[Background Blog] October Development Update

Hey Patrons, 

Compymono here! I’m back from our recent convention appearances and ready to give another development report on Nekojishi: Lin & Partners and Astatos!

This month we attended both PAX Aus and SXSW Sydney along with several other furry game developers as a part of Anthro Festival! It was great getting to meet a lot of fans, as well as show Astatos off to may new people!

However as a consequence, the first 3 weeks of the month were mostly dedicated to working at these conventions— so our progress has been a bit slower than usual. Still, I believe we gained a lot of important information to improve Astatos during this trip!

We’ve also put out new background art posts for higher tiers, featuring artwork from L&P and Astatos!

• [Background Art] Nekojishi: Lin & Partners - Cifa Woo'an

• [Background Art] Astatos — Sulpicius' Retreat

• [Background Art] Astatos [Aristotle - The Golden Mean]

Nekojishi: Lin & Partners

• 3D Scene Progress

  • Various model and scene improvements.

• Music Progress

  • Progress on scenario BGM “Sad Theme” (Tentative title)

  • Progress on exploration BGM “Lian Shan Group” (Tentative title)

• Migrated the project to the recently released Unity 6.

  • This enables us to use newer engine features and take advantage of performance improvements.

Astatos

• Astatos PAX Edition

  • Developed an offline demo version of Astatos that was utilised at both PAX Aus and SXSW Sydney. (There’s also a good chance this demo version will be polished and made available on Steam at some point in the future.)

• Chapter II Progress

  • Written Sub-Chapter 2-2-3

  • Chapter II Interlude writing progress.

  • CG’s completed for Sub-Chapter 2-2-2

  • CG planning for Sub-Chapter 2-2-4

• Artwork

  • Chapter II CG work.

  • Monthly hero skin artwork progress.

• Gameplay Changes

  • After watching many people play the demo version, I identified several areas to make the game more intuitive to new players. 

  • Starting with the next update, We’ve reworked the way players interact with Hero Cards. Upon selecting a Hero Card, a context-sensitive action menu is displayed. This menu allows you to give Energy and toggle Hero Abilities where appropriate.
    
    (This was quite a tricky interface to design and implement, so I hope people enjoy the change!)

  • Several other bug fixes and optimisations have been completed. (See the Astatos v0.7.15 patch notes for details)

Note: Development on the BEEK 2.0 update is still ongoing, however we had to prioritise other tasks this month and will get back to it soon.

Now that the conventions are over, I hope to have some more time to work on gameplay systems and story implementation next month! 

— Studio Klondike