This week I wanted to talk about The Chaser’s Voyage and accessibility. Cameron and I are both firm believers that games should be accessible for anyone to play, either by having those considerations baked into the game itself or by having a plethora of options to allow players to customize games to maximize their enjoyment. This includes difficulty settings.

 

We’ve always envisioned The Chaser’s Voyage to be a hard game. Even now, part of my job is to find that level of balance where the game will be challenging to new comers until they’ve demonstrated a certain mastery of the system, and even then, the game shouldn’t become a cakewalk. That balance just makes paying back your debt on time all the sweeter. A reward for becoming an ace pilot. However, we have plenty of friends and family members who aren’t expert gamers. We’ve encountered plenty of people that have become interested in our story, experiencing the crew interactions, and just overall want a less demanding and stressful experience.

 

And, I don’t know, maybe we’re on to something?

 

 

We also have both been up to date on the several “accessibility vs. difficulty” debates that spring up every now and then regarding games like Cuphead, Soulsborn games, and Celeste. I was even very vocal WAY back when Nintendo started adding their assist modes that would take over and show you how to complete a level after dying a lot of times and when they added casual and phoenix modes to Fire Emblem. Personally, my stance is and will always be “if you don’t use those options, why do you care?” I’m also glad that they are there. Like, as someone who really loves the Fire Emblem franchise, I’m glad that more and more people can get into that series thanks to the easier modes, even if I don’t use them.

 

Getting back to The Chaser ‘s Voyage though, once it had become clear that we needed to adjust the difficulty of our game, we thought it was best to split the game into three modes: Captain, Ace, and Voyager Mode. Inspired by the way that some games were trying to de-stigmatize the connotations of playing on an easy or beginner mode, we opted to have each mode be guided by an idea. Captain Mode was to be our primary mode. We would describe it as “the way The Chaser’s Voyage is meant to be played.” It has a difficulty level that ramps up, it has permadeath, and it’s designed overall for those players seeking to play our true vision of the game. Ace Mode was our challenge mode, defined primarily by making you play the game entirely in Captain Mode’s hardest tier. It was actually our original vision of the game, the one we toned down after feedback because, well, we didn’t to scrap that option completely.

 

 

For Voyager Mode, we wanted to be careful and make sure to describe it as anything other than “easy mode.” It’s true, it can be easier and we do recommend it for beginners to learn how to play the game, but it’s not the “easy mode.” At first, we were using “it’s our accessible mode” as our guiding mantra. We wanted to add in options to allow players to make the game as easy as they wanted or needed to. We were also thinking of it as a kind of training mode, a way people could practice or experiment with strategies before tackling the other modes. When we started implementing these options though, we realized that it would actually be less work to just transfer over all the tools we had made for balancing and debugging purposes.

 

With that came some options such as damage sliders, that would allow players playing Voyager Mode to reduce the damage their shields and hull take individually, all the way to zero if they’d like. They also would have the option to increase the damage they take. By a lot too, up to 300%! It was from that point on that we decided that the guiding principle for Voyager Mode was to make it our “customizable mode”, where we will let the player adjust most settings in order to make the game truly the challenge they want.

 

 

To further not stigmatize playing games the way you want to, we don’t hold back any content from Voyager Mode. You can earn all the insignias and their corresponding achievements, you can unlock every entry in the crew journal (once we implement it), and you can still get both endings. The one caveat regarding insignias is that each mode is separated into their own little bubbles. So, even if you unlocked every insignia in the game in Voyager Mode, you’d still have to unlock each one in Captain and Ace Mode, and vice-versa. We also keep the records separate. So, if you want to brag about beating The Chaser’s Voyage on Ace Mode, you’ll have to back up your words by showing off your Ace Mode records.

 

In addition to these difficulty modifiers, Cameron and I are trying to be conscious of anything else we could add to better accommodate all kinds of players, so people who just want to enjoy the story or take on the challenge can get what they want. This includes turning off certain background elements a player might find distracting (across all modes) and completely customizable controls. We’ve even added in some other features that, I personally, wasn’t too sure about adding, but was convinced because, it was easy.

 

And ultimately, when it comes to making games more enjoyable to a wider audience, not only is it the right thing for a game developer to do, it’s also easy to do.

 

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:

With our Gamepad Update now live on Steam, we have finally entered into the second part of the “Making our Tutorial” phase… actually making the tutorial. Implementing gamepad support was an exciting, but necessary, detour, as adding it was always one of our biggest desires and the tutorial was always something we were gonna save for last. During our time in Early Access, we have really come to grasp how badly our game needs a playable tutorial. The video we have that plays when you first load up the game asks the player to take in a lot of information before they’ve even touched the game and right now, our quick overview of gamepad controls, may be too ambiguous. These were never meant to be permanent. While they could exist in some forms later, they will most likely be removed once we have finished building the playable tutorial. After all, when it comes to video games, the best teacher is actual experience. In the meantime, we ask that you continue to be patient with us and use this article as another resource for learning how to play with the gamepad!

 

 

Probably the most essential part of playing with the gamepad is learning to associate which button goes with which system.

•Weapons: A (on Xbox) / Cross (on PlayStation)

•Shields: X / Square

•Engines: Y / Triangle

•Auxiliary: B / Circle

•Space Jump: Right Shoulder

 

When pressing any of these buttons alone, you will begin repairing that system if it is broken. If your Space Jump Drive is fully charged, pressing the right shoulder button will send you to the next area. Otherwise, pressing these buttons on their own won’t do anything.

 

One of the most important mechanics in The Chaser’s Voyage is the ability to reallocate power from one system to another quickly and effectively to fit your preference and the current situation. The right and left triggers take the place of the right and left button on your computer’s mouse. Only this time, you hold down a trigger and press one of the system buttons to change the power. Left trigger to take power away and add it to your reserves and right trigger to put power in from your reserves.

 

We had a lot of discussion of how to properly convey this when making the controller image above, but we were worried it might be to vague. For example, one way I thought of transcribing it was:

 

•Increase Power to Weapons:   RT(Hold) + A.

•Increase Power to Weapons:   LT(Hold) + A

 

But Cameron was worried that this would imply that you had to do both at the exact same time… which you don’t have to. So I thought about writing it like:

 

•Increase Power to Weapons:   RT(Hold), A

 

But it was by that point that I remembered that this is why I never got into fighting games besides Super Smash Bros. as a kid. We concluded it was best to just use plain language and wait until we can make the players do this in a tutorial.

 

I think our other buttons are much more straight forward. We have many of the ship’s other functions set to the D-Pad but opted to move Activate Communications to the left shoulder button simply because in the heat of a thrilling battle, that button is more accessible.

 

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how The Chaser’s Voyage was going to play on gamepad, which is why I didn’t want to focus too much on it during early development. It was something Cameron really fought for to add in before proper work on the tutorial would begin. Now, playing on gamepad is the only way I play The Chaser’s Voyage and I’m kicking myself for not pushing to get it down much earlier in production. Consider this lesson learned!

 

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:

With our second Steam sale ending this week, I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk a bit more about where we’re taking The Chaser’s Voyage based on feedback we’ve received since going live via Early Access. First, there’s the article Cameron wrote up a few weeks ago talking about how we’ve been busy updating our game to work with gamepad controllers. We should hopefully be done with that soon, but at the time of this writing, we’re currently nailing down rumble features. Also, if you use a PlayStation controller, you’re in for a special treat! One of the reasons we wanted to get the gamepad stuff in sooner rather than later is due to  some feedback we got shortly after launching into Early Access.

 

Interestingly, the other feedback we’ve been receiving has revealed an issue we suspected could be a problem. It’s luckily not about any major game design decisions, as we were pretty determined to make sure our game was close to finalized before entering Early Access. Instead it’s about conveying how to play our game. Even before our Early Access launch, we anticipated this might be an issue. It’s our belief that tutorials should be made last because they are the first thing to become outdated if you change any kind of mechanic and in our case, it’s a good thing because we might have to change some stuff to better emphasize mechanics.

 

Here’s some examples of feedback we’ve received that we will be addressing in some matter or another:

• Going Slow Makes the Game Boring

An interesting bit of feedback we’ve received involves a core part of our game that ties the space jump drive to the engine speed. The general gist of the feedback is always that some events take too long/aren’t interesting enough when going slow, but are too hard and intense when going fast. It’s a kind of paradoxical issue to work out because it comes from players wanting the best of both worlds, something that’s safe and easy but also challenging and dangerous. When designing this game, we made a couple of design choices that we thought would encapsulate the idea of skill and risk that comes from, honestly, a good game.

 

 

The first was that higher speed would mean more punishment for mistakes. It’s a simple risk reward system that is essential to any game where the premise is that you must complete a task by a certain amount of time. In that sense, The Chaser’s Voyage is a bit like a racing game. Playing things safe and going slow is how you lose. However, the second design choice we made is that going slow by removing power from your engines IS sometimes necessary. It’s why we gave you the amount of power that we did and why part of this game is learning how to manage your resources carefully. You cannot have it all, so you must choose carefully, and sometimes when fighting off an enemy, you will need that extra offensive or defensive boost. It’s one of those aspects that, I think, makes our game really interesting.

