Hello everyone! It’s finally time, this is the final big update for The Chaser’s Voyage before we leave Early Access and officially launch the game! We plan to launch around the end of September / the beginning of October, so get excited! This update is no slouch, with a big focus on redoing and finalizing the whole Options menu and making some final bigger balance changes centered around damage and clients. Also, with this update the entire game is now controllable with a Gamepad. So lets get into this update!

 

First things first, the big final thing missing from The Chaser’s Voyage before we could call the game complete, the Options Menu! We left this less exciting update for last so that we wouldn’t have to restructure this menu every time we added new options to our game, which definitely was a good call. We kept things pretty simple and cut down on how many different sub menus the options menu had. No need to go more in depth describing it, as the options menu is pretty self explanatory: it’s the options!

 

Here’s a look at the newly formatted Keyboard options. Gone is the wonky temp menu of old!

 

So moving on, in terms of balance, we found that there too many clients who were offering amazing Jump counts for their money. So rather than change how much they offered, we decided to slightly increase a lot of the client’s min jump counts and some of their max jump counts. With changing how often easy high value voyages occurred, we decided to also adjust the damage the Chaser takes and how much it costs to repair said damage. Shields were set before to take 90% of the base damage from obstacles and enemies and Hull took 140%. Now both of them are back to 100%. Repair costs were at 125%, but we decided to decrease them by more and made them 80% now. So over all this means longer voyages, but it’s a bit easier to survive them and less punishing when the player barely survives. Speaking of surviving, mines were still causing a lot of damage, specifically because their explosions were still really big. Now that we have the mine shockwaves to trigger other mines, the actual hitbox of the mine explosions don’t need to be so big, so we’ve reduced the explosion size by 40%! This should make it easier to avoid individual mine explosions and also better align with the explosion sprite’s size.

 

In addition to the options menu and balance changes, we also made some UI changes: Added Defaults to the Ship Customization screen and better organized its options, slightly redid the System Info screen, added tips from the System Info screen to the Loading screen, removed the temporary Default Gamepad Controls notice, and improved the scrollbars’ size and readability everywhere they appear. Then there’s another bucket of bug fixes to go along with everything else!

 

And with that we’ve reached the last big pre-launch update for The Chaser’s Voyage! All that we have left is assorted bug fixes and planning for our full launch. We still can’t believe we’re finally here and are so excited. See you all soon for take off!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and can follow Bright at Midnight on Bluesky! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can still buy it now while we’re in Early Access or wait a month for the full launch on Steam: