The Crimson Highlands Update is live!
almost 2 years ago – Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 09:57:30 AM

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

 That's it, the fourth and final world of Astral Ascent is available right now, here is a list of what to expect -

❗ For saves issues - if you experiment saves issues because you did not play for a long time, please check our guide about how to get back your saves. We had some saves lost when changing the way we store the saves + when integrating Cloud saves, thanks for your understanding!

 New Hero - Calie the Geomancer 💎

This new playable Hero is coming with an unique narration and gameplay!

She fights with Gems that she can shape into anything she wants. That's right, she can create a massive 2 hands sword then a long range bow!

Her Basic attacks are mid-range AOE hitting Gems so she is very good at cleaning pack of enemies very quickly!

When her Signature Spell is ready, her Basic Attacks leave crystals on the battlefield. Then, she can recall them by using her Signature Spell, dealing damage to enemies in between and gaining mana points like a regular attack. Be strategic and aware of your crystals placement to maximize your damage and mana for better spell rotations!

Her Perks are focused on the Crystals she leaves on the battlefield, her crystals can have effects when recalled or change shape to trigger an effect like fire crystals creating combustion as below.

 The Crimson Highlands ⚡

The Crimson Highlands is the last world of your Astral Ascent runs and it is also the most dangerous one. 

The enemies there won't be forgiving any mistakes and you better be ready for what is coming!

2 New Zodiacs : Libra ♎ & Aquarius ♒

The Crimson Highlands is also the land of the 3 most dangerous Zodiacs - Aquarius, Libra & Gemini and you can now face 2 of them, Libra & Aquarius.

Libra is one of the most dangerous being in the Universe and she will be testing your agility and reflexes.

On the other end, Aquarius is a bit special, they are a golem and a child bound together, they will be testing your stamina & concentration.

New Zodiacs also mean new challenges, new summons & new zodiac spells! Getting them by your side can be a precious help as you can see with Libra summoning below.

 Fifth world ❓

If you success to defeat Libra or Aquarius, you will have a teasing of the final boss, the Master of the Prison and you will be able to fight him in the Final Release. Based on this world and statue you might be able to guess who he is!

Also, in the final release, before the final boss you will be able to spend your last quartz, stars & everything to be as prepared as possible for the fight!

Run progressions change + Telluric Ruins

We have changed a lot of things regarding the progression of your runs, from your feedback and our own experience we thought we had too much of everything and it made runs and building confusing.

What we did is first is creating rules for the special rooms so they cannot appear randomly anywhere in order to have a better control on the runs.  We have also greatly reduced the amount of Spells, Gambits and Slot unlockers that you drop but made the merchant much more central in the game experience. 

• The Minibosses are not always there.
• The Echo Islands are now a reward for defeating minibosses and do not require keys to get there anymore. 
• Exploration rooms rewards are now Quartz, Auras & Gambit and you cannot have multiple auras or gambit at once.
• Merchants are always there in first room of worlds.
• Astral Key chests are now limited to one per exploration but they have been reworked (see below).
• Andromeda's drinks are not increasing anymore so you are not too penalized if you are taking a healing room before a boss.
• Healing rooms can now spawn more frequently depending of your current HP.
• Healing Altars now use stars instead of Quartz so you can still create your build at the merchant.
• Salvaging Auras now grant 4 stars so you get Andromeda drinks if you are unhappy with your dropped Aura.

The new forge Room is not in world 1 but there is a special room to get an extra spell from the beginning there now - The Telluric Ruins

There are more change to come obviously, we want to make the Auras much more central, be able to get rarities on them and to make them synergize better with our builds.

The Forge - a new room Type 🔨

A new addition to this update is the Forge, a room that let you choose one of these bonuses -

• +1 to all your spells level
• Pick one new spell among 3 choices
• Unlock a locked gambit slot on all of your spells

Given the progression changes we made, this room gives you more control on your builds and became very important!

New Gambit rewards ✨

Zodiacs rewards has been changed and they now only drop gambits, mythic ones! But this update introduces a new rarity for gambits - The Astral Gambits.

They are very rare drops that can only be dropped by Zodiacs and they can completely change your builds as they are really powerful. For example one of them create several saplings on each hit as you can see below.

Chamaeleon's Lottery 🪅

Lottery has also been changed, our point of view is that too many systems were facing each others instead of working together. The lottery that used to work with Stars was preventing you from using the stars at Andromeda's bar and some players would only use it or always ignore it.

So we decided for the Lottery to be a free bonus appearing randomly once in a run in an intro room giving you some currency. We might change his position later!

