Hello everyone. It’s been a while since we last updated but we’re finally ready to tell you what we’ve been working on these last 2 and half months. The short version of it all is that we’ve been making some major changes to our tutorial. Since going live with it last November, we’ve gotten to see more people playing The Chaser’s Voyage first hand and it’s given us a better understanding of what we need to prioritize and what we need to back away from when it comes to introducing people to the game. Namely, it required a lot less talking and lot more doing.

 

 

I think the current version of the tutorial has too much talking in it. It was a way to introduce some core concepts of not just our game world, but also why the mechanics are the way they are. I thought it was a necessary bridge that needed to be crossed for players to understand why they were doing something. For example, unlike a space game like FTL where you might be traversing the entire galaxy, we limited ourselves to just a small corner of the galaxy, Sector 99, so that all of our planets could have names and backstories and our list of alien species didn’t have to grow to, well, a galaxy sized level. In retrospect, I don’t think that it was necessary to introduce the player to these lore explanations, at least not in the tutorial. So, we did away with a lot of the universe building dialogue, though we still did allow ourselves some brief, inconsequential, moments of world building.

 

We also thought that having a character explain what needed to be done vs. having text prompts explain would be a more active way for players to learn the ins and outs of the core mechanics. It definitely works for some games, but we realized, it doesn’t work that way for ours. We didn’t want players to feel like our game was too hand holdy or a “by the numbers” type game where “when X happens, you must do Y.” We wanted to emphasize the idea that “Hey, you’re going to be called on to make decisions, so just be ready for that” but I think it ended up adding some bits that the player isn’t necessarily going to be interested in at that moment and the “on the fly decisions bit” can still be reinforced without us having to be explicit.

 

 

So, we changed our tutorial to something that uses a lot of less talking and lot more text prompts. This itself required a lot of work, as we made our text prompts no longer automatically close, but instead, players could choose when to close the prompt once they had carried out the prompt’s instructions. We decided that perhaps for this part, a little hand holding was necessary to get the players started. We didn’t want people to feel overwhelmed with options at first, after all. With our text prompts came more inspiration from Nintendo games, where we decided to color code text and use symbols to connect the keywords and instructions to the interactable elements. So for example, when we tell players to set their weapons to level 2 to shoot down missiles, the word “weapons” will be colored green and show the weapons icon and the symbol for level 2 weapons will be next to “level 2”. It’s actually been quite the challenge to think of every way we can make something as clear as possible and this time, no fear of whether or not it might be obvious.

 

 

Remaking our tutorial isn’t the only thing we’ve been working on these last couple of months. We’re really trying to revamp our social media marketing campaign. I’ve been doing a lot of studying up and we’re prepared to make a couple of big changes. The first and most notable is that we’re dropping “roguelike” from our marketing and will soon be changing it on Steam. While I will die on the hill that our game is technically a “roguelike”, we are missing a lot of the modern hallmarks of what makes a roguelike a “roguelike”. We don’t have randomized power-ups or engage in tedious resource collection. For better or for worse, those are elements associated with roguelikes and I have gotten some questions along those lines from people wondering how The Chaser’s Voyage is like a roguelike.

 

And since nobody wants a lecture or a redirection to my article, we feel it’s just better to drop the genre from our marketing. This does once again leave us without a genre to categorize ourselves in but as I said in my “Is Our Game a Roguelike?” article, we don’t like genres and we didn’t set off to make a game constrained by genre. Though, in the writing of this article, I’ve learned that we made some assumptions about genres like “space flight simulation” which encompasses everything from games like Elite: Dangerous, to Kerbal Space Program, to Star Wars: X-Wing. Which is wild. So, going forth, we’ll be leaning more into the “space flight” aspect of our game, perhaps marketing ourselves as a “space flight lite” or maybe just a “space flight sim”. Who knows? (Have I mentioned I hate genres?)

 

With this change in marketing decision it also means changing some of our stuff on Steam and making a brand new trailer (again). We’re hoping that our new trailer can be the kick-off of our new marketing efforts, but we’ll see if this article doesn’t end up doing that first.

 

We’ve also made a new Twitter account just for The Chaser’s Voyage that will act as a central source for all things The Chaser’s Voyage (while our Bright at Midnight twitter account will still be focused on stuff going on with us as game devs).

 

With all this going on, we’re still hopeful of finishing The Chaser’s Voyage relatively soon. We still plan on executing a well-crafted, unique, professional indie game. We want The Chaser’s Voyage to go to the stars and we’re prepared to do whatever it takes to make that happen!

 

 

You can follow The Chaser’s Voyage and Bright at Midnight 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: