#Kickstarter astral ascent code#

But in the end, it released on consoles, in a lot of languages, had a physical release and it gave a real boost to our studio.įor Astral Ascent, it was only Alexandre and I involved in pre-production in late 2019, but with public help and money from previous projects, we have created a talented team around the project, including Construct community member Relixes who is doing a fantastic job on the game! We have also hired a new full-time artist and we work with freelancers for narrative design, sound design and music. He was working in a pharmacy, and I personally come from a sociology background! We've put in a lot of effort but we've eventually reached the level of quality we wanted from our work!ĭark Devotion was a much bigger success than we had expected and to begin with, we only aimed for a small release on PC. For example, our lead artist Alexandre never did any pixel art before we started working together. Interestingly, all of us were 'self-taught' in our fields. Hibernian Workshop started out back in 2017 and there were just four of us when we released our first project. CAN YOU GIVE US A BIT OF BACKGROUND ON THE STUDIO? HOW YOU ALL CAME TOGETHER? YOU'VE GOT QUITE THE TEAM AT HIBERNIAN WORKSHOP.

#Kickstarter astral ascent code#

I would say for us, the design has more often been a challenge than the code itself. When you have a publisher, you have a steady income and less risk, but self-publishing means you have to make sure your studio can handle more tasks like QA, marketing, PR, ports, translations, and of course funding!Īpart from that, so far, we've not faced any major challenge regarding the game's code. It is challenging because everything is uncertain. It will be risky, but if we're successful, we think it'll help stabilise our studio and allow us to grow even more for future projects! Our biggest hurdle is an ongoing one: we want to self-publish! We think we are capable of it and that now is the right time to take our chance. WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR? Nothing has been particularly challenging so far, but it is a lot of work to put together a campaign and the demo is keeping us busy as we try to make sure we're ready in time!Īlthough, there is something that is quite the time sink: trailers! It takes so much time to do and it is very hard to make sure it's up to the standards of other trailers that players are used to seeing! I think our trailer will take about 2 weeks of full-time work to be ready. We have also left the Kickstarter until later in the development of the game, so we already have a lot of things to show and even the aforementioned demo. We have hired a marketing company (which is very important because there is so much to do, all the time!), we have prepared a lot of very exciting physical rewards and several stretch goals. This time though, we come into it much more prepared. We had no marketing and only focused on development during the campaign. Plus, we probably made a lot of potential mistakes during our previous campaign. As well as settling on the gameplay, we knew we wanted to move far away from Dark Devotion so we've gone from a dark, fairly oppressive game, to a bright, colourful game with a lot of aerial action!Ī Kickstarter is always stressful, but we have already done one with Dark Devotion, so we know what to expect. Construct is still a fairly new engine to us, so we're also trying to stay close to what we know mechanics-wise. So, we've ended up with a 2D platformer that has rogue-lite elements and impressive bosses! At Hibernian Workshop, we love playing these types of games, so it was easy to settle on what we wanted to work on. We've been working on Astral Ascent since late 2019 and when we started the project, we wanted to work on a game genre we were comfortable with. So far, I've found that Construct 3 has everything I need to make all the games I want to make! YOU'RE CURRENTLY WORKING ON ASTRAL ASCENT, TELL US A BIT ABOUT THE GAME AND THE STORY BEHIND IT. But, it felt really long-winded and complicated to do very basic stuff, I felt stuck.Įventually, I gave Construct a try with a tutorial from Udemy and it was a true revelation! Everything was easy and really good to use! I genuinely spent my first months yelling with joy as I kept finding features that were missing from my previous engine. My work with indie studios got me using Unity for a bit and I even made a few games on it for mobile with Playmaker visual scripting extension. Though it took me years of practice before I felt comfortable with it. I never learned to code but did I learn to use Clickteam Fusion 2.5 in my game design class.