Hey Survivors,

It’s time for an update on the game, where it’s currently at, and how we’re going to proceed from here. If you followed our previous posts you’ll know that after the issues we’ve had with Unity DOTS, we decided to switch engines in order to fix the instability and constant crashes DOTS was causing. While the port is largely finished now, because of how fundamentally different DOTS is to normal programming paradigms we essentially had to rewrite the entire game from scratch.

The UI was completely redesigned and reworked for higher efficiency and better visuals.


Reproducing over a year’s worth of work in less than half the time is a pretty big thing to ask for, but the fact we managed to do it (and while maintaining higher levels of quality/stability to boot) is a good sign that ditching DOTS was the right choice to make. While the rate of progress is much faster, it still took us a considerable amount of time, meaning we didn’t have any time left to work on new major features as compared to the demo.

Taking stock of our starting position and assigning work priorities through the new interface.

Our original plan was to port over the demo features and release it with some minor additions, along with the added polish and improved stability of no longer relying on DOTS. This would have made for a very rudimentary initial build with very little content, which would have felt very underwhelming for a lot of players when it first dropped.

Using the new designation system to mark grown trees for chopping.

That’s why over the past month we’ve put some work in behind the scenes to secure an additional round of funding. We’re still ironing out the details, but as of right now development funds have been secured for at least another year. Instead of being forced to rush out a sub-par version for lack of money, we’ll be able to take this time to make sure the first launch is a success.


Since we’re no longer putting all of our resources towards recreating what we had before, and we’re largely done with the basic engine architecture, going forward we’ll be able to concentrate on implementing some of the major features we have planned for the game. You can expect more dev logs with updates coming soon as a result.

A simple shelter being laid out.

While we think getting the extra dev time for a fleshed-out release is necessary and will benefit the game in the long run, we also understand that many of you were pretty excited to finally get to play it in April. We’re already working on some ideas for how to alleviate that, but the details depend on how certain things shape up within the next few weeks. We’ll announce specifics as soon as we can on that front.

Using the resources we harvested to build.


We hope that despite the delay, you’ll understand why we chose to do things this way. After all, quality can’t be rushed and you only get to make first impressions once. That’s why we want to make sure when you first get to play AoA, your experience will be a good one. Stay tuned for more progress updates soon.

Until then, stay safe and keep surviving!

-Max and the AoA team

Dear Survivors,

Everybody on the Ascent of Ashes team extends our gratitude to every one of you who has participated in our development journey thus far. You’ve helped shape the game and its future with your passion and your feedback.

Internally, we’ve been debating between a couple of potential dates for weeks. As a result, news has been scarce. Today, however, we have an announcement. The game will be released into Early Access next month, April 2024.

We want to express our deepest appreciation to our dedicated community for your patience and support for Ascent of Ashes. Your passion inspires us every day, and we’re looking forward to sharing more updates with you soon.

Sincerely,

-Max, Vivid Storm Interactive, and Camlann Games

Rock beetle

Hey guys,

it’s time for a new progress update. As you know, after our recent Unity issues we’ve made the decision to delay the Early Access release and port the game over to the Godot engine. Since then we’ve been hard at work migrating our codebase from ECS to OOP.

Much of the initial workload was designing the new code architecture, making sure it will provide a solid foundation to build on. The last thing we want is for our new code to be as unstable and prone to crashes as DOTS turned out to be.

Diagrams such as this help us visualize the architecture of our new custom engine. ^

That does not mean that we have nothing new to show however. We do not want the Early Access release to simply be a re-release of the demo with better stability. While we reimplement the demo features we’re adding additional polish and functionality where we can, taking advantage of some of the new features Godot offers us in the process.


One thing we received a lot of feedback on during the demo was the UI. The overall style was rather plain and many players had issues finding their way around the controls. A big part of this was the lack of basic features like tooltips and other UX features.

With Unity, our approach to UI was to follow the “recommended” workflow by creating UI prefabs within the Unity editor and writing various custom scripts to bind them into the game logic. This approach had several issues. For one, it required an artist to first create the UI and required sprites, then a programmer had to make it actually function, increasing workload and friction. Every time the UI design changed, all the scripts had to be adjusted as well, and actually connecting those scripts to ingame objects was easier said than done. The whole approach also made the UI very difficult to change for modders, since they don’t have source access to the project.

