Howdy, it’s Jack again!

A part of the game that is still in its infancy is naval exploration and combat. We’ve had a lot of ideas we will see come to fruition over the course of development, but we’ve made a lot of strides to turn what would be a simple world map into a whole other phase of gameplay.

Ship Movement

In Pirates! style, we wanted to add a naval combat module to the overworld. What we didn’t want to do, however, is make a really clunky, slow-paced, and technical style of ship-to-ship combat (Like the Pirates! model). In the demo, we enabled the ability to fire cannonballs from the ship as soon as it is repaired, but in the full release, we will probably require The Captain to arm the ship with cannons one by one, as the M.S. Tradewind begins primarily as a trade ship.

Naval Combat

Crew members grant special abilities to the M.S.Tradewind and will grant advantages in combat and other operations. For instance, Crow allows other ships’ allegiance and hull integrity to be visible at sea.

In the near future, we plan to have a module in place that allows you to board other ships and fight via hand to hand combat for a higher risk-to-reward method of play. We built a concept of this but it just wasn’t ready to release for the public demo.

Ship-To-Ship Melee

There will also be other stationary targets such as forts and cities that will be destructible and/or explorable. The idea is to have an area which looks one way when you visit it intact, and another way after it is in ruin. Ideally doing this will affect some kind of influence you have politically, but the specifics of that aren’t ironed out completely yet.

There should be lots of fun to be had at the helm of the M.S. Tradewind as well as exploring the world by land.

At The Helm

Well that about wraps it up for me today. Thanks to all of you for sticking with us and for helping spread the word!

-Jack