Hello all!

It's been a little while since I last wrote a devlog, but now that the demo has been out for a few days, I figured I'd check in and give an update. Across both itchio and RMN, the Astra Hunter Zosma demo has been downloaded over 80 times! Thank you all for your support.

I've gotten quite a lot of feedback about the game so far, and I'm glad that many of you have enjoyed it! I'll get into the takeaways in a minute, as I'm sure you're all wondering where things stand in development. So let's take a quick look at our friend and savior the Progress Chart:



Our friend the Progress Chart Lock has been doing a good job making sure the game's scope can't extend any further! I'm glad he's there.

To put it simply: the entire second dungeon and second part of the Expanding Void are largely feature-complete and fully playable. I'll be implementing story events and related content soon. All in all, I have about double the amount of content finished that was in the demo.

The demo itself clocked in at about 60-90 minutes if you did both dungeons. That's quite a bit of content! I'll be doing my best to make sure that saves from the demo are compatible with the full game when it is eventually finished. If anything changes in this regard, I'll be sure to let you all know. I'm hoping it won't come to that, however.

Demo Takeaways

Astra Hunter Zosma has been largely an experimental game for me so far, and it's exploring a lot of territory that I haven't really touched yet. Sideview battles, an emphasis on gameplay vs story, and many other things have made this a much different dev experience than any game I've done before it. So far, it looks like everything has been coming together better than I expected.

But there are, of course, a few things I want to improve!

1. Improve the Companion's AI.

Right now the companion character has very basic battle AI: It will choose from one of any of the actions that you have invested Ability Points in, as well as the normal attack command. The regular attack command being shuffled into the mix is actually something of a compromise: RPG Maker MZ seems to do this by default for AI-controlled party members (even if you prevent them from using it in any way), and is something that I'm hoping to remove in the full game if possible. Hopefully I can do something!

2. Revisit Healing Abilities and Defending

Players pointed out two very noticeable things about Zosma's move set: He has no healing abilities, and he can't defend. Healing only through items was an intential decision, because I wanted healing to chain into items, and to make the game more resource-intensive instead of having items sit in your inventory forever. While Zosma does get limited healing abilities later in the game with an equippable Sigil, I might also consider making those available sooner.

As for defending, the default Guard command was too game-breaking as you could still attack several times in a turn AND Guard for the damage reduction. I might also include Guard in a Sigil, but make it less powerful than the default and only usable as Zosma's final action for a given turn.

What's next?

I'll be releasing Demo v1.0.3 soon, which will be a very small update that fixes a couple of visual bugs and makes the shop in the Betwixt a little easier to navigate. Beyond that, work will continue on finishing the second area and beyond. Things are going pretty well! So thank you for continuing to stick with this project.

Until next time!
- Sgt M