[WIP] Ships and Scurvy RPG: Feedback appreciated!

[Mask]

Whoa, you really outdid yourself with that trailer, it's great! I'm amazed with how much you've accomplished in such a short time. I'm really looking forward to the game.

 

[Whiskeybarrel Studios]

Haha , somewhere along the line, all realism has gone out of the sailing aspect of the game - the ship sails like a speedboat, it has magical upgrades to its sails, cannons, can be equipped with night-lights and so on - all things that make the game more playable for the audience I'm going for, but won't win me any awards for nautical accuracy, that's for sure. Hearts of Oak have that market cornered anyway ... hehe ...

 

[Whiskeybarrel Studios]

Cheers Mask, that's awesome of you to say so - really helps with the motivation!

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Haha , somewhere along the line, all realism has gone out of the sailing aspect of the game - the ship sails like a speedboat, it has magical upgrades to its sails, cannons, can be equipped with night-lights and so on - all things that make the game more playable for the audience I'm going for, but won't win me any awards for nautical accuracy, that's for sure. Hearts of Oak have that market cornered anyway ... hehe ...

Fun is worth quite a lot.

 

[Whiskeybarrel Studios]

"If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning." - Jules Verne

So it's mid June and long overdue for another Ships and Scurvy game developer diary. It's interesting actually... when you first come up with a game idea, you're bursting with ideas about it and just want to write down as much as you can, sketch everything on paper, tell the whole world about it and so on. I was entirely sure that once I started Ships and Scurvy, I'd write a developer diary at least once a week with updates.

One week becomes two, which becomes a month, and now it's been six weeks. The further along I get into developing the actual game, the less energy I seem to have for doing everything else around the game - the promotion, *the myriad internet forums you're supposed to be engaging the community in and so on. More on this in a little while. Anyway, there's only so much energy to go around , but rest assured, the less frequently I'm updating these developer diaries, the harder I'm actually working on the game and the more I have to show.

So... since the last major update I've knocked off a stack of new features for Ships and Scurvy. I've written up over 44 of the 60 or so island adventure scenarios now. They take a huge chunk of time, because you have to come up with an interesting adventure, 4 possible outcomes and the associated bits of data telling the computer how to reward / punish the crew accordingly. One of the things I noticed while playing through an early prototype of the game was that these adventure scenarios were very entertaining but a little 'text heavy'.

To alleviate that, I decided they probably needed a little eye-candy in the form of a hand drawn sketch. I used to draw all the time on paper, and thought it might be fun to get a sketchbook and a pencil and actually draw up some of these scenarios and add them to each adventure. Each one takes 5 to ten minutes to draw and then I run a photoshop 'Oil Paint' and 'Linear Burn' filters over a parchment background. I'm no great artist but I'm pleased with the results as they make the game feel very hand-crafted.

So, next up, I've also built the 'Tavern' section of the game. The crew , after long days at sea, can visit taverns to get a hot meal, buy a drink or even hire new recruits. I remember a classic Sega game, Wonderboy in Monsterland , had little taverns the hero could visit - buying a drink would often give the player hints and rumours. I added these into the game. You talk to the barkeep and he picks a random fact from the world to give you. How this works is kind of interesting:

• 
  [li]I pick an island in the game to give a fact about, then give the bartender a prefix comment such as 'I've heard sailors talk about [ISLAND NAME][/li]
  [li]I find where the island is relative to the player and allocate a procedurally generated string such as 'far to the north-west'[/li]
  [li]I then choose some random fact about the island , such as the fact that gold or berries might be found there.[/li]
  [li]Certain proper quest hints can also be found here by talking to the game, these will appear in a different colour such as [TO FIND THE NEXT SEA CAPTAIN, VISIT ISLAND X][/li]

Certain proper quest hints can also be found here by talking to the game, these will appear in a different colour such as [TO FIND THE NEXT SEA CAPTAIN, VISIT ISLAND X]

After the player's had four or five drinks, the bartender cuts you off for the day - so you don't get unlimited hints.

Related to the tavern, but on board your ship, you have the 'Crew Quarters' screen where you can dismiss the crew you've hired by tapping their portraits, or feed them a meal from the cargo hold. Food , morale and health is a pretty important part of Ships and Scurvy. You have to keep the crew from mutinying and free from disease - here's where you do it. As you can see below, there's four different meals the chef can make the crew that will either see them happy and healthy or at death's door and plotting against you. I've kept it fairly simple, you don't have to peel every potato and boil every vegetable!

Other additions in the last six weeks include a whole bunch of refinements and changes to the UI, a proper day/night cycle (allowing you to rest and gain experience at night ....levelling up comes next!) . I'm almost at the point where I have a fully working game prototype that allows you to create a character, hire a crew, explore the world, die in battle or whatever, and get resurrected on Coconut Island and try again.

There's still a few major sections of the game that need building including 1 vs 1 sea-captain duels, the level-up character stuff, as well as a 'dungeon/temple' exploration thing I'm trying to flesh out in my head, seeing how well it would fit with the game, but that's yet to come.

I'm in talks about getting a publisher for the game at the moment so hopefully I have some exciting news for next update - as well as a longer 'Let's Play' gameplay video of the game. Until then though, thanks for being along for the journey - I appreciate all the great feedback I've received so far.

Cheers and happy journeys!

Oliver Joyce
Whiskeybarrel Studios

 

[Thagarr]

Excellent Dev Blog their Oliver! Taverns are simply a must! Getting rumors from the bartender all the time though could get a bit boring, us piratical types much prefer talking to the buxom tavern wench!

Not that I am trying to increase your workload mate, but that would certainly improve the eye candy, and give you an excuse to draw a buxom wench!

 

[Whiskeybarrel Studios]

Haha , I heartily concur, Thagarr! That particular bartender will only be in the one town, will have a few buxom wenches in another port town. Thinking of also adding the good old 'message in a bottle' floating around the oceans with clues to the next quest. What would also be awesome is the ability to get into a barfight ( I actually only need to get a tavern background image done and it's totally possible ) , maybe once the duels are built!

As always, cheers for your awesome feedback mate!

 

[Whiskeybarrel Studios]

"Sleep soundly, young Rose. For I have built you a good ship, strong and true." - Thomas Andrews

Sometimes I feel my game development journey on Ships and Scurvy RPG is like I'm at the helm of the Titanic, steering blindly into a North Atlantic night. The giant iceberg of failure and obscurity rushing towards me as I ignore all the warning signs ( "the market is too crowded", "the game is too ambitious", "you need a bigger team" ). Moments of pure joy as friends try and love the game ( "I'm the king of the world!" ) , moments of acknowledged mistakes as you test systems that aren't working ( "There are not enough lifeboats on this ship - not by half") .

I've said a lot over the last 6 months that this is probably my last big shot at making a successful game. Since December, I've basically been working on Ships full time, supporting it with the occasional bit of contract work and slowly eating away at 10 years of hard earned savings. As many of you know , indie game development takes a big toll on your time - relationships get strained, your actual regular career is put on hold, your finances take a big hit. There's a huge turbulent storm inside your mind - you feel like that every moment away from the screen, you are further and further away from the game being done, and even if you finish it, to what end? Does the world really need your game?

One of my game development friends, the inspirational Christer Kaitila ( founder of One Game A Month and a huge source of encouragement to gamedevs like myself) posted recently that even he suffers the same fears as I do. "What if the game is not good enough?" , "What if my game never succeed like my friends' games do?", "Am I really cut out for this?" . It's a fear so many of us solo developers face. The odds are stacked against you because historically the bar has never been lower to making a game. There's never been more people making games. There's never been more competition out there for the audience's attention - and you are constantly comparing your game to every one of them.

But you know what?

I believe in myself. I'm going to succeed. Why shouldn't I? I have something unique. Nobody else can make a game like me, with my sense of humour, with my oddball game design philosophy and unorthodox approach to world building. There's a moment early in the game when my composer Adrian Galassi's delightful music score kicks in and your little raft sails off from the first island, into a vast blue ocean full of possibilities and my heart soars. That's what game development should be about.

I've never been more excited at where Ships and Scurvy is at. The game is barely past the early prototype but already it's by far the favourite of all my creations, including Swords and Sandals 2, which was played hundreds of millions of times by countless people.

This journey doesn't have to be doomed. Fate is never sealed. Icebergs can be swerved and that triumphant homecoming on the shores of America can be realised.

Anyway, enough of the Titanic analogies ( I'll admit it - I loved the movie, I cry like a baby when the string quartet scene played.) and onto actual game development news.

The latest from Ships and Scurvy

Since the last update, there's been an absolute mountain of work done. I look back at June's teaser trailer and the game feels vastly different already. I sent an early prototype to a few trusted friends and game dev associates ( big shout out to Tom Gattenhof, Richard Csala, Silas Rowe, Mauno Vaha and Mattheui Senidre ) and received some absolutely invaluable feedback that changed some fundamental parts of the game. You've heard this before and you'll hear it again - get others to playtest your game as often and as early as you can. (On the flipside , you don't have to take on board all of their comments, you're the one with the vision.)

Off the top of my head, here's a list of the major changes.

Visual improvements:

First up, the ship in the early build of the game was way too big and too fast. It made the islands feel tiny, it was harder to spot other ships before they were right on you and it didn't quite 'feel right'. By reducing the ship to 50% of its original size and shrinking it, the world feels more epic ( and seamonsters scarier!)

The first incarnations of the shops and taverns felt a bit clunky too. For example, to hire new sailors for your crew, you had to go to the tavern , click on "Sailors", click on "Hire New Crew" , go to yet another screen, then click on the sailors you wanted. Too many levels. I decided to combine several screens into one, so you can buy a drink, eat a meal, hire sailors all from the one main tavern screen. I kinda love the new tavern now. The rumours the bartender give you actually can lead to you getting a lot of gold early in the game if you pay attention to them. I have to admit, I took some inspiration from the SEGA classic Wonderboy In Monsterland for the tavern scenes. ("Ale or mead?")