Stone Altars & Key Chests rework 🗝️

First thing first, we decided to change the Key Chests reward. They used to ask you for 1 key (few quartz + a bit of heal/mana) or 3 keys (to randomly get a Stone Altar or an Aura).

We thought it felt bad to sometimes have unwanted Auras and sometimes have unwanted Stone Altars so Auras are now Exploration rooms rewards and Key Chests are now randomly Pavo Feathers or Stone Altars chest, then you select if you want to use 3 or 5 keys in it.

• Using 3 keys will give you access to 1 Stone or a Pavo Feather +1 (level one of your spell, each level adds 20% damage to your spell). 
• Using 5 keys will give you access to 2 Stones or a Pavo Feather +2. 

Also, to give you more choices when selecting stones, the Stones Altar will now have 6 choices instead of 3, the 3 new choices are -

• Armor points, each of them reduce the damage taken by 2
• Critical hits, each of them increase all your crit chances by 2
• Mana Max, each of them increase your max mana by 1

Same applies to Andromeda's bar and both drinks are reset when one is selected.

These change allow you to have a better control of the reward you select and a more steady progression on your spells level. It also removes the randomness of the reward as you know what is the reward before using your keys.

Co-op Balancing Changes 🤝

Co-op players have been requesting for a long time for a better co-op experience loots and progression. Here is a list of what we changed -

• Explorations rooms now give twice the rewards in co-op
• Forge & Telluric Ruins give twice their bonus in co-op
• Echo Island allows you to take 2 Echoes in co-op
• Merchant quartz price is reduced by 40% in co-op so you can buy more elements
• Minibosses & Zodiacs rewards are doubled in co-op

We hope these changes will make your runs more enjoyable!

What is next?

So that is it for this Update, at least for the main elements, you can check the Patch-Notes of version 0.41 for more details - https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1280930/view/3672157322349859720

Now that we have our 4 main worlds it becomes much easier to balance the global experience and we know a lot of things still require our attention on the coming months. We are still planning a Q3 2023 release for the final version (to be confirmed) so we will use this time to do frequent smaller updates, some of the things we would like to improve/expand before final release -

• Minibosses fights and number
• Elites modificators
• Zim-Zim improvements
• New Game Plus System (giving the Moon Currency a purpose)
• Rework and improve Auras system
• Improve Heroes perks building

And many more things!

Thanks again to everyone following us during this journey and thanks for your support which means everything to our small self-publishing team!

Hoping you enjoy this update and have a great day,

- The Hibernian Workshop Team

Next Update Sneak Peak - New World, New Hero & Libra ⚡
about 2 years ago – Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 08:34:01 PM

Hello everyone, 

Whole Hibernian Workshop team is wishing you a great 2023 ahead! 😊 We are back from holidays and are ready to do our best for this coming year!

On our side 2023 is very promising & exciting, we will have the final release of Astral Ascent with physical and console editions, the 12 Zodiacs & the final boss, Calie, Yamat & even more things coming! 

We wish Astral Ascent to be one of the best roguelites experience of 2023, count on us to do our absolute best to reach your expectations for the game! ✨

While we released the exporter update in December 2022, we also made great progresses on the World 4 update - The Crimson Highlands, please check below some of the exciting new features coming very soon!

Calie the geomancer!

Calie is the last of the heroes to be released for Final Release and she is coming very soon. She fights with stones that she can shapes into very varied weapons. As Octave she fights from a longer range but her attacks go through all enemies leaving stones there. Her utility spell, calls back the stones to her dealing extra damage and effects on the way back.

We personally really love her gameplay and wish you will like her as much as we do!

The Crimson Highlands

This is the final world of the game, the wind world and the closest to the final boss. The Zodiacs there (Libra, Aquarius & Gemini) are the most dangerous of all. 

The enemies are also more dangerous and more intense as you can see below - 

Libra, the deadliest of all

We are sure you are impatient to fight against Libra, one of the 2 bosses from next Update, we have to tell you she is extremely strong right now and she will be your toughest challenge in the game so far. 

This was a quick sneak peak update, this update will be released Q1 2023, hopefully very soon. Also, we wanted to tell you that we are aware of some elements that need polish in the game right now, there is so many things that we want to improve but we decided to start with the world 4 update and do a lot of polish between world 4 and final release. 

Having the whole game experience will make things much easier for us to balance the game and have the most appropriate design changes.

Have a great day,

- The Hibernian Workshop Team

New Exporter Update & Level Up available now! 🪄
about 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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