Hello everyone. Cameron and I are back from our winter break and ready to continue our work on (and hopefully finish up) The Chaser’s Voyage this year. So first, let’s go over what we’ve accomplished last year by looking at the Starmap for the game.
Last year, we revamped the tutorial, we added in a new client type, the aligned cartographer, and we updated client stories to improve randomization and fall more in line with our game’s lore. We also made other client tweaks such as highlighting mentions of factions in the client stories, so that you, the player, can really know which clients are good and which will lead to a horrible death. Along the way, we made plenty of little updates, including making some UI changes to improve the experience for gamepad users. When we first made this Starmap, we put the biggest obstacles and challenges first, but we didn’t anticipate some unexpected challenges, like prioritizing implementing gamepad support and making a full performance overhaul. Now though, we are happy with how these things have come together and we’re ready to tackle the final parts of The Chaser’s Voyage before launch.
So what are those parts? They’re the fun little extras that we’ve been dying to get into the game for a long time now. The first is our lore, which takes the form of our Crew Journal. We’ve talked a bit about it before, but to reiterate, it’s pretty much where a bulk of our game universe’s history and character backstories lie. They’ll take the form of various in-universe pieces of media, such as news articles, private messages, or non-voiced character interactions. It’s all extra stuff, but we’ve made a huge effort to ensure that the galaxy you’re flying the Chaser through is a reflection of a consistent world full of other stories to tell or have yet to be told.
With so much lore though, all together it’s the same amount of words as a short novel, one of the first problems we were encountering with the Journal was how it affected the startup loadtime. We actually had all the lore in the game for a while in outdated UI, but since it was inaccessible we removed it for the Early Access builds. Luckily, Cameron seems to have found a promising solution already. At the time of this writing, we are now exploring how we want to present the Crew Journal visually. So, fingers crossed that we’ll be able to get that into an early access build soon.
After that, we’ll only have one more major feature to work on, which is the inclusion of our training mode, the Flight Simulator. This will allow players to create their own scenarios that they can use as practice for the main game. For instance, if pirates chasing you through minefields are always giving you a hard time, you can set the simulator to those same conditions and practice until you master the encounter. You can also adjust your starting health and choose which systems are already damaged upon entering the encounter. The cool thing about implementing this feature is that we already have it in the game, it’s just inaccessible. The reason for that is that is two fold. 1: There are options only intended for our use (to make it easier to capture exactly the footage we want for trailers since so much of our game is determined randomly). And 2: We are planning on overhauling the visuals for the Flight Sim UI, since the ones we have now are fairly bare bones.
After the Flight Sim, it’s a matter of cleaning a few things up, maybe adding some features we didn’t think of at the time, and bug testing before finally launching out of Early Access. Some of these features we’ve already implemented, such as the Voyager+ and Captain+ modes, which lets players play the Ace mode’s encounter randomization on lower difficulties. One of the big things that needs to be cleaned up is our options menu, which is not finalized since we don’t want to set anything in stone while we’re still developing the game and adding new options and setting.
Now, you may have noticed that we also have a “Milestone” between “Phase 1” and “Phase 2”. We wanted to reach a more polished state before we started really using VoxPop’s platform. We are still definitely hoping to collaborate with streamers in order to get the word out there, especially after last year’s updates. Neither Cameron nor I are really into marketing, but we’re determined to do everything we can to make The Chaser’s Voyage succeed.
I have a lot of high hopes for this year. We’re gonna keep working towards making The Chaser’s Voyage really soar and we’re hoping you’ll be with us when this voyage finally takes off!
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: