New Exporter Update & Level Up available now! 🪄
over 1 year ago – Thu, Dec 08, 2022 at 06:36:58 PM

Hello everyone! 

After the launch of the Coral Archipelago Update we immediatly started working on the next major one: the Crimson Highlands Update. This upcoming one will make possible to visit the 4th world with the most dangerous Zodiacs as long as playing Calie, the Geomancer. 

We have already made great progress on this update and we should be able to release it early Q1 2023. But do not worry, we will take our time to polish it as much as we did for all previous updates. We will share more about the Crimson Highlands Update in next newsletter as we have exciting news to share in this one!

New Exporter & new Systems are available! 💪

Once again we had ambitious & promising new features ideas for the next upate but instead of releasing everything at once as we did for the Coral Archipelago Update, we decided to release part of it for you to play right now on Steam! Full Patch-Notes 

This should display version 0.38.0 or higher on main menu, you can relaunch Steam if it's not.

This new content is getting available alongside the long awaited New Exporter version provided by our partner MP2 Games and we would like to thank them again for the tremendous work porting the whole Astral Ascent game from our game engine to C++ for the best possible performances!

This new exporter fixes a lot of crashes and issues (like Steam Remote sound issue) & massively improves FPS allowing you to play at constant frame rate with almost no loadtimes. 

This new version will change your game experience by making it much more comfortable and fluid, in particular for smaller settings. The game is also now playable for Steamdeck with very stable 60fps, you can even do Remote Play co-op with 2 Steamdecks without issues.

However expect some inconsistencies (badly oriented elements, small visual glitches etc.) as this build is very close but is not yet the same as the main build, we are still working on it! 

If you see anything wrong please let us know on our Discord Server in the #bugs-report channel.

Level up system - an answer to many issues! ✨

•  Basic attacks issue - Basic attacks do not become more powerful with time unlike your spells with levels & gambits so the more you progress the weaker your basic attacks feel and are. Also, getting Auras for your basic attacks was preventing you to have Auras for other purposes so you would sometimes sacrifice interesting builds to get them.
•  Utility Spells issue - Utility spells were very inconsistent as it was rare (and occasionally too frequent) to get one. Sometimes they were strong, sometimes they were too weak and it was easy to forget to use them as they were not really part of our build.

From these questions emerged new systems.

•  Signature spells - They completely replace the Utility Spells that we removed from the game, they are new and unique spells based on cooldown different for each Hero.  You will have many synergies to discover and play with from one run to another as you can improve them with the Level up system!

•  Level up system - Defeating enemies will now grant you experience points, filling an experience bar  above your HP, when it reaches a certain threshold, your character will level up gaining maximum Health, Basic attacks damage and the possibility to claim a Prowess. 

•  The Prowesses - They are a set of passive skills that can be claimed in intro rooms of each world, including first world, when interacting with the giants there. Every level, you will be able to claim 1 additional prowess to a max of 8 in a run. These prowesses are of two kinds: Basic attack (right) & Signature Spell (left)

 The Prowesses for Signature spells are unique to each hero, there is a lot to try out! Also, Zim-Zim now has an ability to make you reset the choices of Prowesses.

Andromeda's trials! 🧩

Another fun addition to the game are the Andromeda's trials!

In the exploration rooms, sometimes you will find a purple altar, interacting with them will teleport you to a new room where you will have to face a platforming challenge without being hit to get one of the famous rainbow drinks poured by Andromeda herself! 

Do not worry, if you get hit you are simply teleported outside but you will not lose HP so feel free to try them as many times as you want! We personally love them and we hope you will too!

Discord trading card game!🃏

A smaller addition has been made to the Discord server, the Astral Ascent Digital Trading Card game!

Every day Barbecue offers you a new card from his fine collection! You can trade them with everyone or merge them to gain rarer cards (4 rarities for the 39 existing cards) and get the greatest collection!

There was no newsletter last month but be sure we are working our hardest to make the game the best it can be and we are still active on the Discord Server for any of your suggestions and feedback! 

Oh, and here are some extra elements!

More improvements are coming later!

Don't forget our Backerkit shop and our Discord Server to speak with the community and give us feedbacks on the game!

Have an excellent week ahead and next time we will share about the upcoming world 4!

