER LINE has been submitted, including extras! It is now just a matter of us processing them. Now I say "just" but that in itself is a quite a bit of work however it is more reassuring knowing that the work is connected to us getting through it and not externally waiting for someone else!

That is all the updates for now! As always, please feel free to share your thoughts below.

Thanks again for your continued support. :^)

- Dishu