Author: Eos//G

Graduate from UC Santa Cruz. Lead game designer, director, and lead writer. Follow me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dawnknightx.bsky.social

January 19, 2026

Indie Impact 2025 Dev Spotlight: The Chaser’s Voyage

Last November, Cameron and I were invited to take part in a charity event hosted by Indie Impact over on Twitch. It was a showcase of indie games streamed over the course of a weekend to raise money for the Stonewall Community Foundation with interviews with a variety of LGBTQIA+ indie developers (including us!) It was a ton of fun to do and the charity event was extremely successful. Big thanks to Indie Impact for playing The Chaser’s Voyage and giving us an opportunity to speak about our game for an hour.

If you want to stay updated on what we’re doing you can follow Bright at Midnight on Bluesky! The Chaser’s Voyage is now available on Steam:

October 2, 2025

The Chaser’s Voyage: Post-Launch Thoughts

Well, we finally did it. We put out our first game and I couldn’t be prouder. I know this might sound like hubris, but I still think The Chaser’s Voyage is one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. I hope that everyone else who is willing to give our little passion project a try will feel the same way. Now that we’ve launched, I wanted to share some closing thoughts on the development process for the game.

1) Our biggest hurdle was always the art. Neither of us are artists by training. I mean, I doodle a whole bunch, but I always used to think that if we could have a trained artist on hand or by commission, then that would be better. Now, I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. I mean, if you are an artist or have an artist on your team, then that’s probably best. (And I use artist to mean someone who can draw and compose images, because game design and programming are an art form as well.) But if not, it’s probably better to just teach yourself. It seems daunting, but I was surprised by how quickly one can learn how to compose some kind of image that looks good with just time and practice. I personally think that I’ve improved quite a lot over the course of The Chaser’s Voyage’s development and I think in the future it will be best to just hone my skills and do it all myself… even if it’s not going to look like the people who have millions of dollars to commission the best artist. Of course, there will always be something where it would better to hire a professional.

2) Game design is an ever evolving process. The best decision we made was making combo encounters, and that was a really late addition to the game that only came about when we were thinking of how to do implement the flight simulator. I know of some indie devs who kind of wing the whole project and run out of steam very quickly because they don’t have a road map. I also know of some who are very rigidly attached to their designs at all stages of development that they miss out on some good opportunities. There’s a time for both improvisation and a time for executing a well-thought out plan, but the real trick is planning enough ahead of time to know where you’re going and being open enough to recognize when things need to deviate.

3) You really need a thick skin to survive in this industry. At the time of this writing, The Chaser’s Voyage is new and we don’t have a long line of people eager to play our game (yet), but we have at least one review copy handed out and a showcase lined up and, to be honest, I’m so nervous about both. I’m sure that over the course of our lifetime, there will be people who like The Chaser’s Voyage and people who don’t like The Chaser’s Voyage, and that’s fine. But I think the worst feelings I’ve ever had when developing this game were around some of the negative feedback we had gotten.

Obviously at times we’d get negative feedback, which is pretty normal and mostly welcomed. Some of the earliest feedback we got led to some of our best ideas. If you unlock and play Ace Mode in our game, then you will no doubt note its difficulty. That was more or less the only difficulty early on, but negative feedback on this challenging mode led to the creation of our Voyager and Captain modes, which are Cameron’s and my favorite modes, respectively. More than a few times however, we’ve had people who just didn’t like our game, sometimes without even offering any real criticism. Something didn’t click with them or they were perhaps not the right audience, but regardless, it feels awful when people write off your art before they even give it a chance.

But, then there’s those times when you see people really engage with your game and you see things click for them. You see their eyes light up and you know that everything just works. I live for those moments. Seeing people enjoy The Chaser’s Voyage powers me up to move right past any nonconstructive negative feedback (while still keeping an open ear to the constructive kind).