The Hibernian Workshop Team

The Coral Archipelago Update is Live NOW!
over 1 year ago – Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 02:31:43 AM

Play a new Character, explore a new World, fight new Zodiacs and much more!

Thanks a lot everyone for your patience regarding this Update, we created so much more elements than we originally anticipated in order to create the best and most complete experience possible for this first Major Update  (several more to come!).

This version sadly does not contain the new exporter that will solve many crashes and increase performances by a lot (if you have performances issue, don't hesitate to check this guide). We have made huge progress on it but this new exporter still contains issues so we thought it would be better to release it once it is totally ready but you can expect it to be released Q4 2022, take a look at our Roadmap iff you want more precisions about it. This version also does not have a complete localization to supported languages yet, when translations are missing it should be replaced by English for now, we will update when we have receive the texts.

Take a look at in the timeline planned until the release of the DLC!

For the next weeks we will be working on solving the main bugs/balancing issues that you will encounter so do not hesitate to report these on our Discord Server where we have dedicated channels for that. We will also start preparing the mid W3-W4 Update.

If you want a complete list of what is new, here is our complete Patch Notes link and the main features listed below -

Major Features

• New Playable Character - Octave: New range hero with 11 unique spells to unlock
• New World to Explore - The Coral Archipelago: New assets, new traps and new enemies
• New Zodiacs Battles: Scorpio & Pisces. Face these 2 members of the Orphnée family
• Scorpio & Pisces challenges: Get their summons through their challenges
• Sun Room: Exchange your quartz to access powerful spells
• Moon Room: Exchange your maximum life to access Zodiac unique powers
• Zodiac Spells: Find and use 7 news powerful zodiac spells: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Leo, Pisces and Scorpio
• Echo Isles Room & Summon your Friends: Pick among 15 different summons of your friends so they can help you during your run
• New Miniboss - Draco: Fight a dangerous new Miniboss
• community inspired ⭐ Andromeda's bar interior: Visit the Zodiacs there and the more victory you have against them, the more likely they are to join you
• Affinity Zodiac: Your Constellation sign can now randomly help you (once you met at least once) and will more easily join you in Andromeda's bar
• community inspired ⭐ Pixel Art Animated Portraits: Legacy Portraits will still be accessible through game options but default portraits will now be Pixel Art and hand-animated
• Fight Rooms Rework: Complete rework in order to have waves / difficulty depending of level of the room
• New Affinity System: Spells now have elemental affinities (fire/ice/thunder/poison and neutral) and they gain power with related elemental gambits attached (up to 100% bonus damage)
• New Synergy System:
  - Many Auras has been reworked and a DOZEN additional new auras have been added
  - Many Gambits has been reworked and a THIRTY additional new Gambits have been addedNew
  

We would also like to thank our community and Play Testers for the great support provided to our small team, we are doing our absolute best to create this game we love. 

Have an excellent time in the game and good luck against the new bosses!

- The Hibernian Workshop Team

Major update is very close!
over 1 year ago – Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 04:33:41 PM

September it is! 🌅

We have a release date for the World 3 update named "The Coral Archipelago Update", this release date is in September 2022, which means we are only a few weeks away from releasing a game changer update for Astral Ascent. 

We know this update has been very long to release but we added much more than we anticipated to the game. 

A world update is supposed to contain -

• A new playable character (Octave for this one that comes with 11 unique spells)
• A new world to explore (+ 8 new enemies and 4 level design elements)
• 2 new Zodiacs + their challenges and summons
• World 4 Zodiac blocking your path

In addition to that we added -

• Zodiacs Spells system (it means 7 of them already)
• Reworked some existing Zodiac summons
• Sun & Moon new room type
• New mini-boss - Draco (whose fighting style might remind you of someone!)
• Kinship System & Echoes Room, you can have up to 4 friends to summon by your side from a total of 15 possible summons (Zim-Zim, Oloon, Ikki, Ordan, the Heroes and much more)
• Pantheon room accessible for those who paid an ingame statue of themselves (with or without their pets)
• Andromeda's bar interior with new friendship system with the Zodiacs that will make chosing your constellation meaningful (this is not final yet but close to what we had in mind)
• Major synergy rework that will make your runs much more interesting with many new or reworked auras, gambits, effects
• One more complicated and very requested element is still unannounced ✨

But that's not all as we have also improved so many small details all around, from small UI improvement, to enemies AI and balancing, about everything has been closely looked and observed to be improved (even the Credits screen has been reworked!), at least we did our very best given the small team that we are.

