Category: Games

The Flight Simulator Update for The Chaser’s Voyage (Version 0.8.0.03) is Now Live!

Hello everyone! The Chaser’s Voyage’s Flight Simulator is finally completed and available for you, the players! We’ve been using the Flight Sim for ages to test various things in our game, and from an early point, planned for it to be accessible to players as well. It has been functional for quite a while, but with incomplete and outdated UI. We obviously had to give it a fresh coat of paint before letting our players get our hands on it, but that also was one of our lower priorities. We already made it so that when the player loses to an encounter, they could practice it in the Flight Sim and playing the game itself also serves as great practice. So having a mode dedicated solely to practicing and training for certain encounters felt less urgent than adding in features like the obstacle combos, crew journal, playable tutorial, etc. But those updates are already done, and now the Flight Simulator is too!

 

 

Before I get into the details on the Flight Sim, I want to do a quick look back through the year and a look forward. This year, we got THREE major updates out vs the two per year we’ve had before! The crew journal was on of our biggest updates and we could not be happier with how it came out. The obstacle combos were a pleasant surprise tangent, but they’ve added a really great level of variety to the game. And of course, the Flight Sim is now out, which leaves only 2 main updates left, options and release! Next year we will be finalizing the options menu and after that, adding in some final polish and then we’ll be leaving Early Access and fully releasing The Chaser’s Voyage! It’s been one hell of a voyage and it’s so nice to see the the release coming up. Okay, with that stuff out of the way, let’s dig into the Flight Simulator!

 

 

The Flight Sim lets the player customize and practice almost any encounter that they’d find in the main game. The purely friendly encounters, like Merchant Fleets of Neutral/Friendly Aligned Fleets are not selectable since there’s nothing in those encounters to actually, you know, practice. Every other encounter is available though! The player starts by choosing their difficulty and insignia, just like when starting a new Voyage, then they select their encounter. Each option in the Flight Sim is accompanied by a fun little wireframe depicting the option. There’s also a preview window that shows what your encounter settings are. After that, if the encounter can have any obstacles, the player chooses how many and which obstacles to have. Just like the main game, only 3 obstacles can be active at once, and stars are incompatible with the electronic obstacles (Sentries and Mines). After the obstacles comes the storm if applicable, then onto the Chaser’s Options. Here the player can customize exactly how damaged the Chaser is, including which systems are disabled and the hull integrity. Once all those setting are chosen, the player can go up against their chosen encounter as many times as they want! One of the neat things about the Flight Sim is that it lets the players choose some options that are a bit more hidden in the main game. You can choose what bounty level the bounty hunters are, how dense asteroid fields are, and what the sentry affiliation is!

 

 

We also made a couple of changes to mines to make them a little more interesting and have a few more ideas for them for next year. We fixed a bug regarding Pirate’s chances to be friendly with player over Space Ports and straightened out a continuity error in one of our Crew Journal entries. Until next year, safe flying!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and can follow The Chaser’s Voyage and Bright at Midnight on Twitter! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

Surprise! The Obstacle Revamp Update for The Chaser’s Voyage (Version 0.7.0.05) is Now Live!

Hello everyone! As we were working on the UI finalization of the Flight Simulator, Eos had a devious idea: “Can we have multiple obstacles active at once?” This prompted quite the conversation regarding how we would attempt this (both design wise and implementation wise) and, more importantly, the pros and cons involved. Long story short, the pros definitely outweighed the cons, so we got right to work with revamping how we do obstacles in The Chaser’s Voyage. So let’s get into it!

 

Obviously the big feature in this update is Obstacle Combos, so here’s the run down. We’ve made it possible for up to 3 different obstacles to all be active at the same time! So you could have something like an asteroid field and a ship graveyard near a star! Speaking of stars, we decided that stars and the electrical obstacles wouldn’t make sense to overlap, so stars cannot combo with Sentries or Mines. Also, now that stars can have obstacles you have to dodge AND enemies to fight off, we decided that a Star with a radiation storm is just too much to handle with all the different sources of system breaks, so we’ve made stars no longer appear with radiation storms. They already could not spawn with a hail storm, since we found it silly to have everything frozen AND on fire.

 

As if stars weren’t bad enough, now we have to dodge Asteroids as well!?

 

For determining how often to have Obstacle Combos and how many obstacles to be active at once, our existing tier based encounter randomization system worked wonderfully. We normally have 1 Obstacle, 1 Encounter, and 1 Storm and depending on what Tier the player is in, we’ll limit how many of these can be active at once. So we just added in Obstacle #2 and Obstacle #3 to those calculations. This means in Tier 1 you’ll get no Obstacle Combos, as you can only have 1 thing active at a time, but in Tier 2 you can have 2 active at once. So you can then get an Encounter + Obstacle, Encounter + Storm, Obstacle + Storm, or now, Obstacle + Obstacle.

