Tag: Development

May 31, 2022

Inspiration and The Chaser’s Voyage: The Adventures That Made Us – Part 1

Last week I answered the question of whether or not The Chaser’s Voyage is, in fact, a roguelike. The answer ended up being “yes”, but in that article I explained how we never set out to make a roguelike and how we accidentally stumbled into the genre through a wellspring of inspirations taken from experiences and media we enjoyed. This week, I wanted to share what some of the inspirations for The Chaser’s Voyage were, because I think it’s important for us, as game developers, to share our process and show how we learned from our inspirations, rather than just blindly took, to create something wholly unique and innovative.

I think it must first be said, that some might find that The Chaser’s Voyage gives off a lot of FTL: Faster Than Light vibes. As I mentioned last week, Cameron and I were familiar with FTL, though we didn’t really think of it as a “roguelike” when we played it. Mainly because we didn’t really know what a “roguelike” was back then, but I would argue that despite the similarities, (such as managing power across multiple systems like weapons, shields, and engines) the FTL devs and us both just drew inspiration from the same pool of sci-fi related tropes. “Divert all power to the engines/shields” is a common enough phrase mentioned in both media like Star Trek and Star Wars and it just lends itself readily to the idea of having a limited amount of power and only being able to allocate it in specific ways. To give credit where it’s due, FTL did show me that such a concept could work and, in a story that I find a little embarrassing, I may have subconsciously been a little too inspired by the game in the beginning.

In my original prototype for “Project: Space Captain”, you took on the role of a daring space captain. You were in charge of managing power across your four main systems. You made the call to stop for repairs or keep going. Most importantly, you pushed the big button that would warp you from one part of space to another, where you would battle enemies in different kinds of interstellar environments that would be chosen and mixed together at random. That last one was definitely inspired by Disneyland’s Star Tours more than anything! I thought it would be a neat game that really captured the feeling the being in command of a starship, where you had to trust your crew, make bold decisions, and face the unknowns of the next big jump. So it kinda came as a surprise to me when Cameron gave me one condition before greenlighting this project: “make it less like FTL.”

I remember wanting to be defensive about this. It wasn’t like FTL. Sure, your ship didn’t move on screen, but that was so the player could concentrate more on managing their power systems and yeah, you were being pursued by an interplanetary empire, but that was just for plot reasons to justify the timer, not to hinder any exploration. We also both have permadeath, but that was inspired by lots of other games, mainly my fascination with the mechanic from the survival horror game, ZombiU. The more I thought about it the more obvious the truth was. For all it’s differences, “Project: Space Captain” would look way too similar to FTL. I took the task to make the game less like FTL and more true to what Cameron and I set out to accomplish when we formed Bright at Midnight: make unique and interesting games set in fully realized worlds. I remember thinking to myself “how could I have strayed so close to a game that I played only a couple of times in college? I really thought I was paying homage, while staying distinct from, one of my favorite Disneyland rides of all time.” That’s when it hit me. FTL’s inspirations were clearly from Star Trek. It’s space battles played out like the submarine combat that inspired the original show. Your role as captain was like being Kirk or Picard. But I’m not a Trekkie. I’m a Star Wars fan. If FTL was going to be like Star Trek, then it would seem only fitting that we were gonna be more like Star Wars.

Immediately, Cameron and I agreed on letting the player also pilot the ship. We actually really liked the idea of piloting a ship while managing systems in real-time. It reminded me of… well, a Star Wars game I played as a kid. It was the Revenge of the Sith movie game for the Nintendo DS. It had this mini-game where you would fly a starfighter and using the touch screen you could strengthen your shields in the front, the back, or keep them balanced. It was actually really fun and very Star Wars to be making those kinds of adjustments in mid-flight. Luckily, the original design already kept things very simple and the only significant change, besides the added piloting, was tying how fast your jump drive charged to the ship’s speed. In the original prototype, the goal was actually to travel a certain number of lightyears within the time limit and a space jump would take you 10,000 lightyears. The amount of distance your engines could travel was very small, even at full power, so they were mainly there to better your chances of evading. The space jump drive would charge at the same rate, regardless of how much power was in engines, and like in The Chaser’s Voyage, it would stop charging if it was damaged. With the game now being a real-time action game, we needed a way to discourage players from simply turn off their engines and waiting for a full charge. By tying the engine power to jump charge (with no power resulting in no charge), we found that way.

