Hello everyone! The Chaser’s Voyage’s Flight Simulator is finally completed and available for you, the players! We’ve been using the Flight Sim for ages to test various things in our game, and from an early point, planned for it to be accessible to players as well. It has been functional for quite a while, but with incomplete and outdated UI. We obviously had to give it a fresh coat of paint before letting our players get our hands on it, but that also was one of our lower priorities. We already made it so that when the player loses to an encounter, they could practice it in the Flight Sim and playing the game itself also serves as great practice. So having a mode dedicated solely to practicing and training for certain encounters felt less urgent than adding in features like the obstacle combos, crew journal, playable tutorial, etc. But those updates are already done, and now the Flight Simulator is too!
Before I get into the details on the Flight Sim, I want to do a quick look back through the year and a look forward. This year, we got THREE major updates out vs the two per year we’ve had before! The crew journal was on of our biggest updates and we could not be happier with how it came out. The obstacle combos were a pleasant surprise tangent, but they’ve added a really great level of variety to the game. And of course, the Flight Sim is now out, which leaves only 2 main updates left, options and release! Next year we will be finalizing the options menu and after that, adding in some final polish and then we’ll be leaving Early Access and fully releasing The Chaser’s Voyage! It’s been one hell of a voyage and it’s so nice to see the the release coming up. Okay, with that stuff out of the way, let’s dig into the Flight Simulator!
The Flight Sim lets the player customize and practice almost any encounter that they’d find in the main game. The purely friendly encounters, like Merchant Fleets of Neutral/Friendly Aligned Fleets are not selectable since there’s nothing in those encounters to actually, you know, practice. Every other encounter is available though! The player starts by choosing their difficulty and insignia, just like when starting a new Voyage, then they select their encounter. Each option in the Flight Sim is accompanied by a fun little wireframe depicting the option. There’s also a preview window that shows what your encounter settings are. After that, if the encounter can have any obstacles, the player chooses how many and which obstacles to have. Just like the main game, only 3 obstacles can be active at once, and stars are incompatible with the electronic obstacles (Sentries and Mines). After the obstacles comes the storm if applicable, then onto the Chaser’s Options. Here the player can customize exactly how damaged the Chaser is, including which systems are disabled and the hull integrity. Once all those setting are chosen, the player can go up against their chosen encounter as many times as they want! One of the neat things about the Flight Sim is that it lets the players choose some options that are a bit more hidden in the main game. You can choose what bounty level the bounty hunters are, how dense asteroid fields are, and what the sentry affiliation is!
We also made a couple of changes to mines to make them a little more interesting and have a few more ideas for them for next year. We fixed a bug regarding Pirate’s chances to be friendly with player over Space Ports and straightened out a continuity error in one of our Crew Journal entries. Until next year, safe flying!
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:
