Tag: Development

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 0.5.3.01 – 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:

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:

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: