Hello everyone! Here’s another surprise big update, we’ve reworked our entire tutorial! We were planning on finishing up our client updates, but as Eos mentioned in last week’s blog post, we realized we needed to rethink how we did our tutorial. There’s quite a few changes to go over so let’s jump into it!

 

 

We changed a BUNCH of our tutorial, starting most obviously with our newly designed Prompts! We wanted something that better fit our game’s visual style and had a bit more pop to them, so we redesigned the prompt windows. Besides just the visual look, we also made two other changes to our prompts. We made it clearer what we wanted the player to do, sometimes separately from how to do it, and always with an underline to draw attention to it. We also made prompts no longer close on their own once the player satisfied the prompt. Instead there are now “Close Prompt” notices that allow the player to close the prompt after they’ve done the required action, but also allow them to continue reading the prompt if they want. There are more prompts now than there used to be, but teaching the player how to properly play with clarity is very important! In order to add more clarity, we also color coded the systems in the prompts and added icons where applicable, to draw a better connection between the game UI and the prompt instructions.

 

Next obvious change is to your crewmate Argi. We realized that while we really like all our lore, the tutorial is not the place to give it. It’s better to just get into the action! So Argi’s lines have been changed and reduced to help the tutorial flow better. For those who like our lore as much as we do, don’t worry, Argi still has plenty of character.

 

 

The final big change is to the tutorial scenes. The original tutorial had 6 scenes: Introduction, System Repairs, Imperial Fleet, Debris Field, Battleship Pursuit, and Pirates. We’ve not only changed the order of these scenes, we’ve also changed some of them, and added a couple more new scenes.

• The 1st still goes over the piloting basics and system management, but with MUCH less talking now.

• The 2nd scene is mostly the same, except we decided to better teach the player the relationship between the Auxiliary Systems and repairs.

• For the 3rd scene we have the player navigate an asteroid field, focusing on obstacle evasion. This replaces our debris field which was was more focused on general system management.

• We added a new encounter for the 4th scene, Imperial Sentries in a Radiation Storm. This is especially important as it gives the player much needed info on how to combat rad storms, as well as showing them the effects the storm can have on certain obstacles.

• The 5th scene is another new one, a bounty hunter! Bounty hunters tend to be a bit easier to deal with than Pirates (in one off encounters), so we wanted to give the player some experience with fighting enemy combatants before the final scene of the tutorial. This also serves as a way to teach the player about enemy weapon types, which we didn’t go over before.

• The 6th is the new home of the Imperial Fleet. We still wanted to teach the player how to communicate with this scene, but since we added more combat encounters to the tutorial, we also expanded on this scene and made it the docking and hull repair tutorial. This gets the player topped off for the final two challenging encounters.

• The penultimate scene is mostly unchanged, the player is taught how to survive an encounter with a pursuing UGS Battleship!

• The final scene is still the “test” of the tutorial, the Pirate Attack! This encounter is unchanged as it was hard enough before, but now the player should be better prepared for it after getting through this new and improved tutorial.

 

 

In addition to the tutorial changes are a couple of smaller quality of life additions. the bigger of the two is for gamepad users. We’ve added arrows to the Remaining Power section of the UI to show when the Increase Power and Decrease Power inputs are active. It’s a pretty neat little change that helps give some good input feedback. Secondly, the Battleship Distance screen now shows wire frames for both the battleship and the player’s ship, to make it clearer how the distance info is displayed.

 

And to wrap thing up as always, there’s the bug fixes! There were quite a few we found over the last couple months, and with your help, we can find more!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and 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:

Hello everyone! I know it’s been a few months since our last game update, but for good reason! We’ve been busy going through almost EVERY part of The Chaser’s Voyage in order to improve performance and make your voyage as smooth as can be! This update contains quite a few miscellaneous changes, so let’s get started with the main one!

 

 

We have improved performance for when things spawn, despawn, or interact with other things! This might not sound like much, but it required going through all of the game’s code and optimizing interactions, adding object pools (reusing objects after you’re done with them instead of destroying them), and making sure that everything still worked the way it should. (I happened to break quite a few things with my changes, so HUGE shout out to Eos for testing the game so much while I was busy trying to fix more things, especially since she was in the middle of a move!) This was the main focus these past few months and it was quite the journey to go through all the code and try to optimize it! Along the way, I noticed several other things that we wanted to change (or fix in the bugs’ cases), and those changes make up the rest of this update!

 

 

Some of the bigger remaining changes we made with this update have to do with obstacles. Not only did we fix some bugs regarding obstacle interactions and background obstacle spawn rates, but we decided to implement 2 new options regarding background obstacles. We added a slider that lets the player set the rate at which the background obstacles spawn and a slider that changes how bright the background obstacles are! In the earlier stages of creating The Chaser’s Voyage, we really wanted to fill out the screen space with fake background obstacles that the player couldn’t interact with, to add a bit more depth to the experience. We were cautious to not make those obstacles too bright though, lest they be confused for objects that the player actually needs to dodge. They were a little darker than we’d like, but we didn’t want to brighten them until we made an option for the player to customize the object brightness. We felt that this update was the right time to do that, and both added the option, and increased the default brightness of the background obstacles to better match what we wanted. Also, in fixing the spawn rates of the background obstacles, we were easily able to make a system to let the player control the spawn rate themselves, and decided to add that in as well.

 

Besides the general changes, sentries also got some tune ups. Sentries have enemies based on their affiliation (UGS dislike bounty hunters and the Empire dislikes pirates), but this was not being expressed the way we wanted it to be. The sentries would become hostile to these enemies, but usually after being attacked, not by default. The sentries now work how we want, and will target their enemies right from the get go! (Also, they will no longer target their army’s own fighters. Sorry about that fighter pilots!) Space battles also got a change, with exploding battleships no longer slowing down. This change was made to make sure that the battleships didn’t get too clogged up at slower speeds.

 

 

The next batch of changes are visual ones. We wanted to add some slight improvements to various visuals, to go with our performance improvements. First, we now have subtitles on as the default. Since our game starts immediately with the tutorial and more specifically with Argi talking to you, we wanted to make sure anyone who needs subtitles would have them from the get go. Second, we slightly darkened Nila’s subtitle color to better match the rest of the crew’s subtitle colors. Third, we added some subtle shadows to Battleships, Bounty Hunters, Buildings, Fighters, Merchant Ships, Obstacles, and Pirates. These help the sprites “pop” a little better (and in the case of buildings on planets, a LOT better). Finally we made it so that the insignia on the Loading Screen will now cycle through all of the insignias, not just the 3 Chaser insignias.

 

And, as always, there are the bug fixes. Since we were going through all of the game to make performance improvements we found a lot of bugs (and a couple of typos) that had slipped under our radar! They have all been squashed, but if you happen to find more, please be sure to tell us!

 

Here’s a link to the full patch notes, and for more news follow us on Twitter and join our Discord. (Where you can also give feedback! (Or bug reports!))