[Background Blog] The Groundwork of Astatos the Video Game

Hello everyone!

Today we wanted to share with you an early look at some of the development of the foundational systems of the Astatos video game which is currently in development after we hit the stretch goal for it last year during the Astatos Kickstarter.

As you can imagine, there are both benefits and challenges that come with adapting a physical card game like Astatos into a video game. On one hand it's easier to guide the player through the game, on the other we have to come up with lots of ways to handle more ambiguous tasks in the game that usually require cooperation and discussion between players.

Starting Out

The first steps on our journey to bringing Astatos into the digital world began earlier this year. To begin with we wanted to get an idea about the game by building it out physically on screen.

Above you can see a very early test scene of the game based around the layout of the prototype playmat of Astatos. (the final one included with the card game features a new design) The idea was to get a basic understanding of how the game plays out in a digital space before we get too deep into design. 

Online Multiplayer

This process also gave us time to start development on the most crucial part of this project. Since this is the first game we've developed with online multiplayer there was a lot of work to be done behind the scenes before we could move forward with developing the game itself.

To begin with, we knew we needed a cross-platform user account system so players could play on both PC and mobile interchangeably. A simple thing to say, but it's weeks of work to firstly set up, and then make sure all the information we collect from you is protected to the best industry standards.

The two goals of the system as it stands are to let players bring their save data between platforms, and let players on any platform be matched against each other in online Trials.

The above screenshot from our server terminal may look simple but there's been a lot of work behind it to get this far.

The next element of online support has been putting together the core Lobby / Room server system to handle the matching and communication between players. i.e. Safely establishing connections between the server and then player's game clients over this server.

It took us about two weeks to get this stable and working in internal tests between team members on different sides of the world, but now it's up and running we can focus on moving the game forward.

Coming Next

The next part has been building the core gameplay loop. For initial testing this included the Card Draw stage, Trial Stage, basic Hero Stage, and putting in place the winning conditions. The result is that we've been able to play in basic test matches.

For now we're just focusing on what we'll be considering the "classic" game mode which directly represents the original card game, but in the future we hope to be able to offer various other modes built upon the same framework for 1v1 competitive and single player tutorial modes.

This progress has allowed our graphic designer to move forward and begin putting together the user interface and interactions for the entire game. While the user interface still needs a lot of tweaking it's already a massive improvement from the basic development UI.

Where we go from here?

Our aim is to be able to reach an alpha state within the next month or so where we can play classic matches with the base hero cards and whatever expansion pack cards are the easiest to implement. From here we'll be looking to do a small closed-alpha stress test to catch bugs while we work to flesh out the game and create more content.

And that's where we're currently at with the development of the Astatos video game. There's a few more things we could cover like the UI design but we can save that for when things are a bit more finalised.

We hoped you liked this blog and be sure to let us know if you have any feedback or questions about the game.

- Studio Klondike