Cameron also wanted a change in the plot. They felt like the “transport an imperial defector” plot was too similar to the plot of FTL (which I didn’t even remember until they brought it up.) This challenge actually wasn’t as simple as just writing a new plot. The reason I initially went with that defector plot was to spice up the reason for having an arbitrary timer. I felt that the timer was majorly important to adding tension to the game, but just having a timer with no consequence didn’t make any sense. But then it hit me: What if you had a debt to repay? That was very Star Wars. In fact, it was Han Solo’s motivation for taking Luke and Obi-Wan to Alderaan. However, simply changing the window dressing didn’t address the root of the problem, so I proposed that instead of one big adventure, what if our game was actually comprised of many smaller adventures? After all, we didn’t want to just tell players that this big final score is gonna save their skin, we wanted them to say it themselves naturally when they saw a client offering a lot of money.

So from this radical rethinking of how our game could be structured, a desire to make something more unique from another popular game, and a leaning into something we love without borrowing too much, we felt that we had come up with a game that was unique, interesting, and a perfect way to show off what we could do as game designers.

To be continued in Part 2!

May 24, 2022

Is The Chaser’s Voyage a Roguelike? The Answer May Surprise You! (Spoiler: Yes, but Accidentally)

Now that Steam’s Going Rogue event is over (thank you to everyone who checked out our game!), I thought now might would be a good time to discuss a pretty important question: Is The Chaser’s Voyage a roguelike? The answer (and the history behind said answer) is a little complicated. For starters, neither of us set out to make a roguelike in the first place. When I initially pitched “Project: Space Captain” to Cameron, the word roguelike was never mentioned in the conversation. Looking back on it, there were definitely a lot of roguelike elements in the initial design, but we both were still rather unfamiliar with the term and our experience with the genre was limited to games like Spelunky and FTL: Faster Than Light. Instead of roguelikes, we looked at other sources of inspiration, such as the Disneyland ride, Star Tours. Particularly the modern incarnation that randomly strings together sequences to create unique experiences for the riders. I remember I pushed hard on the permadeath aspect because I was fascinated with the concept thanks to playing ZombiU, the only survival horror game that I really like, because of the actual fear it put into me (because of the permadeath mechanic, I actually felt a little sick after a particularly harrowing experience and I loved it). With these inspirations we created a game featuring procedural space encounters with a permadeath system. So in short, we accidentally reverse-engineered the concept of a roguelike, which I say is a testament to the appeal of the genre.

Since starting Bright at Midnight, Cameron and I wanted to be free from the constraints of genre labeling and in a way, we think that really helped shape what would eventually be The Chaser’s Voyage. This lack of focus on genres allowed us to think more deeply of the experience we wanted to create, rather than try and force in ideas that were common to a specific genre. For example, according to Wikipedia’s page on Roguelikes, some key features of the genre include making the game turn based, adding in resource managements such as health potions, or in the case of a sci-fi setting, fuel, repair material, and ammunition, as well as other concepts that neither us really wanted in our game. The freedom from genre also allowed us to add features that would be appropriate for the game were making, but maybe not what people would think of when you call something a roguelike. For example, our 100 day time limit and transporting clients who are willing to pay you (and have their own stories going on in the background) was particularly inspired by the scene in Star Wars: A New Hope where Luke and Obi-Wan meet Han Solo, who if you remember, is primarily motivated to pay off a debt to the notorious gangster Jabba the Hutt, just like how the player must repay a debt to the infamous pirate lord, Pirate Lady Styx. (What I’m saying is that The Chaser’s Voyage is a Han Solo simulator, okay?)

Thanks to this genre free development mindset, we were able to confidently cut a galactic map feature, which meant we removed any literal exploration from the game without ever having to think “wait, but isn’t exploration a key part of roguelikes?” Which thank goodness we removed it, because thinking about that idea again, it would have unnecessarily made the game way more complicated. We also were able to implement one of our more unique features without a second thought, that being that after failing to repay your debt to Lady Styx on time, (Hover over for spoilers) you do not get a Game Over, but instead the game continues, giving you a new mission with new unique challenges. We remove the time limit and increase the money you need to pay to Lady Styx, but due to the bounty she placed on you, the difficulty of the game increases in unique ways.

So why are we calling our game a roguelike now? Because, while we don’t like the constraints of genre labels, marketing does. When it finally came down to putting our game onto Steam, we had to think of a label to call our game. Again, we didn’t even consider our game a roguelike, because we never set out to make it one. Before this, we had kind of been describing our game as a “sci-fi sidescrolling space based action game with real-time strategy elements.” While most of that was true (real-time strategy is true in only the most technical of aspects), it was also a mouthful. Once we were looking at genres to classify our game on Steam, it kind of dawned on us that our game might be a roguelike. Looking at the Wikipedia article (and finding out that what is and what isn’t a roguelike is a debated point) and this article on RogueBasin, we realized we hit most of the high value features in the Berlin Interpretation:

1) Random Environment Generation. Yep. If you want, you can think of each territory you jump into as a room filled with randomly generated obstacles, with many of them having randomized factors.

