Code twice, publish once
Ahoy all!
Been a spell since I had the time to come back up for a post. Between art, coordinating the team, and restarting my bilge puzzle I`ve been busy. Quick updates: We`re up to five on the team, all of us pursuing the dream that is remaking a game we`ve all loved. We`re making good progress on the basics; gunning, carpentry, bilge and sword-fighting are all underway. As you can see above we have decided on a typeface we`ll be using for titles etc. I hope to make some art with it for all those lovely reinforced messages like:
Okay, that last one isn`t in YPP, but I`ll be damned if is not going to feature in ours!
Me myself I`ve restarted my bilge project. Already I`m 1/3 the way through the tutorials and a lot of it I can straight up skip. Its been worth it as decoding my first try would have taken many more months of time and wouldn`t have been as good. I`m also laying the foundations for the UI elements, sounds, music and look so all the puzzles we build will have similar feels.
I am also looking at ways to create a secondary 'bilge' style puzzle. Almost every other puzzle has managed to have a secondary but bilge was apparently left alone. One of my thoughts is to make it more of the standard match 3, with speed and combos being more important than big moves. I`ll get the feel from the community, and build them both for now. Here's a quick screen shot of my progress so far:
I know it looks like colorblind argyle but bear with me. I also want to redo a lot of the art to make it better.
Its tricky re-envisioning some of these to fit a phones 16:9 format, but I`m sure we`ll manage. We`re also going to code in multiple ways to control, from fingers to tapping controls and of course the classics for our PC players like myself ;).
Some exciting things we`re working towards: New moves in swordfighting; now you can fight dirty with moves like pocket sand! Blind all who are attacking you for a few moments! We`ll have to see how it plays out, but its designed to impede players and bots ganging up too much.
A few of the first drafts for the SF art: 
We are still tracking for a Alpha status as of the end of the year. The plan is to then go through a few Betas till we publish near the end of '22. If I can get some publishers on the hook and a full team we may be able to do so even sooner.
I`ve also made the call that we will be largely redoing the swords themselves. A few will remain the same, but I want to add in a whole variety of weapons from axes to harpoons and other things. Each 'group' will have a pattern but similar weapons will be just for looks.
We are still tracking for a Alpha status as of the end of the year. The plan is to then go through a few Betas till we publish near the end of '22. If I can get some publishers on the hook and a full team we may be able to do so even sooner.
This is a harsh criticism, steel yer balls.
ReplyDeleteAs a 26-year-old gamer, I feel that there are quite a lot of red flags from my first impressions of reading the blog.
Firstly, steampunk airship pirates is a hard sell, it’s VERY unrelatable, I cannot imagine for the life of me what kind of world a floaty-island steampunk society would be like, let alone a pirate society.
Why are we in the Air? Exploded world? Magic Crystals? Are there regular-water pirates underneath us? Is there nothing there and we just fall to the steadily increasing air pressure? Is there a plot-convenient death barrier? The setting is confusing.
(personal) The graphics look like Runescape 3 and it gives me PTSD. While it works, It never really immersed me and is unnecessarily GPU intensive, and honestly, I hate it and there are rarely good games with it. Animations are difficult and lackluster, but prove me wrong.
Magic crystals are kind of a cop-out lore-wise, you won’t find a community of adults bonding a game around… magic crystals… unless it’s Final Fantasy… and that requires magic, not steampunk.
In a world of machinery, why do I need to manually load a cannon? Or manually sail? Or Manually do anything at all? Does it not rob the purposefulness of doing puzzles? And sword fighting? Is that really how people fight in this world? What about guns? Falling to our deaths? Pushing people overboard? There are a lot of questions and inconsistencies.
Conclusion: In my own honest opinion, the concept is unrelatable, confusing, un-immersive, weak lore, and is contradictory.
Sorry for the harsh criticism.
And here are some ideas maybe:
Exploration of “the lower layers” is a very enticing concept, I love exploration. (like sea monster hunting)
Battle Navigation in 2D but a “top” and “bottom” layer. Or maybe even a “middle layer”, will need testing, or just keep it 2D idk.
Gunfights?
You better get some good sound design, puzzle pirates isn’t puzzle pirates without the ship creaking and the dockyard ambiance.
PS. I’m looking back after writing this and re-reading the Reddit/blog and maybe I’m wrong and the game might work, but I won’t change what my initial thoughts were and I hope you guys make a great game.
Thank you very much