 

As you continue to progress we keep upping how many things can be active at once, maxing out at 4 different things. This gives a good amount more variety than previously and also makes for some really kick ass jumps. Fighting a Pirate in a Mine/Asteroid field with a Radiation Storm is TERRIFYING. It’s wonderful! This also lets us make the Ace, Voyager+, and Captain+ modes a little more. . . devastating. Since Tier 4 maxes out at 4 things active at once, you can’t actually get all of 3 Obstacles, 1 Encounter, and 1 Storm active in the same jump. Which is good because that’s really challenging. So we made the non-Tiered modes have that option available, and from the get go! Good luck everyone!

 

Running into a Pirate hiding out in obstacles has never been scarier!

 

While testing out these Obstacle Combos, we realized that when using autopilot, the day timer and the life support gauge were changing at half the rate compared to when autopilot was off. That’s quite the bug, so we fixed that immediately! But, by fixing that bug, we also increased the amount of time it takes to complete voyages. Every mid-jump that was autopiloted through was now twice as long in-game. This paired with the now more dangerous Obstacle Combos required us to make some balance tweaks. We reduced the damage the Chaser’s hull takes by 10% and increased all client payments by 1.3 times. Since the Obstacle Combos resulted in harder to dodge obstacles and the autopilot bug fix resulted in more in-game time being taken up than before, we felt we needed to slightly compensate on both damage and money. Even in a good run, repairs were stacking up to be much too expensive and the 100 day goal was significantly harder to reach.

 

For more minor changes, we added minor randomized pitch shifting to most of our sound effects, increased the sound effect volume for obstacles being destroyed, edited “KTC CEO Defends Illegal Minefield After Fatal Disaster” to no longer say that battleships don’t go through minefields (since, you know, they DO go through them now), added destroyed battleships to the background of space battles, fixed some typos, and squashed SO MANY BUGS. We’re really happy with how the Obstacle Combos have turned out and how they add more variety and a fresh layer of difficulty to the game and hope you guys enjoy them as much as we do!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and can follow The Chaser’s Voyage and Bright at Midnight on Twitter! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

It’s Finally Here! The Crew Journal Update for The Chaser’s Voyage (Version 0.6.0.06) is Now Live!

Thanks for waiting everyone! As the title says, the Crew Journal Update for The Chaser’s Voyage is FINALLY live! A lot of things delayed our work in real life, but we managed to hunker down and finish what I consider to be the biggest update to The Chaser’s Voyage since we first launched on Early Access.

 

The main screen of the Crew Journal, with the default entries unlocked. Will you unlock them all?

 

For those who haven’t heard about it yet, the Crew Journal is a collection of written in-universe lore that the crew uncovers and comments on while you play the game. There are over 300 entries in it, short ones for each planet, and a bunch of longer ones covering a wide range of topics: gameplay tips, galactic news of the war, species you encounter, and even silly junk mail. There’s a short novel’s worth of lore now in the game for players to unlock!  The Crew Journal is the players’ window into the larger story of The Chaser’s Voyage universe and we are so excited to finally be releasing it.

 

Ironically this is the first entry unlocked!

 

Alongside learning about the greater universe through your crew’s eyes, you will also learn more about your crew mates’ pasts! My favorite part of the journal is the crew’s comments at the end of each entry. The journal has gone through many edits (both writing and UI) and we hope you enjoy it! You can access the journal through the main menu, pause screen, and mid jump screen. It will even tell you if you have a new entry every time you jump, so you can take a breather in between encounters and read the latest that your crew has to say.

 

This button’s finally active?! It’s a miracle!

 

Alongside adding the Crew Journal we also changed how the crew’s voice lines are selected. They will now cycle randomly through all of the lines for an event at least once before repeating a line again! This should make for a more immersive and less repetitive experience. (Yes Tai, we’ve heard that war story already!) This update is the final planned lore update, so if you’re a fan of great character interactions, learning about the world(s) from the view of the underdog, or just engaging sci-fi space stories, then there’s never been a better time to get The Chaser’s Voyage! Especially since it’s now on sale via Steam’s Summer Sale for $10.19, 49% off! (There’s even a journal entry that will shed some light on our repeated use of 10/19, it’s got everything.)

 

And of course, no update would be complete without bug fixes and typos. We fixed a bunch of random ones as well as some huge ones in the Tutorial. Big shout out to our Discord for pointing out some nasty bugs, it means a lot to us!

 

The next major update on the list is our training mode, the Flight Simulator. It’s been a wonderful dev tool for us and hopefully shouldn’t prove too hard to finalize with some pretty UI elements. (Famous last game dev words.) Until next time, enjoy discovering the newly expanded galaxy of The Chaser’s Voyage! Safe Flying!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and can follow The Chaser’s Voyage and Bright at Midnight on Twitter! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

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:

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!

