Author: Cameron S Chapman

I am a programmer and designer dedicated to making our team's ideas take form!

Patch Notes for The Chaser’s Voyage: Update 0.3.1 – 1/23/2023

Hello everyone! We’re back from a very nice break and hope you all had some great holidays! We’re hitting the ground running this year with a small update to The Chaser’s Voyage before we dive headfirst into our performance update. Other than crushing some cutscene related bugs, we made two cool visual changes with this update.

 

1) We added button press effects to the System UI buttons when the player is using the gamepad. This is a subtle change, but it goes well with the highlight effect we added last update!

 

2) We changed Lady Styx’s sprites for the Day 100 cutscene. Now she is hidden mostly in shadow with some ominous glow thrown in. We really wanted to make it so that her reveal was upon the player beating the game and paying off their debt, not when the player failed to pay it within 100 days. This not only adds some cool suspense and spookiness to getting the Day 100 cutscene, but also better matches how we handle her appearance in the Credits, where she’s in shadow until you’ve beaten the game.

 

 

We’re excited for what this year holds for The Chaser’s Voyage and we hope you are too! You can read the full patch notes here!

You can also follow us 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:

The Chaser’s Voyage is On Sale, 49% off, During Steam’s Winter 2022 Sale!

Hello everyone! We’re still on holiday break, but we wanted to pop in and let you know that you can get The Chaser’s Voyage for $10.19 (49% off) during the Steam Winter Sale from now till January 5th! Our final update before the break was our Playable Tutorial Update, so now’s a great time to get The Chaser’s Voyage and have some holiday fun!

For more news follow us on Twitter and join our Discord. (Where you can also give feedback!)

The Playable Tutorial (Update 0.3.0) is live!

Hello everyone! Just in time for the holidays, The Chaser’s Voyage Update 0.3.0 (the Playable Tutorial Update) is now live! There are some pretty exciting additions to the game with this patch, so here’s what’s new in Update 0.3.0.

 

 

First off, we have removed the temporary tutorial video and have implemented the playable tutorial! This took quite a bit of care and effort to make, and we’re really happy with the final result! The tutorial will automatically start when the player first boots up the game, and completing it is required to get to the rest of the game. So that means that the tutorial is not skippable. (Unless it has already been completed of course!) After completing the tutorial, the player will be put into a new Voyage. If bookmarked voyage data exists, the player will be allowed to choose to keep their data and go to the main menu instead. The tutorial will bring the player through 6 different encounters that we chose specifically to best teach the player all the skills they’ll need to play The Chaser’s Voyage. It will definitely be a tough tutorial (just like our game), but we have the Voyager Mode options enabled for the tutorial. Which means that every player, regardless of skill, will be able to complete the tutorial. This was very important to us as requiring the player to finish the tutorial before accessing the main game AND making the tutorial hard to beat would have been very frustrating for players.

 

Next, lets go into the story of the tutorial! You’ll be instructed by a new face for returning players: the Nygothan, Argi!

 

 

We’re excited for players to meet this new character, and you can read a bit more about her in this update we posted before. In addition to a new face, the player will also be flying a new ship! The tutorial is the prologue to the main story and thus takes place before the player has met the crew of the Chaser, let alone seen the ship itself! So before then, Argi will be teaching the player to fly in a rather fancy new imperial ship. I don’t want to spoil much more than this, but the tutorial’s story is very important to the overall narrative. When we set out to make the story for The Chaser’s Voyage, we decided on how the tutorial’s story would go and it’s connections to the main story. We’re really excited to finally get this big part of the backstory put into the game for players to experience! Speaking of story, we also added a new little animation to the New Voyage Cutscene, here’s a sneak peak!

 

 

The other big change is this patch is our addition of Boss Stops for when the player defeats Bounty Hunters or Pirates, as well as when the player’s ship reaches 0% Hull. As Eos said in this tutorial update: “At first, we wanted to keep things relatively simple. A simple sound effect over a brief pause in the action, but it kinda looked too much like the game hanging up. So, we added in some hit animations and decided to do something a little extra for when the player dies.” Here’s a look again at the Boss Stop for the Player!

