Hello everyone! As we were working on the UI finalization of the Flight Simulator, Eos had a devious idea: “Can we have multiple obstacles active at once?” This prompted quite the conversation regarding how we would attempt this (both design wise and implementation wise) and, more importantly, the pros and cons involved. Long story short, the pros definitely outweighed the cons, so we got right to work with revamping how we do obstacles in The Chaser’s Voyage. So let’s get into it!
Obviously the big feature in this update is Obstacle Combos, so here’s the run down. We’ve made it possible for up to 3 different obstacles to all be active at the same time! So you could have something like an asteroid field and a ship graveyard near a star! Speaking of stars, we decided that stars and the electrical obstacles wouldn’t make sense to overlap, so stars cannot combo with Sentries or Mines. Also, now that stars can have obstacles you have to dodge AND enemies to fight off, we decided that a Star with a radiation storm is just too much to handle with all the different sources of system breaks, so we’ve made stars no longer appear with radiation storms. They already could not spawn with a hail storm, since we found it silly to have everything frozen AND on fire.
As if stars weren’t bad enough, now we have to dodge Asteroids as well!?
For determining how often to have Obstacle Combos and how many obstacles to be active at once, our existing tier based encounter randomization system worked wonderfully. We normally have 1 Obstacle, 1 Encounter, and 1 Storm and depending on what Tier the player is in, we’ll limit how many of these can be active at once. So we just added in Obstacle #2 and Obstacle #3 to those calculations. This means in Tier 1 you’ll get no Obstacle Combos, as you can only have 1 thing active at a time, but in Tier 2 you can have 2 active at once. So you can then get an Encounter + Obstacle, Encounter + Storm, Obstacle + Storm, or now, Obstacle + Obstacle.
As you continue to progress we keep upping how many things can be active at once, maxing out at 4 different things. This gives a good amount more variety than previously and also makes for some really kick ass jumps. Fighting a Pirate in a Mine/Asteroid field with a Radiation Storm is TERRIFYING. It’s wonderful! This also lets us make the Ace, Voyager+, and Captain+ modes a little more. . . devastating. Since Tier 4 maxes out at 4 things active at once, you can’t actually get all of 3 Obstacles, 1 Encounter, and 1 Storm active in the same jump. Which is good because that’s really challenging. So we made the non-Tiered modes have that option available, and from the get go! Good luck everyone!
Running into a Pirate hiding out in obstacles has never been scarier!
While testing out these Obstacle Combos, we realized that when using autopilot, the day timer and the life support gauge were changing at half the rate compared to when autopilot was off. That’s quite the bug, so we fixed that immediately! But, by fixing that bug, we also increased the amount of time it takes to complete voyages. Every mid-jump that was autopiloted through was now twice as long in-game. This paired with the now more dangerous Obstacle Combos required us to make some balance tweaks. We reduced the damage the Chaser’s hull takes by 10% and increased all client payments by 1.3 times. Since the Obstacle Combos resulted in harder to dodge obstacles and the autopilot bug fix resulted in more in-game time being taken up than before, we felt we needed to slightly compensate on both damage and money. Even in a good run, repairs were stacking up to be much too expensive and the 100 day goal was significantly harder to reach.
For more minor changes, we added minor randomized pitch shifting to most of our sound effects, increased the sound effect volume for obstacles being destroyed, edited “KTC CEO Defends Illegal Minefield After Fatal Disaster” to no longer say that battleships don’t go through minefields (since, you know, they DO go through them now), added destroyed battleships to the background of space battles, fixed some typos, and squashed SO MANY BUGS. We’re really happy with how the Obstacle Combos have turned out and how they add more variety and a fresh layer of difficulty to the game and hope you guys enjoy them as much as we do!
You can read the full patch notes here and can follow The Chaser’s Voyage and Bright at Midnight on Twitter! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:
