Hello everyone! I know it’s been a few months since our last game update, but for good reason! We’ve been busy going through almost EVERY part of The Chaser’s Voyage in order to improve performance and make your voyage as smooth as can be! This update contains quite a few miscellaneous changes, so let’s get started with the main one!

 

 

We have improved performance for when things spawn, despawn, or interact with other things! This might not sound like much, but it required going through all of the game’s code and optimizing interactions, adding object pools (reusing objects after you’re done with them instead of destroying them), and making sure that everything still worked the way it should. (I happened to break quite a few things with my changes, so HUGE shout out to Eos for testing the game so much while I was busy trying to fix more things, especially since she was in the middle of a move!) This was the main focus these past few months and it was quite the journey to go through all the code and try to optimize it! Along the way, I noticed several other things that we wanted to change (or fix in the bugs’ cases), and those changes make up the rest of this update!

 

 

Some of the bigger remaining changes we made with this update have to do with obstacles. Not only did we fix some bugs regarding obstacle interactions and background obstacle spawn rates, but we decided to implement 2 new options regarding background obstacles. We added a slider that lets the player set the rate at which the background obstacles spawn and a slider that changes how bright the background obstacles are! In the earlier stages of creating The Chaser’s Voyage, we really wanted to fill out the screen space with fake background obstacles that the player couldn’t interact with, to add a bit more depth to the experience. We were cautious to not make those obstacles too bright though, lest they be confused for objects that the player actually needs to dodge. They were a little darker than we’d like, but we didn’t want to brighten them until we made an option for the player to customize the object brightness. We felt that this update was the right time to do that, and both added the option, and increased the default brightness of the background obstacles to better match what we wanted. Also, in fixing the spawn rates of the background obstacles, we were easily able to make a system to let the player control the spawn rate themselves, and decided to add that in as well.

 

Besides the general changes, sentries also got some tune ups. Sentries have enemies based on their affiliation (UGS dislike bounty hunters and the Empire dislikes pirates), but this was not being expressed the way we wanted it to be. The sentries would become hostile to these enemies, but usually after being attacked, not by default. The sentries now work how we want, and will target their enemies right from the get go! (Also, they will no longer target their army’s own fighters. Sorry about that fighter pilots!) Space battles also got a change, with exploding battleships no longer slowing down. This change was made to make sure that the battleships didn’t get too clogged up at slower speeds.

 

 

The next batch of changes are visual ones. We wanted to add some slight improvements to various visuals, to go with our performance improvements. First, we now have subtitles on as the default. Since our game starts immediately with the tutorial and more specifically with Argi talking to you, we wanted to make sure anyone who needs subtitles would have them from the get go. Second, we slightly darkened Nila’s subtitle color to better match the rest of the crew’s subtitle colors. Third, we added some subtle shadows to Battleships, Bounty Hunters, Buildings, Fighters, Merchant Ships, Obstacles, and Pirates. These help the sprites “pop” a little better (and in the case of buildings on planets, a LOT better). Finally we made it so that the insignia on the Loading Screen will now cycle through all of the insignias, not just the 3 Chaser insignias.

 

And, as always, there are the bug fixes. Since we were going through all of the game to make performance improvements we found a lot of bugs (and a couple of typos) that had slipped under our radar! They have all been squashed, but if you happen to find more, please be sure to tell us!

 

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