Dogar And Kazon

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 here on our blog, 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.

Visit us at pistolshrimpgames.com.

If you have been following our live development streams, you may have caught guest appearances from our full, colorful cast of characters. Sometimes, they’ve been unplanned, like when Paul decided to publicly shame Dan by outgunning him in melee. Other times, they are intentional, like when Fred joins to discuss technical details of our language. In all cases, it is especially fun to have our viewers get involved in the creative process, or at least prompt bad jokes.

This Friday (2/18) at 2pm PT, we will be doing a special version of the stream just focused on that! Lee Hutchinson, who has been assisting with our writing, will be hosting an audience-participation writing session where you, the viewer, will get to contribute to an imaginary alien encounter. We want to guarantee this is entirely spoiler-free, but if you help write something incredible, we also can’t promise it won’t be in the game. If you want to learn a little about our process, possibly contribute actual text to the game, and have some fun, please join us at https://twitch.tv/pebby on Friday.

This is a quick note to say that we are making good progress on the tech and narrative underpinnings of UQM2. Ken Ford and Dan Gerstein have been part of the core team for the last few months. Speaking of Dan, he has an interesting idea! I’ll let him describe it…

Dan here. I got my professional start in games interning for Paul and Fred at Toys for Bob. I was inspired by their spirit of helping, learning, and experimenting -- our UQM2 subreddit is a good example of this spirit in action. Now I want to try a crazy new experiment motivated by those same ideals. Every week, you can watch a live stream of me working on UQM2 for a couple hours. This is not a curated or gussied up show -- it is raw, real game development at a very early and rough stage. It’s going to look a lot like programming (that's mostly what I do) except I will be using the bespoke scripting language Fred has created. Fred will be joining me for this first session, answering questions about his language, and -- if I know Fred -- relentlessly mocking me, my programming, and probably the very reason for my existence. If people enjoy this experiment, I'll be doing this on a regular basis.

We will be starting for now on Friday at 2:00pm PDT (21:00 UTC) at https://twitch.tv/pebby. Please stop by if you’re interested in UQM2, game development, or if you just want to say hi and stare at my screen with me.

Whenever we set out to make a game, we ask ourselves two really basic questions: "Why are we doing this?", and "How do we define success?" So why are we making a sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters? The short answer is "we want to". The more complex answer is that we find ourselves in the joyful position of doing things our own way. Our definition of success is simply to create a sequel that you will love - but of course that's far from simple. That's where your brains and our doing things our own way come in. We are going to try an experiment! We are going to engage the fan community's collective brainpower to help us figure out some of the of the most interesting, most important questions for UQM2.

Our current plan is, each week, to highlight a few questions at https://reddit.com/r/uqm2 and have a dialogue about certain aspects of the game. We'll be checking in mid-week with our own thoughts, and each week we will likely close the old questions, highlight our current thinking based on the discussion, and ask new questions. We'd like to let the community determine questions to discuss as well, so we will even be open to asking questions you'd like us to ask. This subreddit will strictly be for our Q&A format. This process is experimental, so we will almost certainly change and improve how things work over time as we learn together.

After last week's short, cryptic announcement, several of you asked, "Where's the beef?!"  Actually, none of you asked that (sadly, beef-related metaphors have been on the decline), so I will put this in simple, vegan terms: Fred and I have been working on UQM2 full time since Fall of last year.  So far it's just the two of us, with Fred working loooong hours developing a cool new designer-friendly scripting system for gameplay, and me reading old sci-fi, drinking Mai Tais and trying to make something coherent out of almost 30 years of story notes and design sketches. 

Our goal is to create a genuine sequel to the game we last worked-on in early 90’s -- something that feels like a seamless continuation of your best UQM memories.  Selfishly perhaps, we also want to make the game our own way without any bosses, driven only by our own imaginations and that of the UQM community.  To that end, we will soon be opening up a forum where the core UQM2 team, volunteers and fans can discuss, debate and collaborate on the new game.  

We are making real progress, but we still have a long way to go.  We sincerely hope that all of you are up for the journey -- it's going to be a blast!