StudioKlondike

[Background Blog] Astatos Chapter 1 Revision Progress

Added 2022-01-31 03:49:29 +0000 UTC

Hey Patrons,

Since the release of Astatos we've been deep into production of Chapter 2. Additionally, we've been working hard on a revision plan to polish up Chapter 1 after taking in feedback from players and as we plan out the rest of the story.

The revision of Chapter 1 is planned to include:

New character sprites for 6 named characters who only appeared off-screen. (These sprites were planned originally, but cut to reduce scope.)
Revising the story to remove some beta plot elements that we won't be bringing forward after a recent revision.
Extended scenes for some chapters where we felt things ended too sudden.
New music as we work with Tama to expand the range of tracks we have available going forward.

So today we wanted to give a sneak peek at Janus, one of the new characters getting sprites in Astatos as a part of this revision.

Below you can see our basic doc and references for the design of Janus. In some early planning he was going to be a canine, but that was changed to a fox due to the symbolism used in the Chinese version of the game. (Concept sketches by Fruitz!)

After this we pass the reference illustrations to Mamaduo and we begin working on sketching out the character sprite, refining the design, painting the base sprite, and working on the expression set.

While Janus won't be appearing in the game itself for some time while we're busy on getting other content written and new features added, we hope you enjoy a brief look at his design and the process we took to get there.

- Compymono