Last night we released a side story for Asterism- it’s a very short game set after the true ending for Asterism where Kotachi takes Ophi to a museum.
We made the game for the Shoot for the Stars jam on Itch.io. One of the cohosts for the jam and a promo artist for Enamored Risks, Ohisashi, agreed to do the sprite artwork for this game.
As said, the story is about the two of them going to a museum. While Asterism is an astronomy-themed game, there’s not much space-themed stuff about the story yet. Kotachi hears about a planetarium at the museum and decides that’ll be the perfect (first?) date. The setting is after the true ending for Asterism so that it’d be an actual date rather than two guys hanging out.
After mostly finishing the script (the entire thing is only 1.5k words long) we started testing it with placeholders.
Foleso did the final GUI, taking us from this:
To this:
The backgrounds are filtered free to use photos, since Asterism doesn’t have any museums. We did a lot of different style tests for them!
Here’s another example of a background we were testing.
And here’s the final version of that background.
In the end we went with a slightly blotchy style.
Here’s a look at Ohisashi’s finished sprites.
Ini
Towards the middle-ish of the story, Kotachi and Ophi bump into Ini, one half of the constellation Gemini. What he’s doing there we won’t spoil here, but it’s probably related to his sister… Whatever it is, he’s not happy to be at the museum.
Space Penguins
One thing that kept being requested was “space penguins”… so, we added some!
Originally we were going to pick between one design, but we decided to put both in.
They sorta became mini-mascots for the fictional planetarium.
On the next page we’ll show the art process for the ending CG- if you don’t want it spoiled, then go play the game and come back here!
