Tag: Development

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:

The Art of Tutorial Crafting

So since we’ve been hard at work on making our playable tutorial, I thought it would be good to perhaps write about our thought processes and ideas behind what makes a “good tutorial.” As most gamers are probably aware, tutorials have been, and still are, somewhat controversial. Many older gamers were basically conditioned into figuring out games themselves by mashing on buttons at the usually unforgiving first level. If someone was truly desperate, they could read the manual, or eventually, check the internet. As time went on though and instruction manuals were phasing out, game devs began incorporating their tutorials into their first levels, teaching the player the controls as they were doing cool things in cool situations. In some cases, these tutorials really worked, getting the player into the actual game play part of their game quickly and efficiently. Other times, these tutorials felt obtrusive and asinine, especially to veteran gamers who didn’t need to be told how to move or shoot in the 5th game of their favorite shooter series.

 

This has made tutorial crafting an actual art. A demonstration of pure game design as we designers have to figure out the best way to convey new information to the player in a way that will make them understand and process it later for application. This is especially hard for Cameron and I, as The Chaser’s Voyage is a fairly unique game to play. Where most side scrolling space shooters just involve movement and shooting, our game requires managing a system in real time, including repairs, with no actual shooting being done by you. In addition, we need players to understand how our other, more complicated, game mechanics actually work. Where in shooting games, the concept of “shoot the bad guys and don’t get shot” is very easily understood, the core mechanics in The Chaser’s Voyage are more akin to learning how to fly a plane or drive a car. They require skills that aren’t intuitive, but are very necessary. Teaching players these skills is a tall order, which is why we adopted three core principles when it came to crafting our tutorial: inform, apply, and demonstrate.

 

• 1. Inform

The main goal of any tutorial should be to inform players how to actually navigate the game space they are in. After all, if someone doesn’t know which button attacks or ducks, etc. then there’s no way they’re gonna figure out the more complicated stuff. At the same time, we didn’t want to be condescending to anyone who either already knows how to play or feels like they could figure all this out on their own. That latter idea is why so many people feel like they can just skip the tutorials and then, usually, later complain that they “can’t” do something.

 

For The Chaser’s Voyage, we have to teach players four basic mechanics: movement, allocating power, repairing systems, and activating the space jump. Movement is pretty obvious and the most conventional of our core mechanics. We include it pretty much as a formality, since every game could be someone’s first. It’s the beginning of the tutorial and is easily moved on from. Next comes allocating power, which means removing some power from one system and putting it into another. On a gamepad, teaching the allocation of power might be considered fairly complicated, since it involves a combination of buttons, so we have to make sure that we are precise in our language and that the player is given plenty of time to safely understand what they need to do. The same is true for activating space jumps and repairing systems which are the 3rd and 4th parts of the tutorial. These controls are a little bit simpler on keyboard and mouse, as they merely involve hovering the cursor over the various systems and left-clicking, right-clicking, or pressing the space bar. Since most of the interactions are on the UI, we even employ the classic tactic of putting big blue arrows where you’re supposed to click.

 

 

Once the player has shown that they can actually perform all these actions, they have every tool in their disposal to navigate the game world. However, just knowing what controls do which actions doesn’t necessarily cultivate a good gaming experience. After all, even in the simplest of platformers, you can make a player jump, and a lot of the functions of jumping might seem intuitive, but what’s really crucial is having them understand what jumping actually means for them, which is why our second phase is…

 

• 2. Apply

In this part of the tutorial, we show the player what all the stuff they learned how to do actually means in terms of playing The Chaser’s Voyage. We start off with something safe, but that will be incredibly useful during the main game, communications. We tell the player to remove power from any systems and apply it to the communications (level 3 in auxiliary power) so that they can talk to a passing by battleship. This is important because it shows that the auxiliary systems have different functions depending on how much power you put into them. By this point the player should have already figured out that adding more power into engines makes the ship go faster and that adding power into weapons and shields also make them stronger too. So, we wanted a sequence that emphasized the importance of auxiliary, even though it’s most likely going to be kept a minimal power during most gameplay.

 

 

After that comes our first real obstacle: navigating a debris field. This is gonna be the first time we really let the player “play the game”. They are free to use the knowledge they’ve acquired in an actual scenario. They can go slow and defensive or blast away debris with their lasers while flying past them. They can even try out their sensors (level 2 in auxiliary power). The important part is that we let them experiment, since that’s the entire nature of The Chaser’s Voyage. We want players to experiment, adapt, and strategize, particularly on the fly and under pressure. It’s what makes the game satisfying to play, which is why after this, we really emphasize our third aspect of tutorial crafting.

 

• 3. Demonstrate

Now that the player knows how to play the game proper, we need to sell them on this whole “The Chaser’s Voyage” concept. After all, there’s no guarantee that they bought our game based on our amazing trailers or even word of mouth. It might just be something they bought on sale… something they could return if they find the concept boring. So, we throw a couple of challenges their way to give them a small taste of what to expect. So why not start off big with a battleship pursuit?

 

This sequences lets us show off one of the technical obstacles, which is good cause that means we can teach players the value of your sensors as well as dealing with threats like fighters. Also, if the players go too slow, they can get a better glimpse of what exactly they are running from. Battleship pursuits are pretty fun sequences that aren’t too challenging to get through if you know what you’re doing. It also showcases one of the most important distinctions that sets The Chaser’s Voyage apart from many other space games. Namely, you are not in an invincible super-powered fighter craft. This isn’t the type of game where you just bravely charge into battle against massive battleships. You are outrunning, you are surviving by the skin of your teeth, and you are fragile.

 

With that, we have the player move onto the final exciting selling point of our game, combat. A one-on-one against a space pirate will be a very common occurrence and will require every skill you learned throughout the tutorial to survive. Though, we also want to emphasize how important strategizing and adaptability are and given the last sequence will invoke a sense of fragility, we want players to experience failure, with their ship crash landing on a desert planet which leads the player into the actual start of their grand voyage. What’s also very important to note is that our tutorials give the player a foundation for what they need to know and what they’re going to do, but we didn’t show them everything nor did we teach them everything. We merely gestured at everything they’ll need to become an ace pilot.

 

Important to note that while “demonstrate” is our third phase to tutorial crafting, we’ve actually been “demonstrating” the cool parts of our game the entire time. From voice acting, to explaining a little bit about the world, and how the rules of the world dictates the mechanics. For instance, at one point, the trainer, Argi, tell you about how the distance a ship can space jump is determined by factors like the size of your ship, which is why i can take multiple days to get from one planet to the next despite some kind of faster-than-light travel. This not only explains the world the player is getting into but also how the number of space jumps relates to the eventual days the player will need to keep track of. We also drop a little more lore in other parts simply to insinuate that there is a lot more going on in this universe than just what we present before you and once the player gets access to the crew journal (and we… y’know… implement it) then they can really see how they are just one small adventure going on in a galaxy that contains hundreds, if not thousands, of other stories to tell. It’s part of an idea I have that feeling like a small part of something bigger makes the world you’re exploring feel all the more richer.

 

 

I hope people can see how we have laid out our plans for our tutorials and take away some ideas for how they craft their own. As a bonus, there was a fourth aspect we were sure to implement that I think many games often overlook. After the first time you complete the tutorial, it becomes entirely skippable. It’s a prologue to your story that contains some story elements, but nothing essential that isn’t covered in our opening cutscene and if someone does want to replay it, that option is there too.

 

Once our tutorial is done and we update the game with it, we’ll really need help in fine tuning to make sure that we achieve all our goals, so please feel free to give us feedback on either Twitter or Discord. What’s also exciting is that once the tutorial is complete we’ll be finally moving onto our next phase of our Star Map, where we’ll be courting some streamers and other content creators to check our game out. So, please contact us if you are a content creator who might be interested.

 

If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

A Quick Look at Our Playable Tutorial

We’re working hard on the playable tutorial. Here’s a little sneak peak at what it looks like.

 

Since the tutorial is also the prologue for our game, you aren’t yet the captain of the Chaser. Instead, it looks like you’re flying some kind of Imperial ship. Fun fact: It’s design is actually based on an early design for the Chaser.

 

And since you have yet to meet the other crew members, your crew is actually just this person named Argi. He’s seems nice.

