Studio Updates - End of Year 2023

Grab your festive drink, warm your feet by the Druuge furnace, and sit down for our seasonal end of year update. 2023 was a big year for us – 1 bigger than 2022, to be precise – with some unexpected turns, twists, and folds.

We’re winding down this year to start on some new, exciting things for 2024, so, in Dickensian style, let us walk for a moment with the spirits of the past, present, and future and hopefully scare a rich person into giving us some money.

The Present - Studio Holiday

Pistol Shrimp is “closing” for a week from December 25th until January 2nd for some holiday break time. Since we have no physical office, Dan will just be locking a small box in his closet which contains the keys to his work computer. Don’t be surprised if you still see us lurking around on the internet, as Dan is not going galavanting anywhere this year, but instead retreating into a vow of silence to protect Fred’s remaining sanity.

We do have one special holiday gift coming over the break as a thank you to our Patreon supporters, though. Be on the lookout!

The Past - 2023 In Review

We set out our goals for 2023 in last year’s blog post. We didn’t nail all of them, but it’s nice to look back and see where we succeeded and where we had challenges.

For Free Stars: Children of Infinity

• We went from our working title (The Ur-Quan Masters 2) to our real name, Free Stars: Children of Infinity, and launched https://freestarsgame.com as its official home.
• We entered production, where we had a firm enough set of solutions for how we would be making what we wanted to make, not just thinking about what we could want to make.
• We released the Procedural Planet Generator which was the gateway for getting some community members involved with helping us create our real, in-engine procedural planet art solutions. They’ve made some awesome planets and are still making more.
• We finished the story map for Free Stars: Children of Infinity, complete with a strong beginning, middle, and end (no spoilers, but we’re really excited about the final act). It will continue to evolve as we implement it in the game, and we love where it’s leading.
• We know who ten of our new aliens are. We’re working with artists and writers on fleshing them out.
• After living with Dan’s “art” for too long, we finally have support from artists building our actual in-game art, especially focused on ships and planetside.
• We finished working on our proof-of-concept viewer and pivoted to using the Godot Engine as our target viewer to represent the audiovisual experience of the gameplay we had built in Simple.
• I (Dan) played the adventure game for a solid five minutes, with music, sound, art, and UI, and I had a ton of fun. It is actually a massive, challenging milestone to hit, especially for a multifaceted game like ours. It makes the game world we’re manufacturing feel truly believable as I got to actually use the starmap and experienced the feeling – as a player – of entering orbit at an unknown (even to me!) planet before landing on its surface.

For Pistol Shrimp

• Paul and Ken moved on from Pistol Shrimp, having completed their work on the project and the industry, respectively. This was a big change-up, and we had to spend some time recalibrating our work.
• We announced the re-release of Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters on Steam.
• While we had to stop our twice-weekly development streams, they also came back for some more sporadic showcases, including an overview of our work with Godot. Most recently, we used the channel to host talks with other developers:
  • Brian Bucklew and Jason Grinblat from Freehold Games
  • Charlie Cleveland from Unknown Worlds
• We continued to be flabbergasted (adj: lipids confusingly quivering with love and excitement) by the support from our amazing community on Patreon. Seriously, it means a lot to us, and we are still entirely self-funded with your support. In a challenging year for video game funding, we value our ability to maintain creative control without compromise, and we couldn’t do it without you.

What’s Next for 2024?

If our crystal ball from last year was ultimately flawed, the one from this year will certainly have some imperfections. We want to let you know at least a slice of what to expect and what we’re planning for next year:

• Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Launch: UQM will re-launch on Steam. We will announce a release date soon, and there will be a *party*.
• Free Stars: Children of Infinity Details: We’ll be revealing more details for our forthcoming game, including, but not limited to: teasers of new story, characters, and gameplay; its planned release date; and more of what to expect from the final product.
• More Development Streams: We really, really miss doing open development streams with the community. We want to do it more because we like having you involved (and we think it makes the game better), especially when more details are announced and various cats are out of various bags.
• More Developer Chats & The Pistol Shrimp Podcast: You saw a couple we did this year, live, but did you know we have done a few more in pre-recorded sessions and are planning on doing even more as time goes on? We’ll be releasing these next year and also making them available as part of the old Pistol Shrimp Podcast.
• Godot Viewer for All: Just as we released our toolset, Simple, for people to play with and use to make their own games, we are planning on releasing our Godot viewer, which will enable anyone to use Simple to add art, sound, and more sophisticated interactions to anything they make in Simple.
• Discord Refresh: Yes, we know. The channels make no sense, it’s still called The Ur-Quan Masters 2, and there isn’t a place dedicated to bird photos. We’ll be giving it a fresh coat of paint.

That’s just a glimpse of our plans for next year. We don’t know what the future holds for us, which is part of what makes it exciting, but it also means that we may be surprised. This year was truly full of unexpected challenges, and we are grateful you are all here along for the ride. We hope you’re as excited about our progress as we are.

If you want to know more or get involved, please join us on Patreon, Discord, or Reddit, and be sure to follow us on Twitter (while it still exists) or whatever other social or anti-social places you like (even a mailing list!). Check the full list at https://freestarsgame.com.

Thank you, again, and Happy Holidays from Pistol Shrimp.