Tag: Patch Notes

What’s Next & Patch Notes for The Chaser’s Voyage: Update 0.4.1 – 5/5/2023

Hello everyone! Update 0.4.1 for The Chaser’s Voyage went live last Thursday as a quick bug fix update. We usually aim to update the game on Mondays, specifically because this allows us to be ready to update the game if any terrible bugs are found and that’s exactly what happened!

 

Those bugs are now fixed (more on that below) and so we’re moving on to our client updates! And unlike our past big updates, we’re going to be able to release the client updates in batches. We currently have 3-4 updates planned for the clients, including some fun color changes, updated stories, and most exciting of all, a new client type! We’ll tell you more as we’re closer to each update and we hope you look forward to them!

 

Now that you know what’s coming up, time to talk about this update! Some problematic tutorial bugs slipped through our testing for the Performance Update. Fighters and pirates took up pacifism and would not shoot the player anymore! The player also was able to communicate with the pirates, even after they started to crash, which could lead to endless communication sounds. There were also some small changes we had already made before finding these bugs, like fixing our landing pad sprites, making sure the tutorial always led into the intro cutscene, and fixing a typo. Overall small stuff, but the tutorial bugs were nasty enough that we wanted to push out a fix ASAP.

 

Our new and improved Landing Pad!

 

You can read the full patch notes here and can follow us on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

The Performance Update for The Chaser’s Voyage (Version 0.4.0) is live!

Hello everyone! I know it’s been a few months since our last game update, but for good reason! We’ve been busy going through almost EVERY part of The Chaser’s Voyage in order to improve performance and make your voyage as smooth as can be! This update contains quite a few miscellaneous changes, so let’s get started with the main one!

 

 

We have improved performance for when things spawn, despawn, or interact with other things! This might not sound like much, but it required going through all of the game’s code and optimizing interactions, adding object pools (reusing objects after you’re done with them instead of destroying them), and making sure that everything still worked the way it should. (I happened to break quite a few things with my changes, so HUGE shout out to Eos for testing the game so much while I was busy trying to fix more things, especially since she was in the middle of a move!) This was the main focus these past few months and it was quite the journey to go through all the code and try to optimize it! Along the way, I noticed several other things that we wanted to change (or fix in the bugs’ cases), and those changes make up the rest of this update!

 

 

Some of the bigger remaining changes we made with this update have to do with obstacles. Not only did we fix some bugs regarding obstacle interactions and background obstacle spawn rates, but we decided to implement 2 new options regarding background obstacles. We added a slider that lets the player set the rate at which the background obstacles spawn and a slider that changes how bright the background obstacles are! In the earlier stages of creating The Chaser’s Voyage, we really wanted to fill out the screen space with fake background obstacles that the player couldn’t interact with, to add a bit more depth to the experience. We were cautious to not make those obstacles too bright though, lest they be confused for objects that the player actually needs to dodge. They were a little darker than we’d like, but we didn’t want to brighten them until we made an option for the player to customize the object brightness. We felt that this update was the right time to do that, and both added the option, and increased the default brightness of the background obstacles to better match what we wanted. Also, in fixing the spawn rates of the background obstacles, we were easily able to make a system to let the player control the spawn rate themselves, and decided to add that in as well.

 

Besides the general changes, sentries also got some tune ups. Sentries have enemies based on their affiliation (UGS dislike bounty hunters and the Empire dislikes pirates), but this was not being expressed the way we wanted it to be. The sentries would become hostile to these enemies, but usually after being attacked, not by default. The sentries now work how we want, and will target their enemies right from the get go! (Also, they will no longer target their army’s own fighters. Sorry about that fighter pilots!) Space battles also got a change, with exploding battleships no longer slowing down. This change was made to make sure that the battleships didn’t get too clogged up at slower speeds.

 

 

The next batch of changes are visual ones. We wanted to add some slight improvements to various visuals, to go with our performance improvements. First, we now have subtitles on as the default. Since our game starts immediately with the tutorial and more specifically with Argi talking to you, we wanted to make sure anyone who needs subtitles would have them from the get go. Second, we slightly darkened Nila’s subtitle color to better match the rest of the crew’s subtitle colors. Third, we added some subtle shadows to Battleships, Bounty Hunters, Buildings, Fighters, Merchant Ships, Obstacles, and Pirates. These help the sprites “pop” a little better (and in the case of buildings on planets, a LOT better). Finally we made it so that the insignia on the Loading Screen will now cycle through all of the insignias, not just the 3 Chaser insignias.

 

And, as always, there are the bug fixes. Since we were going through all of the game to make performance improvements we found a lot of bugs (and a couple of typos) that had slipped under our radar! They have all been squashed, but if you happen to find more, please be sure to tell us!

 

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

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

Hello everyone! We’re back from a very nice break and hope you all had some great holidays! We’re hitting the ground running this year with a small update to The Chaser’s Voyage before we dive headfirst into our performance update. Other than crushing some cutscene related bugs, we made two cool visual changes with this update.

 

1) We added button press effects to the System UI buttons when the player is using the gamepad. This is a subtle change, but it goes well with the highlight effect we added last update!