 

This is how we’ll teach players how to play the game, with big arrows!

 

We’ll even have the controls automatically change based on which controller you are using.

 

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:

Accessibility and Difficulty – Talking About Voyager Mode and Other Options

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?

 

Taken from https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/fearoffailing/

 

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.

 

We have three difficulty settings. Captain and Ace mode have permadeath where Voyager mode has several respawn options.

 

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:

Patch Notes for Update 0.2.2 – 8/22/2022

We released Update 0.2.2 yesterday and I wanted to go over some more changes we’ve made!

Since our last patch came out earlier than planned, this patch finishes off things we started in Version 0.2.1. On top of the previous Voyager Mode additions, we’ve now added Wolfe’s Secret Options. Unlike the base Voyager Mode options, these options only serve to increase the challenge of Voyager Mode, further leaning into it’s place as our Customizable Mode. The Secret Options are as follows:

• Added a slider to adjust the rate at which the Space Jump Drive charges. (1% – 100%) [Note from Eos: As of right now, the game is pretty balanced with the rate of the current space jump charge rate. If you adjust this value too high, just don’t expect to get the good ending.]

• Added a slider to adjust the damage the player deals to Enemies. (0% – 100%)

• Added a slider to adjust the damage the player deals to Obstacles. (0% – 100%)

• Added a toggle to prevent respawning.

 

While we don’t expect many players to use these options to the max challenge, they were very easy to add and make for a much more challenging Voyager Mode to those seeking it.

 

 

To follow up making the Jump Drive charge faster in Version 0.2.1, we wanted to reward perfect play and make sub-optimal play more punishing. Rather than decreasing the amount of money players get, we decide to up the cost of repairs. This means that players who play very well will see little change, but reckless players who take a lot of Hull damage will find Lady Styx’s 100 Day time limit more challenging to meet!

This is the last planned small update before we fully dive into implementing the playable tutorial, and I’m glad we could get in these expanded customization options and balance changes!

 

Finally, there are some miscellaneous bug fixes. You can read the full patch notes here, and we hope you look forward to our next update!

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:

Patch Notes for Update 0.2.1 – 8/11/2022

Last Thursday we released Update 0.2.1 and I wanted to go over some of the gameplay changes included, but first, BUGS!

• Bug Fixes:

Bugs are the reason why this update did not release on our usual preferred day. With the implementation of Gamepad Support, we had to revamp our input system. This resulted in 2 different bugs popping up in regards to our cutscenes. The first prevented the player from progressing the cutscene that plays when they fail to pay back their debt on time. Thankfully you could still skip the cutscene and continue playing the game, but obviously that is far from ideal. The second bug made the dialogue for the cutscenes progress when you let go of the Left Mouse Button. So if you were just clicking to progress the cutscenes, it would skip every other line of dialogue. I squashed these bugs right away and we decided to push out a patch that we already had been working on as soon as we could. Hence a random Thursday update!

 

 

• The Space Jump Drive:

Now onto the gameplay changes we were working on! In this patch we upped the speed at which the Jump charges while at Level 2 and 3 Engines. For Level 2, 25% was buffed to 50% speed and Level 3, 50% to 75%. We made this change to punish players a little less for not being able to keep their engines at Level 4 (130% charge speed!) constantly. Level 4 is still the far superior choice for charging the jump quicker, and thus getting to your next client quicker, and THUS paying back Lady Styx quicker! But the increased obstacle damage that comes with it can make piloting at Level 4 a difficult challenge for less experienced pilots. So this should allow a little more wiggle room for players to switch up their engines more as the situation requires it.

 

• Accessibility Options:

We had recently gotten feedback over some of our visuals and realized that we could easily extend our current Graphics Accessibility options. So we added in toggles to disable a few different visual effects in our game that may be a bit jarring for some players. These effects are:

– The Ship UI shaking when the player takes damage

– The Speed Lines that help show that the Chaser’s speed is different at different energy levels. (These exist since we refuse to have the space background behind you scroll, as that is a pet peeve of ours for space games.)

– The Warp Lines that flash across the screen while you’re Mid-Jump.

If anyone notices any other effects that would benefit from a toggle, please let us know! We really appreciate all the feedback we get!