2) Permadeath. Again, yes. Though we eventually added a mode that removed this because we know that permadeath isn’t for everyone. We still have two modes where permadeath is very much in effect.

3) Turn-Based and Grid-Based. No. Here’s the reason why I said we hit -most- of key features. We never intended this game to be played in either of these fashions, even in the initial concepts.

4) Non-Modal. Yes. One of the reasons we designed our UI the way we did was so that every action you take could be done in real-time.

5) Complexity. Absolutely. We invite players to find their own solutions to solve the problems each jump puts forth. The only challenge we give the player is to survive and earn their money within the time frame. This means the player can run away from bounty hunters rather than destroying them, tank asteroids with their shields at the cost of speed, communicating with pirates (if those scoundrels are open for it), etc. You could also vow off picking up any clients that are wanted by the Empire or risk it all by going with whoever is paying more.

6) Resource Management. Your money is a resource that not only do you need to win, but also to survive. Since all hull repairs deplete your money, taking too much damage puts you that much further from you goal. You also manage your power across your systems, which tie into the resources that are your shields and oxygen. We would argue that the game is primarily about resource management.

7) Hack’n’slash. This one could be a little contentious because we are more a bullet-hell esque side scrolling shooter than a Hack’n’slash (this is why we don’t like genres), but killing enemies is important to our game. It’s not necessary if you’re skilled enough and sometimes pirates can be talked out of fighting you, but I’d still argue we hit this marker in spirit, if not in perfect practice.

8) Exploration and Discovery. Again, this might be contentious because, yes we don’t have literal exploration in our game, but we do encourage a kind of narrative exploration that helps players decode our system to help them make better choices. For instance, while I spoiled it a few weeks ago, pirates being more common in UGS territories is not told to players outright. It’s revealed through the crew journal in an entry that talks about how the UGS has a pirate problem.

So why did I feel like it was necessary to tackle this question? What other game devs feel like they need to justify their own genre labeling? After all, if someone calls their game a Metroidvania, nobody really questions that. Part of the reason was because I wanted to acknowledge that our game doesn’t have the usual trappings one might expect in a roguelike. It’s something that’s always been in the back of my mind when talking about our game, because I’m worried someone might say “this isn’t a roguelike, because there’s no items or upgrades” or something like that. So, it just makes me feel better to have all my thoughts laid out here. The other reason though, was to encourage any developer or aspiring developer out there to really do away with the notion of genre. The Chaser’s Voyage was born not out of the idea to make a space-based roguelike in the same vein as FTL, but to make a game where you felt like a daring space captain. Where you felt like Han Solo making your Kessel Run. A way to create unique and cinematic moments where you can later brag to your friends how you narrowly avoided that bounty hunter just off of Wohza by racing her through an asteroid field. Really focus and make your game in such a way that best serves the experience you want to deliver to an audience. Then later, for marketing or to just easily describe your game to your friends, shoe horn it into a genre.

April 19, 2022

Guide to the Galaxy – The People of Sector 99

Last week, we talked about the planets of the sector you’ll be traversing during your time playing The Chaser’s Voyage. This week, I’ll be showing off the different denizens of the sector that will make up your potential clients. One of the best parts of making a sci-fi/fantasy setting is creating all sorts of fun and interesting new sapient species, so we were really excited to not only show off some alien creatures, but also to write some history for them. Like most of our art, we gave our artist a lot of freedom when it came to the designs, only offering our input to make some refinements (adjustments that fit better into the larger lore we had in mind) or just some designs we really wanted to have in. From there, we wrote backstories to fit the designs, doing our best to avoid any typical alien tropes that one might see in a lot of sci-fi settings. We particularly wanted to avoid any kind of histories that would imply that everyone of a particular species shared a belief, mindset, or personality type.

