After nearly a year, the team at Pistol Shrimp is advancing to the next stage of development and needs your help to do it. From the very start, our mission has been to see if there are better ways of making games, and that includes how we fund our efforts. If you like what we’re doing and want to support us, our Patreon page has launched.
We have a vision for how creating games should look, which starts with some questions we want to answer. Those questions are:
- How can our development process create a community that feels valued?
- How can we make better tools for ourselves, and share those tools with the community?
- How can we produce games we all love, without compromising the quality of the game and the well-being of our team members?
Our Community
We announced a subreddit last year where we could discuss questions and ideas about the game with fans. Dan streams development twice a week, live on Twitch, and Fred often joins. We share our raw experiments, have fun teaching Simple, and work with our viewers’ participation and excellent jokes. We also recently created a Discord server to talk more directly with our community.
Prioritizing our community and sharing our work openly is not something we would normally be able to do as part of our development cycle, much less while our game is so raw. In any other environment, Dan would never be permitted to discuss details of an unfinished game, much less share his screen, showing work and visuals the player may never see in the final product. Those are normally trade secrets, ready to be packaged behind a shiny trailer.
But we think having you here and sharing will only make things better for all of us.
Our Tools
Fred has created Simple, a tool that lets people who aren’t programmers design and create gameplay – the interactive part of games. Simple is available in binary form under a Creative Commons license. We have also released sample content (including some of our actual game content) under an MIT license. Anyone can freely use our tools to play and mod our game in progress, or even learn to make their own game experiments with the help of our documentation. Eventually, Simple will be available as a modding tool that comes with our finished game, so players can continue to create and experiment even after release.
No studio Fred has worked at would permit us to give away its proprietary development tools. It means a lot to us that we can give everyone fun, accessible tools to play with.
By sharing our own tools, we think we can make them better for ourselves and for anyone else using them.
Our Game
We are currently working on The Ur-Quan Masters 2 (working title, referred to as “UQM2”). The game is a sequel to our previous work, released in 2002 under a GPL license as The Ur-Quan Masters. It remains freely available and supported by the open source community. UQM2 is something we want fans of the first game to have and enjoy, but it is also something we’ve been wanting to work on ourselves for nearly thirty years.
We want to fill UQM2 with quality and love—things that will take us time and effort. We don’t want to compromise our game or our well-being in the process, which are both risks we all know too well.
We will celebrate when the game is released, but imagine how much better it will be – for us and the game – to be able to celebrate the entire process.
Why does Pistol Shrimp need you?
All four of us left our paid work in 2021 to make Pistol Shrimp our full-time jobs. We believe in the unique vision of what we’re doing—from our process, to our tools, to the game we’re making. By supporting us, you are helping realize that vision.
Game development can be so much better than what many of us – creators and players – have experienced. We can all take a journey together that makes everyone feel valued and inspired. We want the development process to be just as rewarding as the game itself. It’s a big goal, but we are committed to trying.
UQM2 will eventually be for sale and help us sustain ourselves and other talented people we work with, but that’s still a ways off. In the meantime, we need your support for the journey. We want to continue to invest in software, streams, and content everyone gets to enjoy, free of charge. The Ur-Quan Masters was given to the community many years ago. Please help us develop Simple and UQM2 to prove there’s a better way to make games.
Do you believe in our vision too? Come support Pistol Shrimp on Patreon.