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:
I was creating some art arrangements for our new trailer trailer when I made something that I thought would be cool desktop wallpaper (1920×1080).
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:
Hello everyone. Today I thought I would just give you all an update on what I’ve been doing since starting work this year.
With some minor graphical updates made to The Chaser’s Voyage and our tutorial and intro cutscenes from last year now behind us, it was clearly time to begin work on making a new trailer to celebrate the milestones of our latest version. To prepare, I’ve been watching various tips & tricks videos on game trailer editing coupled with some feedback during our time in early access, I’ve been honing my trailer making skills to hopefully best convey the wonderful game I know Cameron and I have been working on.
For anyone curious, I have been singing the praises of Derek Lieu over on our twitter for providing such in-depth looks into what makes game trailers work. Personally, I have felt for a long time now that indie game trailers never adequately explain the “game” part of their game and instead try to sell me on either a world or a vibe. Worlds and vibes are cool and all, but, when I think of indie games, I think of new and exciting ways to play games. Derek’s videos helped me put into words why I think so many indie game trailers either look very unappealing or leave me asking “What am I actually going to do in this game?”
“When does the game trailer get to gameplay part?”
The plan now is to use the advice provided in Derek’s videos to make a game trailer that not only entices, but also explains just what makes The Chaser’s Voyage the fun and unique experience we’ve aimed for since the beginning. Some feedback we’ve gotten is also helping shape this trailer. Perhaps it’s because I’m too close to the project or a game like The Chaser’s Voyage is one that I’ve always wanted to play, but it seems like it was too hard for me to notice the extent at which potential players weren’t understanding the core idea of The Chaser’s Voyage and why it’s fun. That being the tactile, on-the-fly, power management system and the Han Solo-esque ace pilot maneuvers one might pull off.
So, we’re just going to have to explain it people. As mentioned in this Derek Lieu video, sometimes just explaining how to play a game is necessary if it uses a lot of abstract symbols or whose basic mechanics cannot be fully understood until someone plays. Based on the feedback we’ve received, once people understand what our game is about, something clicks and the mechanics all start making sense and are very fun. I think right now, what we’re battling against is people’s assumptions that our power management system is more akin to a power health bar system (which to be fair, we technically have something like that).
Me getting ready to show our trailer once it’s done.
Fortunately, we devised a way to deliver information about the game while keeping that Star Wars inspired cinematic feel of daring space flights and intense chases. This will require some new voice work but luckily, that’s easy enough to obtain since Cameron also provides the wonderful voice of Edwin. A draft of the trailer has already been made that also utilizes some new video editing techniques I learned how to do (such as split screen) and so I’m very excited to show you guys it when it’s done.
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:
Hello everyone! We’re back from a very nice break and hope you all had some great holidays! We’re hitting the ground running this year with a small update to The Chaser’s Voyage before we dive headfirst into our performance update. Other than crushing some cutscene related bugs, we made two cool visual changes with this update.
1) We added button press effects to the System UI buttons when the player is using the gamepad. This is a subtle change, but it goes well with the highlight effect we added last update!
2) We changed Lady Styx’s sprites for the Day 100 cutscene. Now she is hidden mostly in shadow with some ominous glow thrown in. We really wanted to make it so that her reveal was upon the player beating the game and paying off their debt, not when the player failed to pay it within 100 days. This not only adds some cool suspense and spookiness to getting the Day 100 cutscene, but also better matches how we handle her appearance in the Credits, where she’s in shadow until you’ve beaten the game.
We’re excited for what this year holds for The Chaser’s Voyage and we hope you are too! You can read the full patch notes here!
You can also follow us on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:
Hello everyone! We’re still on holiday break, but we wanted to pop in and let you know that you can get The Chaser’s Voyage for $10.19 (49% off) during the Steam Winter Sale from now till January 5th! Our final update before the break was our Playable Tutorial Update, so now’s a great time to get The Chaser’s Voyage and have some holiday fun!
For more news follow us on Twitter and join our Discord. (Where you can also give feedback!)
Hello everyone! We just released our Playable Tutorial Update this week, so there’s no better time to go pick up The Chaser’s Voyage for 49% off during the Steam Autumn Sale this week!
For more news follow us on Twitter and join our Discord. (Where you can also give feedback!)
Hello everyone! Just in time for the holidays, The Chaser’s Voyage Update 0.3.0 (the Playable Tutorial Update) is now live! There are some pretty exciting additions to the game with this patch, so here’s what’s new in Update 0.3.0.
First off, we have removed the temporary tutorial video and have implemented the playable tutorial! This took quite a bit of care and effort to make, and we’re really happy with the final result! The tutorial will automatically start when the player first boots up the game, and completing it is required to get to the rest of the game. So that means that the tutorial is not skippable. (Unless it has already been completed of course!) After completing the tutorial, the player will be put into a new Voyage. If bookmarked voyage data exists, the player will be allowed to choose to keep their data and go to the main menu instead. The tutorial will bring the player through 6 different encounters that we chose specifically to best teach the player all the skills they’ll need to play The Chaser’s Voyage. It will definitely be a tough tutorial (just like our game), but we have the Voyager Mode options enabled for the tutorial. Which means that every player, regardless of skill, will be able to complete the tutorial. This was very important to us as requiring the player to finish the tutorial before accessing the main game AND making the tutorial hard to beat would have been very frustrating for players.
Next, lets go into the story of the tutorial! You’ll be instructed by a new face for returning players: the Nygothan, Argi!
We’re excited for players to meet this new character, and you can read a bit more about her in this update we posted before. In addition to a new face, the player will also be flying a new ship! The tutorial is the prologue to the main story and thus takes place before the player has met the crew of the Chaser, let alone seen the ship itself! So before then, Argi will be teaching the player to fly in a rather fancy new imperial ship. I don’t want to spoil much more than this, but the tutorial’s story is very important to the overall narrative. When we set out to make the story for The Chaser’s Voyage, we decided on how the tutorial’s story would go and it’s connections to the main story. We’re really excited to finally get this big part of the backstory put into the game for players to experience! Speaking of story, we also added a new little animation to the New Voyage Cutscene, here’s a sneak peak!
The other big change is this patch is our addition of Boss Stops for when the player defeats Bounty Hunters or Pirates, as well as when the player’s ship reaches 0% Hull. As Eos said in this tutorial update: “At first, we wanted to keep things relatively simple. A simple sound effect over a brief pause in the action, but it kinda looked too much like the game hanging up. So, we added in some hit animations and decided to do something a little extra for when the player dies.” Here’s a look again at the Boss Stop for the Player!
And finally we made some smaller changes. We added a nice glow to the System Power bars for when the player interacts with them, and increased the glow for the jump buttons. This gives more obvious feedback for the players interactions with those systems and we like the added oomph. We slightly tweaked some of the Loading Screen tips about the species of Sector 99 and fixed a couple typos we found. And last of all was, of course, assorted bug fixes!
Note from Eos: With this update, we completed another year of development on The Chaser’s Voyage. Like every journey worth having, it wasn’t without it’s time consuming side quests and frustrating obstacles, but we finally have things like the tutorial, gamepad compatibility, and cutscenes. It’s a lot of work for just the two of us and we still got a ways to go before we can mark this voyage as completed, but the road remaining is so much shorter than the road we have traveled so far. To everyone whose been along side us, thank you. We’ll be taking a much needed vacation off from this point out. We’ll see everyone shortly after the New Year! Stay safe out there!
Hello again everyone, we’re overdue for another update on The Chaser’s Voyage, so we hope you’re ready!
1) Everything’s looking super good. Unlike the rest of the game, the tutorial is a set string of events. This gave us more freedom to actually tell a more concrete narrative, which we have fully capitalized on. We’re still steadily making progress on getting everything to be playable. There’s just a few more options that are unique to the tutorial that we need to finish up.
2) New voice lines were recorded, edited, and implemented.
3) Meet Argi, she’ll be showing you the ropes as the new tutorial character.
We took one of the client characters (done by the super talented Santi Leigh) and made a lot of modifications to get a new Nygothan character. She’s a super cheery Nygothan and is pretty excited to teach you how to play the game. I sure hope nothing bad happens to her! We ended up putting a lot more work into her than we initially planned. Originally, our tutorial character was just a simple recolor of one of our client characters. But as Argi got more of a character, we felt she needed a more unique appearance.
4) We’ve implemented boss stops for both the player’s ship and the enemy pirates and bounty hunters. At first, we wanted to keep things relatively simple. A simple sound effect over a brief pause in the action, but it kinda looked too much like the game hanging up. So, we added in some hit animations and decided to do something a little extra for when the player dies. Take a look:
It looks really good when playing! Hopefully we’ll get to show you soon.
So that’s what we’ve been up to the last couple of weeks. 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:
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:
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:
