Hey Zezkali,
Thanks so much for your interest in Alas Astra! I’m really proud and grateful to be able to share our game here with the Unreal community!
Thanks for your kind words, and it sure is awesome to finally get Alas Astra out there to the world at large and have people playing the game. That sure is exciting and a ton of fun so far! 
I’m happy you liked the reveal trailer, and it’s true we did put a lot of work into Alas Astra. But it was definitely fun and rewarding work that I hope our team can be proud of.
To answer your question: Development of Alas Astra started in October 2018. The game spent about 6 months in pre-production with just myself (Russell Morahan - Lead 3D Artist) and my friend Alex Kalavitis ( Gameplay Programmer ) working out the basic gameplay - getting the movement fundamentals going, Jetpacking etc.
In May 2019 I opened up the Alas Astra development team to volunteers (As it was / is a Royalty project with no budget ) and put an Advert on the UE4 Job Offerings forum. With great fortune through that advert we were able to hire the Lead Programmer on the project, Kheng Hoek Teoh. Mr Teoh as I like to affectionately refer to him is an awsome Programmer and he programmed all of the games core code over the next 1 and 1/2 years. Teoh did a fantastic job impleneting shooting, sword combat, advanced jetpacking, A.I. and environmental programming over the next year and more.
We continued developing Alas Astra with great dedication and fervour until the end of 2020. It was out of this work that the Alas Astra Gameplay demo was born - the demo that is now available on Steam.
However at the end of 2020, it became clear to me as Project Lead, that the full realisation and completion of the Alas Astra video game project would not be possible without funding, since our whole team was working with no pay, which made stuff hard. We did seek a poblisher and funding for the project, but alas, without success.
It was for those reasons that development on Alas Astra concluded and stopped at the end of 2020 / start of 2021. A full explanation of this can be seen and heard from this video:
Alas Astra- Demo Release Update.
So yeah, development on Alas Astra concluded in December 2020. But we had made, what I think, hope, is an awesome gameplay demo / vertical slice. And we at Delta Video Games didn’t want the game we had made to gather dust on our Hard Disks, so the decision was made to release the Demo on Steam.
It’s taken a year to get to this stage, but now we’re finally here, and happily the game is now available for everyone to play. Over the last few days, since it’s release quite a few people have played the game and have enjoyed the game so far!
It’s really lovely and awesome to share the Alas Astra game demo with the world. None of which would have been possible without the amazing tech of Unreal Engine 4. So Epic Games certainly have my eternal gratitude for giving us this opportunity to use this amazing game engine.
I, and everyone at Delta Video Games really hope everyone enjoys Alas Astra!
Peace, love, and happy gaming! <3
