For our 30th Anniversary Celebration, we have a special episode of the Pistol Shrimp podcast with none other than Erol Otus, now available on Patreon. Erol was responsible for several creative parts of The Ur-Quan Masters – art, sound, writing, and voice – but was primarily responsible for creating physical and digital paintings of the various aliens’ communications screens. Beyond UQM, Erol has contributed art, design, and boundless creativity to products and games ranging from Dungeons and Dragons to Skylanders.
Originally recorded for the 25th anniversary, Paul sits down with Erol to discuss what it was like to work on art in the time of UQM, D&D, their experiences with games in Berkeley, California, and even limericks. A transcript is also available below.
Erol has generously provided some of his artwork from outside of UQM to share, as well.
Keak
Cover for Goodman Game’s Dying Earth role playing game. Part of the core rule books, this one is sort of their monster manual. It depicts a Keak, mesmerizing and ingesting.
Taloonan
The cover for a module Erol created based on a D&D campaign he was running. It wasn’t full on published, a limited release was created by the North Texas RPG convention. It shows the Demigod Taloonan swimming along below the Shanga, a vessel crewed by the adventurers.
Dwellers of the Forbidden City
An AD&D module cover, “Dwellers of the Forbidden City”
Two weeks ago, we released episode 2 of the Pistol Shrimp podcast, entitled War & Space, early for our Patreon supporters. It features Paul Reiche and Lee Hutchinson discussing the influence of war, the possibility of war in space, and our childhood science museums on UQM. That episode is now available for everyone! Per your request, we are also looking into syndicating the podcast for consumption on your favorite (or least favorite – don’t let us tell you what to do) platform.
As always, please let us know if you have any feedback by joining our Discord or commenting on Patreon.
Happy November 2022 everyone! I am sure many of you know there’s something special in November. Something some of you have been asking us about. Something on your mind for 30 years, perhaps.
Are you excited? Maybe? It’s ok, we’re sure you’ve been thinking the same thing as us: why does vichyssoise get to celebrate, anyway? A whole day just for soup… why – that’s crazy! Does it get a day just for the sheer number of letters in its name? Did anyone even consult with France on this?
This November, we’re going to correct this imbalance. Move over, vichyssoise, because this time we will honor the 30th anniversary of The Ur-Quan Masters, looking back and celebrating one of our favorite games of all time. In particular, we want to celebrate the passionate fanbase that has kept this universe alive for so many years.
You have our deepest thanks for keeping our game in the collective imagination, with your stories, art, music, and countless other acts of support. Did you know that the game just reached #33 in this reader’s poll at Rock Paper Shotgun? It warms our hearts that this is still a thing that happens, and it’s all thanks to your years of loyalty and excitement. We wouldn’t be here without you!
If you follow our channels on Discord, Twitter, and Reddit, we’re using this whole month to share relics from the deepest vaults of The Ur-Quan Masters as well as some things Paul may or may not have just made up. Part of the fun is figuring out which is which. We’re especially excited to cap it off with an online celebration on Twitch on November 30th. Put the date in your calendar, and help us get the word out on whatever your favorite channels are.
Throughout the month, we also hope that you’ll share your own UQM relics. We have some more ideas coming down the line, but it can be a story, some art, or even just a selfie of you and the box if you still have it. We’re finding out that UQM has inspired a whole new generation of game developers! Wherever our fans and communities are, we are going to find ways to give you a moment to shine. Have something to share or find something you think should be shared? Email us or tweet it with the #uqm30years hashtag. You can also reply to our thread on Reddit.
We still have some more surprises for you and French soups throughout the month, so be sure to stay tuned! (We’re looking at you, French Onion!)
Two weeks early for our Patreon supporters, we have Paul Reiche and Lee Hutchinson returning for another episode of our podcast about the creation of UQM, UQM2, and the many steps taken to get here.
The main topic for this discussion is all about how war & space (and war in space) influenced our personal upbringings and the history of gaming through our lenses, which in turn influenced us. Why is Paul so obsessed with space combat? What did we learn from science museums, the threat of nuclear warfare, and pressing buttons in front of screens?
