The Map

Screenies!

So things are starting to come together, and I think it is time that we showed off some bits of the actual gameplay. Quite a lot of stuff is structurally in place, and we know roughly what we want to achieve in the gameplay, but really everything is still changing pretty rapidly, so here are some things we know!

The World

The world will always be randomly generated for each game, and will consist of multiple types of terrain that allow it to perform different types of things. Obviously we have water, which is where you can navigate your ship.

Just because you’re a pirate in some tropical climate doesn’t mean that there isn’t a night time, so you will see the passage of time into night. During night we so far have ‘ghostly’ ships that appear (and will fight you) but the intention is to get more night specific content.

Pirates aren’t just dangerous on the water in their big ships, they also have cutlasses to go cutting up scurvy sea dogs on land, so you can disembark from your ship and have a wonder around the lands. We have also added treasure to the land, where ‘x’ marks the spot of course, but we reckon there is a lot more land based pirate shenanigans to come.

Battles

It wouldn’t be a pirate simulator without epic sea battles would it? So once you have come across a ship you want to take on you can challenge it to an epic, winner-takes-all, battle.

There is a relative concept of levelling, which is based upon how good your crew is, so the plan is to invest some mechanics into training your crew or finding new members (and having them die horribly). You are able to determine which task, whether it be ‘shoot’, ‘defend’ or ‘steer’, each crew member performs and their attributes dictate how much that helps when you attack, or defend against attacks. If a crew ‘shoots’ this will send a cannonball hurtling towards the enemy, so be sure to pick crew with high ‘atk’ values and ‘acc’ ensures that they are accurate (it is easy to miss!). Having a crew member ‘defend’ will mitigate some of the damage incurred when an enemy successfully hits you with their cannonballs so the ‘def’ attribute should be high. Finally a crew member who is told to ‘steer’ will increase the ships overall evasion, based on how good their ‘eva’ stat is, meaning enemies cannonballs are less likely to hit, it also boosts the ‘acc’ of attacking crew members.

The most important thing is to make choices quick and get off as many shots on the enemy as you can. All of the decisions currently are in real-time but it might be that we implement a Final Fantasy style ‘active-battle system’ which basically pauses the action when you have a decision to make. Though I quite like it frantic at the moment!

Towns

Within the world there are also lots of towns dotted about and this will be how you get certain upgrades to your ship and crew, as well as a good way to make money. Your ship has a hold, and you can decide to buy whatever from a town to take to another town to trade at a higher, or lower price. Each town has it’s own economy, and in future will react to supply and demand. There will also be other ships trading in towns so it might be that you end up with a lot of wenches in an economy that has a high demand and low supply, or too many wenches when demand is low and supply is cheap!

Coming Up

We are concentrating on a few system issues, trying to get some of the renderers to run at reliable frame rates because they are a bit all over the place. There is also a working prototype for how NPC ships go from port to port (using a pathfinder) which will be integrated into a wider piece of work to get the town economies working properly.

There is also more work to get the battles working a bit less frantically, and also the ship/crew member level progression that comes as a result of defeating an enemy (as well as booty, gotta earn that loot!). After all of that is in place I reckon we will have our first public release and see what the world tells us to do next… what do you reckon world!? Comment below!

Sea-Men