Hello everyone! We’ve finally done it! You can now play The Chaser’s Voyage using gamepads! In this week’s article, I’m gonna give you a rundown of what’s new in Update 0.2.0.

 

 

Let’s start with the obvious: Gamepad support! Since the next goal of ours is to make a playable tutorial, we first needed to add in gamepad controls. This took much longer than we expected, mainly due to implementing full menu navigation via gamepads. (You can read more about what that entailed here.) Besides navigating the menu with gampeads (and now keyboard as well), we also added in rumble, rebinding of gamepad controls, and even some neat interactions with the PS4 and PS5 gamepad lights! Those lights will now match the Chaser’s Cockpit Color and will also change to match whenever a character is speaking. Of course, you can also pilot the Chaser using a gamepad, and we have a handy control mapping (seen above) in game to help people understand the controls until we implement the playable tutorial. We also have notifications that pause the game to tell you when a gamepad controller gets connected or disconnected, a must have for gameoad support!

 

 

An important note regarding Steam’s Input Controller. Currently, The Chaser’s Voyage does not support Steam’s Input Controller. Gamepad support has been implemented to be used through Windows, so if it seems like the gamepad isn’t working at all, make sure to set the “Override For The Chaser’s Voyage” (under The Chaser’s Voyage Properties->Controller) option to “Disable Steam Input”. This should allow Windows to do it’s thing without Steam’s interruption. (Not all controllers work with Windows though, so keep that in mind.) We would like to eventually add support for Steam’s Input Controller, but as we have a form of gamepad support already implemented, it is currently not as big of a priority compared to things like the Tutorial or Crew Journal.

 

Next, thanks to some feedback we’ve received, we’ve gone ahead and made a few non-gamepad related changes. The first is that we’ve changed the default Power Level Configuration. Before it was 2 power in Weapons, 2 in Shields, 2 in Engines, and 2 in Auxiliary. An even split made sense to us as a middle ground between any customization the player may want to use. However, it is also a absolutely TERRIBLE configuration to keep one’s power at, and by making it the default power, we wrongly enforced the idea that it should be the main power configuration. To address that, we’ve now made the default configuration as follows: 0 power in Weapons, 3 in Shields, 3 in Engines, and 2 in Aux. The most important things when playing The Chaser’s Voyage are to go fast, and to not take too much damage. This configuration should hopefully prime players into a more optimal play style.

 

 

The second change was made to spice up Minefields. While Minefields can be very challenging when fighting off enemies, a Minefield on its own was a bit lack luster. We wanted to spice up Minefields so that they were more interesting without an enemy, but not too much harder when there was someone to fight. Our solution? Moving mines! Each mine in a Minefield now has a chance of moving up and down in addition to the left. These mines are marked with a yellow pulsing light, instead of the normal solid green light. These make minefields much more exciting, and we originally tested out having all the mines move in this way, but that made fighting enemies within a Minefield much too challenging. By only having some mines move, we hit a nice balance between interesting and not overly punishing.

 

 

Finally we made some much smaller changes: We made The Phantom Nebula Insignia’s free repairs now work with Neutral Imperial and Neutral UGS Fleets, we rearranged some buttons on the Customize Ship screen (and added a Randomize All color option), updated some UI, and fixed a whole bunch of bugs!

 

Here’s a link to the full patch notes for more details, and for more news follow us on Twitter and join our Discord. (Where you can also give feedback!)