Greetings RMNers!

I know I don't post devlogs here often, usually because it tends to be a bit of a hassle. You can find them monthly on itch.io and studioalemni.com always.

2023 has finally come to an end. I'll admit, I began writing this developer's log thinking I'd only have a couple of bullet points for the game's development and progress. However, it turns out this year has been a very productive one, and just because the game isn't done yet doesn't mean amazing progress wasn't made.

My resolution is to be more kind to myself as an independent developer, and understand that the project is not funded and that I am working on it entirely in my spare time. With that in mind, and looking just how much we got done this year, I think the project is doing pretty darn good!

This devlog is a lengthy summary broken into three parts: December's development progress, a summary of the entire year, and plans / announcements for 2024.

Buckle up, because this is a long one!

December Developer's Log

December went well, likely due to the holidays and the significant amount of time off that came with them (a bit of a backwards concept, I admit). Here are some of the quantifiable accomplishments for the month:

Finished all of the map layout changes for the new demo

After readjusting the story, some of the core elements of the demo from 2022 will still be in place in the new demo. The order of events has changed a bit though, and as such, so did some of the maps. I actually worked out this initial layout on a piece of scrap paper ahead of reconnecting all of the maps:



The demo is thus playable from start to finish, with just some of the important bits missing. Some new maps were also added, and one was brought back from the dead, which some of you elder fans that have been here since the beginning of time may recognize:



Integrated all dialogue for the new demo

Since the first draft of dialogue for the first act was done and the map layout in place, I was able to get all of the dialogue actually integrated into the game for the new demo. This is relatively close to final and will only need a few more passes of editing.



A fun side-note; I do all of my initial dialogue writing in Google Sheets, using a pretty fancy setup that fills in the face graphics and text for me. That way I have a good idea of what everything looks like before I have to muck around in the editor. Pretty cool, (I think?!):



Updated essence and shop menus

The shop menu hasn't been touched since 2020 (woah!), so it needed some attention. I reworked the layout and flow so it was a lot prettier and a lot less clunky to use. I also gave the essence menu a few updates, improving several UX issues reported in 2022's demo:



At the same time, I also made some much-needed backend improvements to windows and menus in general that should make adding, updating, and revising new menus in the future easier.

Squashed even more bugs

Bug-hunting is a never-ending battle, but there were quite a few issues that were present in the game's 2022 demo that I was able to finally address.

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I should point out that these efforts in December were all related to my attempt to bring the demo back for Steam's February NextFest as previously discussed. However, after some thought, I decided that doing so would be cutting it too close, and wouldn't give me enough time to ensure the game is as polished as it can be.

The new demo will absolutely launch in 2024, as discussed more below. But unfortunately it will not be during the Steam NextFest in a few weeks.

2023 in Summary

It's easy to get overwhelmed by the idea that "nothing was accomplished" when you spend an entire year on a game and don't have a releasable product to show for it. However, looking back, this was probably one of the best years for Legends of Astravia, as it felt like it lead to some much needed improvements to the game's development operations, brand, and roadmap.

Fangsoft joined Studio Alemni and helped massively with development

Fangsoft has been an incredible help this year, and without her, I probably wouldn't have been able to get the game's development back on track. She helped me get the project reorganized and set more concrete goals that inevitably lead to all of the great progress we made this year.

Completed several passes through the entire game, start to finish

Even though there haven't been a lot of visual updates, Legends of Astravia's first part is in a sense, playable from start to finish. We completed several passes through the game to integrate map layouts, item placement, environmental effects and sound.

Made numerous development tools to speed up the game's production

This was the year where I really honed my scripting abilities, employing what I've learned over the years to ensure I am working "smarter, not harder".

I made a lot of cool stuff, honestly to the point of forgetting just how much I did:
• Made a generator that takes a list of filenames and generates placeholder image files for each of them
• Made a global transition system for all of the maps in the game, for both a smoother development and gameplay
• Made a system to initialize and assign special data--including color and lighting information--to maps, eliminating the need for manually eventing each one
• Created various in-game debugging tools, including a dedicated scene for testing and constructing battle sequences
• Changed how data is loaded into the game to permit custom attributes and lightning-fast game content editing
• Documented all of the game's custom functions and attributes
• Made a spreadsheet tool for fast templating and editing of dialogue exactly as it shows up in-game
• Made a "grid-system" for window layouts to make constructing new game menus easier
• Reorganized and cleaned up a good chunk of the game's code base

These things will continue to relieve some of the burden of being a solo dev, and will help get the entire game to the finish line.

