[Background Blog] Astatos: Designing the Story Mode

Hey Patrons!

Last time we talked about the Astatos video game was back in April so we wanted to give you guys a bit of a look into some of progress we've made since then.

In Astatos, we plan to have a story told in a visual novel format and released in chapters over time. (This is mostly so we can get the game out at a faster rate and also so our writers can swap between this game and the in-development Nekojishi Lin & Partners.)

While we're going to keep quiet on the plot of the story mode for now, we can take a look at some of the designs that have gone into it so far.

Designing the Story Mode

The key design requirement of the story mode in Astatos has been efficiency. Both in the tools we're using to create scenes, and the data used to store them. Astatos is planned to release on both PC and mobile, so we need to be careful about how we use assets, both to keep file sizes down, and also to provide a full desktop experience.

When it comes down to assets, you have a few components that make up a VN. Text, backgrounds, character sprites, sounds, and music. Text is basically already so small it doesn't have much of an impact on file size, but it's useful to look into techniques to achieve our goals with the other components.

For example, sounds and music have different quality rates depending on the platform. Images like backgrounds and sprites also use different resolution assets on mobile and PC. But we can take saving space even further by looking at how we store these image assets.

In the above design screenshot you can see that the backgrounds are actually are arranged in a square with three seperate backgrounds stored in the same area. This is because images with dimensions that are both powers of 2 can be compressed to a far smaller size than images at variable sizes. (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc pixels) This way not only can we fit one background into an image, but we can actually fit three!

[Note: We could also get away with a rectangle texture but that would only be putting two backgrounds into the same amount of storage.]

Now this creates an interesting issue, we have backgrounds in a 3:1 aspect ratio so we have to design the interface with this in mind.

Say hello to Likulau making a cameo from the Nekojishi: Lin & Partners asset folder!

The actual layout of the interface is pretty much influenced by this technical quirk, but we think it worked out pretty cool! We'll be sure to show off a lot more of the story mode in action when it's a bit further along, but for now we've got the basic background and sprite transitions, dialogue display, character names, line animations, decisions and a few sound effects.

Here's a look at the decision menu in-game!

And now here's all the madness that led to it. (When you hover over an option an animation plays and the moon shapes to the sides of the options turn into suns.

Along with this the background running this system is probably the simplest scripting tool we've put together to date. While it's a bit dry to show, it's all simple spreadsheet scripting that handles author-error and requires a lot less work than to create scenes for than the scripting for Beek: Familiar Spirit for example. (When we have the full pipeline complete, we'll be sure to get around to writing a blog about making a scene in the game and explore this a bit further.)

But that's it for now, we hope you all look forward to the exploring the world of Astatos we're working hard to make a reality!

- Studio Klondike