That being said, there is one major element for this update that we took the decision to postpone. It is the New Exporter named "Chowdren" version. The game is already playable on this version but there is many small elements that are not as polished as they are on the regular version. It is really sad for us to delay this version as it changes absolutely everything -

• Game is running incredibly faster
• Many crashes are solved
• Remote Play Together sound problem should be solved too
• Loading times are feeling inexistant (as you can see on below video)

But Astral Ascent is a massive project and it takes time for our partner  to solve all the small issues and we currently do not know when exactly this new version will be ready and instead of keep delaying the world 3 update we decided to delay the Chowdren version and make it live as soon as it will be as good as the main version of the game so you can expect a small update between world 3 and world 4 updates with this optimized version and hopefully some more exciting elements (we already have some ideas). Our goal is to avoid impacting too much the world 4 release period that should take less time for the world 3 one. 

Rest assured that our porting partner is doing an incredible job and the project could not be in better hands, new version will be worth the wait! 

Affinity system! 🧊

Continuing with the new effects and synergies that we created for this update, we added a final touch - the Affinity System. This system will give you a way to make you spells even stronger by having certains type of gambits on it corresponding to the element of the spell.

When you equip a gambit on a spell with an elemental affinity that is the same as the gambit, the spell will gain an increased percentage of bonus damage dealt on hit.

However even if that is very clear that Magma Comets have a fire affinity,  some spells do not seem to match a specific affinity like the Spirit Sword below, but don't worry! These spells are considered to have a neutral affinity, instead of having no affinity they actually have an affinity with every gambits but with a lesser increased bonus damage percentage. 

To make things more open we have decided to make specific spells like Fireballs to be randomly neutral and for some spells like Ayla's shuriken to randomly have any affinity type. We think that is yet another very exciting change to the synergy system as it creates even more strategy when equiping spells & gambits.

New zodiacs challenges! ♏

Expect new challenges to come with this update! 2 new challenges made for Scorpio & Pisces, the new Zodiacs. Even if Scorpio is really mean, he would be a very powerful ally to have by your side to escape the Garden!

Kinship system is done! 🐺

The new kinship system is finally done! Your friends from The Garden will now be able to help you in your journey. You can find exclusive "Echoes" in the Echoes Room that will grant you an unique ability related to one of your friends.   Enjoy some of those new summons effects!

•  Ikki can save you once per world! 

• Ordan will give a piece of her mind to the Zodiacs you will face.

•  Other heroes like Kiran will also come to your help! 

Old visual effects rework! ✨

With all the polish going on, we took time to redo some of the older visual effects of the game to make them look even cooler and cleaner than before. Have a glimpse!

We have very excited to release the update, see you in September!

Don't forget our Backerkit shop and our Discord Server to speak with the community and give us feedbacks on the game!

Have a nice week!

-The Hibernian Workshop Team

Synergy rework and Octave sneak peak!
over 1 year ago – Fri, Jul 29, 2022 at 10:06:29 PM

This entire month has been dedicated to finishing all the ongoing features. This is a very ambitious update that we are working on, here are some recent news about it.

New Effects, Gambits and Auras: the Synergy rework🔥

We were not entirely satisfied with the Gambits, Effects and Auras that we had in the game. We knew the system was very interesting but when creating builds we felt it always lacked - Synergy. 

What we call Synergy is the possible combinaisons between the different playable elements that you can find in the game - Spells, Gambits, Auras, Effects.

We had the feeling that very few synergies existed and it was mainly about multi-hit spells and mono-hit spells. After a lot of design talks, we improved the system and made many changes to improve it and make it more central to the game progression.

- First, we removed many of the Auras and Gambits that were not very interesting to play with, for example the ones dealing more damages if enemy health is full or depending of number of effects affecting the enemies. 

- Second, we added several new unique effects to create more synergies opportunities between your spells, auras and gambits! What we call Effects are elements negatively affecting enemies, we have also reworked the way Effects stacks are displayed above enemies as you can see below.

We also added some new summons that will trigger Effects, here are some for you to enjoy!

A feeling that we had in game for a while was the feeling of not really choosing your build regarding the gambits you equip on your spell, here are some balancing changes according to this.