Updated the Studio Alemni website

The Studio Alemni website got a makeover, which I designed and implemented myself. I think it's easy to miss how big of an improvement this was, as the old website was slow and hard to navigate. This also cut the time it took for me to write my monthly devlogs in half, which freed up some more time for development.

Finalized the game's story

Legends of Astravia's story has been the biggest crux with regards to development. It has been changed, modified, rewritten and reworked so much, which has ultimately resulted in so many revisions to the final playable game.

With Fang's help, we finally locked it in this year, and for the first time in the several years of working on the project, I'm finally satisfied with the story is and where it is going. A lot of it required returning to my roots and remembering the "why".

I try to remain humble, but I think the story is one of Legends of Astravia's stronger points. I really hope everyone will enjoy what we've come up with.

Made the game visuals feel less like "RPG Maker" and more like "Astravia"

While the initial venture into this was done in November 2022, a lot of the work was done this year. When the demo in 2022 launched, a big point of contention was it's "RPG Maker Default Graphics".

I found myself often demotivated and unwilling to work on the project knowing that many people would be immediately turned off by the game's visuals. So switching to something that aligned the game with it's classic feel was a huge confidence boost, and really helped move things forward.

Additionally, I was able to secure more confidence in my art skills by replacing the character graphics with my own artwork. Legends of Astravia feels like it's own thing now, and I just think that's pretty cool.

Plans for 2024

Part 1 (of 2!)

While the work in 2023 ultimately didn't result in the release of the first part of the game, I'm very pleased to announce that Legends of Astravia will be delivered in two parts instead of the originally announced three. This means less waiting for the "complete" saga (complete in quotes here, because the first part will absolutely be a complete game!).

How this will work mechanically is yet to be decided (DLC vs two full game releases), but plans will become more concrete with the re-release of the demo in the summer.

Demo return (Steam NextFest)

Speaking of which, the demo will indeed make its comeback this year during the next NextFest. An official announcement will be made sometime in March, and beta testing will begin soon. If you're interested in helping test the game and iron out issues, you can join the Discord server to get involved!

Get the game back on the map

Legends of Astravia was doing reasonably well from a marketing and interest standpoint at two points during its development: the first demo in 2018, and the second demo in 2022. It seems when people get to play the game, news about it travels. Go figure!

In the year and a half that I've been working on the game since it's demo in 2022, interest in the game has naturally waned a bit. I've also had significant difficulty maintaining a consistent marketing campaign on social media sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

Besides just the demo launch, I'd like to revive some of that interest through more consistent visual updates on social media, trailers, and content creator outreach. I hope that more people will become aware of the game, especially those who it is really catered towards.

Part 1's release (Attempt #2!)

This one is tentative. Delaying the game's release over the years has been discouraging, but I also need to remain realistic with my schedule. I'd like to have a holiday launch, but otherwise, the plan for Legends of Astravia is to launch in Q1 of 2025.

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I hope this developer's log renews confidence for those of you who have been patiently waiting for release news. It means so much to have so many people interested in the project and checking in, especially as a small developer who can only work on the project part-time.

It's been a long time, but I do see the finish line on the horizon. Here's to a productive and successful 2024!

Thank you,

-Jaiden

Hello everyone,

I'm sure it was exciting to see the notification for a new download, but alas--nothing has changed. I just moved the standalone download to itch.io because it's really challenging to keep track of RMN uploads and updates on top of the other platforms.

The download is still free, does not require a launcher, and is not paywalled.

Of course, if you haven't tried the demo yet, now's your chance! ;)

Developer's Log - May 2022

Hello everyone,

First off, I'd like to apologize for the delay on this developer's log and reporting on the game's progress. It has been two months since the last formal report, and a couple of weeks since I've shared any visual progress on the game's twitter account (which is far too long).

While a lot certainly happened since then (Japanese translation of the demo comes to mind), many of you have been excited for the game and are likely expecting to hear more about how it is coming along.

I've had some personal setbacks, which are unfortunately a natural occurrence as a solo developer. I will get into more detail in the "Roadmap Update" section of the log.

For now, let's see how things are coming along with the game:

Japanese Translation of the Demo

I'd like to take a moment to speak a little more in-depth regarding the Japanese translation of the demo, which occurred through most of March and April. (Speaking of which, I have uploaded the Demo's v0.3.1 update to RMN finally, which includes this translation, as well as a few QoL fixes. This should make the experience a little better, for those of you who haven't tried it out yet.)

Back in March, I had an opportunity for the demo to be translated to Japanese. Translation was something I was not considering until the game was done, so the decision was a bit sudden. But as cliche as it is, I have always wanted to see the game in Japanese some day. Given Legends of Astravia's inspiration from other Japanese RPGs and media, I decided to go forward with it.

From a development and production standpoint, this was objectively a bad decision. It resulted in me losing over a month of development time better suited for the final product in English, and may even result in the game being delayed. And I feel that some English players who have been following the project for a long time may be frustrated by this.
For that, I apologize.

But at the same time, I do not regret it. I think it was a very good experience for me as a developer, as I learned so much about the localization and language integration process. It allowed me to better understand the scope of such things, so I can properly estimate the financial and time cost of them in the future.

I'll talk about the process a bit, mainly a few of the things I completely underestimated and why it took me so long. I think this will help understand why proper updates on future content have been sparse, and may also help my fellow developers who are considering Japanese translation realize the scope of such an undertaking.


Preparation

Game translation is not simply handing a document full of game text to someone and getting the translation in return (if you have a translator who promises this is all it takes--be wary!). It is a multi-step process with a lot of communication, and generally requires a lot of proper notes and information for the translator(s) handling the project. And, once the translation is done, it all needs to be added to the game, then tested and modified along the way.

I had the pleasure of working with a very talented translator, Obatatsu(S.N.), who took a lot of care with the translation. They also managed the Localization Quality Assurance process while providing me guidance. I think the resulting Japanese demo came out wonderfully as a result.

First, because I work in RPG Maker, I had to ensure the game text was in a manageable format (in this case, a spreadsheet). Thankfully, the game already utilizes a "Localization" plugin that had most of the game's text in an external file. The work involved with breaking that text out of the editor can stack up very quickly, and I probably wouldn't have considered it if it already wasn't done.

Next, I had a document full of notes regarding context for the story, the characters personalities, and various "in world" language that was used. It is important to consider that certain aspects of your native language may not exist in the language you are translating to, or they may require more context and complexity. Thankfully I already had some basic understanding of Japanese, but even with that, there was a lot of extra information needed about the world and certain story elements.

In the case of an RPG, careful consideration was needed regarding the database and interface too. It is not just the character dialogue that needs to be translated. Character names, item names, item descriptions, menu elements, overworld exploration... these are all things that need to be translated. I quickly found during the process that even in my prior preparation, I had tons of hard-coded strings in the battle system, etc. that needed to be pulled out of the engine and made available to translate.

Once I received all of the game text from the translator, I began the integration process. It is worth pointing out there are often entire dedicated teams that handle such things, and after over a month of work integrating a translation for only 1 hour of game, I quickly understood that fact.


Text Length

Text length is something that trips up most developers doing an English -> translation. I told myself I was prepared, but a lot of it still really caught me off guard.

My understanding of Japanese was that you could portray a lot more in a sentence with less characters. And while that may be true, Japanese (and Chinese and Korean, by the way) characters render approximately 1.5 times the width of Roman/Latin ones. Such fullwidth characters can quickly cause a text overflow problem.




I found that I became very close to requiring an extra textbox for certain scenes of the game, but thankfully did not get to that point. Most of the textboxes in the demo were only 2-3 lines in length, which quickly became 3-4 in the Japanese version.

Another observation to make here is that Japanese text does not have spaces. If you have a script that automatically generates line breaks based on spaces, it will quickly fall apart when translating to a language that does not have them.

For dialogue, I manually added every linebreak in Japanese. This required a reasonable understanding of how Japanese sentences are structured, and took me a lot of time. In the future, I think I would work a little closer with the translator on this, and have a special set of guidelines for maximum line length.


Fonts and Typesetting

When rendering in different languages, not all fonts support CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) characters. I had to choose several different fonts for various aspects of the game, since Astravia uses different fonts for headers, text, UI and even cutscenes.




While it was a lot of fun to pick out interesting fonts in Japanese, this was yet another layer of scope added to the process.


User Interface

Lastly, the User Interface elements. Similarly to dialogue text length, the user interface can suffer from having too little space. And unfortunately, an extra text box can't just be added.




I had to create many special exceptions for how text was managed, especially in the battle system. Because the word order is so different in Japanese, the way I substituted certain action text had to be changed, too.



While I could continue to discuss so many aspects of the process, I think that is enough detail for this log. It was really a joy to learn about, and I have so much respect for translators and people involved in game localization.

But perhaps this helps paint a picture of just how involved the process was, and why it took such a large chunk out of development progress.

My hope for the future is that I can garner the budget and resources to have the rest of the game in Japanese. As arduous as the process was, it is really rewarding to see how the characters and story became reflected in that language, and for that, I'd go through it again.

