Advertorial | As they prepare to release their third project, Astral Shift are reaping the benefits of building a community loyal enough to follow them from genre to genre. Their secret? Giving their community what they wish they’d had access to back when they were fans themselves.
In an interview with GamesMarket back in January of 2026, Jason Della Rocca, former executive director of IGDA’s Montreal chapter, said that “building a fanbase, and delighting those fans with your games over time will be the only path to sustainable success”. He was describing the future of games publishing. Despite the fact that Hell Maiden will be their first self-published title, AstralShiftPRO, a small indie studio from Portugal, has been doing exactly what Della Rocca mentions since the studio’s inception.
Through consistent effort and genuine care, AstralShift have nurtured a community that has followed them from an RPG Maker gothic horror game, to a queer all-female dating sim, and now onto a horde survival title. Their secret? They know what fans want because they’ve been fans themselves.
AstralShift exists in its current iteration due (in part) to their community. The first videogame they released was Pocket Mirror back in 2016 as a free project posted on Itch (and it is still there). Back then, they described themselves as the “Pocket Mirror Team”, a group of five people with similar tastes who wanted to work on a game that paid homage to some of their favourite titles.
The actual company wouldn’t be founded until six years later, in 2022. And a year after that, in 2023, AstralShiftPro burst onto the international gaming scene more widely via the remastered version of their original game, Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum and the Square Enix-published Little Goody Two Shoes.
Throughout these ten years, AstralShift has always put the community front and center. Not only because that community is what helped Pocket Mirror exist in the first place, but because the creative minds at the helm of the studio started their journey in the industry as fans. This was one of the main topics of a 2h interview I conducted with three of the studio’s co-owners.
António Lopes, Creative and Art Director at AstralShiftPro, began by drawing fanart for one of his favourite games ever: Touhou Project. That is where the studio’s characteristic artstyle was born, and it remains one of its main inspirations. Back then, he drew characters from his favourite games, hoping that one day he’d have people doing the same based on his own creations.
Patrícia Silva, Writer and AstralShiftPro, was on the same forums, but just as a fan. As she says, she was the one commenting “oh my god, so cute” on fanart posts and playing fan-made games based on her favourite titles. Similarly to Lopes, she lists Touhou Project as one of her main inspirations, but she has always preferred writing her own original stories.
These years of experience as fans not only taught them a lot about community, but also helped them understand the things they wished they had access to back when the internet was still in its infancy and accessing game developers, especially Japanese ones, was nearly impossible.
This unique mixture is the main ingredient behind AstralShiftPro’s approach to community. They know what their fans want, because they’ve been fans forever, too. To this day, they consistently release Character Studies, showcases of visual designs, and comic strips, among many other types of content. Their approach is one that aims to give fans enough content to build upon, offering them resources to create their own AstralShift-inspired art.
Furthermore, they try to remain as directly connected to their community as possible, something they wished was possible back when they were scouring the Touhou Project forums. All members of AstralShiftPro hang out in their Discord, answer fan emails, and generally try to stay in touch with what people want.
That’s not all, though. João Caetano, Lead Software Developer at AstralShiftPro was quick to emphasize that one of the key aspects of the studio’s success was a focus on quality and substance. You can give your fans as many resources as you want, but if the base creations do not have enough substance, they won’t develop any attachment.
Lastly, consistency is mandatory. As Della Rocca pointed out in the aforementioned interview, “today, publishers that are more genre/audience specific are having tremendous success (eg, Hooded Horse with strategy).” That doesn’t mean that a studio is stuck with a single genre, but there has to be a connective tissue between each title.
For AstralShiftPro, that tissue is threefold. Firstly, the characteristic 90s anime-inspired artstyle essentially jumps out of the screen in every title they’ve developed. Secondly, they always have a narrative focus, even when the genre doesn’t usually feature one (most notably now with Hell Maiden). Thirdly, phenomenal music. They’ve released over 6h of tracks for Pocket Mirror and Little Goody Two Shoes alone, and I already have Hell Maiden’s main theme permanently playing in my head.
All these factors combined have helped AstralShiftPro become one of the most successful studios in Portugal. Despite the considerable leap in genres from their two original titles to a survivors-like in Hell Maiden, the studio is confident that their community will join them on this new journey, and the hundreds of positive Steam reviews on the game’s demo seem to corroborate this confidence.
Gonçalo Santos is a video game reporter based in Lisbon, Portugal. Through interviews and lengthy coverage, he aims to share the blossoming Portuguese videogame industry with the rest of the world.