Humans

Of course, humans exist and are quite common. We even have all our your crew mate characters be human. We did this because while encountering and befriending aliens is fun, we wanted to ensure that the vast diversity of humans was also represented in our game (and even then we were unfortunately limited since we only have four crew mates). In a lot of sci-fi/sci-fantasy stories I’ve encountered, humans are always very common either through massive colonization, a focus on places like Earth, or their commonness was not really explored at all. We wanted to explain this commonality in a different way. When thinking of the human backstory, I was inspired by an episode of Power Rangers (of all things) where they hand waved extra-terrestrial humans by simply saying “humans exist elsewhere too.” As far as I know, that was never explained in the context of the series, but I liked the idea. So, we decided that humans would be a kind of galactic mystery, where despite what evolutionary science might say, humans came about independently on vastly different planets, all over the galaxy, thus explaining how common they are.

As for the other species, well, I don’t want to spoil too much since you’ll be able to find out more about them in the crew journal, once we implement it. So, I’ll give you just a little preview of them here.

Chlik

The chlik are an imp-like people from the swampy planet of Yazou. Thousands of years ago they colonized planets that would would later be collectively known as the Deadworlds.

Faeian

The faeians are elf-like humanoids from the forest planet, Tethalon. One of the insignias that you can equip in the game, The Angel of the Radiant Moon, is actually tied directly to faeian culture as part of their most common religion.

Fear-Eaters

These goblin-like creatures were part of the warrior caste in the religious theocracy on the planet Temekko. Since the fall of that theocracy, fear-eaters are way more common throughout the sector.

Gnathus

The gnathus are a fish like species, though they’re more like amphibians, living both on land and underwater. When it came to making different varieties of gnathus we wanted a mix of colors reminiscent to real world fish, with some being explicitly more tropical and others being more arctic. They originated on the icy world of Balitore, though because of their advanced colonization methods, their coloration changed to adapt to new environments.

Gryphinian

Gryphinians are avian people from the mountain world of Ai’lika. Like gnathus, we wanted the variety of colors for this species to resemble the birds we have on earth.

Ka’koi

The ka’koi are a lizard-like species from the industrial world of Agasta. They’re kind of our example of how a species could be designed in such a way to fit a character archetype, but you could still easily apply those traits to fit different kinds of characters. Ka’koi’s eyes, for example, are described as being perfect for hunting, but we say in-game that characterizing them as bounty hunters and warriors is a stereotype and that plenty of ka’koi have gone on to use their innate abilities for medical work, racing, and farming, among other pursuits.

Kingii

Our other lizard inspired species, the kingii, is the first species on this list to not originate within Sector 99 (besides humans). They are from Klik-Sss in Sector 22.

Maloodans

The mysterious maloodans are from the wasteland world known as Dusta. This species was an interesting challenge to write for because they were designed with a mask, but since you could encounter so many of them I had to come up with a reason for why they would all wear masks. What I came up with is that it’s a breathing apparatus featuring some of their cultural designs. Had we more opportunities to explore other maloodan characters, I think it would have been neat to have more variety in their masks. Oh well, there’s always the sequel.

Mayvian

The mayvians are spider people that are the descendants of those who survived a major cataclysm that happened on their home world of Old Serata. I wanted to take this opportunity to show that in this galaxy, those big origin myths that might be the backstory for an entire saga can just be fun information to anyone else.

Nygothan

The nygothans are another species from outside the sector, like the kingii. Their people’s history is seeped in some of our deep lore, so instead I’ll share some of the thoughts we had developing them. While the other species were designed to be gender neutral in their presentation, the nygothan design we chose was more feminine. So, we used it as kind of an opportunity to riff on the, frankly, annoying trope of the all female alien species. They only look all female due to our biases in our perspective. Their species just has very different, culturally contextualized, ways of presenting gender (kinda like us humans do.)

Paju

The poor paju come from the forest world Quitos, but mass colonization eventually forced them to all migrate off world. Their sad backstory was directly inspired by those sad little eyes.

Sin-Eater

Sin-eaters were the lowest caste on Temekko and used their special ability to make people forget specific memories. Then, they would have to atone for those sins themselves. Luckily, most sin-eaters live less traumatic lives now.

Todean

While I’m not entirely sure, I think I was inspired by some of the jokes in Portal 2 when making the backstory for the mantis-like Todean people. They have strong cultural ties to genetic modifications. I think I want it to be ambiguous whether or not the mantis form is how this species naturally looked before they adopted genetic mutations, because that’s much funnier.

Xanapor

Finally, there’s the xanapor. When we saw this design, we loved how weird it was. In fact, I think we specifically wanted something really out there. So naturally, we had come up with a backstory just as weird and mysterious as they are.

These are the species of people you can find as clients, but throughout our crew journal we mention several more species. Usually they are just from outside the sector. All of the art featured here was done by our client artist Santi Leigh Biondolillo.

