Announcements

UQM2 Update – Mid-Year 2023

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Engaging HyperWave Broadcaster.
Determining send and receive frequencies.
Calculating optimal relay delivery route.
CONNECTION ESTABLISHED

>>> Submit to the will of Dogar and Kazon, vile Earthlings, or else you will never lay eyes upon your most beloved of sacred artifacts – the World’s Largest Rocking Chair of Casey, Illinois – ever again!

Carol, knock that off!

Ahem, excuse me. Our resident Umgah got ahold of the transmitter again. We’re still working on our security measures. Who’s Carol? Oh, never mind that. It’s a long story.

Greetings friends, supporters, and other many-appendaged creatures! Dan here, and I wanted to share an update on our progress, advancements, and learnings in the past 6 months, our trajectory for the near future, and really just say hi because I miss ‘seeing’ you on stream. Carol wants me to say hi and thanks for all the fish, too. Also, please stop sending us fish.

Tl;dr

If you just want the short version, here it is:

  • Pre-production – which you can think of as scoping and exploring the size of the box – has ended.
  • Production – which is filling the box – has started!
  • Our twice-weekly dev stream will be pausing for now.
  • We have some more people working with us and are doing some new kinds of work.
  • We have a plan for the fall which involves sharing a lot more content we think you’ll be excited to finally see. Because we’re producing it!

Pre-Production to Production

Production deck slide showing disciplines' work

This week, we were able to put together our first production kickoff (see above slide from that meeting)! If you’re not familiar with this kind of creative & technical development, a framing mechanism we use to separate the kinds of work we do is grouping it into pre-production and production. In broad terms:

  • Pre-production is when we are still making decisions about what we want to be making and how we should be making it. We prioritize that exploration and optimize for being able to grow, learn, and make good decisions in the future.
  • Production is when we have a firm enough idea of what to make and how to make it. We prioritize streamlining the process of getting all our creative contributions being made and woven into the actual game alongside a schedule.

That is a somewhat simplistic representation of the difference between the two, but UQM2 is more than one single piece. There are parts of our game which can be in pre-production longer or production longer, based on dependencies and schedules. The end result looks less like a clean break and more like a dovetail, sawtooth, or kraken wrestling a wooden tall ship as the dread pirate captain seeks to maintain control.

Silly diagram showing how we move from pre-production to production. Includes kraken wrestling boat.

Does that make sense? I hope so. I spent, like… 5 minutes on that drawing! That takes us to the next change.

Development Streams on Pause

If you’ve been following our live development streams, you may have noticed we’ve been unable to do them for several weeks. I love being able to share live development on stream and interact with everyone who attends, but, for the (hopefully short) time being, I have to pause them. 

First and foremost, I have lately been knee-deep in highly sensitive material that we don’t want to show you yet. Not because we don’t like it or want you to see it, but because we care about how you get to receive it. An important part of UQM2 is going to be exploration and discovery, and there are elements that we will want you to actually have fun exploring, discovering, and experiencing interactively as a player, not just as an observer. From things like the overall story to the starmap, I’m now inundated with parts of UQM2 coming to life that reach far beyond the narrow bits of work you’ve seen me do. It’s great to have them shape up and become part of the game, but it also means it’s not as easy to conceal them as I have in the past.

Secondly, since we’ve entered production, I’ve been taking on more responsibilities as what we call in games a producer. That means I’ve become responsible for getting everyone on the team what they need to make forward progress and helping prepare for the deluge of content which will be filling up our game. It’s a little bit like a project manager, but with cool mutant powers and a confusing name. I also have someone else taking on some of those design & scripting responsibilities, but more on that in a moment.

To cap it off, the plan is to pause – not stop – development streams for the near future. It’s possible I’ll be able to come out of the woodwork to do a one-off here and there if the no-spoiler stars align, but the plan is to find a way to resume once a few more cats are out of their proverbial bags. Don’t ask me where the cats came from or who even put them in the bag. I’m still trying to determine the ideal cat-bagging material.

This trade-off on streaming is coming with some more goodies for you, though. More on that at the end of this post.

Team Additions

The Orz

To help us get some of this very important production work done and support development, we have a couple new members of the UQM2 who have come on board. Our friend Danny is joining us with experience in the music industry, helping us with both audio and business development. Another former Toys for Bob-ite, Jesse Browne, is also joining to take on design and scripting responsibilities after working across many technical fields.

