announcements

UQM2 Update – Summer 2023

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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

Paul and Fred on their last day at Toys for Bob

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.

UQM2 Update – Summer 2023 Read More »

Follow Us on Social Media

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Arilou from The Ur-Quan Masters, a green alien seated cross-legged on a red seat surrounded by glowing lights.

Did you know that we’re building out our social media accounts? We’ve slowly been creating some more places where you can follow us. It’s not stalking, it’s keeping in touch! For all we know, one of our communication methods could explode at the whim of the plutocrat du jour, so we figure it’s good to diversify.

You can already find us on the following channels:

We’re also cross-posting the above content on other channels (albeit with less focus):

We plan on being most active on Twitter and Discord, with regular blogs both here and on Patreon, and short stories on TikTok. (I know, we’re shocked about that last one too. It’s an experiment!)

Even though we’re intentionally keeping a few things under wraps, we’re going to be sharing more and more about The Ur-Quan Masters 2 in the coming months. For now, we’re mostly sharing Dan’s random alien thoughts and neverending nonsense. In time, we’ll also reveal more of the game, with bits of text, images, and video. The idea is to have fun and try things – just like we do with game development – to spread the word about The Ur-Quan Masters and its passionate community.

When we resume some more of our live streaming activities, you’ll still be able to find Dan at https://twitch.tv/pebby. And if the social media landscape has scared you into the deep recesses of the internet, we still have an email list you can join at https://pistolshrimpgames.com for big announcements when they come.

Follow Us on Social Media Read More »

Exploring the Planets

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Treasure Planet concept from The Ur-Quan Masters 2 by Damon Czanik

Do you know how many planets were in the original UQM? No, seriously… do you? If you did, you probably read the hint book from back in the day. But anyone who played could tell you: there were a lot. We accomplished that via procedural generation. While the starmap was laid out by hand, the many planets in the many solar systems were created based on a random seed. Most modern agricultural laws block importing random seeds, but we’re in space now. No one can stop us! Take that, Argentina.

In addition to placing the planets, one of the key uses for procedural generation was in creating the planet artwork. We’re excited to be working with some amazing artists on UQM2, but we don’t think they’d be excited if we asked them to paint 10,000* different planets.

*This is not the actual number of planets in UQM2. Unless it is, but we actually don’t know it yet. That would be pretty funny if I guessed it right.

One of our artists, Damon Czanik, dug up a tool which provided a proof-of-concept for procedural generation of planets. We think we could fit these into the UQM2 universe artistically and technically, and we even found some seeds that made worlds that felt like UQM planet types. You can even go play with the tool, picking from some predefined UQM planet type seeds we like, or just trying your own seeds!

While it was a pretty good proof of concept, we knew there was more work to extend it. 

Planting the Seed(s)

Here’s what this tool shows so far:

  • It already generates planet surfaces with pretty diverse looks, but it doesn’t make gas giants.
  • Each seed always produces the same result, but it isn’t controlled in any way by something like a planet type or other parameterized knobs from our game universe (e.g. atmosphere, temperature, etc.).
  • It generates textures which can be used as flat surfaces.
  • It generates textures of different sizes, which might be able to support mip-mapping, but otherwise doesn’t have a notion of level-of-detail for that purpose.
  • It does not support optional, physical features like craters or rings.

UQM2 Goals

Using this tool as a starting point, we wanted to set some goals for how it could work in UQM2:

  • It should be able to generate many varieties of the UQM2 planet types, like the ones we know from UQM such as Emerald Worlds, Treasure Worlds, Gas Giants.
  • Each planet should be different, but exactly reproducible and recognizable by type.
  • Optional physical features can be present, like impact craters, storms on gas giants, and planetary rings.
  • Ideally, we can unwrap the orbital planet into a flat surface to use as a planetside experience.
  • Ideally, we could also use the planet being generated in interplanetary and melee views, with level-of-detail techniques to make it look acceptable when rendered at a smaller size.

UQM Planet Types

We have some modern, hand-painted concepts of UQM planet types courtesy of Damon that showcase the kinds of things we’d like to procedurally generate.

Emerald Planet concept from The Ur-Quan Masters 2 by Damon Czanik
Emerald World Concept
Treasure Planet concept from The Ur-Quan Masters 2 by Damon Czanik
Treasure World Concept
Gas Giant concept from The Ur-Quan Masters 2 by Damon Czanik
Gas Giant Concept

Discover Strange New Worlds

While creating hundreds of thousands of different planets is clearly doable, we know it can be better. The team often refers to planets as characters, where you get an evocative experience from meeting someone new, someone familiar that you like (or dread), or want to learn more about them. More than just interesting art, UQM planet types are emotional set-pieces for players to relate to.

One of our big questions is how we can get lots of our unique, fantastically or scientifically inspired planets that have their distinct, UQM character. This is where you come in!

The team has started with this general approach. Do you:

  • Have experience working with procedural generation or shaders and want to contribute to solving some of our UQM2 goals?
  • Want to make the experience of using this toy more fun in a web browser?
  • Know absolutely nothing technical but just want to show off cool-looking planets you were able to make?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, please check out the running tool, our GitHub repo, and join us in Discord if you have ideas! If you have an even better idea than what we’re starting with, we want to know that too. 

In the past, we’ve opened up our tools with distributions of Simple and our Melee prototype. They’re essential building blocks of UQM2, but they’ve been released as a way of sharing our output. The planet tool is a big step forward since we’re sharing some of our graphical techniques and able to support community input! Our goal is to collaborate on this, improve it together, and share it with everyone as part of UQM2 and beyond.

Exploring the Planets 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.

While we would normally avoid trading such incomplete information, we understand Humans to enjoy mystery and intrigue. We have repaired the document to readability as best we can, and as you are an InfoRelay Prime trader in good standing, we are delivering it as-is with no guarantee of veracity.

We hope that these sentences fascinate you. Thank you for your continued willingness to engage with our services!

With sincerest wishes that you always meet your quarterly guidance,

Trade Master Burnt Umber
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.

Studio Updates – End of Year 2022 Read More »

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!)

30 Years of The Ur-Quan Masters Read More »

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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