 

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:

Patch Notes for The Chaser’s Voyage: Update 0.5.4.01 – 11/13/2023

Hello everyone! The final update of the year for The Chaser’s Voyage went live yesterday. After this week, we’ll be taking a break till the new year, to spend quality time with our family and friends!

 

The update is mainly bugs fixes, but there is a nice Quality of Life change to be found too. When in Voyager Mode, the player can now interact with their systems and Space Jump Drive while the Chaser is respawning. The fixed bugs were related to the Space Jump Drive, Tutorial UI color, and a weird Insignia & Bookmark save interaction.

 

Now with the tutorial redesign and client story updates done, we can get to work on implementing the Crew Journal next year, the biggest source of lore for the universe of The Chaser’s Voyage. We look forward to seeing you in the new year, and hope you’re excited for what we have in store. I know we are!

 

•Eos Note:

I just wanted to thank each and every person who played our game this year, gave us feedback, and reported bugs. For the first time in a long time, we can see the end of our long voyage on the horizon. We accomplished so much this year to get the game into a very playable state from start to finish (including making the tutorial twice!) We’ve been wanting to get the Crew Journal implemented for a long time, as it will add more reasons for players to keep playing as they learn about the characters and the universe.

 

I wish everyone some happy holidays and a happy New Year. See you next space jump!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and can follow The Chaser’s Voyage and Bright at Midnight on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

Patch Notes for The Chaser’s Voyage: Update 0.5.3.01 – 11/6/2023

Hello everyone! The final Client Update has arrived for The Chaser’s Voyage!

 

We’ve been busy going over all our client stories, updating almost all of them and adding a bunch of new stories, doubling the amount of stories each client has. In addition to doubling the available client stories, we’ve also improved the randomization for them. Now you will get every story for a specific Client type before getting any repeats!

 

 

We’ve also changed the name of Debris Fields to be something cooler, Ship Graveyards! This not only plays up their spooky nature, but also reduces the amount of “Fields” in the environment names, adding some more variety.

 

Finally, we fixed some bugs regarding the first scene of the Tutorial and also the Records screen.

 

You can read the full patch notes here and can follow The Chaser’s Voyage and Bright at Midnight on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

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.

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:

Patch Notes for The Chaser’s Voyage: Update 0.5.2.00 – 10/2/2023

Hello everyone! The latest update for The Chaser’s Voyage is now live, and adds a new client type, Aligned Cartographers!

 

 

Now, any time you would get a Cartographer, they have a chance to be aligned with the UGS or the Empire! Cartographers are some of our hardest clients, and aligned ones really step up the risk-reward factor. As they are aligned, you can get free repairs from their allies, a must have during such long voyages. But, they also will be hounded by their enemies, exposing you to hostile fleets and battleship pursuits! We hope you enjoy this new challenging client in your voyages!

 

In addition to our new client type, we’ve also updated our Mid-Jump effects a bit, making the jump speed lines more varied. And of course there’s the additional bug fixes. We added a bunch of new client stories just for the aligned cartographers in this update, and our plan is to add more stories and change exiting ones for each of our other client types in the coming updates. Look forward to it!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and can follow The Chaser’s Voyage and Bright at Midnight on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

Patch Notes for The Chaser’s Voyage: Update 0.5.1.04 – 9/18/2023

Hello everyone! Update 0.5.1.04 for The Chaser’s Voyage is now live! We’ve added some nice Quality of Life changes focused on gamepad use and fixed a LOT of bugs!

 

 

In this update we decided we wanted to make the gamepad controls clearer and found a few things that accidentally required using the mouse. The gamepad control labels now are more specific to different controllers, for example, pressing the right thumbstick would be shown as R3 on PlayStation controllers and RS on others. We also replaced the D-Pad control labels with animating D-Pad icons instead of their plain text used previously. After these changes we wanted to make it a little clearer how to interact with the Info Screen on gamepad, and so we added those labels to the Info Screen buttons. (They change to match your custom controls as well!) Next, in the mid-jump scene, the player could not actually interact with the Save & Quit and Crew Journal buttons via the gamepad. So we decided to change them to instead be labels that show the inputs used for Saving & Quitting and Opening the Crew Journal (not yet available). On the flip side, while docked, the player could interact with the Repair and Depart buttons via gamepad, but they could not toggle between Main and Info on the Info Screen via the gamepad. So we added the functionality to toggle them by pressing up on the D-pad (regardless of custom controls) and changed the buttons to be labels, like how we did in the mid-jump scene.

 

After those changes came a lot of testing to make sure they worked in a ton of different cases, which also revealed quite a few bugs! Some were bugs that occurred when Bounty Hunters chased the player off docks, others were bugs with setting custom gamepad controls, and finally, we fixed for some bugs in Merchant Fleets. Now that this update is done, we’re planning to get back to working on the various client updates, so we hope you look forward to them!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and can follow The Chaser’s Voyage and Bright at Midnight on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam: