So now that the game that would become The Chaser’s Voyage was designed on paper, we needed to decide how exactly we were going to make it. The switch to a real-time action game presented a lot of new challenges, some of which might have eventually presented themselves in our original design, but some I think were wholly unique to our new vision for the game. For instance, how were we going to alert players to events happening in the game, such as systems breaking or new enemies incoming? The answer, of course, was voice acting. We could have taken many approaches, but we were particularly inspired by Star Fox 64’s use of voice acting that served both a flavor and thematic purpose, but also had hidden mechanical purposes, such as giving you advice on what to do or letting you see the boss’s HP.
We wanted something like that for our game and so we decided that you would have crew mates that correspond to each of the different systems, as opposed to having a single co-pilot who would update you on everything. This way, based solely on which person was talking, you could tell what system was being affected. The biggest challenge was to find enough people to lend us their voices, but luckily we were able to.
The characters themselves we knew should be kept wholly original, though of course, starting with some base inspiration isn’t a bad thing. Tai was originally conceived as a bit like Captain Rex from the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV show, as a no-nonsense fighter. Wolfe, while very different, started off vaguely as having a similar energy to Strawhat shipwright Franky from One Piece mixed with the hot shot brattiness of D.Va from Overwatch. Nila, was supposed to be very Spock like, in that she was cool and logical. Edwin was probably the most original idea from conception: just a guy who didn’t want to be there, but was because he’s your friend. By the end of writing though, these characters all ended up taking on a life of their own. Edwin basically stayed the same, except we give him some hidden depths and courage just to make him a little less one note. Tai, on the other hand, became more of a battle-ready goofball who knew when to be serious and when to be himself. Wolfe became a full of herself, hot headed artist full of passion and drive (more inspired by myself than any work of fiction). Nila also took on a somewhat quirkier personality for reasons that I can only remember as being “the more subdued, logical character, doing goofy things is really funny”. I might have been inspired by Garnet from Steven Universe, but I don’t remember if that was a conscious thing, I just knew I liked the trope.
[Hover over this next part to reveal some ending spoilers]
A particularly challenge that came from changing the premise of the game to “you now owe a debt to a crime boss type of character” was: what happens if you lose? The idea of having to race against time to complete an object isn’t necessarily new, but the only game I know that ever did so on such a scale was the Nintendo classic, Pikmin. The only problem I had with that game though is that you lose for failing to meet the time limit. I remember playing that game for the first time and just barely not getting that last part before the time limit ran out. While I didn’t lose, I didn’t get the best ending and trying again would mean restarting the entire game. So, that’s why we thought it would be a cool idea to not have the game end, but instead radically change. Instead of racing against the clock to beat a deadline, you instead were fighting for survival to get a bounty off your head.
But just like with FTL, what I think makes our game great isn’t the stuff that makes us similar to the games and pieces of media that we like, but the differences. In our hyper-media focused world, it might be easy to say that there are no original ideas anymore. As true as that might be, neither Cameron nor I would want to use that as shield for simply copying the things we love. We want to learn from them. When George Lucas first created Star Wars, the story was extremely rooted in the contemporary politics of the time. It meant a lot to him and how he expressed his feeling about a tumultuous time in American history. If we had gone with my original idea, and just used an evil empire, it wouldn’t have meant anything. It would be like that scene in Yesterday, where the main character sings “Back in the USSR” in a world where only he remembered The Beatles, and Ed Sheeran was perplexed why he would sing a song where he called Russia a name that no longer was used by the time he was born. That’s why when it came to our story, we presented our republic stand-in, the UGS, as neutral with our Empire, not better than them. Yes, both sides were at war, but I wanted to express my feelings about politics, especially from the viewpoint of a bystander. I wanted the crew to express different views of the galaxy’s long and complicated history of perpetual conflict.
Because ultimately, that’s what inspiration is. It’s not about taking things you like and using them without any rhyme or reason. It’s about taking those things you like and asking yourself critically about why you liked them. What made them work, how did they work in the greater context, how could something like that work in this new context? Inspiration is about learning from something that came before you. It’s about realizing that what makes Star Wars great isn’t the starfighters and big battles, but the characters and the message that George Lucas wanted to tell. What made Star Tours great isn’t the number of scenes you get to go through, but how each combination made every encounter different, making you eager to experience what was next. What made Star Fox great wasn’t the fact that you were flying with a squad, but that you were part of a team that each contributed to your entire effort. And what makes FLT great isn’t that it’s a roguelike with a Star Trek feel, but that it acts as a playground where gamers can tell their own harrowing adventures of captaining a ship and taking on unpredictable adventures with the help of their crew. All of those lessons are what we really took away and used to craft The Chaser’s Voyage and for that we owe our gratitude.
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