Hello everyone! Happy New Year (in late March)! We’ve been cramming away at one hell of an update for The Chaser’s Voyage. This update doesn’t contain one single big change like the rest of our big updates, but instead is crammed full of a bunch of random changes we’ve wanted to make for while and even more bug fixes. This is our last big planned update before we tackle finalizing the options menu, so we wanted to go all out!

 

First up on the list was performance. Since this update was to serve as our final big systems check, I wanted to go through and improve performance related to collisions. It’s a small thing, but definitely something we had to do before we exit Early Access. This involved making the Player’s hurt box a little more forgiving towards the player, enemy hurt boxes more generous for the player, and simplifying obstacle hit boxes. We also made sure all unnecessary collision checks were removed, like the player’s shots checking if they are colliding with the player. Thankfully most of those were already squared away, but we did find some more while we were double checking!

 

With the performance & collision changes done, we started to add a few balance changes that had been on the back burner, since they were lower priority than implementing the Crew Journal and Flight Simulator. One such change was to slightly buff Bounty Hunters against undesired player behavior. Since the hunters only have one gun, the player could too easily turtle their attacks depending on the hunter’s weapon preference. So to fix this, we made hunters switch their weapons to laser shots when they notice that the player has not moved in a while. This lets them break through the player’s defenses and forces the player to focus on dodging shots again. We also buffed missiles, by increasing their speed more when the player’s engines are low and also by increasing the time between the player’s burst fire volleys. This makes it much harder to just sit there against missiles with low engines and high weapons. After lowering the level 4 weapon fire rate, we needed to increase the damage of each shot at level 4 to keep max weapons feeling impactful. That change then made it so that we needed to increase the health of large debris in Ship Graveyards and the health of sentries in Sentry Fields to not have weapons be too strong in those environments. In a small nerf to asteroids however, we did not change their health at all, so level 4 weapons will now be more effective in an Asteroid Field.  Next, we now have the player go straight into a Captain mode Voyage after finishing the tutorial, as opposed to a Voyager mode Voyage. This way, players can complete “The Chaser’s Voyage” from prologue to credits in what we lovingly refer to as “the canon story.” (Because the Chaser does not have the power to rewind time or magically respawn.) Finally, we decreased the amount of money clients offer. We had previously added a bonus to their offers of 1.3 times, but we’ve reduced that multiplier to 1.15 as it was too much money too consistently.

 

 To account for the fact that new players will probably get a game over after being put into Captain mode, we added a redone version of the tutorial’s death notice, which explains the game over conditions and our three modes. This notice appears the first time a player dies in the main game. Finally we made the enemy fighters in space battles no longer wait to start opening fire on the player. The space battles are chaotic, not time to waste, fighters!

 

Oh look, new mine effects and a new sensor function!

 

Our next changes were focused on adding some cool new features to already existing game systems. First, thanks to some feedback from the wonderful ROOKRULES, we decided we wanted to make it a little clearer which obstacles the player could collide with. We did this by buffing the sensors (level 2 of Auxiliary) so that they highlight incoming obstacles if they will collide with the player if no movement is made. This gives the player more use out of the sensors, but we didn’t stop there! We also made sensors show how far away Pirate and Bounty Hunter ships are from the player, similar to how Battleship distance is shown. This lets the player know not only when these enemies are falling back, but also gives the player an idea of how far they have to get away before the enemy retreats. Next was mines! We used to have mine explosions be stationary so that they could trigger other mines that flew into them, creating chain explosions. It felt weird having only those explosions not move, so we made them move just like every other explosion in the game. However, now we needed a way to keep chain explosions, as they are one of the coolest things about Minefields. So after a bit of brainstorming, we landed on shock waves as a trigger mechanism. Now, when a mine explodes, it sends out a sizable shock wave of shrapnel. This shock wave deals no damage to anything, but does cause mines hit by it to explode, creating more impressive chain explosions than ever before!

 

We also did a batch of small changes that can be split into 2 groups: quality of life changes and random minor adjustments (aka, the rest). Here are the changes, rapid fire style!

Quality of life changes include:

• We made Clients show whether you’ve been to a planet before, to make planet hunting for filling out the Crew Journal easier.
• If the player asks for help in a Space Battle, their side will no longer have their Battleships fire when near the player.
• Repairs will now automatically start once you dock with a fleet or a space port. After all, you docked specifically for repairs, might as well get them started faster!
• We slightly reordered the Tutorial’s first death notice and added back buttons to it.

For minor changes we have the following:

• We made the Battleship laser shots cast more light on nearby objects to make them seem more powerful and made Battleships in Space Battles move their guns slower and have a delay before moving them again after shooting.
• When a Bounty Hunter chases the player off from a dock, the Live Feed display for your crew mates will now display their names instead of their stations.
• We updated some names of Crew Journal entries for length and lore feel and edited the “Guide to Battleships” Entry to better reflect the player’s ability to sense Battleship Cannons in storms.
• We increased the volume of enemy shots to make them slightly more noticeable.
• In the end game victory cutscene that plays after the player delivers their 1.5 million bounty, Pirate Lady Styx will now be in shadow, adding more mystery to her. Now she will only be unveiled if you pay your debt off in time!
• Speaking of cutscenes we also bit the bullet and decided to flip some sprites to always face the center since it just plain looks better.

 

The LONG awaited Anchor Pirates!

 

And FINALLY we fixed TWENTY SIX different bugs! (And quite a few typos!) Too many to list here, with 1 slightly humorous exception. We have a lot of really cool pirate ship designs, with one of Eos’s favorites being the Anchor Pirates. This is the design the player fights at the end of the tutorial. Now, Eos had noticed something while she’d been playing through the game. She wasn’t seeing them. We thought she was just being unlucky, but since we were doing our final systems check, we decided to dig into this and see if she really was just unlucky, or if we had errored. . . We had indeed errored. Pirates 21-25 would never appear in the main game, nor the Flight Simulator. An embarrassing oversight, but one we are very glad to have fixed! So enjoy the “new” pirate type, the Anchor Pilots!

 

With this update now live, our plans are to finalize the options menu and to get the game officially out of Early Access and launched! We’re so close we can taste it! So until next time, safe flying!

 

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

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:

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:

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: