Astra - Monthly Update (October 2023)

Hello Patrons,

It's Friday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hope everyone is looking forward to the weekend. :^)

Thank you for your patience regarding the October update, we were wrapping up the art version of Episode 6 - Act 1 which is now available for your viewing pleasure here!:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/85057446 (download link at the top of post)

Now let's move onward to the monthly update for October!

WRITING

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

Writing has been progressing at a phenomenal pace! Both act 3 & 4 pretty much have their initial drafts in with some scenes in their next iteration. There is mainly just a content review waiting on me which I plan to do on the upcoming week.

On that note, as both act 3 & 4 are looking to complete together, we'll likely just lump the two together to have the completed episode 6 art version (minus hotsprings) done in one go. After that, it will be onward to episode 7. For those who missed the previous updates, the epilogue ended up being so robust that it made sense just to make it another episode altogether! Although it is a positive change for the game, it is likely to affect timelines which will be discussed later in the update!

CHARACTER ART

The finalized version of the Luna CG is finished!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/astra-spooky-cg-91579726

We also made the NFT banana to really deliver on the punchline for the ballroom event:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/astra-mini-91579202

BACKGROUND ART

Background art is still quiet at the moment. More to come soon as find further environment needs!

ANIMATION

Animation has mainly just been more UI polish. You can now press esc in the game to open the submenu / pause screen. I can't believe we didn't have that earlier. O_o

PROGRAMMING

The art version of EP6 ACT1 is done! The programmer is taking a well deserved break as act 3 & 4 writing finalizes and then he will move onward to that.

AUDIO

Just added a few SFX retroactively to scenes. We are still deciding how we want to do the credits/ending, whether it will be a instrumental song like ACE giving a calm vibe, or more of a Crystalline action-y ED with vocals.

Now let's discuss the big cheese, the timeline and release date. It is no mystery that the game scope keeps expanding with episode lengths being 1.5x - 2.0x than our previous game and then also having 6 episodes to begin with and now a 7th due to how much the epilogue grew in size.

It's basically going to be impossible to release everything by 2023 so we are exploring different options on what can be done. Once we have a list of ideas, we'll make a voting poll on Patreon to see which option you all are most in favour of and see where things go from there!

With that being the case, thank you so much for your continued support. <3 This is what we did way back in ACE which caused an abrupt ending however now we are able to keep scoping out Astra thanks to your help. it has been a long journey and we are coming into the final turn!

As always, please feel free to share your thoughts below. Thanks again for your support!!

Cheers,