Ascent of Ashes

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• Announcements·21 May 2026Official

  Version 0.2.0 Progress

  Hey guys,Let's talk about the upcoming update, new features and some related news.Animation OverhaulTo start with, I completely overhauled the game's animation system and changed how animations are controlled under the hood. The old animation system relied on a fixed animation tree and signals from various other systems to transition states, then it would wait for animations to play before sending signals back to those systems to trigger gameplay events. This didn't scale well with the complexity of the game at all and was prone to causing a lot of spaghetti code and gamebreaking bugs. It also came with some major limitations that were preventing the implementation of more advanced combat features. As such I replaced it with a new implementation where all gameplay functionality runs completely independent of animations and the animation state merely reflects what's going on internally. Code is separated much more cleanly, making it easier to debug and build complex features on it.Some of those features include animations for drawing and holstering of weapons, animated weapon sway to give a visual indication of how steady a shooter can hold their gun, sped up/slowed down work animations to indicate overall work speed, improved stance transitions and attacking on the move. Survivors now have the ability to aim and fire their gun while moving and I've added a new "overwatch" command that allows you to set a character to face a certain direction, for example when rounding a corner or clearing a room through a window. There's also a new prone stance in addition to crouching that provides a lower profile and increased accuracy at the cost of movement speed.The animations themselves were reworked to make much more effective use of animation blending, cutting down significantly on the amount of assets required to animate a single rig. This reduces the amount of time needed for maintenance and makes it easier to implement new rigs for different animals and other animated ent...
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• Announcements·7 Dec 2025Official

  November 2025 Progress

  Hey guys,Let's talk about animation systems.Animation Trees and AI InteractionLast time we concluded the AI refactor portion of this upcoming update, this month we took a pass at the animation system that's interconnected with the AI. Until now we've been using Godot's built-in animation tree to handle transitions and playback. You can think of an animation tree as a series of branching animation nodes, transitions and blend values that are combined together to calculate a final animation. This allows for easy layering of different animations for upper and lower body, smoothing cross-fades, etc. To control this tree structure, AI systems would send transition requests to the animation system to trigger animation changes, then listen for callback events that happened at certain frames in the animation to trigger gameplay behavior (for example picking up an item for hauling midway through a pickup animation). The transitions themselves were processed internally by the animation tree based on its node setup.While such a basic implementation works for most games, our case is a bit more complicated. For one, due to the mechanical complexity of our game, there's a lot of different animations that our AI agents need to play. This is further amplified by the fact that agents can be in one of multiple stances, which need their own layer of animations, transitions and so on. The combat system adds several major challenges, needing to layer its own internal state on top of other AI behaviors. With multiple systems vying for control over the animator, keeping track of all the different transitions, reset points and parameters was becoming increasingly difficult, rendering the entire setup prone to bugs. And since other systems were relying on animations to send callbacks before triggering gameplay events, every time a bug occurred it would leave the AI permanently stuck, waiting for signals that would never come.Having reached the limit of what our current setup can do, and wit...
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• Announcements·8 Nov 2025Official

  October 2025 Progress

  Hey guys,It's time for a brief progress update.AI RefactorI mentioned last time that this update will focus on a major under-the-hood overhaul of the AI and animation system in preparation for a new combat control scheme. The AI portion of that refactor is now complete. It took a bit longer than originally expected, partly because it turned out there were more issues than anticipated, partly because of some personal health matters keeping me from dedicating as many hours as I would've liked over the last few weeks.The previous AI setup was a rather convoluted mess where AI agents would sometimes pull tasks from a behavior tree, sometimes other systems would push tasks directly on them and fight each other for control. Mental states acted as a magic second behavior tree that was completely hardcoded and could lock out other tasks through a complicated system of priority layers. Then we had incapacitation/unconsciousness on top of that adding yet another layer of complexity.The new system greatly simplifies control flow by unifying it all into the behavior tree. Mental states and player commands no longer get direct control over agent behavior, instead the agent internally evaluates its priorities to see what it should be doing. This resolves a lot of issues around task prioritization, like disallowing player-given commands while an agent is unconscious on the ground. It also moves many hardcoded structures into XML, making the whole arrangement significantly more modder-friendly.The immediate benefit in terms of gameplay is that it allows shift-queuing of tasks by the player and fixes a number of AI-related bugs. More importantly, it opens the way for a number of other improvements we'll be working on over the coming weeks, such as more advanced AI behaviors for animals and NPCs, stress-induced mental states resulting from low mood, and of course the new waypoint-based control scheme that will form the highlight of the update.New Outfits and ItemsIn addition to the r...
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• Patch Notes·6 Oct 2025Official

  v0.1.6 Update

  Minor hotfix update addressing several smaller issues.FixesFixed an error that occurred when a portal was destroyed while agents were trying to path through it.Corpses no longer incorrectly show as blobs in the fog of war.Fixed context menu not opening for corpses and storage containers.
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• Patch Notes·29 Sept 2025Official

  Tutorial Update, AI Progress

  Hey guys,Let's talk about some progress.Version 0.1.5 passed beta testing and went live earlier today. We've already talked about the new additions in our previous dev log, so I won't go into detail here. That said, while this update was undergoing testing we've already started work on the next upcoming release. Right now there are three main areas of gameplay we want to address in the near future: combat, survivor/base management and visitor mechanics.Combat is rather skeletal at the moment. The foundational mechanics of melee and gunplay are there, but we still have many basic and advanced features planned that need to be added for a fleshed out experience. Management has a number of features that were almost ready for launch but ultimately had to be cut before the deadline. Now that there's less time pressure we want to finish them and get them into the game proper. Visitor mechanics are currently the most barebones and placeholder. We needed something to allow recruitment and discovery of new expedition targets and while the current setup is technically functional, it leaves much to be desired. We have big plans on how to extend visitor interactions in the future, improving both quality of life and expanding on the mechanic as a whole.AI Refactor, Combat ControlsAfter some deliberation we've decided to start by focusing on combat mechanics first. Combat and exploration are the main points setting the vision for our game apart from other colony sims, and while the latter has additional prerequisites combat is something we can work on now to help distinguish ourselves and give prospective players a better idea of what we're ultimately about.We'll start this upcoming update with a major AI and animation refactor. The backend for those systems is in need of a major overhaul and this refactor should fix many of the issues we've been experiencing with AI agents locking up or generating errors. The refactor will also pave the way for a major update to the control schem...
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