However, priority will remain on completion of the rest of the game (in English!) in the meantime.


Core System Adjustments Based on Demo Feedback

This past month, I was able to get some work done on the battle system's core based on feedback I received regarding the demo. I will continue to make such adjustments to the final game as both demo and beta testing feedback comes in, but the goal is to really solidify things so I have to change very little for the later half of the game.


Battle Speed & Damage Adjustments

The battle's timer system, while dynamic and interesting, had a lot of flaws. They start to show a little bit in the demo, which some of you may have noticed.

Character speed varied by nearly 2-3x, leading to some characters "lapping" others on the time bar. Depending on how much of the demo you beat, either Oliver and Azel moved so quickly that there was really no challenge at all, or you would get thrashed by lighting-fast bees. It was not a smooth progression.

This would prove problematic to balance in later parts of the game.

The new system is a little closer to a conventional ATB, with each character and enemy having a predictable speed stat, that only varies with enhancements from equipment and essence.

Here's a little comparison, with the current demo at the top, and the revision on the bottom:



Damage got a small rework in the process too, which is something that will likely require more adjustment as time goes on. I want to ensure that battles have a little more depth to them than just casting a spell to win.

I've spent many hours in a spreadsheet, tweaking formulas and testing outcomes.



It is very close to where I want it to be, and the changes will be in the next beta version to test out.


Enemy Drop Rates

While working in the battle system, I also fixed a problem with enemy drop rates. Apparently, the drop table is rolling twice during the demo, which is why the demo ends with an inventory of about 30000 mushroom caps. Whoops!

I took the time to also extend the range of rarity. So now, items have the capacity to drop as rarely as 1/1000 battles instead of just 1/100.


Content Progress - Mordin Village

Something that I was eager to showcase this month was visual progress for upcoming content. But disappointingly, there is not as much as I hoped to share.

Baldric, and some other NPCs, had their facesets completed. Main characters have many more faces, plus the blink animation, so it takes me some time to draw and prepare them. With this, I can start story and quest development.



Mordin Village itself has received a makeover. I was not satisfied with the original structure, which was very chaotic (given it was one of my first maps, this is not a surprise). Here is a very rough work in progress on that:



The new jumping / cliff system is in place, and the map was split into two separate ones, separated by the bridge. There is also an extra map, not shown here, that plays into the story.

Lastly, a battle teaser with some new enemies:



I wonder what will come of this situation...?


Roadmap Update

It is becoming increasingly concerning that I may not be able to meet the Q4 deadline for Chapter 1, and I really used a lot of my development energy maintaining and updating the demo version of the game the past two months.

I'd like to be a little more consistent with progress, so from now on, I will return to monthly developers logs. As it stands, the next beta wave, due for this month, is now due to be ready in July.

But I want to be honest and say that the end-of-year deadline for Chapter 1's release is looking less and less probable. I don't want to throw in the towel just yet, so the "Q4 2022" will remain on the Steam page. However, within the next couple of months, if I cannot pick up the pace on development or get funding, I will need to delay the release further.

I will be sure to keep you all up to date on this process, and I'm sincerely sorry for those of you who have been waiting so long and are eager to play the game.

Your patience, understanding, and support even as I struggle to maintain a balance of managing my daily life and health while developing this game means a lot. I hope to have more to share with you soon.

That's all for now. If you've read this far, thank you so much! I look forward to next month's report.

-Jaiden

Legends of Astravia is now available to download right here on RMN!

Download now: https://rpgmaker.net/games/10245/downloads/

Fight monsters, solve puzzles, and uncover secrets alongside a mystic companion as you explore the twisting pathways of Mordin Swamp in this one hour introduction to the world of Astravia!

It is currently available for both Windows and MacOS. A Linux release will arrive at a later date.

Any bugs or issues can be reported via the Official Discord Server. Please be sure to read the guidelines before making a report. Otherwise, any feedback is more than welcome, and will help make the game the best it can be when Chapter 1 releases, hopefully, later this year!

Thank you for your endless support, I really hope you enjoy the game. After several years of development, I'm beyond excited to finally be able to share something playable with the world.

HawkZombie did an exclusive stream of the new demo this week, and the VOD is now available!

This is the first public reveal of the entire demo, and Hawk himself has never played it before. As one of the first people who streamed the game when it had its alpha build years ago, it was only natural to let him get a sneak peek at the new and refined Astravia.

If you're curious what is in store for the game and the free demo, check it out! (spoilers, obviously):