#playable 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done for the tutorial, but since game development is an always evolving process, those lines have become slightly outdated.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.

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.

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!

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!

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!)