 

• Voyager Mode Options:

The above bugs reared their head as I was partway through adding more options for Voyager Mode. Before this update, there were three different options (Overall Damage Taken Modifier, Shield Damage Taken Modifier, and Hull Damage Taken Modifier), but we’ve been wanting to expand Voyager Mode’s customizability with some options not directly related to the amount of damage you take. The newly added sliders modify the rate at which Systems break when the Chaser takes Hull damage and the rate at which Systems are depleted when the Chaser is struck by Ion Weapons. As with the previous damage options, both of these can be set anywhere from 0 to 3 times the default rate! We also went ahead and slightly rearranged the layout of the existing Voyager Options to make room for these new options and future planned additions.

 

That covers all the major changes in last week’s patch, but there a few more minor changes that you can read up on by visiting the official 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:

Playing The Chaser’s Voyage with a Gamepad

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:

The Long Awaited Gamepad Update is Now Live!

Hello everyone! We’ve finally done it! You can now play The Chaser’s Voyage using gamepads! In this week’s article, I’m gonna give you a rundown of what’s new in Update 0.2.0.

 

 

Let’s start with the obvious: Gamepad support! Since the next goal of ours is to make a playable tutorial, we first needed to add in gamepad controls. This took much longer than we expected, mainly due to implementing full menu navigation via gamepads. (You can read more about what that entailed here.) Besides navigating the menu with gampeads (and now keyboard as well), we also added in rumble, rebinding of gamepad controls, and even some neat interactions with the PS4 and PS5 gamepad lights! Those lights will now match the Chaser’s Cockpit Color and will also change to match whenever a character is speaking. Of course, you can also pilot the Chaser using a gamepad, and we have a handy control mapping (seen above) in game to help people understand the controls until we implement the playable tutorial. We also have notifications that pause the game to tell you when a gamepad controller gets connected or disconnected, a must have for gameoad support!

 

 

An important note regarding Steam’s Input Controller. Currently, The Chaser’s Voyage does not support Steam’s Input Controller. Gamepad support has been implemented to be used through Windows, so if it seems like the gamepad isn’t working at all, make sure to set the “Override For The Chaser’s Voyage” (under The Chaser’s Voyage Properties->Controller) option to “Disable Steam Input”. This should allow Windows to do it’s thing without Steam’s interruption. (Not all controllers work with Windows though, so keep that in mind.) We would like to eventually add support for Steam’s Input Controller, but as we have a form of gamepad support already implemented, it is currently not as big of a priority compared to things like the Tutorial or Crew Journal.

 

Next, thanks to some feedback we’ve received, we’ve gone ahead and made a few non-gamepad related changes. The first is that we’ve changed the default Power Level Configuration. Before it was 2 power in Weapons, 2 in Shields, 2 in Engines, and 2 in Auxiliary. An even split made sense to us as a middle ground between any customization the player may want to use. However, it is also a absolutely TERRIBLE configuration to keep one’s power at, and by making it the default power, we wrongly enforced the idea that it should be the main power configuration. To address that, we’ve now made the default configuration as follows: 0 power in Weapons, 3 in Shields, 3 in Engines, and 2 in Aux. The most important things when playing The Chaser’s Voyage are to go fast, and to not take too much damage. This configuration should hopefully prime players into a more optimal play style.

 

 

The second change was made to spice up Minefields. While Minefields can be very challenging when fighting off enemies, a Minefield on its own was a bit lack luster. We wanted to spice up Minefields so that they were more interesting without an enemy, but not too much harder when there was someone to fight. Our solution? Moving mines! Each mine in a Minefield now has a chance of moving up and down in addition to the left. These mines are marked with a yellow pulsing light, instead of the normal solid green light. These make minefields much more exciting, and we originally tested out having all the mines move in this way, but that made fighting enemies within a Minefield much too challenging. By only having some mines move, we hit a nice balance between interesting and not overly punishing.

 

 

Finally we made some much smaller changes: We made The Phantom Nebula Insignia’s free repairs now work with Neutral Imperial and Neutral UGS Fleets, we rearranged some buttons on the Customize Ship screen (and added a Randomize All color option), updated some UI, and fixed a whole bunch of bugs!

 

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!)