 

2) We changed Lady Styx’s sprites for the Day 100 cutscene. Now she is hidden mostly in shadow with some ominous glow thrown in. We really wanted to make it so that her reveal was upon the player beating the game and paying off their debt, not when the player failed to pay it within 100 days. This not only adds some cool suspense and spookiness to getting the Day 100 cutscene, but also better matches how we handle her appearance in the Credits, where she’s in shadow until you’ve beaten the game.

 

 

We’re excited for what this year holds for The Chaser’s Voyage and we hope you are too! You can read the full patch notes here!

You can also follow us on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:

The Playable Tutorial (Update 0.3.0) is live!

Hello everyone! Just in time for the holidays, The Chaser’s Voyage Update 0.3.0 (the Playable Tutorial Update) is now live! There are some pretty exciting additions to the game with this patch, so here’s what’s new in Update 0.3.0.

 

 

First off, we have removed the temporary tutorial video and have implemented the playable tutorial! This took quite a bit of care and effort to make, and we’re really happy with the final result! The tutorial will automatically start when the player first boots up the game, and completing it is required to get to the rest of the game. So that means that the tutorial is not skippable. (Unless it has already been completed of course!) After completing the tutorial, the player will be put into a new Voyage. If bookmarked voyage data exists, the player will be allowed to choose to keep their data and go to the main menu instead. The tutorial will bring the player through 6 different encounters that we chose specifically to best teach the player all the skills they’ll need to play The Chaser’s Voyage. It will definitely be a tough tutorial (just like our game), but we have the Voyager Mode options enabled for the tutorial. Which means that every player, regardless of skill, will be able to complete the tutorial. This was very important to us as requiring the player to finish the tutorial before accessing the main game AND making the tutorial hard to beat would have been very frustrating for players.

 

Next, lets go into the story of the tutorial! You’ll be instructed by a new face for returning players: the Nygothan, Argi!

 

 

We’re excited for players to meet this new character, and you can read a bit more about her in this update we posted before. In addition to a new face, the player will also be flying a new ship! The tutorial is the prologue to the main story and thus takes place before the player has met the crew of the Chaser, let alone seen the ship itself! So before then, Argi will be teaching the player to fly in a rather fancy new imperial ship. I don’t want to spoil much more than this, but the tutorial’s story is very important to the overall narrative. When we set out to make the story for The Chaser’s Voyage, we decided on how the tutorial’s story would go and it’s connections to the main story. We’re really excited to finally get this big part of the backstory put into the game for players to experience! Speaking of story, we also added a new little animation to the New Voyage Cutscene, here’s a sneak peak!

 

 

The other big change is this patch is our addition of Boss Stops for when the player defeats Bounty Hunters or Pirates, as well as when the player’s ship reaches 0% Hull. As Eos said in this tutorial update: “At first, we wanted to keep things relatively simple. A simple sound effect over a brief pause in the action, but it kinda looked too much like the game hanging up. So, we added in some hit animations and decided to do something a little extra for when the player dies.” Here’s a look again at the Boss Stop for the Player!

 

 

And finally we made some smaller changes. We added a nice glow to the System Power bars for when the player interacts with them, and increased the glow for the jump buttons. This gives more obvious feedback for the players interactions with those systems and we like the added oomph. We slightly tweaked some of the Loading Screen tips about the species of Sector 99 and fixed a couple typos we found. And last of all was, of course, assorted bug fixes!

 

 

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

 

Note from Eos: With this update, we completed another year of development on The Chaser’s Voyage. Like every journey worth having, it wasn’t without it’s time consuming side quests and frustrating obstacles, but we finally have things like the tutorial, gamepad compatibility, and cutscenes. It’s a lot of work for just the two of us and we still got a ways to go before we can mark this voyage as completed, but the road remaining is so much shorter than the road we have traveled so far. To everyone whose been along side us, thank you. We’ll be taking a much needed vacation off from this point out. We’ll see everyone shortly after the New Year! Stay safe out there!

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:

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!)

The Chaser’s Voyage now has Cutscenes!

Hello everyone! Yesterday, the cutscene update of The Chaser’s Voyage went live! This version includes the much awaited addition of cutscenes, along with some other minor changes.

First, we’ve updated our Splash Screen, making use of the promotional art that we showed off last week. This is replacing the green space background that the Unity Logo and Bright at Midnight Logo appeared in front of.

 

 

We also updated some of our insignia designs! Here’s the new designs for the Proto-Chaser, Neo-Chaser, Tyrant’s Demise, and The Mark of Death Insignias.

Proto-Chaser InsigniaNeo-Chaser Insignia
Tyrant's Demise InsigniaThe Mark of Death Insignia

 

The most important addition to Version 0.0.8 is, of course, our cutscenes! We’ve added 4 different cutscenes to our game, replacing our current temporary story screens. These cutscenes help introduce the player to our cast of main characters and the story of the game, give more narrative weight to when the player fails to pay off their debt in time, and reward the player for beating the game! After each of our two victory cutscenes, our credits will now play.

We also added a few options for the cutscenes and credits. If you’re someone who wants to get right into the action, you can automatically skip the intro cutscene. (Don’t worry, even with this option off, all cutscenes can be skipped by pausing if you want.) We also let the player automatically skip the victory credits if they have already beaten the game. The cutscene dialogue can also be advanced automatically!

 

 

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