Announcements

Join Pistol Shrimp’s Discord

/
discord logo

Are you lonely? Forget social networks, dating apps, or sock hops. What you need is Pistol Shrimp’s Discord!

Since releasing Simple and our Melee content, we’ve heard and seen some of what the community has been able to do with almost no guidance. We know these things are very early works in progress, so we wanted to create a venue for discussion focused just around them. Whether you’re trying to learn how to play with Simple, figuring out how to get some networked Melee going, or made something really cool you want to show to us, this will be the place to do it.

If you want to hang out with us and the rest of the creative (or just very brave) community, join us at https://discord.gg/rasVCDmYKp.

Join Pistol Shrimp’s Discord Read More »

Simple and Melee Gameplay Now Available

/
Simple editor alongside Chmmr in the game

Pistol Shrimp is excited to announce the very early release of Simple, our development tool for The Ur-Quan Masters 2. We’re also releasing some sample content, including our in-development Melee gameplay. This means you and your friends—or enemies—can start playing and tinkering with a slice of our game.

Now, before you get too excited—we’re the excited ones here, remember—we want to make sure you know what to expect. Our tools and content are under heavy development and far from finished, and there will be lots of rough edges on display. (We’ve only had a limited number of devices to test on, and we’re a very small team!) We expect to provide updates to Simple on an ongoing basis, and we’ve made a start at some documentation. Additionally, our twice-weekly livestreams are a good source of information and examples.

We made Simple for us, but at heart we are explorers, experimenters, and tinkerers. We want anyone with curiosity to be able to try making and playing with things, even if they’ve never tried before. With that in mind, we’re happy to be able to license the Simple binaries under a Creative Commons license and the example/Melee content under an MIT license. Play, create, have fun, and share with others freely. We want to know what your experience is like, and we especially want to see if you make anything wild, weird, or fun!

Simple and the content we’re providing are free for everyone. If you like what we’re doing and want to support us in developing The Ur-Quan Masters 2, you can hit our itch.io page linked below. We’ll also have a Patreon coming online soon! Follow these links to get started:

Questions or feedback? See the FAQ or comment on Reddit.

Simple and Melee Gameplay Now Available Read More »

Simply Going Wild

/
Screenshot of the Simple tool from a stream with Fred and Dan

When we started working on UQM2, we knew we would want to involve the community: starting a subreddit, conducting live streams of work, and eventually arriving here at our next weird and wild experiment.

Very shortly, we will be providing a copy of the development tools we use and our own, real Melee data for anyone to play with and enjoy. This means any of the work you see Dan doing on stream is something you, too, will be able to do. You could make a new ship, play networked Melee with a friend (or enemy), or even make entirely different gameplay!

What we’ll be giving you is in active development and by no means complete. It is something which we are using to build UQM2, though, and will continue to improve. In addition to the help we’ll receive from everyone using and having fun with our tools, we’d like to set up a Patreon page where you can support our active development. If it is wildly successful beyond anyone’s imagination, you may even help us avoid the need for a costly crowdfunding campaign, and UQM2 will be even better for it.

What do you think? What questions do you have? Discuss with us on Reddit!

Simply Going Wild Read More »

Announcing Pistol Shrimp Games

/
Pistol Shrimp logo with trademark

Little, weird, and dangerous: the pistol shrimp.

We’re excited to announce the extremely official formation of our studio, Pistol Shrimp™ Games. Those of you already interacting with us on our other platforms might already know who we are, but did you also know we were secretly becoming something else all along, too? Like the butterfly emerging from its previous flightless form, we now coalesce ourselves from the briny sea of game development intangibility into a single, charismatic crustacean.

What does this actually mean for Ur-Quan Masters 2 and its development? As far as designing the game, the live streams, and our general communication with everyone, nothing is really changing. However, by establishing ourselves as a real developer—with a real website, named after a real animal!—we hope to open up important opportunities which will help see our game to completion. Most important and near on the horizon is being able to help fund our project, which deserves its own post (or series of them) discussing our approach in detail.

For the fans who have followed along already on dogarandkazon.com, our subreddit, or even watched our Twitch streams, we appreciate that you were interested in us just because you knew about the creators or the project. For everyone else, we hope this site will help you to get to know us and what we’re doing with UQM2.

At the very least, everyone reading this now knows that there is really such a thing as a pistol shrimp.

Announcing Pistol Shrimp Games Read More »