#ASTRAL ASCENT DEMO TRIAL#

We have added a 'magnet' to closest enemies when auto-attacking. We play the game everyday and did not realize that until now.

Magnet attacks: By watching you play the game, we noticed it was sometimes hard to hit enemies (in particular the flying ones).

We created 4 rarities: common/rare/epic/legendary and it adds a new flavor to each of your drops! Mixing the total value of gambits and slots give us a rarity score to attribute to the spell.

Spell Rarity System: Looting spells feels good but our community thought it would add spices if spells have different levels of rarity and we could not agree more! We spent time to rework our spell loots and now instead of having a fixed list of gambits and locked/unlocked slot on spells we have a list of potential gambits and each gambit now has a value depending of its power, then each spell has randomness on the locked/unlocked slots.We made changes and spells are not consumed until they are launched now and it feels much better: you can cancel your spell before it's launched and not loose anything. Spell not consumed if cancelled: During the demo your spell was consumed (rotate to next spell + mana used) if you were hit by enemies, dashed or jumped before the spell actually launched: it felt unfair and frustrating.Spell swap in inventory: We wanted to add this since the beginning but you can now swap your spells from inventory very easily if you ever want to change your spells basic order (You used to need a spell on the ground to do so).Hopefully we found what we believe is an elegant and great design solution to this problem! You now have the skip to next spell button and you can use it as much as you want without cooldown or restrictions BUT you need to use the 4 spells once to make them available again, this way we make sure you still need to use all your spells but you decide the orders depending of the situation, for example skip your single target spell when you are fighting 5 enemies at once (of course this is optional and you can totally play the game without it). We thought about having a skip to next spell button for a long time but we thought it would lead to have players optimizing one of their spells (and use skip spell button to only use this spell) and letting down the others which would break the spell-building system we are aiming for. Our Spell system allows you to have 4 different spells at the same time but sometimes you may end up forced to use a spell you don't really want to use or that will be very unefficient in the current situation in order to get the next spell.

Skip to next spell button: By far the most requested by community feature.

Dash momentum: When you finish a dash your movement speed was resetted to 0, your speed is now set to maximum after a dash if you are pressing a directional input.

Jump attack: Similar to Dead Cells one (jump + down input), this was highly requested to increase global movement, we made sure that it has a recovery time and moderate damages as it is more a movement action than a direct attack.

What we saw was very promising and hopefully we still have room for improvements so here is a list of things we have already added:

#ASTRAL ASCENT DEMO TRIAL#

It was a fire trial for most of our design ideas and an opportunity to see how solid they were. The playable demo was a great time to see you play (Youtube/Twitch) and collect your suggestions on our Discord Server. This support already gave us extra energy and we have made great progress since the end of the campaign as you can see below: It will make development a bit more complicated as publishers provide things such as porting, localization, marketing and financial support but we are very confident about our capacity to overcome these challenges! From sharing the word to making suggestions or reporting bugs, your support has already been precious and will be even more precious in the months to come so thanks again! At this point the project has been funded by French public help, our previous game revenues and of course your incredible support so this is a great opportunity to release the game by ourselves! With time and reflexion we declined all the offers as it became clear to us that we wanted Astral Ascent to be our first self-published game. Some of them were major indie publishers with very nice offers and we took time to think about these offers.

First of all we have a big announcement to make: we have been in contact with a lot of publishers for Astral Ascent because of the obvious potential of the game.

Astral ascent demo