 

 

And finally we made some smaller changes. We added a nice glow to the System Power bars for when the player interacts with them, and increased the glow for the jump buttons. This gives more obvious feedback for the players interactions with those systems and we like the added oomph. We slightly tweaked some of the Loading Screen tips about the species of Sector 99 and fixed a couple typos we found. And last of all was, of course, assorted bug fixes!

 

 

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

 

Note from Eos: With this update, we completed another year of development on The Chaser’s Voyage. Like every journey worth having, it wasn’t without it’s time consuming side quests and frustrating obstacles, but we finally have things like the tutorial, gamepad compatibility, and cutscenes. It’s a lot of work for just the two of us and we still got a ways to go before we can mark this voyage as completed, but the road remaining is so much shorter than the road we have traveled so far. To everyone whose been along side us, thank you. We’ll be taking a much needed vacation off from this point out. We’ll see everyone shortly after the New Year! Stay safe out there!

Patch Notes for Update 0.2.2 – 8/22/2022

We released Update 0.2.2 yesterday and I wanted to go over some more changes we’ve made!

Since our last patch came out earlier than planned, this patch finishes off things we started in Version 0.2.1. On top of the previous Voyager Mode additions, we’ve now added Wolfe’s Secret Options. Unlike the base Voyager Mode options, these options only serve to increase the challenge of Voyager Mode, further leaning into it’s place as our Customizable Mode. The Secret Options are as follows:

• Added a slider to adjust the rate at which the Space Jump Drive charges. (1% – 100%) [Note from Eos: As of right now, the game is pretty balanced with the rate of the current space jump charge rate. If you adjust this value too high, just don’t expect to get the good ending.]

• Added a slider to adjust the damage the player deals to Enemies. (0% – 100%)

• Added a slider to adjust the damage the player deals to Obstacles. (0% – 100%)

• Added a toggle to prevent respawning.

 

While we don’t expect many players to use these options to the max challenge, they were very easy to add and make for a much more challenging Voyager Mode to those seeking it.

 

 

To follow up making the Jump Drive charge faster in Version 0.2.1, we wanted to reward perfect play and make sub-optimal play more punishing. Rather than decreasing the amount of money players get, we decide to up the cost of repairs. This means that players who play very well will see little change, but reckless players who take a lot of Hull damage will find Lady Styx’s 100 Day time limit more challenging to meet!

This is the last planned small update before we fully dive into implementing the playable tutorial, and I’m glad we could get in these expanded customization options and balance changes!

 

Finally, there are some miscellaneous bug fixes. You can read the full patch notes here, and we hope you look forward to our next update!

You can also follow us 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:

Patch Notes for Update 0.2.1 – 8/11/2022

Last Thursday we released Update 0.2.1 and I wanted to go over some of the gameplay changes included, but first, BUGS!

• Bug Fixes:

Bugs are the reason why this update did not release on our usual preferred day. With the implementation of Gamepad Support, we had to revamp our input system. This resulted in 2 different bugs popping up in regards to our cutscenes. The first prevented the player from progressing the cutscene that plays when they fail to pay back their debt on time. Thankfully you could still skip the cutscene and continue playing the game, but obviously that is far from ideal. The second bug made the dialogue for the cutscenes progress when you let go of the Left Mouse Button. So if you were just clicking to progress the cutscenes, it would skip every other line of dialogue. I squashed these bugs right away and we decided to push out a patch that we already had been working on as soon as we could. Hence a random Thursday update!

 

 

• The Space Jump Drive:

Now onto the gameplay changes we were working on! In this patch we upped the speed at which the Jump charges while at Level 2 and 3 Engines. For Level 2, 25% was buffed to 50% speed and Level 3, 50% to 75%. We made this change to punish players a little less for not being able to keep their engines at Level 4 (130% charge speed!) constantly. Level 4 is still the far superior choice for charging the jump quicker, and thus getting to your next client quicker, and THUS paying back Lady Styx quicker! But the increased obstacle damage that comes with it can make piloting at Level 4 a difficult challenge for less experienced pilots. So this should allow a little more wiggle room for players to switch up their engines more as the situation requires it.

