Welcome back Knights-To-Be!
Wow, can you believe it? Just one more day remains. The day that determines the fate of Talamhel's begins tomorrow. A milestone day for us at Chashu Entertainment. We absolutely can not wait for you all to finally experience Sands of Aura as version 1.0!Sands of Aura - Version 1.0 officially releases tomorrow: October 27, 2023 11 AM CDT | 12 PM EDT | 9 AM PDT | 4 PM GMT!
While we continue counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds till release let us resume our journey together as we remember our second and final year in early access.Year Two
At the start of the second year, early access did not feel much different than at the end of the first. We had just released the Citadel of Steel update, began to analyze the feedback, and planned for the next update to incorporate the feedback. This became our development flow after our first major update, the Twin Thorn. It was going to be more of the same for our next one, the Rotted Throne.

Ah, my shadow!
At this point, we have made numerous changes to combat that moved us in the right direction, but it never quite came together. We added more visual effects, more audio effects, screen shakes, flashes, and added impact on hits. Each of these little improvements pushed combat away from floaty, just not far enough. So we continued iterating, reviewing, and gathering feedback. It was after trying all the possible solutions that we finally landed on one thing we have yet to adjust, shadows.


Seeing is zooming?
In the first week of February, we released the next content update, the Rotted Throne. A few weeks later, we also implemented changes to further enhance the combat feel, such as tightened animation canceling and improved character movement. The most significant change we made for that update was to the camera. The camera has been another area of feedback that required some hard discussions for our studio. There was a design and artistic choice for our camera perspective. The distance and angles were placed deliberately by choice. When creating new animations, islands, etc. they were created with that perspective in mind.

Localization
There was another point of pain for the development of Sands of Aura. Localization. Localization is essentially the translation of our game into the language of your choice. When we first released Early Access, we also released a localization patch that included 9 languages. With the Twin Thorn patch, we also localized the content there. However, an issue began to become a problem for us and it would grow with each content update.


After the Rotted Throne
After the update in March, we were deep in the development for our next update, The Festering Veil. We had planned to release this update at the start of summer, and it appeared we were making significant strides. However, things don’t always go as planned.

The time between
Between the release of our last patch and the release of our most recent Pre-1.0 patch, it was quiet. Without updates during this period, also meant we weren’t able to give our players the fixes and adjustments we made to Sands of Aura or receive new feedback on our changes. Our belief in what we were creating needed to be the strongest it has ever been for the next 6 months. It was a mentally tough period for our studio but we pressed on and proceeded to develop with faith in our vision.


Reaching the end
As the release date inches closer and closer, all of the emotions a developer would experience during development were intensified to the utmost degree. We felt the panic of things not working, we felt relief when the game progressed the way we wanted it to, we became depressed when objects didn’t appear where they should, we felt proud of the design choices we made, we accepted our fate and just a rollercoaster of emotions.
