Hello and welcome to another edition of the Astral Flux devlog! Adam here, resuming my regular duties as auteur.

Milestones

Wow, 6 months already! Although there’s still lots left to do, we’re in the home stretch. We have one more two-month milestone planned which we’ll use to add the final world and the finishing touches.

We’ve left ourselves a bit of extra buffer as well since our release date will hinge slightly on our marketing efforts (i.e. we hope to reach a minimum number of wish lists before launching). This should put the release somewhere around July, but nothing’s set in stone yet.

Arachnophobia

I’m pleased to present the world 3 boss! This was a great collaboration between Nathan and me: I prototyped an early version of the AI, he prototyped the IK animation and art, and I put it all together.

(Semi spoilers ahead)

This one requires a little bit of experimentation in order to defeat, plus a few surprises along the way.

In the process of developing this boss, I also implemented support for particle-based projectiles (think: bullet hell) and environmental hazards (like poison). I’ll keep it a surprise, but you can expect to see a few enemies with these attacks as well.

We also wanted to add some more challenging ground enemies for world 3. What better way than to add some baby spiders crawling and jumping around the temples to stick with the theme of the boss? With some basic AI, these crawly creatures jump or shoot stuff at you. They may seem hard to kill or avoid at first, but once you understand their pattern they become easier to deal with.

Off the Beaten Path

As Nathan alluded to last month, we’ve been exploring ways to add optional content. To that end, we’ve revised the procedural generation logic to identify points of interest. That is, rooms that are off the beaten path and require some exploration to reach. We’ll use these rooms to feature content like upgrades (via challenge rooms), and special items (like coin/time exchangers).

In the picture above you can see an example of a temple with the main path to the boss and final treasure (red path), the branches that can be explored (white path) and the points of interest (red dots) that are far enough off the main path (the green rooms). Everything is randomized every time you enter a temple (the path, the rooms, the POI locations) to keep things challenging and interesting.

Last but not least, a quick reminder that we’ve released an early version on itch.io. Cosmocat patrons get automatic access to this as well.

Well, that’s it for now! Thanks for reading, and see you again in about a month,

Adam