We’re really excited to have them on board, and they’ve already been doing some awesome work to make UQM2 even better. I’m looking forward to showcasing their work too!

Funding Updates

In our end of year update from 2022, I detailed the work ahead of us for 2023 and included funding as part of it. This is still an essential part of taking UQM2 to completion, but it deserves its own blog post describing the process, what we learned, and where we’re going. Needless to say, the same sentiment as last year is still true. We are incredibly grateful to our amazing Patreon supporters who have helped us get this far. This wouldn’t be possible – much less enjoyable – without all of you. One of the reasons we’ve been able to move into production has simply been because we can utilize all of your support to work with some amazing artists helping us! Your support goes almost entirely to funding this process.

What’s Coming Next?

We are really excited to move into production, and the other half of what we’re gearing up is our community building endeavor. We have already established an incredible community of people here who believe in us, are excited for the game, or maybe just want to see my birds and hear bad jokes. Whatever reason everyone is here so far, we don’t take that for granted. Seriously, this is the kind of thing so many artists wish for! Few things are more encouraging to me, personally, than being able to create a virtuous cycle of everyone cheering each other on.

To that end, we are going to be ramping up our own endeavors to give everyone something to get excited about this fall. We appreciate that we’ve gotten enough people here on what seems like pure enthusiasm so far, but it’s time to roll up our sleeves, unfurl our tendrils, and deliver more than just hope and imagination. We’re getting ready to show you much more, especially on the visual and world-building side. We can’t wait to show you in much more vivid detail just where we’re headed as we create an even more inclusive and enthused community.

Though I won’t be streaming, you can look forward to much more frequent communication from us, starting with posts like this but ramping up to even more of the real game content.

Side-by side of a UI doodle and UQM's Melee mode

Thank you for being on the journey with us so far, and an extra special thank you to our generous Patreon supporters. It’s only going to get better from here on out.

If you want to keep in touch more often, please join our Discord where the team and community keeps the *party* going and will welcome you with open claws.

UQM2 Update – Mid-Year 2023 Read More »

Incoming Hyperwave Intercept

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Melnorme Alien

From: Melnorme InfoRelay Prime Trade Network <noreply@besttradersever.nafs.mel>
To: <recipients undisclosed>
Date: 3-8-2163
Subj: Hyperwave Intercept

Greetings, valued trade partner!

We of the Melnorme Ultra-Trade Value Complex are always striving to maximize engagement opportunities for InfoRelay Prime traders like yourselves. Our unparalleled information-gathering network uses vastly sophisticated and, dare we say, TERRIFYINGLY SECRET techniques to scour the cosmic aether for interesting data, and it has come upon a document which we think you will find VERY interesting.

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Melnorme Ultra-Trade Value Complex

Comment and follow along on Patreon!

UQM2_REDACTEDDownload

Incoming Hyperwave Intercept Read More »

Studio Updates – End of Year 2022

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Captain and two grandchildren from the ending sequence of The Ur-Quan Masters

It’s that time of the year again. You know, the time when people say “it’s that time of the year again,” which could arguably be said at any time of the year. But we usually can’t. In December, we have collectively acknowledged that this is really the time to say the phrase. Don’t believe us? Go on, try saying it during your next social gathering in May and watch the confusion on the faces of others.

At this time of the year, we at Pistol Shrimp have a few special things going on we wanted to share with you as the year with the most number of 2’s in it during our lifetime comes to a close.

Studio Holiday

The Spathi High Council from The Ur-Quan Masters
The Pistol Shrimp Team IRL

First off, Pistol Shrimp will be formally “closed” from December 16th until January 16th for various holiday breaks. If you want to reach out, some of the team will likely be lurking around our Discord. Dan, who covers most of our communications, will be taking a long-delayed trip to the jungle where he will instead be communing with various animal species and hopefully avoiding death. If he doesn’t come back, he wants you to remember him by his final words, “Boy it sure would be funny if this blog post was the last time anyone ever heard from me.” Please also abide by his request for his funeral: pay 3 dancers to pop out of the ground dressed as zombies and dance “Thriller,” interrupting what he is sure will be a quite moving eulogy. Anyway.. if you don’t hear back from us for a bit, now you know why. If you don’t hear back for a really long time, boy that would suck (especially for Dan).

2022 in Review

Secondly, we wanted to do a little retrospective on what we accomplished this year together! There’s far too much to list in its entirety, so we’ll try to sum it up with a few big ones.

