Hey crew! It has been almost a year since our last update, which is really sad. The scope of the game had become overwhelming and as a result progress dropped down significantly. However, the good news as that the new build is now out for you to try and it is packed full of very meaningful changes. The biggest change is an attempt to scope down the game into something more manageable, which is to remove the sailing experience in favor for a port that is static between adventures. The openness of the previous sailing experience was cool, but it ultimately left an overwhelming amount of work in order to make it crisp and fun. The port is much more manageable for such a small team as ours. Furthermore, the port adds a really nice pacing to the game since you have an upgrade phase between every event you go on. This matches some of my favorite games such as "XCOM" and "Darkest Dungeon" which mix a high level strategy layer and a tactical layer.
Another big change is the addition of a bunch of new enemy types. Kurt created a bunch of new sprites which can be layered over our basic human model. Each of the new enemy types has new tactics which makes them different to fight. We will be working them into events over the next releases.
New Enemy Types
Lastly, I have added in a leveling system for the crew. They can now level up from 1 to 5 by earning experience in events. Each time that they level up their health and abilities become stronger. This will help the crew's abilities to scale along with the quality of items as the game gets harder at higher levels.
Go ahead and download the latest version here if you want to give it try...
Hey Guys! We have a new build up and ready for people to try out. The main theme of this build is creating a much larger variety of enemy types to fight against. There are a bunch of new enemies in this build but more importantly the framework has been put in to make adding more enemy types much faster in the future. So, we will continue to enrich this over the next few builds. You can try out the build at this link...
Also, if you want to see me get creamed by the new Demon Boss then here is the let's play :-).
The change list for this build is below...
---- v0.22 ----
- New fire demon
enemy type
- New alpha demon
enemy type
- New demon boss
enemy type
- New ice skeleton
enemy type
- New fire skeleton
enemy type
- New skeleton lord
enemy type
- New poison
skeleton enemy type
- New fishman alpha
enemy type
- New fishman guru
enemy type
- New alpha sea
golem enemy type
- New poison
skeleyon enemy type
- Improved random
variation for caves, crypts and dungeons
Hey everyone! The latest build is up for people to try out. The changes in this build are pretty dramatic because I decided to take a step back and objectively evaluate if the game mechanics were working out we had hoped. After doing this, there were a couple of design choices that I decided to change. You can grab the build at the link below...
The most major design changes were the following...
We are removing the action controls and only keeping the strategy controls. They were making the game too chaotic and preventing us from really reaching the tactical depth we wanted
We changed items to be procedurally generated instead of hand crafted. The loot game just wasn't interesting enough and this has helped to spice it up.
There are a bunch of other changes involving how abilities work and a ton of new abilities. They are all directed to make the game more tactical and cerebral. Check you the play through that I recorded below or just try it yourself by downloading!
Here is the more complete change list...
---- v0.21 ----
- Reworked controls
to remove direct control and focus on the tactical element of the game
- Abilities now have
a cast time associate with them which can be interrupted
- Enemy humans now
use abilities against you based on their class
- Class abilities
are now randomly selected from a small set
- New channeling
type of abilities
- Items are now
procedurally generated with various rarities
Hey Everyone! This is just a short post to let anyone interested know that I have open sourced all of my previous games (not including Privateers) onto GitHub. This includes Legends of Descent which is one of the most popular RPG games on the Windows Phone platform still today. If you are interested in game development then feel free to go and check them out.
Hey Guys! We have a new build ready and this time we are trying something new. Instead of a web build we are putting the PC build up on indieDB. You can check it out here...
We continue to focus on adding fun content to the game with this release. One of the biggest additions is that we have put in a dungeon generator which we are using to create various crypts and tombs which you can take your crew in to explore. They are dangerous places to venture, but the rewards could be great!
Exploring tombs is perfectly safe!
Beyond this, we have put together a bunch of quest chains using the new system from the last release. These give more of a sense of direction while you are playing the game. Stay tuned for us to add a lot more of these in future releases. Another important addition to the event content is that we are working to make reputation have a bigger impact in the game. A example of this is that if you have bad reputation, navy ships will now chase you instead of pirate ships. So, be careful about your choices.
Be careful about running into this guy!
Another thing to look forward to is the new demon enemy type. Kurt recently put this guy together an he looks awesome. They can be pretty hard to handle as well :-).
Demon casting a spell
On a less exciting note, we also had to do a big refactor to change out the plugin we were using for sound effect and music. The one we were using was buggy and we couldn't tolerate it any more. The good news is that with this we add a bunch of new sound effects which really help to crisp up the feel of the game.
As always, enjoy the build and please give us your feedback!
---- v0.20 ----
- New dungeon
generator
- Lots of new
dungeon events
- Several new quest
chains
- Many bug fixes
- New demon enemy
type
- Lots of new sound
effects
- Navy ships now
chase you if you have bad reputation
After crunching furiously for the past few weeks, we have finally submitted Privateers to the "Level Up" contest put on by Intel. If you are interested, you can check out the contest page here...
The main focus over the past few weeks has been polishing things up and working out as many of the bugs as we can. Also, we added touch controls since that was a focus for the intel contest. However, there was a lot of other work as well including adding a new threat system to the AI as well as completely reworking how quests are written into the game. You can play the build that we submitted for the contest here...
Hey everyone! I am super excited about showing off this new build. There has been a ton of progress in the game over the last month and I think you guys are going to like it. The main focus has been on combat improvements, UI improvements and rendering improvements. You can check out the build here (there are special buttons to try out some of the boss combat mechanics)...
The most obvious changes are the improvements in the battle mechanics. The enemies now use area of effect attacks which give a warning before they fire. This allows the player take more tactical actions by positioning their crew to reduce the impact of the attacks. Both the Minotaur and the Kraken bosses make heavy use of this. The Kraken also has some new custom AI which allows it to be an interesting fight on your ship as it attacks from different areas.
Another major portion of work was focused on improving the UI. There were several goals that we wanted to achieve with this work...
Create a custom theme which helps tie the games visuals together
Improve usability by adding some additional features for controlling your crew's AI actions and selecting crew effectively
Reduce the amount of chrome on the screen to prevent it from getting into the way.
This work is still in progress, but you can get a feel for the changes in the latest build. We should mostly finalize on it by the next build.
Example of new UI
Lastly but not least, there was a major effort around rendering optimization. This was a bit more technical, but basically what happened is that we were using a custom sprite rendering system due to the large number of sprites on the screen. However, we refactored this to unity sprites which make it much more efficient. Furthermore, we now have much more control over sorting order of the sprites which is great because it allow us to layer the various particle effects in with the sprites which we couldn't do before.
As always, thanks for your support and let us know what you think in the comments!
