Author: Eos//G

Graduate from UC Santa Cruz. Lead game designer, director, and lead writer. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dawnknightx

Update On Our Tutorial

Hey everyone, we’ve been working hard on the tutorial in preparations for our tutorial update. To keep you all in the loop, here is some of the specific stuff we are currently working on.

 

1) Wrapping up the actual playable tutorial sequences. The final sequence of the tutorial will pit you up against a foe in actual combat. Cameron and I spent some time last week hashing out all the finer details in order to make this sequence fit the narrative, but also make the player demonstrate that they are ready to play The Chaser’s Voyage.

 

2) Working on voice lines for the tutorial. Since the beginning of the game has you meeting your crew for the first time, this tutorial/prologue has you with a different crew in a different ship. We originally had some voice lines already done for the tutorial, but since game development is an always evolving process, those lines have become slightly outdated. Thanks to feedback, we now have a clearer idea of what mechanics need to be better communicated to the player. We also realized we need to re-explain certain features as we’ve progressed further into development. These changes also let us address certain narrative elements that we came up with after our original tutorial was done. It’s overall been pretty exciting to re-work on the tutorial in this regard.

 

3) Along with new voice lines comes the need for some new art. We’re experimenting with changing out our original tutorial character with a new one to fit the new voice direction we went with. It’s going to take some work to get it the way we want, so it’s up in the air right now how we’re going to do it.

 

4) Once our tutorial is fully playable, we’re going to be working on some additional functions to ensure that tutorial is effective and not as punishing as our main game, while still communicating the difficulty of what it’s store.

 

5) We have plans for a new cutscene element that might take some time, but it should be cool and better lead into the proper start of the story in a more dramatic way.

 

6) A feature that we already implemented that will be present in the tutorial update is “boss stops” that will add a dramatic flair to combat. You can check out this video to learn more about what a boss stop is.

 

So that’s where we are with the tutorial and what we have left to do with it. We’re pretty excited to be finally finishing it up and pushing it live. After that though, we’re going to be doing some performance updates. We want to make sure the tutorial is done before doing this part, because we want people to be playing it sooner.

 

You can 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 Early Access – One Year Later

So, it’s been about one year since The Chasers’ Voyage went into Early Access. First…

 

How has it already been a year? What does time even mean!?!

 

Next, I’d like to take this opportunity to go over everything we’ve done since releasing in Early Access on Steam, what we have learned, and what we still have in store for The Chaser’s Voyage.

 

A few months after releasing our game into Early Access, I made a “starmap” of what we hoped to accomplish in the 12 months since then.

 

 

Yikes! All this time and this is it? Just the cutscenes? So what happened? Well, Phase 1 had an unexpected addition, in that before starting on the tutorial, it made a lot more sense to add gamepad support first. After all, there’s no point in making a tutorial with just mouse and keyboard controls in mind if we were always planning on adding gamepad support, so we figured we might as well get that done beforehand. This way we wouldn’t have to redo the finished tutorial after implementing gamepad controls. Unfortunately, adding gamepad support was a lot more work than initially anticipated because it wasn’t just making the game playable with a gamepad, but also making the game navigable with a gamepad, which means every menu had to work using a gamepad. This required us (and by us I mean Cameron) to go under the hood of literally EVERYTHING we had worked on to add in gamepad options as well as some professional touches such as notices for the gamepad suddenly disconnecting, registering different kinds of gamepads (like Xbox and PlayStation), and implementing many features that are exclusive to gamepads, such as rumble.

It was a lot of work and definitely worth it, but it was a significant time sink. However, we have faith that it will pay off making it so that people who want to play with a gamepad won’t have to be stuck playing with mouse and keyboard setting while we take even longer to adapt everything.