3.5) The experience of wrapping up The Chaser’s Voyage, submitting it to others for judgement, and hearing both constructive and nonconstructive feedback has caused me to significantly reevaluate not only how I engage with games, but also how I engage with games media. I used to be (and still kinda am) snobbish when it comes to video games. Very much a “I love games. If I don’t love it, I don’t play it.” type. But knowing that some people took my game, didn’t play it, but decided to pass judgement anyway, made me realize that that’s a shitty way to engage with games. Over the last year, I’ve tried, played, and beaten more games I would consider “bad” than ever before, but also found games that have become some of my favorites of all time even though they didn’t click at the beginning. Yes, there are still some real stinkers (even popular games can be bad still), but there are some real hidden gems out there if you just give them a chance.

I’ve also really stopped engaging with too much of the negative media surrounding video games. No more “Top 10 Worst Games of All Time” type videos for me, especially if they’re about indie games, because that’s a really toxic way to engage with a medium that I love. A genuine fear I had was ever ending up on some popular YouTuber’s “Worst Games” list, where they use my art as content while probably misrepresenting it. It’s just not something I wish to engage with anymore, especially now that I’ve, officially, finished and launched my own video game.

I guess what I’ m saying is, the development of The Chaser’s Voyage has changed me, as would anything that takes 10 years to make, and they’re all changes for the better. I’m a better artist, a better game designer, and a better person thanks to this long, LONG voyage. Of course, it helped that I wasn’t on it alone. Cameron, thanks for the adventure. Let’s take a short rest and then head out on another one.

Hopefully a shorter one this time though.

February 6, 2024

Update On the Crew Journal

Hello everyone. Last update I said how were hard at work on the in-game lore for The Chaser’s Voyage, which would take the form of a Crew Journal. Well, here’s some screenshots of what the Crew Journal will look like.

As you can see, not every category will be unlocked at the beginning of the game. As you progress through the game, making it further and further into your adventure and unlocking insignias, you’ll learn more and more about the history of the galaxy and just how all the pieces line up and affect your voyage.

The banners were made by me using both original assets and repurposing those already in the game. Stylistically, I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

Your crew will also be providing insight by leaving comments on each entry. These little dialogue exchanges can expand on information presented in the main entry, talk about something tangentially related, or reveal a little bit more information about themselves.

We hope that everyone uses the Crew Journal as a way to measure their progress. It’s the main tracker of meta-progression we have in the game and acts as a non-gameplay-affecting reward for players who keep playing on their voyage to improve and try out all the game’s features.

With most of the general layout completed, all that’s left now is to further polish it, design the layout for the entry selection screens, and implement the text. And there is a lot of text.

You 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:

January 16, 2024

The Chaser’s Voyage Starmap for 2024

Hello everyone. Cameron and I are back from our winter break and ready to continue our work on (and hopefully finish up) The Chaser’s Voyage this year. So first, let’s go over what we’ve accomplished last year by looking at the Starmap for the game.

Last year, we revamped the tutorial, we added in a new client type, the aligned cartographer, and we updated client stories to improve randomization and fall more in line with our game’s lore. We also made other client tweaks such as highlighting mentions of factions in the client stories, so that you, the player, can really know which clients are good and which will lead to a horrible death. Along the way, we made plenty of little updates, including making some UI changes to improve the experience for gamepad users. When we first made this Starmap, we put the biggest obstacles and challenges first, but we didn’t anticipate some unexpected challenges, like prioritizing implementing gamepad support and making a full performance overhaul. Now though, we are happy with how these things have come together and we’re ready to tackle the final parts of The Chaser’s Voyage before launch.

So what are those parts? They’re the fun little extras that we’ve been dying to get into the game for a long time now. The first is our lore, which takes the form of our Crew Journal. We’ve talked a bit about it before, but to reiterate, it’s pretty much where a bulk of our game universe’s history and character backstories lie. They’ll take the form of various in-universe pieces of media, such as news articles, private messages, or non-voiced character interactions. It’s all extra stuff, but we’ve made a huge effort to ensure that the galaxy you’re flying the Chaser through is a reflection of a consistent world full of other stories to tell or have yet to be told.

