Greetings, Hunams and other lifeforms. We’re coming to you with some updates after an exciting summer of effort on UQM2. Our mission at Pistol Shrimp is about creating a better environment for game development. Being open about our process is an essential way we strive for that. We want you to feel as involved, inspired, and valued as we feel!

We’ll be breaking this into a few parts because a lot has changed, and change is the only constant in the universe. Let’s start with what may come as the most radical news.

Bidding Adieu to Paul and Ken

We wanted to let you know that Paul and Ken have wrapped up their work with Pistol Shrimp and will be moving on. The four of us had been working hard in pre-production, building our tools, outlining the story, prototyping the gameplay, and setting up the studio as a company. Now that we’ve entered production, it’s time for a different set of talents to bring this project to completion.

Paul has written an amazing story which has been in progress long before Pistol Shrimp joined up. To quote Paul, himself, “These characters have been living in my head for 30 years.” They’ve even shown up in amusing places like the writing for Persephone, one of the main characters of the Skylanders cast, who speaks just like the Orz. Entire ship designs were turned into Skylanders, and even Wimbli’s Trident appeared in The Horde. Now in UQM2, we have Paul’s wonderful, new rogue’s gallery of aliens to sit alongside some of the familiar, returning cast. He can’t wait for you to meet them all.

Ken has been looking to retire for a while now after a long career, but we had lured him into giving us one go-around helping to build out our cool technology. After he helped pave the way for production work to happen, he thought it was a good time to stop. We are going to miss him, but we won’t hold him here against his will, and we knew from the beginning that this was part of our plan. We hear retirement is awfully boring, though, so he knows we’re always here if he wants to contribute again.

A Personal Message from Fred

Permit me a tortured analogy. Getting to this point I have often felt like we were collectively Odysseus. I have worked with Paul for over 30 years, Ken is my brother and off-and-on collaborator for many of those, and Dan is pretty close behind. This Odysseus-Voltron completed its Iliad, lo these many years ago, letting the Trojan Horse, UQM, do its work with Accolade and starting the quick journey home to a sequel.

Spoiler alert! Many trials and tribulations intervened (AKA careers), but the flame to return to our universe was never extinguished. In the fullness of time and circumstances we found an opportunity to reassemble. Paul with his well and truly marinated story, Dan with his unmatched design and modern gaming sensibilities, his care for the community, and his infectious enthusiasm. Ken with his dependable output, collaboration, and reasoning. And me, eating sandwiches.

Like any good tale, however, and with the goal in sight, we find our Odysseus-Voltron once again split into components. To continue the abusing and torturing of the reader: Gandalf is occupied with the Balrog. Boromir has blown the Horn of Gondor (I always knew Ken wanted the ring!). Yet the brave Hobbits, Dan and Fred,  forge onward.

Yet we are not lost! Paul has set down the story. Ken has laid the foundation for engineering success. Dan has completed the design skeleton. And sandwiches remain (including with my frequent lunch buddy, Paul)! In effect we are at the end of pre-production, where we now engage artists, animators, writers, and musicians to put the meat on the bones of the skeleton. This was part of the plan all along.

Please join Dan and me to bring this home, where we will string our bow and kill everyone else in the room!

NOTE: No Trojans were actually harmed or killed during the making of this statement. The story of the Sirens stays in Vegas.

A Personal Message from Dan

I got my start in professional game development as an intern at Toys for Bob through a mutual connection with Paul. When I started, I was interested mostly in art and animation and even did some contract work in the title they were shipping while I was there learning. When a new project rolled around, Paul suggested I try my hand at design. After spending a week of time reading a two page instruction manual, working with the amazing tool Fred had built, and getting Paul’s guidance, I made something reasonably playable. I was hired full-time and worked at Toys for Bob for 7 more projects.