A couple weeks ago, we released our special Dialogue about Dialogue – Episode 1 podcast with Paul Reiche and Lee Hutchinson early for our Patreon supporters. That episode is now available for everyone (seriously, it has tons of cool visuals too, go check it out!), and we have also added a text transcript to go alongside the audio.
As always, please let us know if you have any feedback by joining our Discord or commenting on Patreon.
Howdy, folks! Pistol Shrimp is pleased to release something special and exclusive as thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon. We will be making this publicly available in the future but want to give our supporters early access to the very thing they asked for: relics, stories, and insights about the making of our games.
This is the first in what we hope will be a series of dialogues with Pistol Shrimp about the making of The Ur-Quan Masters 2. In this opening installment, UQM2 contributor Lee Hutchinson sits down with series co-creator Paul Reiche and digs in on the role character dialogue plays in storytelling. Come for the behind-the-scenes details, stay for Paul’s anecdotes about the early days of the games industry and the role Pogo the Possum played in UQM’s conversation engine!
Give it a listen and let us know what you think on Patreon.
Pistol Shrimp just wanted to share a gigantic “Thank you!” with everyone who has joined our Patreon. We are honored, excited, flabbergasted, and really so happy to have so much support in a just couple weeks since our announcement.
Thus far, all of us have been investing in Pistol Shrimp using our own savings. For the past couple years, we’ve looked at the usual methods of funding like traditional investment, venture capital, and publishing deals. Those can work, but in each case we have learned from experience that we’d have to compromise UQM2’s development somehow: to make it more commercial, to make it less accessible to players, or to be less open with our development.
We’ve also come up with some downright crazy ideas, like having the Druuge and Melnorme launch competitive digital currencies, or actually ransoming parts of the game (“Cough up the dough or the Yehat takes a long walk out of a short airlock!”). There was even a plan which involved sending 25 lbs of cheddar cheese to William Shatner. We’re not sure how that would have made money, but – trust us – it was going to be a guaranteed success.
While we still have some wild ideas in our back pocket, we believe our community is our greatest asset—for funding, for developing UQM2, for creating our studio, and for making things that people will enjoy. We are so glad to have you all here, and be sure to join our Discord to participate directly.
Thank you, again, to everyone supporting us and our journey together. Please check out our Patreon if you’d like to join!
Add content_installer.exe, which installs the latest content from our github repo and sets it up alongside Simple.
simple
Note: All ‘remembered open scripts’ in sims when upgrading to this version will be forgotten. You will have to re-open them in the UI.
Functionality: Separate sim ‘user layout’ files from the sim files themselves. New .sim.cfg files will be created which will track open files and their line locations for a given sim. Note: these files should not be included in any source control systems.
Functionality: Add Find in scripts: new ‘Find’ tab in the UI, Ctrl+F hotkey raises it as well.
Functionality: Create separate log outputs for different error levels which are displayed in the UI. Designer-added prints and errors are together, and warning/notice/info elements are in a separate group.
Runtime/Tool: Various crash fixes.
Runtime: Add additional warning and notice logging for property initializations.
Runtime: More varied random numbers.
Runtime: Save State fixes.
Script: Add new mods markup for extensions, which causes any Conjures of that component (and its extensions) to also receive the mod, which may include alternate property initializations and additional script SECTIONs.
Script: Support complex initialization for synchronized properties.
Script: Add some limited implementations of orientation arithmetic.
Script: Fixes for problems when accessing singletons.
UI: Fix crash when trying to Conjure a in a repeat Filter.
UI: Fix being able to set failable on a Conjure’s property initialization.
UI: Fix casting a UI Capture to a collection.
UI: When working with multiple sims, add logic which organizes the definitions list based on what sims contain what definitions.
Physics: Minor fixes for Capsule Shape behavior.
Physics: Fixes for occasional crashes when handling Capsule Shape collisions.
Breakpoint crash/leak fixes.
Fixes for errors when running simple if the last known .sim file cannot be opened.
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.
Tweets! While originally only for the Pkunk, the humans have somehow managed to create them too. Some of you may have already been following Paul and Fred on Twitter, but we have a new account we’ll be using for all Pistol Shrimp flavored news. Want to keep up to date with our live streams, Simple, and UQM2? Follow, @, retweet, and #hashtag with us at @pistolshrimpers.
