Open Sourced Games

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.

Dungeon Crawl

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

- Refactoring of event saving to be more stable

- Refactored sound and music to use a new pluggin

Level Up

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...

https://software.intel.com/sites/campaigns/levelup2016/

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...

Build v0.19

(Best with Internet Explorer)

If you are interested in how quests are now written, I made an instructional video here...

As always, thanks for playing and let us know what you think of the new build!

Attack of the Kraken!

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)...

Build 0.18

(Best with Internet Explorer)

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...

1. Create a custom theme which helps tie the games visuals together
2. Improve usability by adding some additional features for controlling your crew's AI actions and selecting crew effectively
3. 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!

More Content!

Hey everyone! Today we are back with a new build which has a bunch of new content in it for you to enjoy. There are two main themes to the work that happened over the last month. The first is putting our new event editor to good use and building a whole bunch of new interesting events. The second is to do a fairly large overhaul of the sailing experience in the game. You can try out the new build here...

Build 0.17

(Runs best on Internet Explorer)

With regards to new events there is are a ton of more interesting ones that we are dumping into the game (and will continue to add). You will notice a lot more branching in the event choices then we used to have since it is much easier to manage in the new tools. Furthermore, we put int he basics of a reputation system which adds a new dimension to how events can play out.

Arena fight event (with dev art still)

The other major focus was how sailing takes place in the game. We have changed it from the turn based system that we had to a semi-real time system that is more similiar to how the action gameplay works. Also, there has been a significant improvement in the AI for the various ships and ports. They no longer just wander around aimlessly. Merchants will go from port to port and Pirates will hunt you down. There are also Navy and Fishing ships which have their own AI patterns. We will continue to expand on this to make the island map seem much more alive.

As always, let us know what you think about the new build in the comments!

Event Editor

We are finally back with some new stuff to show. Most of the past few months has been spent recuperating. But, we have now picked the pace back up and have something to show for it, which is our new event editor.

Event in the making

Previously, all of our events were written in a custom XML format which was hard to read and easy to make mistakes in. As a result, I (Sam) was the only person who had ever successfully written one. So, it was clear that we needed to spend the time to make a tool to streamline the process. Below is a video that I made which teaches how to use the new tool if you are interested.

As always, leave your thoughts in the comments below. If you are interested in getting a copy of this tool and creating some events yourself then let me know and I will pass it along to you. Hopefully the next game update will have lots of new content to play around with now that this is ready!

SIX Report

Hey everyone! SIX was a blast and is now over. Thanks to everyone who came by and said hi and played Privateers. It was really fun to discuss the game with people. There were a lot of players who had as much enthusiasm about the idea as we do which is hugely encouraging.

We put together a special demo build for SIX which had a bit more linear of a story line in order to show off as many interesting features in as short a time as possible. If you want to give that build a try, we now have it online here...

SIX Demo Build

Since this was my (Sam) first time showing a game at a convention, there was a ton of stuff to learn which was great. One of the things that I quickly learned was that it is hard to judge the difficulty of the game as the developer. For me, the demo seemed a bit on the easy side. I was able to win every time that I played without much challenge. However, with all the players who came through and played it only ONE of them was able to beat it. So, apparently the game is harder than I thought :-).

Privateers booth ready to show at SIX

Another issue was the quick approach-ability of the game. I noticed that the games that use Xbox controllers and had local multiplayer on demo were by far the most approachable for people wandering the expo. However, a rogue-like game with crew management has a reasonable learning curve by design, which makes it much harder for someone to just sit down and enjoy for 5-10 minutes of play. Kurt and I are thinking about how to improve this with better tutorial features and things like that, but it is just a hard problem to solve.

Privateers Banner

There was a lot of great feedback for the game that Kurt and I will be picking up over the next few months. The main areas of focus that I think became clear directions for improvement are the following...

1. Improve the AI for crew and enemies
2. Improve the UI to be easier to use and more pretty
3. Add controller support
4. More content!
5. There were a few annoying bugs that showed up that we need to fix

Everyone enjoying the games at SIX

Overall, it was a really great experience. I really enjoyed meeting a bunch of other developers who were showing there, talking to gamers who enjoy similar games to me and getting a ton of great feedback. However, I will say that showing by myself for 12 hours long was EXHAUSTING and I think I am going to have to sleep in for a week to recover!