 

• Accessibility Options:

We had recently gotten feedback over some of our visuals and realized that we could easily extend our current Graphics Accessibility options. So we added in toggles to disable a few different visual effects in our game that may be a bit jarring for some players. These effects are:

– The Ship UI shaking when the player takes damage

– The Speed Lines that help show that the Chaser’s speed is different at different energy levels. (These exist since we refuse to have the space background behind you scroll, as that is a pet peeve of ours for space games.)

– The Warp Lines that flash across the screen while you’re Mid-Jump.

If anyone notices any other effects that would benefit from a toggle, please let us know! We really appreciate all the feedback we get!

 

• Voyager Mode Options:

The above bugs reared their head as I was partway through adding more options for Voyager Mode. Before this update, there were three different options (Overall Damage Taken Modifier, Shield Damage Taken Modifier, and Hull Damage Taken Modifier), but we’ve been wanting to expand Voyager Mode’s customizability with some options not directly related to the amount of damage you take. The newly added sliders modify the rate at which Systems break when the Chaser takes Hull damage and the rate at which Systems are depleted when the Chaser is struck by Ion Weapons. As with the previous damage options, both of these can be set anywhere from 0 to 3 times the default rate! We also went ahead and slightly rearranged the layout of the existing Voyager Options to make room for these new options and future planned additions.

 

That covers all the major changes in last week’s patch, but there a few more minor changes that you can read up on by visiting the official patch notes here!

You can also follow us 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:

The Long Awaited Gamepad Update is Now Live!

Hello everyone! We’ve finally done it! You can now play The Chaser’s Voyage using gamepads! In this week’s article, I’m gonna give you a rundown of what’s new in Update 0.2.0.

 

 

Let’s start with the obvious: Gamepad support! Since the next goal of ours is to make a playable tutorial, we first needed to add in gamepad controls. This took much longer than we expected, mainly due to implementing full menu navigation via gamepads. (You can read more about what that entailed here.) Besides navigating the menu with gampeads (and now keyboard as well), we also added in rumble, rebinding of gamepad controls, and even some neat interactions with the PS4 and PS5 gamepad lights! Those lights will now match the Chaser’s Cockpit Color and will also change to match whenever a character is speaking. Of course, you can also pilot the Chaser using a gamepad, and we have a handy control mapping (seen above) in game to help people understand the controls until we implement the playable tutorial. We also have notifications that pause the game to tell you when a gamepad controller gets connected or disconnected, a must have for gameoad support!

 

 

An important note regarding Steam’s Input Controller. Currently, The Chaser’s Voyage does not support Steam’s Input Controller. Gamepad support has been implemented to be used through Windows, so if it seems like the gamepad isn’t working at all, make sure to set the “Override For The Chaser’s Voyage” (under The Chaser’s Voyage Properties->Controller) option to “Disable Steam Input”. This should allow Windows to do it’s thing without Steam’s interruption. (Not all controllers work with Windows though, so keep that in mind.) We would like to eventually add support for Steam’s Input Controller, but as we have a form of gamepad support already implemented, it is currently not as big of a priority compared to things like the Tutorial or Crew Journal.

 

Next, thanks to some feedback we’ve received, we’ve gone ahead and made a few non-gamepad related changes. The first is that we’ve changed the default Power Level Configuration. Before it was 2 power in Weapons, 2 in Shields, 2 in Engines, and 2 in Auxiliary. An even split made sense to us as a middle ground between any customization the player may want to use. However, it is also a absolutely TERRIBLE configuration to keep one’s power at, and by making it the default power, we wrongly enforced the idea that it should be the main power configuration. To address that, we’ve now made the default configuration as follows: 0 power in Weapons, 3 in Shields, 3 in Engines, and 2 in Aux. The most important things when playing The Chaser’s Voyage are to go fast, and to not take too much damage. This configuration should hopefully prime players into a more optimal play style.

 

 

The second change was made to spice up Minefields. While Minefields can be very challenging when fighting off enemies, a Minefield on its own was a bit lack luster. We wanted to spice up Minefields so that they were more interesting without an enemy, but not too much harder when there was someone to fight. Our solution? Moving mines! Each mine in a Minefield now has a chance of moving up and down in addition to the left. These mines are marked with a yellow pulsing light, instead of the normal solid green light. These make minefields much more exciting, and we originally tested out having all the mines move in this way, but that made fighting enemies within a Minefield much too challenging. By only having some mines move, we hit a nice balance between interesting and not overly punishing.