Over my 12 years at TFB, I learned so much from Paul and Fred. Paul is the ultimate giver of excellent feedback. If you had something running at your desk and a controller to hand to him, he would want to see it and give you amazing insights. My contributions over the years at Toys for Bob largely were driven by trying to shape Paul’s wants and our back and forth dialogue into reality, and, before long, realizing that his voice lived permanently in my head. People tell me I sound like him sometimes, and it’s because his ideals shaped a lot of my own visions for what it means to pick up a controller and just connect with something fun. Thanks to him, one of my favorite parts of game development is what I’ll call the “last 10%,” where he helped me learn to take something functional and add or subtract little touches here and there to make the player’s experience go from walking to flying just through a collection of small pieces. That was one of Paul’s many strong suits in a nutshell: the moment-to-moment details that made huge differences for the player.

Fred was an inverse of Paul, known for ‘sheep-dogging’ (his term) around the TFB office and learning what people needed by observing their failures, moral or otherwise. Jokes aside, I think a lot of people were afraid of Fred because his unassuming nature of checking in would frighten people since Fred was always 10 steps ahead of you. But that was the point! Fred is always 10 steps ahead. Thanks to Fred, I learned to value not just the people who make the game, but the tools and processes they used. Fred envisioned and crafted an amazing tool that anyone who worked with would espouse as the best thing ever. A big ingredient in our ‘secret sauce’ was the person behind the curtain who actually made it possible for folks like us with crazy ideas to actually realize them without making it unwieldy to even try. While ‘failing fast’ has become something of a commonplace term now, I really learned from Fred how to eliminate complications and just do it. Fred is still one half of the UQM genetic material, and he carries not just the same mentality about finding the fun, but the mind, heart, and spirit of the original UQM with Pistol Shrimp.

Ken and I simply exchanged bad jokes and puns on a regular basis. He is one of the most hilarious people in the known universe, and my jokes will only get worse and more grammatically terrible without his guiding inspiration.

Conclusion: Not the Conclusion

Every member of the Pistol Shrimp team has worked alongside both Paul and Ken for much of their own professional careers. From Fred, who carries the original UQM torch as an essential part of that game and a co-conspirator with Ken, to Dan, who worked directly with Paul and learned his formative lessons on design from him at Toys for Bob. UQM2 has been a team project from the very beginning, with different members taking responsibility for different pieces. With the story complete and the design sketched out, Paul is off to his next challenge. With Ken’s work on our technology finished, he’s free to (finally!) rest.

As we look to the future, the team is incredibly excited to be able to take Paul’s story and creative vision, which we know you all care about a lot, and finish UQM2 out. We’re hard at work now with a core group of contributors:

• Fred has created the amazing engine that supports all of UQM2’s gameplay and the work Dan has been doing already, and he’s only supporting more of what the game needs. Fred is still one half of the original UQM super-brain too.
• Dan is building out gameplay which many of you have seen during our development streams, some of which will feel like a cozy, familiar return to UQM and some of which we want to feel fresh and new.
• Lee has been talking weekly with Paul during the entire process to absorb the story and characters, turning them into the alien conversations you’ll experience. He’s working with the team on actually connecting that writing glue with the gameplay.
• Danny has been building a UQM2 encyclopedia with Paul to document all the ideas that have had 30 years to germinate. He’s also making some awesome music that feels right at home in UQM2.
• We have been working with our amazing community, which has already taken the ProceduralPlanet toy we released and has been improving it and actually integrating it with Dan’s help into UQM2.

Please join us in bidding farewell to Paul and Ken. They are irreplaceable contributors with wells of creativity, and we are so happy to have had their contributions.

Coming Up Next

This post is already quite long even though we have so much more to say. We’ll be sharing that in a series of notes coming up, but, even better, the development streams are back, baby! They won’t have the same, twice-weekly cadence that we used to have, but we miss you and we love using them to be together with our community and show our work in a fun, authentic, and inspiring way. Plus, Dan and Fred can talk at least 10 times as fast as they write.

We’re sure you’ll have questions and thoughts, and we welcome you in the discussion on Patreon, Discord, Twitter, or Reddit.