Planet Araenu World Map, Over 200 Maps, Character Themes, Spy Base, and More!

Time for another update!

Here are some pics of one of the three main world maps in the game – the Planet Araenu. Note, there’s no combat on any of the world maps.

We hit a major milestone recently – we have created over 200 maps for Cosmic Star Heroine! To be precise, we’re up to 203. This is just over twice as many maps as Cthulhu Saves the World had & almost twice as many as our biggest game to date had (Penny Arcade 4 with 113). And of course, the maps in Cosmic Star Heroine are generally larger & higher quality than the maps in our previous games. From the look of things, final map count in Cosmic Star Heroine will be between 210-220. We still have more stuff to finish after the maps are created, but we’re quickly running out of things left to do which is a great feeling!

Oh and in case you didn’t know, a map is an area that can be explored without leaving the screen. Most of our maps are 1024×1024 pixels in size, with most of the smaller maps being 512×512 (used mostly for small building interiors). The demo we shared at PSX, E3, and PAX and that can be viewed online had a total of 9 maps in it, although you only see a small part of one of the maps (the demo ends before you really have a chance to do anything on the final map).

We haven’t shared any of the character musical themes yet (although you can hear parts of Alyssa’s theme in the original Cosmic Star Heroine teaser music) so we thought it was time to fix that.  Here are 3 song teasers – Z’xorv, Psybe, and Sue’s character themes!

In the original Kickstarter pitch, we talked about having your own spy headquarters. Now that the game is nearing completion, let’s talk about how that works.

Originally, your headquarters were going to be just a large building, but given the planet hopping nature of the game, we decided to kill two birds with one stone and have your base double as your own spaceship so you didn’t have to constantly be traveling back to any one location. Your base has 3 main floors & 2 smaller floors and as you recruit more people to your base, you unlock new rooms. We’re looking at around 20-25 different recruits (a few of which automatically join) – all of which can be equipped as your support teammate to give the entire party a bonus like higher stats, improved healing, more credits earned from combat, bonus turns, and more. Recruits also may give bonuses in your base itself like being able to buy high-end equipment or even being able to fly away from the final “point of no return” dungeon to go finish up any last minute business you may have.

Your base also has a dining hall. Periodically, you’ll be able to dine with your allies and chat with them – if you’ve played the Grandia games, it’ll be similar to the dinner scenes there.

In other news, we’ve got the Vita version up to a decent performance level. We’re still working on optimizing the code to make it run even better, although right now, our focus there is on lowering RAM use so it’ll run on actual Vita hardware (as opposed to just the dev kit which has some extra RAM). We’re making good progress there and hope to have Vita RAM use and performance in an awesome state by the end of the month.

That’s it for this update! Thanks again for your patience – the game is really starting to come together now and we’re really excited about how good it’s going to be when it’s done!