With so much lore though, all together it’s the same amount of words as a short novel, one of the first problems we were encountering with the Journal was how it affected the startup loadtime. We actually had all the lore in the game for a while in outdated UI, but since it was inaccessible we removed it for the Early Access builds. Luckily, Cameron seems to have found a promising solution already. At the time of this writing, we are now exploring how we want to present the Crew Journal visually. So, fingers crossed that we’ll be able to get that into an early access build soon.

After that, we’ll only have one more major feature to work on, which is the inclusion of our training mode, the Flight Simulator. This will allow players to create their own scenarios that they can use as practice for the main game. For instance, if pirates chasing you through minefields are always giving you a hard time, you can set the simulator to those same conditions and practice until you master the encounter. You can also adjust your starting health and choose which systems are already damaged upon entering the encounter. The cool thing about implementing this feature is that we already have it in the game, it’s just inaccessible. The reason for that is that is two fold. 1: There are options only intended for our use (to make it easier to capture exactly the footage we want for trailers since so much of our game is determined randomly). And 2: We are planning on overhauling the visuals for the Flight Sim UI, since the ones we have now are fairly bare bones.

After the Flight Sim, it’s a matter of cleaning a few things up, maybe adding some features we didn’t think of at the time, and bug testing before finally launching out of Early Access. Some of these features we’ve already implemented, such as the Voyager+ and Captain+ modes, which lets players play the Ace mode’s encounter randomization on lower difficulties. One of the big things that needs to be cleaned up is our options menu, which is not finalized since we don’t want to set anything in stone while we’re still developing the game and adding new options and setting.

Now, you may have noticed that we also have a “Milestone” between “Phase 1” and “Phase 2”. We wanted to reach a more polished state before we started really using VoxPop’s platform. We are still definitely hoping to collaborate with streamers in order to get the word out there, especially after last year’s updates. Neither Cameron nor I are really into marketing, but we’re determined to do everything we can to make The Chaser’s Voyage succeed.

I have a lot of high hopes for this year. We’re gonna keep working towards making The Chaser’s Voyage really soar and we’re hoping you’ll be with us when this voyage finally takes off!

October 19, 2023

Get The Chaser’s Voyage for $10.19 on 10/19 (TODAY!)

We’re having a special one day sale today! If you haven’t already, now’s your chance to pick up The Chaser’s Voyage for $10.19.

August 9, 2023

Where We’ve Been and What We’ve Been Doing – An Update on the State of The Chaser’s Voyage

Hello everyone. It’s been a while since we last updated but we’re finally ready to tell you what we’ve been working on these last 2 and half months. The short version of it all is that we’ve been making some major changes to our tutorial. Since going live with it last November, we’ve gotten to see more people playing The Chaser’s Voyage first hand and it’s given us a better understanding of what we need to prioritize and what we need to back away from when it comes to introducing people to the game. Namely, it required a lot less talking and lot more doing.

I think the current version of the tutorial has too much talking in it. It was a way to introduce some core concepts of not just our game world, but also why the mechanics are the way they are. I thought it was a necessary bridge that needed to be crossed for players to understand why they were doing something. For example, unlike a space game like FTL where you might be traversing the entire galaxy, we limited ourselves to just a small corner of the galaxy, Sector 99, so that all of our planets could have names and backstories and our list of alien species didn’t have to grow to, well, a galaxy sized level. In retrospect, I don’t think that it was necessary to introduce the player to these lore explanations, at least not in the tutorial. So, we did away with a lot of the universe building dialogue, though we still did allow ourselves some brief, inconsequential, moments of world building.

We also thought that having a character explain what needed to be done vs. having text prompts explain would be a more active way for players to learn the ins and outs of the core mechanics. It definitely works for some games, but we realized, it doesn’t work that way for ours. We didn’t want players to feel like our game was too hand holdy or a “by the numbers” type game where “when X happens, you must do Y.” We wanted to emphasize the idea that “Hey, you’re going to be called on to make decisions, so just be ready for that” but I think it ended up adding some bits that the player isn’t necessarily going to be interested in at that moment and the “on the fly decisions bit” can still be reinforced without us having to be explicit.