For The Ur-Quan Masters 2

  • We created a feature-complete implementation of the foundational gameplay from UQM! Hyperspace, a starmap, interplanetary space, approach, orbital view, planetside, resource gathering, procedural system generation, and alien conversations.
  • We prototyped new gameplay loops we want to try mixing in the Adventure mode for the player, like trading posts, fleet ship upgrades, flying fleet ships through hyperspace, and traversal mechanics to get around the starmap.
  • We have functional, co-operative Adventure mode play and have prototyped new paradigms to make UQM2 even more fun to play with friends, like exploring how players might have different capabilities, how we handle defeat scenarios, and looking at what were previously timed events racing against the clock of a single player (the Kohr-Ah would like a word with you).
  • We implemented all the UQM ships — except the Slylandro Probe, which you broke in the first game with the self-destruct sequence — for our Super Melee prototype. Some of them, like the Chmmr, Arilou, Spathi, and Kohr-Ah even became prototypes for how we will be doing art and audio.
  • We prototyped additional game modes for Super Melee to understand what it would take to have fun with more than 2 ships/players: from a 4 player free-for-all, to separate teams with multiple players, to cooperative experiences players could play against AI enemies.
  • We support all of this through online, serverless network play for end users, and even tested a simple proof of concept of our technology live with viewers on Twitch.

For Pistol Shrimp

  • We launched our Patreon! This was the very first step we took toward funding our studio and projects, and we are so honored by the generous support and engagement from the community.
  • We started a Discord server as a community gathering place. While our subreddit was good for talking in slow-time with structured questions, getting instant communication going and pausing our heavy Q&A posting was a big step forward for us.
  • We released our in-development tools and content (including our Super Melee prototype), freely available for anyone to play with or use to create their own things. While we’ve been behind on updates at the time of writing, some community members created their own experiments, from ships for Melee to their own, made-up games. The tools are very nascent and rough around the edges, but they are what we are using to make and power UQM2.
  • We started our Pistol Shrimp Podcast series, both as a thank you to our Patreon supporters and as a way for everyone to learn a little about us and game development! Whether it’s the history behind UQM, how we think about creating games, insights into UQM2’s development, or just hearing from the people working on games, we were excited to create something new to share.
  • We continued to stream live development of UQM2 on Twitch with Dan and Fred. All of the parts of UQM2 detailed above were implemented or iterated upon live on Twitch for everyone to see. Twitch chat even influenced the creation of things, live, making everyone truly a part of our day-to-day development. If you miss the streams, VODs are always available on Vimeo.
  • We celebrated UQM’s 30th Anniversary in November! We collected stories, fan creations, and a testimonial or two from other developers, highlighting them for everyone to enjoy. We shared special interviews with Erol Otus and George Barr, releasing high res scans of George’s original UQM art and some UQM2 concepts. We gathered members of the original UQM team for a live stream with x33n on Twitch on the 30th. Everyone also tried their best to help the Talking Pet.

While everyone certainly wants to see and play the final game, all of these are massive accomplishments for our still-small team. We couldn’t have done this without the help of our community. Whether you support us on Patreon or Twitch, participate in our development discussions, or just follow along with our updates: thank you for being on the journey with us.

A Huge Thank You

In that vein, we have some notes the team wrote to share with you:

From Dan

I realize you hear from me all the time in text or in my live form on stream, but I wanted to speak a little more personally for just a moment — ok, viewers of our stream know I don’t exactly hold back there, either, but not in our blog posts! I love games, but I intended to leave game development for good. Then the opportunity for Pistol Shrimp arose, with the chance to do things differently: making a game and a studio alongside a community! You and I both have access to tools, interactions, and creations that might normally never see the light of day. I am so proud of what we’ve been able to do transparently with all of your support. Thank you for believing in us and what we’re doing.

From Ken

It’s been a blast working on this game and these tools with my fellow Pistol Shrimpers: Dan, Paul, and Fred. Beyond that, it always amazes me (and fills up my heart!) to see the passion of you UQM fans — both for the original and the sequel. I’m glad we (well, mostly Dan!) are including you in what’s going on and eliciting input, reactions, questions, and answers as we all go on our journey together. Some things can (and should?) be “secret” (to avoid spoilers), but everyday trials, tribulations, successes, and laughter should be celebrated as widely as possible. I hope you’ve felt included, because without you, there would be no game! Thanks for supporting us and continuing to believe in us. It is most appreciated.