Godot offers a similar workflow by default, with premade scenes created in the editor. However, having learned our lesson from Unity, we opted to have our new UI framework be entirely code-authored. That means all the UI Nodes are created and configured through a series of standardized methods written by our programmers. Godot makes this easier thanks to its “Theme” feature, which allows our artist to simply configure global style variables that are automatically applied to all the UI widgets our code creates.

One of the new menus, created entirely via code. ^

This allows us to standardize appearance across UI elements (a good general practice to follow in UI design), and to easily tweak global variables when needed. Meanwhile, having the UI be entirely created through code means our artist no longer needs to be involved in the process beyond setting up the initial Theme. It makes it much easier to connect UI elements with game objects, and the overall process is much faster. For example, the New Game menu pictured took me around 20 minutes to make. With our old approach it would’ve taken myself and Ricky both around a day. To top it all off, being code-authored means it’s easy for modders to change how widgets are generated, add their own, or modify existing UI elements.


Speaking of New Game settings, another new feature is biome diversity. Come Early Access you’ll be able to select from a variety of different biomes and topography settings for your home map. Biomes may include things like forests, grasslands, arid steppes and deserts. As the plant life varies, your access to food, wood and other resources will vary greatly.

Temperate forests are categorized by dense canopies and shrubs. Plenty of wood and berries to harvest, but the foliage may conceal approaching raiders. ^

These new biomes are part of our new focus on the player’s home map. For the Early Access release most of our effort will be on the home map, base building, management and raid defense. Expeditions will still be around as a way to get new resources and progress through the tech tree, but we want to make sure we have a solid base for our management gameplay before we turn towards expedition maps.

Grasslands provide clear lines of sight, but building materials may be scarce. ^

That does mean we’ll have to take a step back from the demo’s fully playable expeditions. We think its better if we temporarily disable that particular feature until we can properly polish it, rather than leaving you guys to deal with jank and wonky gameplay. That does not mean the feature itself is cancelled, it will make a comeback with the first major content update post-release.

That’s it for today, until next time stay safe and keep surviving!

Hey Survivors,

Now that the demo has concluded, we want to say a huge thank you to all those who played it and gave us their feedback. We have listened to the community and appreciate all input you have given us. Based on your feedback we have decided to delay our November Early Access release date for Ascent of Ashes until next year: Q1 of 2024.

While we understand a delay is disappointing, we feel that our priority right now is to work on the reports and suggestions brought up by the community. We have taken your input to heart, and will be using it to build a stronger foundation for Ascent of Ashes.

We’ve had challenges with Unity that will take some time as we port over to a new system. We originally planned on porting after EA release, but after community feedback, we realized we would rather make the transition sooner. This will give us time to work on fixing features, as we realized we have to focus on polishing the core gameplay. After the polish and stability fixes, we are committed to releasing a steady stream of content updates as outlined in our roadmap to 1.0 . With the help of your feedback, we understand that there are several key features that players have requested, such as a more in-depth tutorial and UI text scaling, that will be implemented as well.

Our team is dedicated to making Ascent of Ashes the best it can possibly be, and we can’t thank you enough – our players – for helping us realize our vision for the game.

Thank you for your patience, survivors. We’ll be in touch soon.

We are honored to be featured this week as one of Steam NextFest's most played demos. We are extending the playable demo for this week, so make sure to check it out before the EA release!

The demo hotfix is live, and we are so grateful for all player feedback. We addressed several key issues that were reported, with additional fixes and QoL updates planned as we prioritize polish as we work towards EA release.

Enjoy and survive!

We have heard all of your feedback and we have instituted a hotfix for the demo. We acknowledge that we still have more work to do as we move forward to EA release, but we wanted to implement the changes that we were able to diagnose and correct while the demo is still active.

The new build is out now and includes:

-Fixed an error in the time system causing log files to become overly large.
-Fixed context menu showing duplicate commands.
-Cancelled and deconstructed buildings no longer block placement of new structures.
-Survivors waking up from sleep are now moved next to the bed to avoid an issue with getting stuck inside the bed.
-Fixed minor issue that could cause AI to think it was adjacent to something when it was not.
-Fixed AI freeze after returning from expeditions.
-Fixed camera spinning the wrong way when mashing the rotate key.
-Fixed survivors sometimes disappearing when sent on expedition.
-Berry bushes were displaying berries regardless of their growth status, now they correctly display them only when ready to harvest.
-Solved the flickering issue with the tree fade effect, they now fade correctly.
-When a game save was present, New Game would incorrectly load that save. Now the Continue button can be used to resume a previously saved game. The ingame pause menu now allows saving in addition to the quicksave key.
-When selecting an enemy, players were able to drag RMB to create a cone, as if giving a command to the enemy. This has been resolved.
-Issuing a right-click command to a survivor no longer deselects them.
-Various improvements to the pathfinding code, which was causing survivors to bug out when building or hauling.
-Building floors now automatically removes plants.
-When placing a door order on an unbuilt wall the door would disappear when the wall was built. Now the door persists correctly.