So, we changed our tutorial to something that uses a lot of less talking and lot more text prompts. This itself required a lot of work, as we made our text prompts no longer automatically close, but instead, players could choose when to close the prompt once they had carried out the prompt’s instructions. We decided that perhaps for this part, a little hand holding was necessary to get the players started. We didn’t want people to feel overwhelmed with options at first, after all. With our text prompts came more inspiration from Nintendo games, where we decided to color code text and use symbols to connect the keywords and instructions to the interactable elements. So for example, when we tell players to set their weapons to level 2 to shoot down missiles, the word “weapons” will be colored green and show the weapons icon and the symbol for level 2 weapons will be next to “level 2”. It’s actually been quite the challenge to think of every way we can make something as clear as possible and this time, no fear of whether or not it might be obvious.

Remaking our tutorial isn’t the only thing we’ve been working on these last couple of months. We’re really trying to revamp our social media marketing campaign. I’ve been doing a lot of studying up and we’re prepared to make a couple of big changes. The first and most notable is that we’re dropping “roguelike” from our marketing and will soon be changing it on Steam. While I will die on the hill that our game is technically a “roguelike”, we are missing a lot of the modern hallmarks of what makes a roguelike a “roguelike”. We don’t have randomized power-ups or engage in tedious resource collection. For better or for worse, those are elements associated with roguelikes and I have gotten some questions along those lines from people wondering how The Chaser’s Voyage is like a roguelike.

And since nobody wants a lecture or a redirection to my article, we feel it’s just better to drop the genre from our marketing. This does once again leave us without a genre to categorize ourselves in but as I said in my “Is Our Game a Roguelike?” article, we don’t like genres and we didn’t set off to make a game constrained by genre. Though, in the writing of this article, I’ve learned that we made some assumptions about genres like “space flight simulation” which encompasses everything from games like Elite: Dangerous, to Kerbal Space Program, to Star Wars: X-Wing. Which is wild. So, going forth, we’ll be leaning more into the “space flight” aspect of our game, perhaps marketing ourselves as a “space flight lite” or maybe just a “space flight sim”. Who knows? (Have I mentioned I hate genres?)

With this change in marketing decision it also means changing some of our stuff on Steam and making a brand new trailer (again). We’re hoping that our new trailer can be the kick-off of our new marketing efforts, but we’ll see if this article doesn’t end up doing that first.

We’ve also made a new Twitter account just for The Chaser’s Voyage that will act as a central source for all things The Chaser’s Voyage (while our Bright at Midnight twitter account will still be focused on stuff going on with us as game devs).

With all this going on, we’re still hopeful of finishing The Chaser’s Voyage relatively soon. We still plan on executing a well-crafted, unique, professional indie game. We want The Chaser’s Voyage to go to the stars and we’re prepared to do whatever it takes to make that happen!

April 25, 2023

Ambitious Ales Game Night – Our First Public Demo Event!

Last week we got to participate in the Ambitious Game Night hosted by the OC Indie Developers group and showed off The Chaser’s Voyage to local gamers in the area. It was a great night of playing indie games, talking shop with people from all over the industry, and food and drinks.

If we saw you there, we hope you had a good time. It was very exciting setting up our game for a kind of an open demo like that. We have never done anything like that before and we learned a lot about how to present our game in such a setting. We’re looking forward to the next one!

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

March 21, 2023

Understanding the Art Behind Trailer Making

Last week, we made a post showing off the new trailer for The Chaser’s Voyage and it’s a video I’m personally very proud of. To make it, I went back to the basics to learn more about video editing and, specifically, more about how to make good trailers.

First, let me go over some of the follies I think I made during our last trailers. I’m okay with admitting that they weren’t the best trailers, or even “good” game trailers, because I’m still learning this whole process. Trust me, when I started making this game with Cameron, I had no idea about all the things I’d have to learn and do for marketing purposes.

