Support us on Patreon
The easiest way to get involved is to support us on Patreon. 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 and enabling everything you see us doing here.
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.
The Pistol Shrimp Podcast
We aren’t just developing a game. We’re creating stories and communities. Hear from some of the creators talking about history, ongoing development, and their inspirations. Patreon subscribers receive early access to all new episodes.
Watch Dan Work – Temporarily On Hold!
After reading all about UQM2, you must be thinking, “Wow, this game sounds great!” That’s an instruction, not a presumption. Your next question could be, “Do you have a trailer out or some awesome concept art?” We have something else, perhaps something unique to us and our project: live, unfiltered concept design.
While players will eventually get to experience the finished game in its completed audiovisual glory, the game is currently far from finished. We still want to let people participate in what we do have to share, so we started “Watch Dan Work” (official title). Dan regularly streams a slice of his daily design work using our proprietary scripting language, Simple. He explains technical and design concepts, brainstorms with viewers, and has fun sharing what we’re doing with our awesome community.
If you can’t make it to the live broadcasts, we upload VODs on Vimeo for watching at your leisure. Check out everything from what’s being worked on recently to what has been worked on a year ago!
Play and Make with Simple
If you’ve watched our livestreams, you’ve seen Simple, our proprietary tool we’re using for UQM2’s gameplay. You can download and play with Simple, making your own gameplay experience or playing ours with Melee data being released publicly. Using a mouse-driven scripting tool, users of any technical level can prototype and build anything they might imagine with 3D physics and logic, and it supports network play without creators having to even think about it. Gameplay is experienced by way of a viewer – which can support fancy visuals, audio, and UI – but our included viewer only represents collision shapes and a limited subset of UI.
Both Simple and the Melee content are in very active development and have many rough edges, but we want everyone to be able to enjoy them as we work on them. The Simple binaries are licensed 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!
If you are looking to discuss or get help with Simple, join our community on Discord.
Join our Subreddit
In July 2021 we launched a subreddit at r/UQM2 so we could not only keep fans up to date about our project, but actually engage their minds with questions and answers. We would pose questions relevant to the game and hold group discussions around the answers. We wanted to have fun sharing some of our creative process with everyone online, while also allowing as many people as possible to participate.
Recently, we have put questions on hold while we focus on more heads-down development. The subreddit is still the current hub for discussing recordings of the stream, highlights, and any kind of back-and-forth communications between the UQM2 team and our community.