 

So, that (plus balance changes and bug fixes) is what we have accomplished so far, but what have we learned since Early Access? We released into Early Access last year for a few reasons. The first was that we wanted to show people what we were doing. We knew that we were still a long way off from completing the game, but it just seemed right to start building an audience. It was also an opportunity to get our game into the hands of people, so that we can get valuable feedback. In regards to the game, I’ve covered what we’ve learned from our players and how we are choosing to address the feedback in another article on our blog. Something I learned that I didn’t address in that article though is just how difficult “listening to feedback” really is. It can be hard having to listen to so many opinions that are contradictory to each other, but all sincerely inclined to help you improve. It can feel like you’re being pulled in so many different directions that you really need to have confidence in your mechanics before putting your game out there. Confidence in my design technique is something I’ve always had in abundance, but having that confidence tempered into something worthy of it only comes after years of analyzing and arguing about game design.

 

But what else have we learned since releasing in Early Access? For starters, it’s that this business is hard. Marketing is hard and made even harder by the fact that we’re not courting every option available right now because we think the tutorial is crucial to The Chaser’s Voyage making a good first impression.

 

The people on Twitter who host Trailer Tuesdays and Wishlist Wednesdays are very nice and sharing our game trailers on as many of those threads as possible has been my life this last year. It is pretty easy to get lost in the crowd though. It seems like being unique, polished, or visually interesting is not enough to get you noticed. I’m not even talking about The Chaser’s Voyage, there’s a lot of games I’ve seen that look great and I think are in the same position we are in.

 

All my time is spent on Twitter marketing.

 

But, like I’ve been saying this whole time, launching your first indie game is like starting a band. We’re gonna be playing for friends and occasionally at some small parties until we catch our big break. Hopefully, with the completion of our tutorial we will be able to share our game with content creators and game shows. The latter is also pretty difficult to get into. We’ve submitted to a few but usually don’t hear anything back from them. Which is fair, since so many games must be submitted to them. But all this is to say is that we have to be persistent.

 

And that persistence has paid off in some ways. For starters, our Twitter following has been steadily increasing. I think before we launched into Early Access, we have less than 100 followers, now we have almost 700. There’s also a few faces in the Twitter game design space that I’ve become quite accustomed to.

 

Probably the most devastating thing that I’ve learned is just how venomous people are towards the concept of “early access.” And like, I partially get it. Why would someone want to pay for a random game that isn’t even done yet? But like, one time, I mentioned to someone new that I was an indie game developer and just put a game on Steam and before I could say anything else he was like “I hope it’s not one of those early access games.” Talk about awkward. So, hopefully, once we do fully launch for reals, that can also help our marketing push.

 

 

So lastly, what’s in store? Well, we’re still pretty dedicated to sticking to what was outlined in the Starmap and fortunately, the remaining elements are not expected to be nearly as time consuming to implement as gamepad support. The tutorial is coming along pretty nicely and when that’s complete, we’ll have phase 1 finished! Phase 2 is adding things to systems we already have built, which will help Phase 2 not take as long as Phase 1. In the case of the Crew Journal, which houses practically all of our lore (and WOW is there a lot of it), we do have to rearrange the UI elements and we have an idea on how to cut down on its loading time. Once the tutorial is complete, it really will feel like we’re in the homestretch.

 

So after a year of being Early Access, thank you to everyone who has stuck with us, whether you’re friends who knew about us for a long time or someone who just discovered us over the last year.

 

You can 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 Art of Tutorial Crafting

So since we’ve been hard at work on making our playable tutorial, I thought it would be good to perhaps write about our thought processes and ideas behind what makes a “good tutorial.” As most gamers are probably aware, tutorials have been, and still are, somewhat controversial. Many older gamers were basically conditioned into figuring out games themselves by mashing on buttons at the usually unforgiving first level. If someone was truly desperate, they could read the manual, or eventually, check the internet. As time went on though and instruction manuals were phasing out, game devs began incorporating their tutorials into their first levels, teaching the player the controls as they were doing cool things in cool situations. In some cases, these tutorials really worked, getting the player into the actual game play part of their game quickly and efficiently. Other times, these tutorials felt obtrusive and asinine, especially to veteran gamers who didn’t need to be told how to move or shoot in the 5th game of their favorite shooter series.

 

This has made tutorial crafting an actual art. A demonstration of pure game design as we designers have to figure out the best way to convey new information to the player in a way that will make them understand and process it later for application. This is especially hard for Cameron and I, as The Chaser’s Voyage is a fairly unique game to play. Where most side scrolling space shooters just involve movement and shooting, our game requires managing a system in real time, including repairs, with no actual shooting being done by you. In addition, we need players to understand how our other, more complicated, game mechanics actually work. Where in shooting games, the concept of “shoot the bad guys and don’t get shot” is very easily understood, the core mechanics in The Chaser’s Voyage are more akin to learning how to fly a plane or drive a car. They require skills that aren’t intuitive, but are very necessary. Teaching players these skills is a tall order, which is why we adopted three core principles when it came to crafting our tutorial: inform, apply, and demonstrate.

 

• 1. Inform

The main goal of any tutorial should be to inform players how to actually navigate the game space they are in. After all, if someone doesn’t know which button attacks or ducks, etc. then there’s no way they’re gonna figure out the more complicated stuff. At the same time, we didn’t want to be condescending to anyone who either already knows how to play or feels like they could figure all this out on their own. That latter idea is why so many people feel like they can just skip the tutorials and then, usually, later complain that they “can’t” do something.

 

For The Chaser’s Voyage, we have to teach players four basic mechanics: movement, allocating power, repairing systems, and activating the space jump. Movement is pretty obvious and the most conventional of our core mechanics. We include it pretty much as a formality, since every game could be someone’s first. It’s the beginning of the tutorial and is easily moved on from. Next comes allocating power, which means removing some power from one system and putting it into another. On a gamepad, teaching the allocation of power might be considered fairly complicated, since it involves a combination of buttons, so we have to make sure that we are precise in our language and that the player is given plenty of time to safely understand what they need to do. The same is true for activating space jumps and repairing systems which are the 3rd and 4th parts of the tutorial. These controls are a little bit simpler on keyboard and mouse, as they merely involve hovering the cursor over the various systems and left-clicking, right-clicking, or pressing the space bar. Since most of the interactions are on the UI, we even employ the classic tactic of putting big blue arrows where you’re supposed to click.

 

 

Once the player has shown that they can actually perform all these actions, they have every tool in their disposal to navigate the game world. However, just knowing what controls do which actions doesn’t necessarily cultivate a good gaming experience. After all, even in the simplest of platformers, you can make a player jump, and a lot of the functions of jumping might seem intuitive, but what’s really crucial is having them understand what jumping actually means for them, which is why our second phase is…

 

• 2. Apply

In this part of the tutorial, we show the player what all the stuff they learned how to do actually means in terms of playing The Chaser’s Voyage. We start off with something safe, but that will be incredibly useful during the main game, communications. We tell the player to remove power from any systems and apply it to the communications (level 3 in auxiliary power) so that they can talk to a passing by battleship. This is important because it shows that the auxiliary systems have different functions depending on how much power you put into them. By this point the player should have already figured out that adding more power into engines makes the ship go faster and that adding power into weapons and shields also make them stronger too. So, we wanted a sequence that emphasized the importance of auxiliary, even though it’s most likely going to be kept a minimal power during most gameplay.

 

 

After that comes our first real obstacle: navigating a debris field. This is gonna be the first time we really let the player “play the game”. They are free to use the knowledge they’ve acquired in an actual scenario. They can go slow and defensive or blast away debris with their lasers while flying past them. They can even try out their sensors (level 2 in auxiliary power). The important part is that we let them experiment, since that’s the entire nature of The Chaser’s Voyage. We want players to experiment, adapt, and strategize, particularly on the fly and under pressure. It’s what makes the game satisfying to play, which is why after this, we really emphasize our third aspect of tutorial crafting.

 

• 3. Demonstrate

Now that the player knows how to play the game proper, we need to sell them on this whole “The Chaser’s Voyage” concept. After all, there’s no guarantee that they bought our game based on our amazing trailers or even word of mouth. It might just be something they bought on sale… something they could return if they find the concept boring. So, we throw a couple of challenges their way to give them a small taste of what to expect. So why not start off big with a battleship pursuit?