• Spells will now always come with at least 2 gambit slot available minimum. 
• Gambit slot unlocker cost has been reduced from 200 to 75 quartz to be a lot more affordable.

- Finally we also reworked all the gambits icons and aura icons to have a more distinct personality and be much more clearer.

The coral archieplago progress 🏝️

The coral archipelago content is now complete! All the new enemies have been done and will now enter polish phase. Here's a quick tease of what you'll be facing in the world.

Dale has also came through this month with the new great theme of the 3rd world, enjoy a glimpse!

Andromeda's bar interior progress 🍹

Now that the bar interior is open, you will be able to meet the zodiac there in a more peaceful context, discussing with them and if you're lucky they might even consider joining you in battle!

A Jukebox is also available inside for you to enjoy the game ost!

Elites visual rework 💀

Another system that got a visual rework are the elites enemies. They now have an all new color palette applied to them to really feel like different enemies! We also reworked the UI to have icons above their head instead of a text for a better visibility.

Finally a small gameplay glimpse of Octave 🎯

Keeping you updated with Octave, here's a small gameplay clip of some possible combos between his spells, enjoy!

We are entering a critical  phase for the next update, for now we prefer to not give a precise release date for this update as we do not want to compromise on quality.

Don't forget our Backerkit shop and our Discord Server to speak with the community and give us feedbacks on the game!

Have a wonderful weekend!

-The Hibernian Workshop Team

Third world, the Pantheon, Ayla figure, Hero summons and more!
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Jun 29, 2022 at 03:43:38 AM

Happy  to report this month the team has made huge progress on all the new content for the next update and soon all that will be left to do is polish and playtest! ✨

So, without further ado, here is our progress report - 

Welcome to the Coral Archipelago! 🌊

The next world is here! The islands are waiting for you to cross them and meet the marine fauna! But be careful, this world is the home of the dangerous Noble Zodiacs, fierce enemies that will never allow you to pass without an intense fight!

The Pantheon and Ayla figure 💫

The Pantheon is a new place accessible from the main hub of the game. When used, the floating orb will teleport you into a place where we immortalized some of our backers as golden statues. 

We initially wanted to have these statues randomly spawning at the merchant's room but this way anyone can witness them directly from the main hub. If you also want to have a statue of yourself (it can be with your pet) and your name appears when standing next to the statue, you can still order it on our Backerkit store. 

We also have great news regarding the Ayla figure (also available on the Backerkit store), Limited Run Games manufacturer produced an example version that suits our vision and we really love it - we hope you will like it as much as we do!

Kinship system🤝

A completely new system has been added to the game, the kinship system!

In your runs, you will now have access to a new special room inside wich you'll get a new kind of item: the souvenirs.

Souvenirs will grant you the power of one of your friend from the Garden! Each character has their own unique power that will surely help you through your journey!

The intent of this system was to make the characters you meet and love a bigger part of your escape attempts and feel a deeper connection to them when they join your adventure!

Look forward to getting the souvenir as they will surely prove useful in your quest.  

Zodiac summons rework ♍

Another accomplishment from this month was the rework of several of our Zodiac summons!

Most of the old summon either didn't fit the zodiac or were lacking in juice! So we decided to rework most of them to become truly impressive attacks!

But that's not all we also made summons for the next two Zodiacs of the Coral Archipelago, enjoy a sneak peek!

New spells - the Zodiacs spells ♐

We added a new kind of spell to the game, the Zodiac spells! They'll give you the ability to use some of the Zodiacs signature attacks as your own.

Don't expect to find them like others  spells! They will only be accessible in a special place, but we'll let you find out for yourselves.

Andromeda's bar 🥂

The door to the interior of the Andromeda's bar is now open, in here you'll be able to meet the zodiacs and talk with them in a peaceful environment.

Get insight about the world by the mouth of your enemies, learn more about them and if you're lucky, they might even join you directly in your journey!

Discord new emotes! Join us! ✨

We also did something for our lovely discord community. New Astral Ascent emotes have been added to the server for you to express yourself there or on any other place if you have Discord Nitro!

We hope you'll enjoy them as much as we do! 

This month has been a great month of progress and we cannot wait to let you play with all of this new content! 

Don't forget our Backerkit shop and our Discord Server to speak with the community and give us feedbacks on the game!

Have a great day and week!

-The Hibernian Workshop Team