From Fred

I’ve been making games at other people’s behest for too long! The Ur-Quan Masters (well maybe the Horde) was the last game that we made the way we wanted to make it. Finding a time, a place, and support from like-minded colleagues and supporters where this is once again possible is an unexpected gift after all this time. I’ve made this comparison before: I feel a bit like Odysseus must have felt. After the Trojan War (Ur-Quan Masters), he thought he’d quickly return home. It didn’t exactly work out that way and after many intervening years and adventures he eventually made it back to Ithaca. So thanks to all of you for keeping the home fires burning and welcoming us back. I think we’d like to stay awhile.

From Paul

*ASK THEM ABOUT THE FLOWERS* *SO BEAUTIFUL* *WHERE’S MY SPACESHIP?!* Hey, what happened?! In all seriousness: Paul is currently unavailable at time of writing and definitely not working on mind control.

What’s next for Pistol Shrimp?

Lastly, seeing the entire next year with certainty is too challenging, but we do want to share a bit of our outlook on what we want to accomplish in the near term when we return:

  • Updated Tool & Content Releases: Our initial takes at releasing our tools (Simple) and content (test content and Super Melee prototype) were good, but we have learned a bit about sustaining them. We have ideas and look forward to developing better processes.
  • Community QA & Playtesting: We want the most crucial parts of our game, especially the parts over the network, to not just function but be fun too! Our unique community, livestream, and publicly available tools offer us a chance to validate that long before the game is even done. Look forward to more information on how we’ll be doing this and how to participate.
  • Pistol Shrimp Podcast: This is an obvious one, but we enjoy producing these and we hope you enjoy them too. We recently were able to syndicate it via distribution platforms, and we look forward to creating more for you.
  • Asset Creation: Probably obvious for those of you watching the development streams and VODs, but we have not been focusing much on the creation of what we call assets (art, audio, visual effects, etc.). This is largely due to our very small team size and its respective disciplines, but also part of how we have been working. We are prioritizing being able to make fun, engaging gameplay and — especially for UQM2 — a story we’re excited for players to experience. We are trying to be prudent about creating expensive assets for parts of the game that may not make it to the finished game. Many parts are now becoming ready for this important coat of paint, so we hope to share some more with you as we create it.
  • Funding: We want to be able to pay the people working on the game, especially those whom we will be bringing in to work with us on the asset side. Our Patreon page was an amazing beginning for the team, but a crucial next step for UQM2 is also being able to fund its entire development. We have been focusing on this internally and want to solidify our next steps to help us see UQM2 through to completion.

Those are just some of what we want, but we’re also interested in what you want! If you follow our Discord, subreddit, Patreon, podcast, or Twitch channel, what things would you like to see happen in those spaces? How would you like to engage with us or your fellow community? We want to know. Tell us on Discord, Reddit, or Patreon.

We wish you happy holidays and look forward to being back and more alive than ever in the new year. We’re excited to continue the journey with all of you.

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Pistol Shrimp Podcast – Now Syndicated Everywhere!

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Pistol Shrimp Podcast cover and logo

Back in my day we were lucky to catch our favorite shows on HyperWave channel 44! These days when we just want you to pour our thoughts directly into your grey matter — definitely not mind-controlling you in the process — we need additional tactics. By popular demand, our Pistol Shrimp Podcast (previously just hosted directly on Patreon) is now syndicated across the internet universe.

New episodes (apart from the anniversary specials which we were too excited to share) will still be available early to Patreon supporters, but you should now be able to listen wherever you are:

Questions, comments, or mind control success stories? Talk to us on Reddit or our Discord!

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30 Years of The Ur-Quan Masters

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UQM Printed Map from development

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.

That’s right, in November we celebrate National Vichyssoise Day!

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!)

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Pistol Shrimp Podcast – Episode 2 – War & Space

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Interior of the Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts

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?

Check it out on Pistol Shrimp’s Patreon!

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Dialogue About Dialogue – Episode 1 Publicly Available

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Cover image of Booty and the Beasts

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.

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Dialogue about Dialogue – Episode 1

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Alien name code wheel from Star Control 1

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.

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Pistol Shrimp Wants More than Your Brains

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People overlooking an alien settlement

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

Development stream screenshot with melee ship wheel

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

Simple scripting language

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

Simple tool, Chmmr in the simple viewer, and Chmmr in the game viewer with art

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.

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