Astral is a 2D sci-fi action exploration game. You start out as a stranded space traveller on a remote planet, your ship has crashed, your equipment is broken. All you have left are the basic tools to gather resources and create shelter. This is where your journey begins, a new beginning. You must carve out a new life for yourself, explore new frontiers in an endless universe filled with warmongering factions, greedy trade federations and hostile environments on alien planets. Experience space travel in your very own custom built ship, put your mark on the universe with fully destructible environment, battle powerful enemies with fast paced combat using a huge arsenal of customizable weaponry. Everything with real time physics. With Astral, we want to bring you a new sense of exploration and discovery, experienced either on your own or online with your friends.
We've been working hard on many of the features in Astral lately, so it's difficult to decide what to show you guys. And most of the stuff is still very much a work in progress, but the landscape and environment is starting to take shape and we wanted to share it with you!
The programmers implemented a system for parallaxing in Astral a while ago, making it easy for the artists to configure as well. This turned out to be a really effective way to work on the background. The artists can create the assets for the background and assign them to their respective layers as they see fit. Meaning that we don't have to wait for the programmers to implement the new assets into the game(saving a lot of time on both sides).
When adding a new asset to the background, we have a number of parameters that we can tweak to make sure it fits just the way we intended. Each layer can have as many different images rendered on it as we want, so that we can create variety in the landscape. Also we have to adjust size and a variable that decides how often that specific layer will render its assets, since it's random we have a specific range that we specify.
We plan to have different background assets for each biome on the planet, so that the biomes visually stretch outwards across the landscape. The videos in this post show how it looks like right now, we have a few assets for the background, but we plan to have more soon as the landscape is lacking in variety as it is now. But we hope it's enough to give you a feeling of how the parallaxing and landscapes will feel in Astral!
Edvin Avdagic - Art Director
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One of the characteristic features we want for Astral is realistic looking physics, although realistic is probably not the correct word for a 2D game...
Recently we added mountains to Astral to make the terrain more varying. This adds a lot to the game and we want to show you how it looks right now, so...
We've steadily been progressing and want to talk about and show some of the things we've done. We also discuss some of our near future plans for the game...
In this article you can read about the process of creating art for Astral and implementing it into the game.
Still working on it?
Awesome! Tracking!
Looks good at first, i'm tracking to see how this develops.