Tag: Development

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!))

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:

Patch Notes for The Chaser’s Voyage: Update 0.3.1 – 1/23/2023

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:

The Playable Tutorial (Update 0.3.0) is live!

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!

 

 

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

 

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!

Another Tutorial Update!

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:

Update On Our Tutorial

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:

The Chaser’s Voyage Early Access – One Year Later

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: