Astral Ascent · published
We hope your summer is going great, on our side we are back with a new major update! ːzagplsː Take a look to the full Patch Notes below -
A new NPC appeared in The Garden, The Yalee Builder! We hesitated for a long time to call this NPC "Leonardo Da Yalee" but thought it may not be fitting very well with the rest of the game, but at least you know it now haha
You will have many places where you can add new assets, this feature was voted a lot by our Discord community about how to handle the extra Sun Pieces in late game!
(We also noted other suggestions for later! ːtaurusSmirkː) But while making this new system it appeared to us that a Sun Piece payment for these changes was not the best option because :
New players could favorize Decorations over meta progression making them weaker for chosing this
It will unbalance the overall meta progression
People would only buy a few elements they really want and not have many elements to choose from
People with a lot of sun pieces would still exhaust the options very very fast and still be super rich
For these reasons it made much more sense to us to attach thse new decorations to challenges so you will often unlock new ones and have several to choose from. Also, no worries, if you are far into the progression you should unlock most of the rewards directly. But we will find ways to spend the Sun Pieces for late game players no worries! There is 7 Decorations families
Under the Moon
Inside the Reef
Deep in the Dune
Beyond Soft Melancholia
In the Observatory
Near the Pinnacle
Behind Parnassus
Here are a few examples -
That's just 6 examples out of a total of 84 beautiful assets to unlock and select to customize your hub!
Ayla, Kiran, Calie & Octave are getting 2 new spells and many of you asked for Yamat to get more spells as she had a bit less than the others so we gave her 5 new spells instead of 2 ːtaffyː
N360 Death Lotus
N1000 Thousand Cuts
Crater Maker
Kiran Comet!
Kuzite Scythe - Quake
Opulent Waltz
Osculum Vale
Infinitus
Raging Bull
Starburst
Serpentine Strike
Feeding Frenzy
Fowl Plumage
In 2.2, all spells were reviewed to ensure an accurate display of average damage and hits. These updates do not impact the way the spells function, only the displayed information on the spell. In addition to the informational updates, many spells received additional changes. 2 and 3 cost spells were the focus of these changes as they were not providing enough damage for their cost when compared to 1 cost spells.
A large number of spells received rebalancing to ensure that no matter what you enjoy using, it will be effective.
N°539 FREEDOM FIGHTER
TWIN DRAGON UPPERCUT
PERFORATIO
AZURITE FALCHIONS - PIERCE
STERN PRESENCE
COMMON SPELLS
ZODIAC SPELLS
We have collaborated with players with hundreds of hours on the game to make these balancing changes as accurate and fair as possible. We have also addressed many bugs reported by the community and we will keep fixing more with time!
You may have noticed that our updates 2.1 and 2.2 have been a slightly smaller than previous updates and that is partly because we are preparing the Kickstarter campaign launching in September for our new game Fallen Fates, if you haven't already do not hesitate to follow the Kickstarter campaign as we will have a lot of reveals and exciting things during the campaign!
But we have also been having new team members who had to take their marks on Astral Ascent which is a huge project now! So our plan for the future is not to slow down but on the opposite trying to make a lot of new content and improvements to the game you love and that we love just as much ːzimzimSmileː We already have a ton of ideas for partnerships with great games, features and more! We often said that as long as the game keeps selling we will keep making updates and the love and support you are showing is truly motivating us a lot! If you ever want to support us you can leave a review on the game or on the DLCs pages and talk to your friend about the game, thanks again!!! ːzagplsː
A lot of you have been asking about Steam Workshop features and we are starting to take a look at that, we don't have a lot of experience with that for now but the idea seeing what content you would create is so exciting! In order to have a better idea of what you would like to do, we would love to hear from the creative modders out there to hear you and see what you would like to be able to do, in order to do that we have created an event channel on our Discord server where you can suggest your ideas and upvote the others suggestions!
There will be things we won't be able to do but we will try our best to take extra attention to what was upvoted the most.
If you follow our currently announced roadmap (we will need to update it at some point when we define more precisely what is next) our next update will be the Animals Charity DLC! This DLC has been inspired to us by the Paws & Claws DLC from the great Children of Morta and they announce of their DLC page that they collected more than 460 000 $ for their association to protect animals! We love animals ourselves, you can see below some of the team cats member we shared on August 8th for the cat international day!
We felt like this initiative was amazing and absolutely wanted to run a similar campaign to get money for animals Charity so we asked people of Dead Mage and they were happy we would follow their steps and try to gather money for charity too!
We have checked different associations and we ended up having an excellent contact with One Voice who are actively fighting for animals rights and protection internationally! In order to help them save animals, we are collaborating and we will give them 100% of the revenue generated by this upcoming DLC so we hope it will work nicely to support them as much as possible ːzagplsː
About the game content itself, we already have a lot of ideas but we still need to finalize them. What we know is that we would rework the bottom right part of the hub to make a shelter for animals and the animals would be able to follow you during your runs and should provide different bonuses that should not be locked the animals themselves so you can select your favorite animal and your favorite bonus separately, here is a concept we worked on to pitch to One Voice -
We hope that weither it is for the gameplay part or for supporting the charity for animals this DLC will be making everyone happy!! --- Before I go, I wanted to credit the tremendous work of the passionated community for the Astral Ascent Wiki page!
You can lean more about pretty much every aspect of the game with a ton of accurate details so don't hesitate to visit it! Wishing all of you an excellent day and great time in game! - The Hibernian Workshop Team