 

The third design choice was tying the engines to the jump drive. The reason we did that actually came about from testing and was very obvious when we tried having the jump drive separate from the engines. The optimal strategy would just be not to play. Like, say you were in a debris field: you could set shields to max, engines to to zero, and go make a sandwich and by the time you come back, you could just jump to the next area. One really shouldn’t be making a game where not playing is a good strategy. An alternative could have been to make the speed of obstacles always the same and have the jump drive still charge at a fixed pace, with engines just affecting maneuverability. We actually do have some insignias that somewhat do that, but with some added effects to change the game up a bit, but overall the reason we didn’t want that for the default game mode is because it greatly simplifies the experience and reduces the impact of the choices you can make. It also eliminates the possibility of damaging an enemy ship’s engines and then just boosting away, which we think is a really cool strategy that you don’t see in a lot of games.

 

 

So that said, what are we going to do with this feedback? Well, for starters, we’re making some adjustments to the default power distribution that you get when first taking off from Azedo and when you respawn in Voyager Mode. Before, it was a 2/2/2/2 set up (that’s 2 in weapons, 2 in shields, 2 in engines, and 2 in auxiliary). We had it set up like this because it just kinda felt right, even if that set up is actually a very sub-optimal way of playing. We’ve now set it up so that default power distribution is 0/3/3/2. We did this to reinforce a couple of key points, such as: you should be going somewhat fast at all times and that defense is more important than offense. We also believe this set up is the best to keep someone alive after they’ve just respawned.

 

We’re also going to  place in the tutorial (and maybe at the start of a new game, though in that case it will be toggleable) a message from Wolfe that will better explain that the faster you’re going, the faster your jump drive charges. That’s what this problem really is: players not understanding this mechanic. If we can get players to learn that, then we think they’ll have a lot more fun with the game.

 

• Mouse accessibility

We’ve heard, and always suspected that some players might just loose track of the mouse when playing with the mouse and keyboard. We hope that people more accustomed to gamepads can alleviate this problem by switching to gamepad controls once we release our gamepad update. For those who will be sticking with the mouse and keyboard, we’ve explored solutions like adding a trail or a small pulse that could come from the mouse to help players keep track of it. However, many of the style of fixes we’ve thought about are things that the Windows OS already has built in. For this reason, we’ve decided that, at least for now, we aren’t going to be adding any mouse accessibility options, since it just overlaps with the accessibility options that Windows already has. (We do already have the option to turn off our custom cursor though!)

 

• Speed lines

Playing The Chaser’s Voyage, you might have noticed these white lines that streak across the screen as you’re flying. They were originally suggested by our artist, Nate, as a way of conveying motion across the screen, as we were pretty adamant about not letting the space background scroll (as that is not how perspective works in space). Lines such as this seemed common enough in space games, but I suppose never in a bullet hell-esque game that The Chaser’s Voyage can be compared to. Due to some feedback, we’ll be adding an option that will turn off the speed lines for anyone who finds them distracting.

 

• Changing what buttons advance cutscene dialogue

When we first made the cutscenes, we set some of the controls for them, like clicking to progress and space to auto-advance because those made sense to us. Hearing some feedback, we think players have all sorts of preferences that would be easy to accommodate, such as pressing spacebar or enter to progress, while making the auto-advance toggle a less commonly used button.

 

 

• Better communication

Just like with the engines, we overall need to better communicate some core mechanics. For example, one player didn’t remember that the space jump drive was it’s own system and needed to be repaired on it’s own to function. One of the hardest things right now for us, is understanding how new players think without us being directly there to hold their hands. We’ve been developing this game for so long that a lot of the controls are second nature to us. We try our best, but sometimes we think something is clear when it isn’t. The challenging part is that we need to find that fine line between giving our players the opportunity to learn the game and constantly holding their hand, afraid that there might be some aspect they don’t understand. Games are suppose to be about learning to make, and experiment, with your own choices. The best we can do, as the developers, is give the player the tools they need to succeed. We cannot help it if someone just forgets something we already explained.

 

 

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:

 

 

Continued from Part 1!