 

This sequences lets us show off one of the technical obstacles, which is good cause that means we can teach players the value of your sensors as well as dealing with threats like fighters. Also, if the players go too slow, they can get a better glimpse of what exactly they are running from. Battleship pursuits are pretty fun sequences that aren’t too challenging to get through if you know what you’re doing. It also showcases one of the most important distinctions that sets The Chaser’s Voyage apart from many other space games. Namely, you are not in an invincible super-powered fighter craft. This isn’t the type of game where you just bravely charge into battle against massive battleships. You are outrunning, you are surviving by the skin of your teeth, and you are fragile.

 

With that, we have the player move onto the final exciting selling point of our game, combat. A one-on-one against a space pirate will be a very common occurrence and will require every skill you learned throughout the tutorial to survive. Though, we also want to emphasize how important strategizing and adaptability are and given the last sequence will invoke a sense of fragility, we want players to experience failure, with their ship crash landing on a desert planet which leads the player into the actual start of their grand voyage. What’s also very important to note is that our tutorials give the player a foundation for what they need to know and what they’re going to do, but we didn’t show them everything nor did we teach them everything. We merely gestured at everything they’ll need to become an ace pilot.

 

Important to note that while “demonstrate” is our third phase to tutorial crafting, we’ve actually been “demonstrating” the cool parts of our game the entire time. From voice acting, to explaining a little bit about the world, and how the rules of the world dictates the mechanics. For instance, at one point, the trainer, Argi, tell you about how the distance a ship can space jump is determined by factors like the size of your ship, which is why i can take multiple days to get from one planet to the next despite some kind of faster-than-light travel. This not only explains the world the player is getting into but also how the number of space jumps relates to the eventual days the player will need to keep track of. We also drop a little more lore in other parts simply to insinuate that there is a lot more going on in this universe than just what we present before you and once the player gets access to the crew journal (and we… y’know… implement it) then they can really see how they are just one small adventure going on in a galaxy that contains hundreds, if not thousands, of other stories to tell. It’s part of an idea I have that feeling like a small part of something bigger makes the world you’re exploring feel all the more richer.

 

 

I hope people can see how we have laid out our plans for our tutorials and take away some ideas for how they craft their own. As a bonus, there was a fourth aspect we were sure to implement that I think many games often overlook. After the first time you complete the tutorial, it becomes entirely skippable. It’s a prologue to your story that contains some story elements, but nothing essential that isn’t covered in our opening cutscene and if someone does want to replay it, that option is there too.

 

Once our tutorial is done and we update the game with it, we’ll really need help in fine tuning to make sure that we achieve all our goals, so please feel free to give us feedback on either Twitter or Discord. What’s also exciting is that once the tutorial is complete we’ll be finally moving onto our next phase of our Star Map, where we’ll be courting some streamers and other content creators to check our game out. So, please contact us if you are a content creator who might be interested.

 

If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

A Quick Look at Our Playable Tutorial

We’re working hard on the playable tutorial. Here’s a little sneak peak at what it looks like.

 

Since the tutorial is also the prologue for our game, you aren’t yet the captain of the Chaser. Instead, it looks like you’re flying some kind of Imperial ship. Fun fact: It’s design is actually based on an early design for the Chaser.

 

And since you have yet to meet the other crew members, your crew is actually just this person named Argi. He’s seems nice.

 

This is how we’ll teach players how to play the game, with big arrows!

 

We’ll even have the controls automatically change based on which controller you are using.

 

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:

Accessibility and Difficulty – Talking About Voyager Mode and Other Options

This week I wanted to talk about The Chaser’s Voyage and accessibility. Cameron and I are both firm believers that games should be accessible for anyone to play, either by having those considerations baked into the game itself or by having a plethora of options to allow players to customize games to maximize their enjoyment. This includes difficulty settings.

 

We’ve always envisioned The Chaser’s Voyage to be a hard game. Even now, part of my job is to find that level of balance where the game will be challenging to new comers until they’ve demonstrated a certain mastery of the system, and even then, the game shouldn’t become a cakewalk. That balance just makes paying back your debt on time all the sweeter. A reward for becoming an ace pilot. However, we have plenty of friends and family members who aren’t expert gamers. We’ve encountered plenty of people that have become interested in our story, experiencing the crew interactions, and just overall want a less demanding and stressful experience.

 

And, I don’t know, maybe we’re on to something?

 

Taken from https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/fearoffailing/

 

We also have both been up to date on the several “accessibility vs. difficulty” debates that spring up every now and then regarding games like Cuphead, Soulsborn games, and Celeste. I was even very vocal WAY back when Nintendo started adding their assist modes that would take over and show you how to complete a level after dying a lot of times and when they added casual and phoenix modes to Fire Emblem. Personally, my stance is and will always be “if you don’t use those options, why do you care?” I’m also glad that they are there. Like, as someone who really loves the Fire Emblem franchise, I’m glad that more and more people can get into that series thanks to the easier modes, even if I don’t use them.

 

Getting back to The Chaser ‘s Voyage though, once it had become clear that we needed to adjust the difficulty of our game, we thought it was best to split the game into three modes: Captain, Ace, and Voyager Mode. Inspired by the way that some games were trying to de-stigmatize the connotations of playing on an easy or beginner mode, we opted to have each mode be guided by an idea. Captain Mode was to be our primary mode. We would describe it as “the way The Chaser’s Voyage is meant to be played.” It has a difficulty level that ramps up, it has permadeath, and it’s designed overall for those players seeking to play our true vision of the game. Ace Mode was our challenge mode, defined primarily by making you play the game entirely in Captain Mode’s hardest tier. It was actually our original vision of the game, the one we toned down after feedback because, well, we didn’t to scrap that option completely.

 

We have three difficulty settings. Captain and Ace mode have permadeath where Voyager mode has several respawn options.

 

For Voyager Mode, we wanted to be careful and make sure to describe it as anything other than “easy mode.” It’s true, it can be easier and we do recommend it for beginners to learn how to play the game, but it’s not the “easy mode.” At first, we were using “it’s our accessible mode” as our guiding mantra. We wanted to add in options to allow players to make the game as easy as they wanted or needed to. We were also thinking of it as a kind of training mode, a way people could practice or experiment with strategies before tackling the other modes. When we started implementing these options though, we realized that it would actually be less work to just transfer over all the tools we had made for balancing and debugging purposes.

 

With that came some options such as damage sliders, that would allow players playing Voyager Mode to reduce the damage their shields and hull take individually, all the way to zero if they’d like. They also would have the option to increase the damage they take. By a lot too, up to 300%! It was from that point on that we decided that the guiding principle for Voyager Mode was to make it our “customizable mode”, where we will let the player adjust most settings in order to make the game truly the challenge they want.

 

 

To further not stigmatize playing games the way you want to, we don’t hold back any content from Voyager Mode. You can earn all the insignias and their corresponding achievements, you can unlock every entry in the crew journal (once we implement it), and you can still get both endings. The one caveat regarding insignias is that each mode is separated into their own little bubbles. So, even if you unlocked every insignia in the game in Voyager Mode, you’d still have to unlock each one in Captain and Ace Mode, and vice-versa. We also keep the records separate. So, if you want to brag about beating The Chaser’s Voyage on Ace Mode, you’ll have to back up your words by showing off your Ace Mode records.

 

In addition to these difficulty modifiers, Cameron and I are trying to be conscious of anything else we could add to better accommodate all kinds of players, so people who just want to enjoy the story or take on the challenge can get what they want. This includes turning off certain background elements a player might find distracting (across all modes) and completely customizable controls. We’ve even added in some other features that, I personally, wasn’t too sure about adding, but was convinced because, it was easy.

 

And ultimately, when it comes to making games more enjoyable to a wider audience, not only is it the right thing for a game developer to do, it’s also easy to do.

 

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:

Playing The Chaser’s Voyage with a Gamepad

With our Gamepad Update now live on Steam, we have finally entered into the second part of the “Making our Tutorial” phase… actually making the tutorial. Implementing gamepad support was an exciting, but necessary, detour, as adding it was always one of our biggest desires and the tutorial was always something we were gonna save for last. During our time in Early Access, we have really come to grasp how badly our game needs a playable tutorial. The video we have that plays when you first load up the game asks the player to take in a lot of information before they’ve even touched the game and right now, our quick overview of gamepad controls, may be too ambiguous. These were never meant to be permanent. While they could exist in some forms later, they will most likely be removed once we have finished building the playable tutorial. After all, when it comes to video games, the best teacher is actual experience. In the meantime, we ask that you continue to be patient with us and use this article as another resource for learning how to play with the gamepad!

 

 

Probably the most essential part of playing with the gamepad is learning to associate which button goes with which system.

•Weapons: A (on Xbox) / Cross (on PlayStation)

•Shields: X / Square

•Engines: Y / Triangle

•Auxiliary: B / Circle

•Space Jump: Right Shoulder

 

When pressing any of these buttons alone, you will begin repairing that system if it is broken. If your Space Jump Drive is fully charged, pressing the right shoulder button will send you to the next area. Otherwise, pressing these buttons on their own won’t do anything.

 

One of the most important mechanics in The Chaser’s Voyage is the ability to reallocate power from one system to another quickly and effectively to fit your preference and the current situation. The right and left triggers take the place of the right and left button on your computer’s mouse. Only this time, you hold down a trigger and press one of the system buttons to change the power. Left trigger to take power away and add it to your reserves and right trigger to put power in from your reserves.

 

We had a lot of discussion of how to properly convey this when making the controller image above, but we were worried it might be to vague. For example, one way I thought of transcribing it was:

 

•Increase Power to Weapons:   RT(Hold) + A.

•Increase Power to Weapons:   LT(Hold) + A

 

But Cameron was worried that this would imply that you had to do both at the exact same time… which you don’t have to. So I thought about writing it like:

 

•Increase Power to Weapons:   RT(Hold), A

 

But it was by that point that I remembered that this is why I never got into fighting games besides Super Smash Bros. as a kid. We concluded it was best to just use plain language and wait until we can make the players do this in a tutorial.

 

I think our other buttons are much more straight forward. We have many of the ship’s other functions set to the D-Pad but opted to move Activate Communications to the left shoulder button simply because in the heat of a thrilling battle, that button is more accessible.

 

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how The Chaser’s Voyage was going to play on gamepad, which is why I didn’t want to focus too much on it during early development. It was something Cameron really fought for to add in before proper work on the tutorial would begin. Now, playing on gamepad is the only way I play The Chaser’s Voyage and I’m kicking myself for not pushing to get it down much earlier in production. Consider this lesson learned!

 

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:

Fun Little Gamepad Features

We’re still working hard on getting our gamepad update done! A lot of what’s left (at the time of this writing) is getting it so that when a controller connects or disconnects, the game will pause and notify the player. In the mean time, please enjoy just a taste of what is to come regarding playing with a gamepad.

 

You can 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:

3 Tips When Playing The Chaser’s Voyage

Last week I talked about some of the ways we’ll be updating, and not updating, The Chaser’s Voyage based on feedback we’ve received. So while we begin crafting the tutorial, here are some tips to help you succeed at The Chaser’s Voyage.

 

1) Gotta Go Fast!

We’re experimenting with what the default engine power should be, but remember that you only have 100 days to earn your one million units. This 100 day limit is not a flavorful timer, it’s real, and your space jump drive charges faster the more power you have in your engines. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to have level 4 engines on all the time, but having them fully powered up often, especially when in empty space or during other opportunities when you can auto-pilot, is a must.

 

 

2) Experiment With Power Set Ups / Balanced is Bad

As mentioned last week, we are changing the ship’s default power distribution from 2 Weapons, 2 Shields, 2 Engines, and 2 Auxiliary to a 0/3/3/2 set up. This is because the 2/2/2/2 set up is really bad. It’s like driving the speed limit in a racing game, it’s safe, it’s boring, and you aren’t gonna win. Instead, you should be experimenting with extremes. Choose a system you want to focus on for each situation. For example, when fighting pirates that you want to quickly dispatch of, you should try and have your weapons set to power level 3 or 4. Then decide whether you want to put more power into your shields or engines. Some situations might demand more shield power than engines, such as flying through a dense asteroid field. Others might demand more engines power, such as if the pirates are using ion weapons that easily chew through your shields.

 

The point is, you definitely need to shift your power around in order to succeed. Especially, remember to set your engines to max power when you can cruise on auto-pilot. After all, you are in a race against time!

 

3) Look Over Client Information

I think a lot of players will be tempted at first to just pick the client who is paying the highest amount of money. That’s usually fine early on, but eventually, a lot more factors are added into the equation and if you expect to survive and pay back your debt, you will need to take them into account.

 

 

For example, some clients have specific factions that are after them, like the Empire or the UGS. When looking at the right side of the client select screen, you can read that fun little story about why they need to hire you and find out if anyone is after them, which should factor into your decision if you scroll down further and see which territories their trip will take you in. (The client face portrait backgrounds are also colored to reflect any enemies or allies they may have.)

 

So, let’s say you pick up an “Evil Scientist” on the run for their experiments. They’re offering you the most money out of your three clients. While reading their story, you find out they’re on the run from the Empire. Then, when you check their territory list, they want to cross 3 imperial territories in a row. From your past experiences, you know that imperial territories have more patrolling imperial fleets that you’ll have to fly through. Also, if in any of those territories you come across a planet, you will not be able to land on it for repairs as it is an imperial controlled planet. So, while that client is offering you the most money, maybe even the best deal as you must take into account how long their mission is going to take, it could still be the riskiest.

 

Those are just some tips I usually recommend to players when first starting to play The Chaser’s Voyage. I know, as the developer, I will not be able to hold the hand of everyone who plays our game, so we’re going to try and emphasize these tips in the tutorial.

 

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:

 

Feedback We’ve Gotten and How We’re Addressing It

With our second Steam sale ending this week, I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk a bit more about where we’re taking The Chaser’s Voyage based on feedback we’ve received since going live via Early Access. First, there’s the article Cameron wrote up a few weeks ago talking about how we’ve been busy updating our game to work with gamepad controllers. We should hopefully be done with that soon, but at the time of this writing, we’re currently nailing down rumble features. Also, if you use a PlayStation controller, you’re in for a special treat! One of the reasons we wanted to get the gamepad stuff in sooner rather than later is due to  some feedback we got shortly after launching into Early Access.

 

Interestingly, the other feedback we’ve been receiving has revealed an issue we suspected could be a problem. It’s luckily not about any major game design decisions, as we were pretty determined to make sure our game was close to finalized before entering Early Access. Instead it’s about conveying how to play our game. Even before our Early Access launch, we anticipated this might be an issue. It’s our belief that tutorials should be made last because they are the first thing to become outdated if you change any kind of mechanic and in our case, it’s a good thing because we might have to change some stuff to better emphasize mechanics.

 

Here’s some examples of feedback we’ve received that we will be addressing in some matter or another:

• Going Slow Makes the Game Boring

An interesting bit of feedback we’ve received involves a core part of our game that ties the space jump drive to the engine speed. The general gist of the feedback is always that some events take too long/aren’t interesting enough when going slow, but are too hard and intense when going fast. It’s a kind of paradoxical issue to work out because it comes from players wanting the best of both worlds, something that’s safe and easy but also challenging and dangerous. When designing this game, we made a couple of design choices that we thought would encapsulate the idea of skill and risk that comes from, honestly, a good game.

 

 

The first was that higher speed would mean more punishment for mistakes. It’s a simple risk reward system that is essential to any game where the premise is that you must complete a task by a certain amount of time. In that sense, The Chaser’s Voyage is a bit like a racing game. Playing things safe and going slow is how you lose. However, the second design choice we made is that going slow by removing power from your engines IS sometimes necessary. It’s why we gave you the amount of power that we did and why part of this game is learning how to manage your resources carefully. You cannot have it all, so you must choose carefully, and sometimes when fighting off an enemy, you will need that extra offensive or defensive boost. It’s one of those aspects that, I think, makes our game really interesting.

