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!
