With our second Steam sale ending this week, I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk a bit more about where we’re taking The Chaser’s Voyage based on feedback we’ve received since going live via Early Access. First, there’s the article Cameron wrote up a few weeks ago talking about how we’ve been busy updating our game to work with gamepad controllers. We should hopefully be done with that soon, but at the time of this writing, we’re currently nailing down rumble features. Also, if you use a PlayStation controller, you’re in for a special treat! One of the reasons we wanted to get the gamepad stuff in sooner rather than later is due to  some feedback we got shortly after launching into Early Access.

 

Interestingly, the other feedback we’ve been receiving has revealed an issue we suspected could be a problem. It’s luckily not about any major game design decisions, as we were pretty determined to make sure our game was close to finalized before entering Early Access. Instead it’s about conveying how to play our game. Even before our Early Access launch, we anticipated this might be an issue. It’s our belief that tutorials should be made last because they are the first thing to become outdated if you change any kind of mechanic and in our case, it’s a good thing because we might have to change some stuff to better emphasize mechanics.

 

Here’s some examples of feedback we’ve received that we will be addressing in some matter or another:

• Going Slow Makes the Game Boring

An interesting bit of feedback we’ve received involves a core part of our game that ties the space jump drive to the engine speed. The general gist of the feedback is always that some events take too long/aren’t interesting enough when going slow, but are too hard and intense when going fast. It’s a kind of paradoxical issue to work out because it comes from players wanting the best of both worlds, something that’s safe and easy but also challenging and dangerous. When designing this game, we made a couple of design choices that we thought would encapsulate the idea of skill and risk that comes from, honestly, a good game.

 

 

The first was that higher speed would mean more punishment for mistakes. It’s a simple risk reward system that is essential to any game where the premise is that you must complete a task by a certain amount of time. In that sense, The Chaser’s Voyage is a bit like a racing game. Playing things safe and going slow is how you lose. However, the second design choice we made is that going slow by removing power from your engines IS sometimes necessary. It’s why we gave you the amount of power that we did and why part of this game is learning how to manage your resources carefully. You cannot have it all, so you must choose carefully, and sometimes when fighting off an enemy, you will need that extra offensive or defensive boost. It’s one of those aspects that, I think, makes our game really interesting.

 

The third design choice was tying the engines to the jump drive. The reason we did that actually came about from testing and was very obvious when we tried having the jump drive separate from the engines. The optimal strategy would just be not to play. Like, say you were in a debris field: you could set shields to max, engines to to zero, and go make a sandwich and by the time you come back, you could just jump to the next area. One really shouldn’t be making a game where not playing is a good strategy. An alternative could have been to make the speed of obstacles always the same and have the jump drive still charge at a fixed pace, with engines just affecting maneuverability. We actually do have some insignias that somewhat do that, but with some added effects to change the game up a bit, but overall the reason we didn’t want that for the default game mode is because it greatly simplifies the experience and reduces the impact of the choices you can make. It also eliminates the possibility of damaging an enemy ship’s engines and then just boosting away, which we think is a really cool strategy that you don’t see in a lot of games.

 

 

So that said, what are we going to do with this feedback? Well, for starters, we’re making some adjustments to the default power distribution that you get when first taking off from Azedo and when you respawn in Voyager Mode. Before, it was a 2/2/2/2 set up (that’s 2 in weapons, 2 in shields, 2 in engines, and 2 in auxiliary). We had it set up like this because it just kinda felt right, even if that set up is actually a very sub-optimal way of playing. We’ve now set it up so that default power distribution is 0/3/3/2. We did this to reinforce a couple of key points, such as: you should be going somewhat fast at all times and that defense is more important than offense. We also believe this set up is the best to keep someone alive after they’ve just respawned.

 

We’re also going to  place in the tutorial (and maybe at the start of a new game, though in that case it will be toggleable) a message from Wolfe that will better explain that the faster you’re going, the faster your jump drive charges. That’s what this problem really is: players not understanding this mechanic. If we can get players to learn that, then we think they’ll have a lot more fun with the game.

 

• Mouse accessibility

We’ve heard, and always suspected that some players might just loose track of the mouse when playing with the mouse and keyboard. We hope that people more accustomed to gamepads can alleviate this problem by switching to gamepad controls once we release our gamepad update. For those who will be sticking with the mouse and keyboard, we’ve explored solutions like adding a trail or a small pulse that could come from the mouse to help players keep track of it. However, many of the style of fixes we’ve thought about are things that the Windows OS already has built in. For this reason, we’ve decided that, at least for now, we aren’t going to be adding any mouse accessibility options, since it just overlaps with the accessibility options that Windows already has. (We do already have the option to turn off our custom cursor though!)

 

• Speed lines

Playing The Chaser’s Voyage, you might have noticed these white lines that streak across the screen as you’re flying. They were originally suggested by our artist, Nate, as a way of conveying motion across the screen, as we were pretty adamant about not letting the space background scroll (as that is not how perspective works in space). Lines such as this seemed common enough in space games, but I suppose never in a bullet hell-esque game that The Chaser’s Voyage can be compared to. Due to some feedback, we’ll be adding an option that will turn off the speed lines for anyone who finds them distracting.

 

• Changing what buttons advance cutscene dialogue

When we first made the cutscenes, we set some of the controls for them, like clicking to progress and space to auto-advance because those made sense to us. Hearing some feedback, we think players have all sorts of preferences that would be easy to accommodate, such as pressing spacebar or enter to progress, while making the auto-advance toggle a less commonly used button.

 

 

• Better communication

Just like with the engines, we overall need to better communicate some core mechanics. For example, one player didn’t remember that the space jump drive was it’s own system and needed to be repaired on it’s own to function. One of the hardest things right now for us, is understanding how new players think without us being directly there to hold their hands. We’ve been developing this game for so long that a lot of the controls are second nature to us. We try our best, but sometimes we think something is clear when it isn’t. The challenging part is that we need to find that fine line between giving our players the opportunity to learn the game and constantly holding their hand, afraid that there might be some aspect they don’t understand. Games are suppose to be about learning to make, and experiment, with your own choices. The best we can do, as the developers, is give the player the tools they need to succeed. We cannot help it if someone just forgets something we already explained.

 

 

You can also follow us on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam: