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Indie Caribbean City Builder 'Sugarmill' Aims for Launch Q2 2016!

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The past month or so has been a bit of a blur for me, getting back to work from the holidays, and taking over coordinating the new QA Tester position in the Hearts of Oak Dev team. Those on top of my usual duties as an Admin and looking up news posts for the front page here and for Twitter, hasn't left me a whole lot of free time lately. As consequence of course, I am more likely to miss it when cool things happen. One such thing I missed back in late December was the posting of the first episode of a DevBlog for a new city building game set in the Caribbean during the late 15th and early 16th century's! The game is called Sugarmill and it is being developed by Aatlantis Studios.



I did a bit more digging and found out the game was actually announced a couple of months before, back in October along with that video. But the game concept it's self had been under development for over a year. Quite impressive when you consider that Aatlantis Studios is actually a development team of one single person. A college student from Ontario, Canada with a growing family to support! That video looked pretty impressive to me, so I did a bit more digging, and the led me to the developers web page at : SugarMill I wasn't able to find his name, but he goes by the handle naaturaz over on IndieDB.

The game is being developed using Unity, and he is aiming for a release in Q2 of 2016 and has been approved as a concept for Steam's Greenlight. . The basic premise of the game is as follows :

During the 17th trip to the new indies when entering the Caribbean Sea, a storm awaits and takes your ship in its wrath. After a few days waiting to see land, finally your crew and you find yourselves in this lush green island. You must now take charge of this land and make your people thrive or all will die.

After some hard work you have managed to put together a few shacks and storage for some of the goods left by the ship wreck. You can reconnect with the Crown to find a way back or MAYBE you want to settle in this lush warm land and make your people thrive!

SugarMill is a sandbox city building game based in the late 15 century and early 16th century when the new indies were discovered. You are going be playing within the Caribbean Sea.

Once you have a solid economy and enough resources you can create a port. You will be able to place import and export orders thru the dock. However, one order can take a while to arrive since your port will not be known at all. In the game you will have to deal with the "Port Reputation" which is basically what traders and merchants have heard about your port. Hence would it make good business sense to stop at your port to buy something cheap or sell goods. In the beginning you will only receive small boats with small amounts of trade volume however if you keep a steady supply of a product your port will slowly gain a better reputation, that is when the fun starts. As your port starts to gain momentum the incoming fleet of ships coming in and out of your port will change the pace of your economy.

At the same time you will have to deal with the "Pirates Attacks", an indicator will be present to shown the risk your town faces of a "Pirate Attack". You will be able to lower this risk by building military forts, jails and others structures. You will become more and more engaged in the game as you have to manage your increasing wealth accounts as well as maintaining your town safe.

Pirates? In the Caribbean?? I'm in! Since sugar was definitely one of the main economic engines behind the development of the Caribbean, it is of course going to be in Hearts of Oak as well, though not quite like it is presented here. I am curious to see what the final results of this game will be. So far, I am quite impressed by what I have seen and read about this game! You can read Sugarmill's DevBlog #1 HERE, and Devblog #2 HERE!

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