 

 

Finally we made some much smaller changes: We made The Phantom Nebula Insignia’s free repairs now work with Neutral Imperial and Neutral UGS Fleets, we rearranged some buttons on the Customize Ship screen (and added a Randomize All color option), updated some UI, and fixed a whole bunch of bugs!

 

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

What We’ve Been Up To: UI Navigation!

It’s been a while since out last development update, so this week we wanted to share what we’ve been working on: UI Navigation via gamepad and keyboard! For the most part, we have finished implementing UI Navigation and only have a bit left until we release our gamepad update! (We’ve also updated a couple of menus to have more animations and more intuitive layouts.) Here’s more details on what exactly we’ve been up to:

 

You might remember that a couple of months ago we talked about our progress in adding gamepad support to The Chaser’s Voyage, including our new control scheme for the gamepad. The implementation of those controls was a fun and relatively quick experience. But gamepad support does not end at letting the player pilot the Chaser! In order for our game to fully support gamepad use, we need the player to also be able to navigate the UI of our game with a gamepad.

 

As The Chaser’s Voyage was initially designed with Mouse and Keyboard in mind, we knew implementing the gamepad menu navigation wouldn’t be simple. As someone who primarily plays games using gamepads, I have had a long history of frustration at many games’ UI navigation. Implementing this feature myself gave me a much needed outlet to address all of these frustrations! Here’s some of those frustrations and other challenges we’ve met while implementing the navigation:

 

•Virtual Gamepad Cursor: We both have noticed a growing number of games that use a virtual cursor that is controlled via the gamepad. In implementing our menu navigation, it became clear why. If you simulate a cursor, then you don’t actually need to make the menu elements navigable, you just have the player “click” on them with a virtual mouse. I have no love for virtual cursors. They are always either clunky or imprecise and sometimes both. They always felt odd and out of place and now they just feel like the cheap alternative to properly implementing good menu navigation. However we do understand how time and money limits can cause AAA games to need to cut corners, and while cursors aren’t a perfect solution, they are an easy one. Regardless we did not want to resort to a virtual cursor for our game, and thus still had to tackle the following issues.

•Menu Wrapping: This is a feature whose absence always baffles me. Not only does making the menu navigation loop back around the screen save so much time and reduce unnecessary button presses, it also just feels right and the lack of it is immediately noticed.  What’s even worse than no menu wrapping though, is bad menu wrapping. Games that have menus wrap, but only in one direction are particularly infuriating. Nothing quite compares to accidentally looping to the top of a menu, only to find you can’t loop back to the bottom and instead have to go all the way through the lengthy menu again. (And if you accidentally loop again? Agony!!) Implementing this feature was pretty trivial, especially with Unity’s UI Navigation tools. (Making me even more confused why any game would not have it.)

 

 

•Scrollbar Positioning: We don’t have many different scrollbars in The Chaser’s Voyage, but you do find one every time you’re picking up a new client. As a product of menu wrapping, the player can continually navigate down or up and continue switching between the scrollbar and the confirm client button. But when this happened the scrollbar would stay at the bottom or top of its zone. What I’ve seen other games do sometimes is that if you highlight a scrollbar from the top, the scrollbar would then jump up to the top most position, and jump to the bottom is highlighted from the bottom. This took a little bit of extra coding to pull off, but the final result is well worth it. It really ties the scrollbar to the other menu elements in a subtle manner. A second consideration was making sure that the Insignia Selection menu’s scrollbar automatically shift its position to match which insignia the player was currently highlighting. On top of that we needed the correct insignias to be highlighted when the player moved off of the scrollbar after they moved it manually.

•Button Highlights: This was thankfully already mostly accounted for by our current design of our UI, but many games do not make it obvious enough which button is being highlighted or is currently selected when using a gamepad (or even a mouse sometimes!) This was something we kept in mind from the beginning of our previous UI redesign, and Eos came up with the current (wonderful) highlight icons for buttons, and I added in the smooth animations to make them pop to life. Now all that was left in regards to button highlighting in gamepad navigation was making sure that buttons only became highlighted when they were usable. We have quite a few neat animations with our UI screens popping in and out, or fading different elements, so I needed to account for these animations where the UI buttons aren’t activated.

