Astra - Monthly Update (February 2022)

Hello Patrons,

Hope everyone is having a fantastic week so far! Firstly, thank you for your patience in this update being one day delayed. We ran into a last minute snag on some Live2D share I wanted to do within Unity however it cascaded a few more issues. I rather have this update to you guys now and we can discuss more about that in the programming section.

The super big juicy update for this month is that things are progressing well and starting in March, we'll be able to start making the actual playable version of our game!! This will be Live2D models, backgrounds, and music, however it will have an omission of voice over and SFX. Basically it is the Unvoiced Episodic releases we've done in the past. This is a major milestone since I know a lot of you have been waiting for at least this version to try out Astral Ascension!

Now back to our regular scheduled monthly update! Please note there are medium spoilers (artwork and locations that are main path specific but may reveal certain game content; writing titles revealing game events).

WRITING

Writing is steadily moving forward and we also hired a freelancer to assist with a couple of scenes! Hopefully the additional help will bump our velocity since art is starting to catch up. The good news is because our game has been pre-planned, art can continue to work into the storyboard and isn't waiting for the episodic scripts! This is one of the other advantages to our new development method.

CHARACTER ART

Sunimu went full beast mode this month and fully completed three CGs!! We have just two more CG's for him to catch up on (Iris and Vaela exotic dancer) and then he will be working on new artworks. This post is a bit Iris and Luna heavy however keep in mind that the latter part of episode 3 deals with Vaela's arc so she is bound to have her spotlight soon!

BACKGROUND ART

Backgrounds has been coming along at a very steady rate! I am especially a huge fan of the Polaris city designs (BG number 2, 3, 4). It has a very clean and futuristic vibe to it. By the way, we are at 40 backgrounds now for Astral Ascension which is a crazy number given we are just a little over half way done!

ANIMATION

With Live2D all wrapped up, we've mainly been using our animator to work from bug fixes, physics updates, and general polish. Nothing major to share however all the little things do add up!

PROGRAMMING

Our programmer has been insanely busy working through all the Live2D implementation and integration with Naninovel with Unity. Our previous engine Utage had a simplified integration of Live2D which made it easy to use but almost impossible to customize. This version is a lot more upfront work to make sure all the pieces play nice together however we have an insane amount of control since the Live2D models are recognized within Unity.

There is just a little bit of inner working on what goes on! To be honest, we might have over-integrated functionality compared to what we will actually need to use! That being said, I rather we have everything setup so we are only limited by what we want to do rather than what limitations we have by the system!

AUDIO

Eric has a preview up for the next track! We want this to be a stress-inducing track that makes the player feels uneasy. The song is just a bit too hippity hoppity which we will be toning down a bit to make it feel more grounded and heavy. The preview is available as an attachment to this Patreon post!

That's the big update for this month! Just to recap, the biggest news is read-only versions will now be replaced with the unvoiced versions starting with all three existing episodes getting their treatment in March.

On another note, Patreon updates have been a bit light on January and February. We've been doing a lot of back-end work which is hard to showcase however that is mostly wrapping up. Sunimu was also heavily invested on supporting Live2D models and then catching up on already sketched out CGs.

We should be going back into a more consistent pattern of showing more WIP content and then some extra fun behind the scenes will be ramping up like voice over audition previews and such!

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

- Dishu