Category: Games

The Tutorial Revamp Update for The Chaser’s Voyage (Version 0.5.0.03) is live!

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

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!

 

 

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 0.4.3.01 – 5/22/2023

Hello, everyone! Update 0.4.3.01 is live for The Chaser’s Voyage and it has a few surprise changes to our difficulty modes!

 

But first, look at our updated Ion Missiles!

 

To start off, let’s talk Ace mode. It’s the hardest difficulty mode in our game by default, and is meant for only the most skilled pilots. We didn’t want anyone to be locked out of trying Ace mode though, as it is also the only mode to not have our encounter tiering system, which means in Ace mode, all encounter combinations are available from the beginning of a Voyage. This is one of the 2 big features that makes Ace mode so hard, but it’s also a really unique way to play the game. Thus, we decided to make it so that the player only had to start a game in both Voyager and Captain mode in order to unlock Ace mode. A simple enough task, but one that would guide most new players away from starting on Ace mode.

 

We were pretty happy with this decision, but over time we’ve realized that it has unintentionally devalued Ace mode. There’s no sense of accomplishment for unlocking it, no sense of progression into the highest tier of play. We realized we needed to make unlocking Ace mode match the intensity of the mode, so we have changed how it is unlocked. In order to unlock Ace mode, the player now has to pay back their debt to Lady Styx on time in Captain mode. If a player has not done that yet, but had already unlocked Ace mode, it will now be locked for them. But if you’ve already paid your debt off on time in Captain mode, then Ace mode will already be unlocked for you. This should make unlocking Ace mode have more meaning and give thrill-seeking pilots another goal to aim for.

 

However, this still left us with our previous problem, having our “no encounter tiering” mode being locked behind a challenge that not everyone may be able to complete. We want as many of our game experiences to be available to as many players as possible, so we moved a future planned update up to the front of the line: the Voyager+ and Captain+ modes! These modes are almost identical to the existing Voyager and Captain modes, but with one exception: They have no encounter tiering! We had always planned to have these modes available in the final version of game, but their priority was on the lower end compared to things like the Tutorial and Cutscenes. With us increasing the difficulty of unlocking Ace mode though, this was the perfect time to put them in! Now all players, regardless of skill, will be able to experience our game in its most random form in any mode. Additionally we wanted to add a sense of achievement to unlocking them, so Voyager+ is unlocked by surviving a Voyage in Voyager mode, and Captain+ by surviving a Voyage in Captain mode. Since they are unlocked by beating the game, and put the player in the endgame tier of encounters, you can think of these modes as our New Game+!

 

Our Difficulty Selection screen with the new Voyage + options!

 

For the rest of this update we made some small miscellaneous changes. Battleships now deal less damage with their shots in Ace mode. They were just too powerful!! We made it more likely that the player will see Merchant ships and Battleships space jump, since it’s a pretty cool effect. We also updated the visuals for Ion Missiles to further distinguish them from regular Missiles. And finally, throw in some random bug fixes, and that’s everything! We hope you enjoy unlocking and playing our Voyager+, Captain+, and Ace modes!

 

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 0.4.2.04 – 5/15/2023

Hello, everyone! Update 0.4.2.04 for The Chaser’s Voyage went live yesterday and it’s the first of our client updates! There’s some really cool stuff to cover, so let’s not waste any more time and get to it!

 

An example of our new color coding AND new client type names!

 

The most obvious change in this update is the addition of color coding for certain text! As you can see above, we’ve color coded not just the territory names within the client info, but also any instances of “UGS”, “Empire”, and “Imperial”. Whenever “UGS” and the “Empire” appear in text, they will be color coded orange and purple respectively. Since these two factions have a big impact on client selection, we wanted to make them stand out more. This should make it easier to see at a glance where the client wants to go, and where their allegiances lie. All color coded text is also bold. If this color coding is a bit much for you though, don’t worry! We’ve also added an option to disable the color coding.

 

Expect to see new client type names!

 

With the color coding implemented we realized that “Imperial Traitors” and “UGS Traitors” gave the wrong impressions of who they were aligned with. So we decided to take this opportunity to revisit our client type names and ended up updating 4 of them! “Evil Scientist” is now “Outlaw Scientist” (a little more accurate and less mean to those poor scientists!), “Fleeing Criminal” is now “Fugitive” (cooler and more succinct), “Imperial Traitor” is now “Defector to the UGS”, and “UGS Traitor” is now “Defector to the Empire”. This means if a client type has UGS in it, they are always with the UGS, and the same with the Empire. The client types are changed in name only though, so don’t worry about having to learn the intricacies of a new client type. (YET! >:3)

 

The Client Selection Screen isn’t the only thing with color coding!

 

Besides the Client Selection Screen, we also added the color coding for the Empire, UGS, and territories to the “Info” section of the main console and to the insignia descriptions. Pretty much every place where the Empire or UGS appear in text is now color coded! We also fixed some bugs we found with the Main Console’s “Info” section, the insignia selection scrollbar, and the scrollbar speed setting in this update. We hope you look forward to our next big update!

 

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:

What’s Next & Patch Notes for The Chaser’s Voyage: Update 0.4.1 – 5/5/2023

Hello everyone! Update 0.4.1 for The Chaser’s Voyage went live last Thursday as a quick bug fix update. We usually aim to update the game on Mondays, specifically because this allows us to be ready to update the game if any terrible bugs are found and that’s exactly what happened!

 

Those bugs are now fixed (more on that below) and so we’re moving on to our client updates! And unlike our past big updates, we’re going to be able to release the client updates in batches. We currently have 3-4 updates planned for the clients, including some fun color changes, updated stories, and most exciting of all, a new client type! We’ll tell you more as we’re closer to each update and we hope you look forward to them!

 

Now that you know what’s coming up, time to talk about this update! Some problematic tutorial bugs slipped through our testing for the Performance Update. Fighters and pirates took up pacifism and would not shoot the player anymore! The player also was able to communicate with the pirates, even after they started to crash, which could lead to endless communication sounds. There were also some small changes we had already made before finding these bugs, like fixing our landing pad sprites, making sure the tutorial always led into the intro cutscene, and fixing a typo. Overall small stuff, but the tutorial bugs were nasty enough that we wanted to push out a fix ASAP.

 

Our new and improved Landing Pad!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and 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 Performance Update for The Chaser’s Voyage (Version 0.4.0) is live!

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

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!)

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:

The Chaser’s Voyage is On Sale, 49% off, During Steam’s Spring 2023 Sale!

Hello everyone! Our Performance Update for The Chaser’s Voyage is coming along well, we just put out a new, awesome trailer, and it’s time for another Steam sale! Get The Chaser’s Voyage for $10.19 and enjoy!

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

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!

 

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: