Astray release date, and what’s happening post-release

As of about an hour ago, Astray has been released as “coming soon” on Steam, with a release date set for 3rd February 2015. The game will be available for £6.99 ($9.99 USD).

With this announcement comes an updated release trailer and a brand-new gameplay trailer.

 

Post-Release Plan

With that out of the way, I’d like to talk about what we’re planning for after the game is released, starting with the VR situation.

 

Virtual Reality

Back in October, we tweeted saying that it looked like Astray would have full VR support at launch, but unfortunately that won’t be the case due to Unreal Engine not duplicating the UI in stereo mode yet. Astray can still be played with the Oculus Rift; most of the VR-specific functionality is in-place, but the menus and HUD (including in-game notes) don’t work in stereo mode and thus are impossible to read. Playing Astray with the Rift right now means missing out on the story and having to mentally track battery usage.

Localization

We do still want to release Astray in multiple languages and will likely be rolling out some language packs in the coming months. Currently, the languages we’re likely to localize to include:

  • French
  • German
  • Spanish
  • Russian

Other Platforms

At the moment, Astray only has a Windows build. Since neither of us have any real experience with operating systems outside of windows (and since this is our first major release), we decided to stick to the one platform for launch. We’ll be working on other platforms including Linux and possible console release – hopefully shortly after our Windows release on Steam.

Astray Greenlit!

It’s been 25 days since we launched our Steam Greenlight campaign for Astray and honestly, we didn’t think we’d make it without some sort of additional marketing push. But as of two hours ago, Astray is officially greenlit! Thanks to everyone who voted.

Now we’re hard at work finishing the game. Also of note: our Oculus DK2 is expected to be shipped in the next few days so we should soon have a concrete answer to whether or not Astray will support Oculus VR at launch.

Expect more news in the coming weeks.

Nameless no longer

Well, it’s finally time to drop the codename. As of yesterday, Project Erebus is now known as “Astray”. This follows the launch of our gameplay trailer and greenlight campaign for the game.

We’ve amassed a healthy number of yes votes so far and the comments have been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks to everyone who’s voted on our greenlight page so far. As of the time of writing this (approximately 17 hours into our campaign), we’re 12% of the way towards achieving a spot in the top 100, so we still have a long way to go.

If you haven’t already, please vote on our greenlight page using the link below and tell your friends about it. We need your help to get Astray on Steam.

 

Thanks for all the support! We’ll be posting updates on Astray as well as some tutorial-style posts in the coming weeks. Any news is usually posted to Twitter first and new blog posts are tweeted about, so if you’d like to keep up-to-date with the news regarding Astray, please follow us on Twitter.