Hey Patrons,

Compymono here! Since our last development blog we’ve been hard at work on our different projects. (For real, I’ve been buried head down and blowing through a lot of dev work!)

First a quick rundown on the posts we’ve put out since the last development update in April for higher tiers:

Concept Art

[Background Art] Astatos [Amicus - Stellar Deliverer]

[Background Art] Astatos - Journey Anew CG

[Background Art] Astatos [Caelius - Ranger of the Heartland]

[Background Art] Astatos - Everything With You CG

[Background Art] Astatos [Cato - The Method of Madness]

[Background Art] Astatos - The Miracle CG (Part A)

Background Blog

[Background Blog] Website Overhaul Project

Astatos

In June we finally launched the final part of Chapter II; including new story scenes, new interludes, and a new credits theme by Adapt 9— with its own OST release on YouTube.

In July we released the New Trial Experience update for the game, a near-complete rewrite of the gameplay codebase, targeting the following key points:

Necessity! We had heaps of tech-debt originating from the original development of the game. Gameplay data was heavily fragmented behind classes and UI elements, several monolithic scripts were responsible for the gameplay systems, several parameters were not properly exposed making it difficult to add the effects I needed for Cascade Trial.

Easier Hero Ability Authoring. The new framework makes it much quicker to develop new Hero Abilities and is much better at handling passive abilities in particular.

More stable online play. Player synchronisation has been rebuilt, greatly reducing desyncs and stalled Trials.

Host migration. If the host disconnects mid-Trial, the match now continues under a new host instead of ending.

Player replacement. If a player disconnects mid-Trial, they are replaced with an AI player in their place, allowing the remainder of the match to be played out normally.

Smoother pacing. Ability animations and turn flow are now kept in step across all players.

Revised AI logic. AI opponents now take actions faster and cooperate better with players in Conquest Trials.

New Hero Stage AI. The Hero Stage AI has been rewritten, with more advanced modelling of the Hero Abilities and the ability to plan longer-term actions on higher difficulties.

A huge update like this effectively meant that all trials and online gameplay had to be bug tested from scratch. Without a proper testing team, I had to think of an inventive way to go about this without wasting lots of my dev time just playing the game and trying to dig up bugs.

So I developed an automated testing system for Astatos, allowing an external program to launch up to 16 instances of the game simultaneously on my computer, set up and complete matches without any human interaction.

Whenever any bug occurred, the game saves the gameplay log and a screenshot into a folder which I can then use to diagnose the issues.

The testing system also allows me to rapidly test a variety of scenarios, game mode combinations, player + AI combinations, and simulate various network conditions and dropouts.

With the automated testing I was able to focus my efforts on tidying up bugs before any players fund them and manually verifying the story and tutorial Trials.

Along with this, July also saw several major game balance changes to the game. Over the course of working on the New Trial Experience update, I had the chance to polish the game balance for Conquest Trials and Mukaki’s Side in particular.

(It was pretty funny seeing players discuss the balance issues I had implemented changes covering too haha)

New story editor! With Chapter III on the way, I decided to sit down and put together a story editor for the game’s cutscenes.

Previously, every cutscene had to be hand-scripted in a CSV file. (working in Excel) This meant the entire scripting parameters and current state of the scene had to be tracked in the mind of the person scripting the scene, which isn’t exactly intuitive and required a lot of trial and error, and extra testing.

The new story editor is a web-based custom CSV editor with full syntax autofill and nice additions such as the ability to display the list of expressions available for each character. There’s even a estimated scene preview!

With this tool it should be much easier to quickly draft out cutscenes for Chapter III and beyond!

Cascade Trial Updates! With the New Trial Engine out of the way, I dove into a lot of the remaining backend work for Cascade Trial. Some big milestones hit over the last months:

Dungeon progression, meaning a run from Layer 1 to the final boss and run completion is now possible.

Game design work developing the event structure, with each archetype based on the Trigrams of I Ching, and each event split among the 64 Hexagrams.

Server systems, supporting the dungeon drops, progression saving, and weekly rewards planned for Cascade Trial.

Chapter III is coming of course! Although we’ve still got a long way to go. Lately we just completed the second scenario outline review, with the third review underway. (The story will be good, we hope!)

Mamaduo is currently working on sprites for the new characters as well!

And as always, we’re also working on new artwork for the monthly Hero Skins.

Nekojishi: Lin & Partners

It’s been a while since we talked about Nekojishi, but I’m happy to say we’ve been making a lot of progress over these past few months.

It’s been a looooooong while since we did a proper update on the game, so it deserves it’s own blog to give it the attention it deserves. (And because backers deserve to get the same updates as our Patrons do!)

But for the gist of things:

We’ve finalised the latest art pass for the big cat’s sprites. (Lin Hu + Likulau)

Updated character shaders.

Rewrote our character controller systems.

Updated the camera controller.

New expansions to the debate gameplay.

Fleshed out an old prototype of the garden arrangement gameplay.

And yeah, once again, new blog on the above will come out separately down the track! A lot of things are pretty rough, and the UI is really unfinished atm, but that’s just how development is haha. Hope people are looking forward to it!