April 12, 2022

Guide to the Galaxy – Planets of Sector 99

Now that we’ve met your crew, lets find out more about the galaxy you’ll be flying through in The Chaser’s Voyage. All of the action takes place in a small section of the galactic map called Sector 99. To the wider galaxy, it’s known as the last bit of territory before one enters The Frontier (an unexplored and enticing section of space), which makes it coveted by all sorts of galactic powers, such as the UGS, the Empire, and even gangs of pirates. Your adventure always starts on your home planet of Azedo (a small backwater farming planet), but from there the worlds you can visit open up as over 260 planets become possible destinations requested by your clients. While your stays on each planet will only be brief, your Crew Journal will give you little hints at the much bigger world you just happen to be visiting.

One of the most difficult things of operating on an indie game budget (or really any kind of game budget) is that it’s not often possible to make the world you’re exploring as vast and deep as you’d want it to be. Since The Chaser’s Voyage’s inception, we knew the player would be hopping from planet to planet. Of course, it’s immersion breaking and boring to always just be heading towards some unnamed “planet”. How’s this universe supposed to feel lived in if you know nothing about it. So, we decided to name our client planets, making one for each combination of several factors, such as land to water ratio, primary biome (borrowing the ever classic single biome trope), population density, and civilization type. So pretty soon, we were able to visit places like the sparsely populated shanty towns of the snowy world of Porons or one of the massive factories that sprawl along the wastelands of Neraka or even the modern cities of the jungle world, Shirenko.

We felt like this made each planet have it’s own identity. After enough time playing, planets like these would becomes as familiar to the player as some of the crew or key figures mentioned in the Crew Journal. With this kind of identity also came a desire to make the planet feel more alive. We didn’t want to always just show static images when the player was landing and taking off, so we added in some simple weather events. On Korri for instance, it could be snowing when you visit it, while on a jungle or forest world, it might be raining. Some buildings also have smoke effects to help make them a little less static. Background ships were added as well, to give the feeling that you are in a space port town, with ships landing and taking off every day.

Ambient sound effects were also crucial. We made sure they were subtle, so as to not be intrusive, but if you listen carefully you can hear the winds blowing across a desert planet or the moving of machines on an industrial world. Finally, with each planet becoming more alive and characterized, we gave them small snippets of backstory that fills out your journal whenever you visit a planet for the first time. They are little comments left by your crew reflecting some of their thoughts, observations, or even the history of the planet. We sadly can’t let the players freely explore all these worlds, but we wanted to give the impression that you are just one part of this larger galaxy that is full of adventures and stories to tell. Ironically, I think it helps grounds the story we are telling.

The art for the landscapes of each planet as well as the different kinds of buildings we use was done by Felix Yuniar.

March 22, 2022

Adding Gamepad Support

Hello everyone. We’ve been super busy adding and testing gamepad support for The Chaser’s Voyage. It took a lot of tweaking, but we finally got a control scheme that feels really good to use. Personally, I love playing with the Xbox gamepad now.

You can check out the gamepad in action on our twitter.

Once we get more gamepad functionality in, we’ll add it to the early access build so that you guys can get to play around with it. What was really tricky was finding the perfect control scheme for our, admittedly, non-standard game. We wanted something that was as easy and intuitive as our keyboard + mouse controls. We’re hoping you guys will like them, but even if you don’t, we do plan on making this control method just as customizable as the keyboard + mouse control scheme.

Default Gamepad Controls (Xbox Controller):

• Left / Right Thumbstick: Move The Chaser

• D-Pad Up: Toggle between Main Screen and Info Screen

• D-Pad Left: Engage / Disengage Autopilot

• D-Pad Right: Save & Quit (when available)

• Left Bumper: Activate Comms

• Right Bumper: Activate Space Jump Drive / Repair Space Jump Drive (if broken)

• Start: Open Pause Menu

• Select: Open Crew Journal

To increase power to a system, you hold the Right Trigger and then press the corresponding face button. To decrease power, you hold the Left Trigger and press the corresponding face button. Finally, to repair a damaged system, you just press the corresponding face button without holding either trigger. Each face button corresponds to one of the Chaser’s systems:

• A Button: Weapons Systems

• X Button: Shield Systems

• Y Button: Engine Systems

• B Button: Auxiliary Systems

• Right Trigger (Hold): Increase System Power

• Left Trigger (Hold): Decrease System Power

We’re really looking forward to having people play The Chaser’s Voyage with a gamepad and we hope you all like it as much as we do.