So now that the game that would become The Chaser’s Voyage was designed on paper, we needed to decide how exactly we were going to make it. The switch to a real-time action game presented a lot of new challenges, some of which might have eventually presented themselves in our original design, but some I think were wholly unique to our new vision for the game. For instance, how were we going to alert players to events happening in the game, such as systems breaking or new enemies incoming? The answer, of course, was voice acting. We could have taken many approaches, but we were particularly inspired by Star Fox 64’s use of voice acting that served both a flavor and thematic purpose, but also had hidden mechanical purposes, such as giving you advice on what to do or letting you see the boss’s HP.

 

 

We wanted something like that for our game and so we decided that you would have crew mates that correspond to each of the different systems, as opposed to having a single co-pilot who would update you on everything. This way, based solely on which person was talking, you could tell what system was being affected. The biggest challenge was to find enough people to lend us their voices, but luckily we were able to.

 

The characters themselves we knew should be kept wholly original, though of course, starting with some base inspiration isn’t a bad thing. Tai was originally conceived as a bit like Captain Rex from the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV show, as a no-nonsense fighter. Wolfe, while very different, started off vaguely as having a similar energy to Strawhat shipwright Franky from One Piece mixed with the hot shot brattiness of D.Va from Overwatch. Nila, was supposed to be very Spock like, in that she was cool and logical. Edwin was probably the most original idea from conception: just a guy who didn’t want to be there, but was because he’s your friend. By the end of writing though, these characters all ended up taking on a life of their own. Edwin basically stayed the same, except we give him some hidden depths and courage just to make him a little less one note. Tai, on the other hand, became more of a battle-ready goofball who knew when to be serious and when to be himself. Wolfe became a full of herself, hot headed artist full of passion and drive (more inspired by myself than any work of fiction). Nila also took on a somewhat quirkier personality for reasons that I can only remember as being “the more subdued, logical character, doing goofy things is really funny”. I might have been inspired by Garnet from Steven Universe, but I don’t remember if that was a conscious thing, I just knew I liked the trope.

 

 

[Hover over this next part to reveal some ending spoilers]

A particularly challenge that came from changing the premise of the game to “you now owe a debt to a crime boss type of character” was: what happens if you lose? The idea of having to race against time to complete an object isn’t necessarily new, but the only game I know that ever did so on such a scale was the Nintendo classic, Pikmin. The only problem I had with that game though is that you lose for failing to meet the time limit. I remember playing that game for the first time and just barely not getting that last part before the time limit ran out. While I didn’t lose, I didn’t get the best ending and trying again would mean restarting the entire game. So, that’s why we thought it would be a cool idea to not have the game end, but instead radically change. Instead of racing against the clock to beat a deadline, you instead were fighting for survival to get a bounty off your head.

 

But just like with FTL, what I think makes our game great isn’t the stuff that makes us similar to the games and pieces of media that we like, but the differences. In our hyper-media focused world, it might be easy to say that there are no original ideas anymore. As true as that might be, neither Cameron nor I would want to use that as shield for simply copying the things we love. We want to learn from them. When George Lucas first created Star Wars, the story was extremely rooted in the contemporary politics of the time. It meant a lot to him and how he expressed his feeling about a tumultuous time in American history. If we had gone with my original idea, and just used an evil empire, it wouldn’t have meant anything. It would be like that scene in Yesterday, where the main character sings “Back in the USSR” in a world where only he remembered The Beatles, and Ed Sheeran was perplexed why he would sing a song where he called Russia a name that no longer was used by the time he was born. That’s why when it came to our story, we presented our republic stand-in, the UGS, as neutral with our Empire, not better than them. Yes, both sides were at war, but I wanted to express my feelings about politics, especially from the viewpoint of a bystander. I wanted the crew to express different views of the galaxy’s long and complicated history of perpetual conflict.

 

 

Because ultimately, that’s what inspiration is. It’s not about taking things you like and using them without any rhyme or reason. It’s about taking those things you like and asking yourself critically about why you liked them. What made them work, how did they work in the greater context, how could something like that work in this new context? Inspiration is about learning from something that came before you. It’s about realizing that what makes Star Wars great isn’t the starfighters and big battles, but the characters and the message that George Lucas wanted to tell. What made Star Tours great isn’t the number of scenes you get to go through, but how each combination made every encounter different, making you eager to experience what was next. What made Star Fox great wasn’t the fact that you were flying with a squad, but that you were part of a team that each contributed to your entire effort. And what makes FLT great isn’t that it’s a roguelike with a Star Trek feel, but that it acts as a playground where gamers can tell their own harrowing adventures of captaining a ship and taking on unpredictable adventures with the help of their crew. All of those lessons are what we really took away and used to craft The Chaser’s Voyage and for that we owe our gratitude.

 

Follow us on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback!