March 14, 2025

Ascent DX drop date + Steam Sale is live

Hey there,
hope all is well with you. Here's some good news from Apskeppet!

Ascent DX Launches March 26
Mark your calendars, wishlist it now, and get ready to explore an unknown planet! I spent last week making the game ready for the Steam Deck and it looks and sounds gorgeous. Also got some great testing help from the community to locate a gnarly bug that only appears randomly in production. I've been getting a few questions if the game will be released on itch.io as well, and yes it will but a later date. It is enough work for me to release on one platform. 😅

👀 Wishlist Ascent DX on Steam

× Close dialog Intro for the game Ascent DX. A spaceship crashes on a mysterious planet.

Spring Steam Sale
All my games qnd tools are on sale right now! The Steam Spring Sale is in full swing so take the opportunity to grab any items you've been eyeing.

🛒 Get the Deals on Steam

Ascent DX, behind the scenes
I also wanted to give a little peek behind the scenes of the level design tool I built for Ascent DX. I've made few of these over the years and there are a couple of things I find critical when making a world of tiles.

1) Copy & Paste
Believe it or not, most things look the same. Especially in a tile based world you reuse the same structures again and again. I the level editor for Ascent you can easily mark any section and then use it as a brush and place it anywhere.

× Close dialog Example showing copy/pasting in a level editor.

2) Layers
Even if 2D worlds are flat, I still love when there is a sense of depth. Having an additional layer drawn on top of the game world with a few grass tufts or similar really adds to the experience. In my tool you can have how many layers you want, but I rarely use more than two.

× Close dialog A character is walking left and right. In front of some objects and behind others,

3) Quick access to all tiles
It has to be easy to see what's available at a glance. Scrolling around too much breaks the flow. Usually I just grab something that is already placed, but I also have a full list of all tiles to pick from. The copy/paste-mechanic works here too - great for placing combined tiles.

× Close dialog An example of placing tiles from a tile map editor.

As you can see there are a few other useful things, like room dimensions and the like. That was it! Let me know if you want more like this in future newsletters.

Last but not least - we recorded that last bits of live music for the secret project last weekend and it went really well. Can't wait to share it when it is revealed!

Thanks for being part of the journey! Let me know what you're grabbing in the sale, or what you think of Ascent DX’s latest updates.

Johan