 

The third design choice was tying the engines to the jump drive. The reason we did that actually came about from testing and was very obvious when we tried having the jump drive separate from the engines. The optimal strategy would just be not to play. Like, say you were in a debris field: you could set shields to max, engines to to zero, and go make a sandwich and by the time you come back, you could just jump to the next area. One really shouldn’t be making a game where not playing is a good strategy. An alternative could have been to make the speed of obstacles always the same and have the jump drive still charge at a fixed pace, with engines just affecting maneuverability. We actually do have some insignias that somewhat do that, but with some added effects to change the game up a bit, but overall the reason we didn’t want that for the default game mode is because it greatly simplifies the experience and reduces the impact of the choices you can make. It also eliminates the possibility of damaging an enemy ship’s engines and then just boosting away, which we think is a really cool strategy that you don’t see in a lot of games.

 

 

So that said, what are we going to do with this feedback? Well, for starters, we’re making some adjustments to the default power distribution that you get when first taking off from Azedo and when you respawn in Voyager Mode. Before, it was a 2/2/2/2 set up (that’s 2 in weapons, 2 in shields, 2 in engines, and 2 in auxiliary). We had it set up like this because it just kinda felt right, even if that set up is actually a very sub-optimal way of playing. We’ve now set it up so that default power distribution is 0/3/3/2. We did this to reinforce a couple of key points, such as: you should be going somewhat fast at all times and that defense is more important than offense. We also believe this set up is the best to keep someone alive after they’ve just respawned.

 

We’re also going to  place in the tutorial (and maybe at the start of a new game, though in that case it will be toggleable) a message from Wolfe that will better explain that the faster you’re going, the faster your jump drive charges. That’s what this problem really is: players not understanding this mechanic. If we can get players to learn that, then we think they’ll have a lot more fun with the game.

 

• Mouse accessibility

We’ve heard, and always suspected that some players might just loose track of the mouse when playing with the mouse and keyboard. We hope that people more accustomed to gamepads can alleviate this problem by switching to gamepad controls once we release our gamepad update. For those who will be sticking with the mouse and keyboard, we’ve explored solutions like adding a trail or a small pulse that could come from the mouse to help players keep track of it. However, many of the style of fixes we’ve thought about are things that the Windows OS already has built in. For this reason, we’ve decided that, at least for now, we aren’t going to be adding any mouse accessibility options, since it just overlaps with the accessibility options that Windows already has. (We do already have the option to turn off our custom cursor though!)

 

• Speed lines

Playing The Chaser’s Voyage, you might have noticed these white lines that streak across the screen as you’re flying. They were originally suggested by our artist, Nate, as a way of conveying motion across the screen, as we were pretty adamant about not letting the space background scroll (as that is not how perspective works in space). Lines such as this seemed common enough in space games, but I suppose never in a bullet hell-esque game that The Chaser’s Voyage can be compared to. Due to some feedback, we’ll be adding an option that will turn off the speed lines for anyone who finds them distracting.

 

• Changing what buttons advance cutscene dialogue

When we first made the cutscenes, we set some of the controls for them, like clicking to progress and space to auto-advance because those made sense to us. Hearing some feedback, we think players have all sorts of preferences that would be easy to accommodate, such as pressing spacebar or enter to progress, while making the auto-advance toggle a less commonly used button.

 

 

• Better communication

Just like with the engines, we overall need to better communicate some core mechanics. For example, one player didn’t remember that the space jump drive was it’s own system and needed to be repaired on it’s own to function. One of the hardest things right now for us, is understanding how new players think without us being directly there to hold their hands. We’ve been developing this game for so long that a lot of the controls are second nature to us. We try our best, but sometimes we think something is clear when it isn’t. The challenging part is that we need to find that fine line between giving our players the opportunity to learn the game and constantly holding their hand, afraid that there might be some aspect they don’t understand. Games are suppose to be about learning to make, and experiment, with your own choices. The best we can do, as the developers, is give the player the tools they need to succeed. We cannot help it if someone just forgets something we already explained.

 

 

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:

 

 

Free The Chaser’s Voyage Summer 2022 Wallpaper!

Sometimes it’s really important to take a break and enjoy the summer sun… even when you have a mission to complete.

 

 

Here’s our little summer gift to all our fans: a summer 2022 The Chaser’s Voyage desktop wallpaper. Feel free to download it! Also be sure to check out The Chaser’s Voyage, currently in Early Access, on Steam. It’s on sale during Steam’s Summer Sale for 49% off!

 

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