Fred and Dan chat with Ken Levine about his leadership on the BioShock series, plus his storytelling on System Shock 2, Freedom Force, and Thief: The Dark Project. Ken shares his love for The Ur-Quan Masters and Super Melee, and explains the subtle art of game feel and centering the player's story.
Learn more about Ken ...
2024-02-13 19:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Fred and Dan chat with Tim Cain about his career in games, including his leadership on Fallout, Arcanum, The Outer Worlds, and more. Tim explains why The Ur-Quan Masters is one of his favorite role-playing games, and shares his insights on telling an interactive story and finding a game's tone.
Check out Tim Cain'...
2024-02-13 18:15:11 +0000 UTC View Post
If you’re reading this and haven’t played The Ur-Quan Masters, first… please tell us how you found us. Second, don’t worry. Everyone on Earth will be able to play Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters on 2024-02-12 20:18:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Today’s episode of our dev diary is about how we’re generating our procedural planet art. It’s a big task, but we want to share the journey so far and highlight some of the amazing work we’ve been doing in what is our biggest, most collaborative undertaking so far.
Our process for planet art is following th...
2024-01-30 00:05:00 +0000 UTC View PostThank you to everyone supporting us here on Patreon. You should have received a note in your inbox from the team, and we wanted to share one more little thing.
With the leverage you've provided, we've twisted some bureaucratic arms and extracted the following report from the New Alliance of Free Stars Security Council. ...
2023-12-25 21:35:10 +0000 UTC View PostGrab 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 Dicken...
2023-12-21 20:41:02 +0000 UTC View PostWe really miss being together with our live development streams. They’re on hold for a lot of good reasons, including the delicious spoilers we’re drowning in. In the meantime, we wanted to bring something fun back for the mandated time of seasonal festivities. Please celebrate with us, or else.
This month,...
2023-12-04 22:33:22 +0000 UTC View PostLast year during November, we celebrated 30 years of The Ur-Quan Masters! This year, it’s not quite as big and round as 30, but it is 31. We wanted to have a quieter month but still celebrate the legacy of UQM and the wonderful community we have. We had lots of ideas! There were going to be balloons, dogs, balloon doggies. ...
2023-11-30 23:06:07 +0000 UTC View PostWe wanted to share a little bit about the technical processes we are using to bring ships to life in Free Stars: Children of Infinity. If you’ve seen our development streams, most of our visible development effort has been in design, and we’ve recently been hard at work painting layers of content over it.
L...
2023-10-31 22:16:04 +0000 UTC View Post
We had a number of requests for a full resolution version of our Free Stars site art! Please take and enjoy this awesome image by our artist, Robert Mauritson. Make it a cool wallpaper for your desk, turn it into graffiti (we do not endorse actual crimes), or just zoom infinitely into the pixels for your entertainment.
...
2023-10-27 00:39:27 +0000 UTC View PostIn our bubbling cauldron which is the potion that will be UQM2, we have been adding the odds and ends we need for the game. Design and audiovisual content are like ingredients which add foundational magic but are there to be enjoyed later. Sometimes, though, we add a big, phosphorus ingredient, spilling out some awesome theat...
2023-10-24 22:40:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Fred and Dan had the opportunity to sit down with Brendan Sinclair of GamesIndustry.biz and talk about our history of switching technologies, losing ownership, and our change to Godot. There's a little bit of our own histories and insider experience in there. 2023-10-03 18:13:54 +0000 UTC View Post
A little bit of background: when we charted our course for UQM2 and Pistol Shrimp, one of our guiding principles was “to own what we make.” That had a lot of meanings, but it directly pointed to building our own technology, and leveraging other open-source technologies. Fred was passionate a...
2023-09-20 22:12:14 +0000 UTC View PostGreetings, 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, an...
2023-09-12 22:17:01 +0000 UTC View PostDid 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.
... 2023-08-22 21:44:59 +0000 UTC View Post
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 procedur...
2023-07-17 23:17:05 +0000 UTC View PostEngaging 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 arti...
2023-07-06 21:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostIt's been a long, long time coming but we're finally releasing new tools and content for our extremely patient and supportive public. If you've never dived into our in-development development tool, Simple, or tried to check out and run our Super Melee prototype, now is a great time to give it a test if you're...
2023-03-27 22:47:10 +0000 UTC View PostFrom: 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 Val...
2023-03-08 23:52:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings to all of our wonderful Patreon supporters! We wanted to formally announce that Pistol Shrimp — and me, Dan, in particular — will be taking a break for the holidays. I'll be gone from December 15th until January 15th, so we will be a little quiet during this time. You will likely still find some action in our
For our 30th Anniversary Celebration, we have an additional, special episode of the Pistol Shrimp podcast with UQM illustrator George Barr. George was responsible for many of the iconic, physical illustrations which would then become digitized for use in UQM. Beyond UQM, George contributed artwork to science fiction and fanta...
2022-11-30 22:46:31 +0000 UTC View PostFor our 30th Anniversary Celebration, we have a special episode of the Pistol Shrimp podcast with none other than Erol Otus. Erol was responsible for several creative parts of The Ur-Quan Masters – art, sound, writing, and voice – but was primarily responsible for creating physical and digital paintings of the various ali...
2022-11-30 15:32:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello Hunams! Save the date and time for our fantastic, amazing, wonderful live event for the 30 year anniversary of The Ur-Quan Masters. Pistol Shrimp is excited to have x33n hosting us at https://twitch.tv/x33n on November 30th starting at 1pm PST (4pm EST). Mor...
2022-11-25 19:08:42 +0000 UTC View PostHappy 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 2022-11-02 00:22:25 +0000 UTC View Post
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...
2022-10-20 23:55:12 +0000 UTC View PostHowdy, 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.<...
2022-08-22 20:51:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello Frungy Fans! Dan here again. While the sport of kings is still a contender for all of our attention, another fun thing we're working on is Melee. Did you know you can get Simple and play around with our Melee prototype right now? You can! In fac...
2022-07-25 19:06:05 +0000 UTC View Post
In our work on UQM2, we have been doing a lot of archaeological digs – if that is something one can even do in space – to reveal what really went on when the player wasn't looking in UQM. We are pleased to share this n...
2022-07-18 20:07:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Simple's scripting language is great for creating tons of dynamic, interactive gameplay. But what about parts of the game that benefit from visual layout, like the static starmap from UQM1? We walk through how a designer (or modder!)...
2022-07-15 18:38:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Welcome to the club! We wanted to do a demonstration of our rarely-shown Game Viewer and our never-shown Chmmr art. We cover Damon's concept art, technology for normal mapping, our game viewer with VFX, and how the player will experience view-relevant information with the Game Viewer.
2022-06-30 23:03:18 +0000 UTC View Post
