Hello everyone!

We, the SPirateS crew, are working on SPirateS, a sandbox game that’s all about roaming seas and space, defeating other pirates and conquering towns in a hack’n’slash action experience with RPG elements.

Here, we will describe the process of creating such a large-scope game, failings and anecdotes during development.

Early Development

Originally, we spent a good two years developing our core engine from scratch because … reasons. In fact, we created a highly-scalable engine on c++ based on SDL that simulates things in a universe-wide scale. Of course, weather effects are included, inducing lightning and waves.

Early prototypes were even more horrible than the current state of the game, with frequent crashes and appalling programmer art everywhere. Not to mention aliasing and shader issues. However, putting some solid effort and using some nice feedback from friends that volunteered to test the game, we managed to improve things at a point where the core mechanics and engagement were present.

Just to take note of how strange things get when developing your own engine, we once had a bug that crashed the game if the player closed the inventory with the mouse over a timed condition and then opened it again after the condition had gone away and the mouse had not moved in the meanwhile. You can bet it took a lot of effort to figure that out. XD

After fixing everything we discovered, we embarked upon creating basic content, such as ships, stars, planets, items and towns, as well as devising the basic world background story. We overdid it a “little”, making large swaths of content that needed to be updated as the engine progressed (a beginner’s mistake in game development). However, we were reasonably pleased with the end-result, as the feeling of character and ship customization came across nicely.

Later Changes

Unfortunately, making a space exploration simulation game is not an easy task. There are levels upon levels of detail that needed to be addressed. For example, seabeds could also be reached, so we needed to also create appropriate content there and find a way for it to not bog down performance.

Afterwards, we also realized that the original system where the player knocked on each house for people to come out interact with them appeared shallow. Hence, we introduced building interiors, adding another layer of depth.

Finally, after testing a lot, we came to the realization that combat felt too hack’n’slashy. You would eat a lot of food to gain high health regeneration and would only move left and right while hacking at enemies with your weapon of choice. Ranged weapons are also a viable and more interesting tactic, but the mentioned method would simply be too effective.

Therefore, we tried to vary combat with a couple of simple mechanics that ended up working really well; first, we made boxes scattered throughout towns to restrict horizontal movement and then added a cap on how much food the player could simultaneously consume. This made fleeing against large groups of enemies to handle them individually close to mandatory. It also made crew a more vital part of gameplay, as recruiting people now requires less effort during combat.

Alpha Release

At that point in development, we decided that the game was reasonably playable. Thus, after a few more months of fixing bugs here and there and making art more presentable, we decided to present it as an early alpha version, to obtain user feedback as we continue to improve upon it.

So, here we are!