 

 

•Button History: When you go back a menu, you expect to be put on the button that led you to said menu. With our nestled menus, we had to keep track of what buttons led you where, and make sure to put the player back on the correct buttons when exiting a menu. This was relatively straight forward for the most part. But the next item on the list complicated this process quite a bit.

•The Back and Start Button: These two buttons were the trouble children of menu navigation for us! We have a decent amount of nestled menus and had to make sure only the most recent menu disappeared when the back button was pressed. We also had to make sure that like the UI buttons, the Back button wasn’t usable while the menus were animating in or out, as it would cause some very awkward game states. On top of that, we needed the correct previous button to be highlighted. This was easier when everything was done by clicking on UI buttons, as each button that exited a menu could point to the previous button, but the Back button can be used on any menu no matter what. So we needed to keep a more detailed history of the buttons that were pressed to get into nestled menus, and make sure that that history was cleared and used correctly. Adding in the Start button as a way to exit the pause menu (a necessity) no matter which screen you were on complicated things further. We now had to make sure multiple button history elements were cleared or risk the player being trapped in an inactive menu! (Don’t worry, we always allow the mouse and Esc key to be used, regardless of if the gamepad is in use, so the player is never locked out of the game. You know, just in case. ;D)

 

 

•Dual Stick Controls: This is a relatively small point, but it still deserves a place here due to my affection for it. Let it be known that the Nintendo Switch has absolutely spoiled me. The ability to navigate its menus using either the left OR right thumbsticks is such a wonderful improvement to UI navigation. There have been way too many times where I would try to navigate through a menu with the right thumbstick as it occasionally felt more natural, only to be reminded that almost no games do this. Why limit UI navigation to one stick when the other is unused? Some games make great use of the right stick as a way to scroll through many menus, but that is not drastically different from just having the left stick scroll instead. We decided for The Chaser’s Voyage to make the left and right sticks both navigate through the menu in the same way, just like the Switch.

 

That covers most of the big points of UI Navigation that gave us any sort of trouble or that I wanted to give a special spot light (dual stick controls). With UI Navigation done, the current task is now getting button remapping to work with gamepad, adjusting the options to let players switch between control schemes, and adding in some pause menus for when controllers get disconnected. We can’t wait to get this update into your hands, this has definitely been a very important feature made with lots of care!

Follow us on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback!

The Chaser’s Voyage now has Cutscenes!

Hello everyone! Yesterday, the cutscene update of The Chaser’s Voyage went live! This version includes the much awaited addition of cutscenes, along with some other minor changes.

First, we’ve updated our Splash Screen, making use of the promotional art that we showed off last week. This is replacing the green space background that the Unity Logo and Bright at Midnight Logo appeared in front of.

 

 

We also updated some of our insignia designs! Here’s the new designs for the Proto-Chaser, Neo-Chaser, Tyrant’s Demise, and The Mark of Death Insignias.

Proto-Chaser InsigniaNeo-Chaser Insignia
Tyrant's Demise InsigniaThe Mark of Death Insignia

 

The most important addition to Version 0.0.8 is, of course, our cutscenes! We’ve added 4 different cutscenes to our game, replacing our current temporary story screens. These cutscenes help introduce the player to our cast of main characters and the story of the game, give more narrative weight to when the player fails to pay off their debt in time, and reward the player for beating the game! After each of our two victory cutscenes, our credits will now play.

We also added a few options for the cutscenes and credits. If you’re someone who wants to get right into the action, you can automatically skip the intro cutscene. (Don’t worry, even with this option off, all cutscenes can be skipped by pausing if you want.) We also let the player automatically skip the victory credits if they have already beaten the game. The cutscene dialogue can also be advanced automatically!

 

 

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!)

The Chaser’s Voyage Out Now!

We’ve done it! We have officially released The Chaser’s Voyage on Steam via Early Access! It’s been quite a voyage so far, but there’s more in store! We’re looking forward to adding in more features like fully voiced cutscenes, a crew journal full of lore, a practice mode, and a playable tutorial. We hope you check out and enjoy our game!

We also set up a Discord where you can receive updates on our progress and submit feedback. Join the Bright At Midnight Discord!