So, it’s been about one year since The Chasers’ Voyage went into Early Access. First…

 

 

Next, I’d like to take this opportunity to go over everything we’ve done since releasing in Early Access on Steam, what we have learned, and what we still have in store for The Chaser’s Voyage.

 

A few months after releasing our game into Early Access, I made a “starmap” of what we hoped to accomplish in the 12 months since then.

 

 

Yikes! All this time and this is it? Just the cutscenes? So what happened? Well, Phase 1 had an unexpected addition, in that before starting on the tutorial, it made a lot more sense to add gamepad support first. After all, there’s no point in making a tutorial with just mouse and keyboard controls in mind if we were always planning on adding gamepad support, so we figured we might as well get that done beforehand. This way we wouldn’t have to redo the finished tutorial after implementing gamepad controls. Unfortunately, adding gamepad support was a lot more work than initially anticipated because it wasn’t just making the game playable with a gamepad, but also making the game navigable with a gamepad, which means every menu had to work using a gamepad. This required us (and by us I mean Cameron) to go under the hood of literally EVERYTHING we had worked on to add in gamepad options as well as some professional touches such as notices for the gamepad suddenly disconnecting, registering different kinds of gamepads (like Xbox and PlayStation), and implementing many features that are exclusive to gamepads, such as rumble.

It was a lot of work and definitely worth it, but it was a significant time sink. However, we have faith that it will pay off making it so that people who want to play with a gamepad won’t have to be stuck playing with mouse and keyboard setting while we take even longer to adapt everything.

 

So, that (plus balance changes and bug fixes) is what we have accomplished so far, but what have we learned since Early Access? We released into Early Access last year for a few reasons. The first was that we wanted to show people what we were doing. We knew that we were still a long way off from completing the game, but it just seemed right to start building an audience. It was also an opportunity to get our game into the hands of people, so that we can get valuable feedback. In regards to the game, I’ve covered what we’ve learned from our players and how we are choosing to address the feedback in another article on our blog. Something I learned that I didn’t address in that article though is just how difficult “listening to feedback” really is. It can be hard having to listen to so many opinions that are contradictory to each other, but all sincerely inclined to help you improve. It can feel like you’re being pulled in so many different directions that you really need to have confidence in your mechanics before putting your game out there. Confidence in my design technique is something I’ve always had in abundance, but having that confidence tempered into something worthy of it only comes after years of analyzing and arguing about game design.

 

But what else have we learned since releasing in Early Access? For starters, it’s that this business is hard. Marketing is hard and made even harder by the fact that we’re not courting every option available right now because we think the tutorial is crucial to The Chaser’s Voyage making a good first impression.

 

The people on Twitter who host Trailer Tuesdays and Wishlist Wednesdays are very nice and sharing our game trailers on as many of those threads as possible has been my life this last year. It is pretty easy to get lost in the crowd though. It seems like being unique, polished, or visually interesting is not enough to get you noticed. I’m not even talking about The Chaser’s Voyage, there’s a lot of games I’ve seen that look great and I think are in the same position we are in.

 

 

But, like I’ve been saying this whole time, launching your first indie game is like starting a band. We’re gonna be playing for friends and occasionally at some small parties until we catch our big break. Hopefully, with the completion of our tutorial we will be able to share our game with content creators and game shows. The latter is also pretty difficult to get into. We’ve submitted to a few but usually don’t hear anything back from them. Which is fair, since so many games must be submitted to them. But all this is to say is that we have to be persistent.

 

And that persistence has paid off in some ways. For starters, our Twitter following has been steadily increasing. I think before we launched into Early Access, we have less than 100 followers, now we have almost 700. There’s also a few faces in the Twitter game design space that I’ve become quite accustomed to.

 

Probably the most devastating thing that I’ve learned is just how venomous people are towards the concept of “early access.” And like, I partially get it. Why would someone want to pay for a random game that isn’t even done yet? But like, one time, I mentioned to someone new that I was an indie game developer and just put a game on Steam and before I could say anything else he was like “I hope it’s not one of those early access games.” Talk about awkward. So, hopefully, once we do fully launch for reals, that can also help our marketing push.

 

 

So lastly, what’s in store? Well, we’re still pretty dedicated to sticking to what was outlined in the Starmap and fortunately, the remaining elements are not expected to be nearly as time consuming to implement as gamepad support. The tutorial is coming along pretty nicely and when that’s complete, we’ll have phase 1 finished! Phase 2 is adding things to systems we already have built, which will help Phase 2 not take as long as Phase 1. In the case of the Crew Journal, which houses practically all of our lore (and WOW is there a lot of it), we do have to rearrange the UI elements and we have an idea on how to cut down on its loading time. Once the tutorial is complete, it really will feel like we’re in the homestretch.

 

So after a year of being Early Access, thank you to everyone who has stuck with us, whether you’re friends who knew about us for a long time or someone who just discovered us over the last year.

 

You can 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: