Project Introduction

Astral Throne plays like a retro SRPG, where you move an army of units on a grid individually and engage in unit-to-unit combat in a turn-based gameplay style. Each unit is a character with their own individual class, stats, art, and story. There are two types of units: Hero and Militia. Hero units are the sort of main characters. They have special weapons, abilities, growth rates, and art. Militia units are meant to build out your party and individualize each run of the game. They can be a variety of different classes, but all share many attributes like a skill pool. Units learn skills every time they level up, where the player can choose one of three randomly chosen. Throughout a run, players can also find randomized loot and different militia to recruit, adding further variance to runs.

The trick with Astral Throne's structure is that, like Slay the Spire, each encounter is handcrafted with the minor procedurally generated elements mentioned earlier, as we felt that the essence of an SRPG is handcrafted encounters. The order you find them in, however, varies between runs and the player has a choice between following paths with combat encounters, story events, or stronger boss-like encounters.

An SRPG staple, there is also permadeath for every unit, and a run ends when the entire party has been permanently killed. The player wins by progressing through encounters completing objectives, recruiting units, and collecting loot until they are strong enough to face the final boss.

Additionally, the story contains a mystery and each major Hero character has their own motivation for going on their journey:

"One night, a prosperous island kingdom was struck by a falling star. Ever since, the island has been shrouded in a mysterious starry fog. No one has left the island since this incident, save for some curious investigators. Only some investigators leave, with barely being able to recall what they saw. Vague recollections of a cult-like force that has taken over the royalty, and a strange undefined worship of that fallen star."

About Developer

We are a group of 4 friends from Ontario that started a Video Game studio after working for some years in corporate tech position. We are passionate gamers and creators, so we felt our talents (and sanity) were better spent in the Video Game space. We've been together for under a year and have released one game already, but we feel we are just getting started, and want Astral Throne to be the best game we can make it.

Our team is also mostly (75%) equity-seeking groups, with some being LGBTQ+ and others legally persons of disability. Part of our raison d'être is to take it into our own hands to create an opportunity for us to hopefully create a stable career in an accepting environment, and to give a voice to those of us who feel have not been given one.