Do not be mistaken though, I am proud of those older trailers. I think editing and style wise they are pretty good. Our reveal trailer is pretty boring visually, but there are hints of something stylish buried beneath an understandably amateurish composition. Our steam trailer, I like to think, has a lot more flair with trailer unique animations and swooshing character introductions, but it was flair in the wrong direction. Seeing hypothetical people’s perspectives can be really rough. I’ve spent so much time with Edwin, Tai, Nila, and Wolfe, that I forget that most people don’t know how awesome they are. Still, this trailer came about after I redid our entire user interface, meaning my skills in GIMP were still burgeoning.

I really like this composition and still think the effects are really cool, but without anyone really knowing our characters, most people would tune this out

Our early access trailer wasn’t actually meant to be our “big trailer.” It was meant to be a smaller trailer that used the flashier steam trailer as a supplement. You can actually tell though that some of the problems with our marketing strategy were starting to be addressed. Less emphasis on the characters nobody knows about and an attempt to better communicate the mechanics of the game. Still, more often than not, audiences did not seem to see what made our game unique and why it was fun. Your advertisements are often the first time people encounter your game, especially in the wild, so making a good first impression that catches people’s attention is absolutely essential.

As I detailed a couple months ago, for this new video, I went back to the basics and scoured the internet for resources to learn how to make a better game trailer. Luckily, professional game trailer editor Derek Lieu has many videos and articles all about the art form. There’s still so much more to learn and do, but for anyone who wants to learn how to make a trailer on their own, I couldn’t recommend Derek’s stuff more.

For our newest trailer, there’s a few key things I experimented with. The first was zooming in to block off the UI. Unlike many other games, our game is VERY UI dependent. How you interact with the UI is how you play the game, so turning it off completely was just not going to happen. For a long time, I was worried that zooming in so much to completely block off the UI would make the game look not as crisp and that might leave a bad impression, but after some tests, I found that it actually looked really great at 1080p. So with that fear assuaged, I used a lot of zoomed in footage to better get across the daring space adventurer vibe without worrying about the UI detracting at all from that. It also made the beginning of the trailer feel much more dynamic.

It’s worrying that this could give a false impression of how The Chaser’s Voyage is played, but what was more important was just hooking people’s attention.

I also learned how to do picture-in-picture in order to better highlight certain elements (and by that I mean the power management mechanics). This actually allowed me to still show off our characters a bit by connecting them to the primary mechanics. A little pip shows which system is going up, a banner says what action the player will get to do, and the character lets the audience associate the system with the character.

Sound mixing and balancing was also a big focus this time on the trailer. I made sure that every cut was on some sort of beat and that the music was properly balanced to emphasize the voices when they were talking, but to also emphasize the music when nobody was talking. Which is important because our music is still incredible. These are all things I learned from Derek’s videos and articles.

Lastly, it was just making sure we showed off everything we’ve done since the last trailer and this one. Showing off cutscenes, using our new Steam thumbnail art, and even using new character art for the villain of the game, that we showed off as a wallpaper a while back. We also were able to include our player death stops for a very dramatic and suspenseful ending.

While progress can be slow, I feel like we’ve made a lot of progress nonetheless. Cutscenes were a huge milestone for us!

The results were a better trailer. One that I think really shows off what we love about The Chaser’s Voyage and will hopefully be the reason everyone else loves it too. It was totally a lot of work, but it goes to show you that as long as you’re willing to put in the work, check your ego at the door, and always be trying and doing, you can go from a know-nothing novice to a knows-a-little-bit novice like me.

For more updates on The Chaser’s Voyage, be sure to check back on our blog, follow us on Twitter, or join our Discord! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

March 14, 2023

The Chaser’s Voyage – Early Access Trailer 2

Check it out! Our second early access trailer for The Chaser’s Voyage. It’s been a while since our last trailer and we wanted to incorporate some of the new elements we’ve implemented since then.

We’re really proud of this one and it’s going to be our main trailer going forward. Please, share this trailer with as many people as you can. Let’s keep building up this hype starship!