If you encounter any bugs, issues, or have any feedback regarding QoL suggestions, please let us know in either of the following platforms:
1. You can use our Demo Bug Megathread on Steam to report.
2. You can create a ticket in the #support channel in our Discord: https://discord.gg/8tHNMdVhrr

Thank you so much for all of your feedback, bug reports, and QoL suggestions. We are leaning heavily on player input, and appreciate the community taking the time to address and report these issues to us. We are going to continue prioritizing polish as we move forward to EA release. Thank you again for your help.

Hey Survivors,

Some good news, some bad news and an optimistic future.

1) First. We're super excited for Steam Next Fest.

Demo is dropping! Here's what you can expect to be able to try out:

• Language selection: English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Korean
  
• Brief tutorial
  
• Basic base building
  
• Multi-level base building
  
• Basic work management
  
• Basic needs management
  
• Basic combat via Expeditions
  
• Defensive building
  
• Armor loot for character customization
  
• Lore surprise at the end. Keep building up your base. You'll need it ;)

2) Second, we have been having some major issues with Unity. We have been working with Unity and the DOTS API since the beginning of development. Issues with bugs in the API have caused a lot of delays on our end to create and polish new features at the velocity we had originally intended.

You may even see some of these bugs and crashes in the demo, unfortunately. We apologize and are working tirelessly to optimize and fix ongoing issues caused by the Unity engine and DOTS

Add in the most recent news of Unity changing pricing and our feature delays have deepened as we now consider our options for an engine port.

That said, we want to assure players that we're committed to an on-time Early Access release November 15th. And we're already hard at work shipping additional features for Day 1. In addition to a deep roadmap of future milestone targets.

Read more here:
https://vivid-storm.com/unity-troubles/

3) Third. Despite the setbacks, the Early Access roadmap is still on track here's what we're planning:

Early Access Release Date, Nov 15th:

• Inventory Management
  
• Crafting
  
• Electricity
  
• Hunting
  
• Advanced Needs Management
  
• Ammo
  
• Towns
  
• Voice lines

Milestone #1:

• Advanced combat and combat mechanics
  
• Farming
  
• Overworld exploration infrastructure
  
• Vehicles
  
• Story and Factions
  
• Ongoing polish, bug, crash and balance fixing/optimization

Hey Survivors,

As we gear up for Next Fest, we wanted to drop a note about what you can expect for the Early Access release Nov 15th. We'll be announcing a more definitive content roadmap with both Early Access expectations and what you can look forward to for first milestones.

In addition to what's available in the demo dropping Oct 9th, here's a quick rundown of what you can expect from Day 1 at time of Early Access release:

• Inventory Management
  
• Crafting
  
• Electricity
  
• Hunting
  
• Advanced Needs Management
  
• Ammo
  
• Towns
  
• Voice lines

We're heads down for the next 5 weeks, making sure the new and existing features are in great shape. We're optimizing performance. We're bashing tons of bugs and crashes from previous builds.

All in all, we're extremely excited to be bringing the best player experience we can to the Early Access release and beyond.

Till then, we're excited to share the demo with the player community Monday morning!

Hey Survivors!

We'll be broadcasting the Ascent of Ashes gameplay stream during Steam Next Fest starting

Oct 9th 6pm EST, 3pm PST.

Come check out colony sim Youtuber, Adam Vs Everything, run through the demo.

And definitely grab the demo yourself to give it a try on the Steam store page starting October 9th 1pm EST, 10am PST when Next Fest goes live!

Keep in mind, this is a 45min - 1hr basic core gameplay experience. We have more content dropping come November 15th Early Access release. And a huge feature roadmap that we're excited to tackle for early milestones. So enjoy some of the basic infrastructure of the game today!

Demo features include:

• Brief tutorial
  
• Basic base building
  
• Multi-level base building
  
• Basic work management
  
• Basic needs management
  
• Basic combat via Expeditions
  
• Defensive building
  
• Lore surprise at the end. Keep building up your base. You'll need it ;)