Level up!

Finally, there's an experience points system and 'Character level up' screen in the game. Every league you sail, every time you set foot on a new island, every time you win a battle at land or sea, and so on, your character will gain experience. When you go to bed at night, all that XP is tallied up and your character will level up and gain new skills like the abililty to hunt animals on islands, go diving for treasure, to talk to bartenders and get special rumours, to improve the combat skills of your soldiers, and so on. I've still got a bunch of skills to add, there will end up being 40-50 possible skills to learn I would imagine - meaning that every adventure and every sea captain will be pretty different.

The tutorial prologue is now in the game

Yeah, I know. Nobody enjoys a tutorial, least of all me. Problem is, this is a big, sprawling game that has a few complicated systems that need explaining. Back in the 80's or even the 90's , this wouldn't be a problem, you'd just 'figure it out' but these days attention spans are shorter, people are less forgiving and the window for hooking players into your game is a lot smaller. Hence, the need for a tutorial.

What I've done, is turned the 'prologue' part of the game into a tutorial. You wake up on the island and the game's basic systems and UI screens are explained to you. You learn how to explore, how to harvest wood and build a raft. You fight your first battle, and then you learn how to sail. It's a 5 to ten minute section that is pretty enjoyable and kind of sets the scene for you without completely feeling like too much of a trial.

All 50 island adventures have been written and there's artwork for them

This took absolutely ages, a lot longer than I thought. My lovely girlfriend and I came up with most of the scenarios while on holiday in Bali in Feb and I started coding them up when I got home. It's now July and they're only done. The sketches were actually pretty fun to do, but time consuming as it's been years since I've drawn on pencil and paper and my art skills have become very rusty. Here's a sneak preview of a few of my favourites.

The food system has been overhauled YET AGAIN!

Third time's a charm. Finding food, trading for food, keeping your crew fit and healthy are important parts of the game,but I got the food system wrong twice already. I kind of went full Peter Molyneux and went overboard on the importance of food. For all 150+ food items in the game, I had a weight, a nutritional value, a disease resistance, a god-damned USE BY DATE for them!!! Looking back, it's kind of hilarious but at the time I thought that this would be something that interested the player. I've gone back and stripped that out. Now, all foods count as ONE unit each. Each crew member needs one food unit, 3 times a day. If they dont eat, they starve and you face death or a mutiny. It's that simple.

Oh, and breakfast beers are awesome.

And many, many more changes.

I've done a stack of little changes to the game to make it more playable. I want to try and get it as refined as possible before I add in the next two sections of the game , the captain vs captain sea combat and the dungeon exploring components. Arguably these are games all alone in their own right - hell, 1 vs 1 combat is kind of all Swords and Sandals was, right?

For me, its key that I get the world around these sections right, so when I start on them, I can focus fully on making them as cool and as fun as they can be. Imagine, taking a crew of diseased, starving and mutinous crew members into a lost jungle dungeon in search of a legendary giant iguana. Tempers will flare, but the promise of treasure and fame might just hold them together until they can return to the ship wealthier and happier.

That's it for now.

I'm hoping to get prototype 0.0.4 up next week. If you're interested in being an early prototype tester, hit me up at info@whiskeybarrelstudios.com or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/oliver_joyce.

Also, I'm still working on the best way forward for marketing. I'm looking at approaching some publishers real soon - if you work for one and want to discuss teaming up, I'd love to hear from you! This is a step I need to think very carefully about as it can make or break the game. I've been talking with Colm Larkin, creator of the brilliant Guild of Dungeoneering about the right approach to publishing, I want to give a massive shout out to him for his invaluable advice and support. You're a true inspiration.

Thanks again, thanks for staying with me until the end of this epic post and I promise you, this will be a grand adventure unlike any other.

Cheers and happy journeys,

Oliver Joyce
Whiskeybarrel Studios

 

[Whiskeybarrel Studios]

Ahoy my friends at Pirates Ahoy!

I just thought I'd let you know of the latest on Ships and Scurvy. Firstly, the game is up on Steam Greenlight now - I'd hugely appreciate any votes you could spare to get it through! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=498890824

Secondly, if any of you fine nautical fellows are interested in trying out a private prototype, please leave me a message and I'll send you a private link to the game to try ( PC only at this stage ). Your feedback as always is hugely invaluable.

Finally, I've got an official website for the game too. http://shipsandscurvy.com/ , just with some more media, screenshots, an FAQ and so on.

Game development continues as always - duels are in the game now, a new minimap and a quest system are nearly there too. No rest on the sparkling blue ocean! Cheers and happy journeys.

Oliver

 

[Whiskeybarrel Studios]

Good morning seafarers!

I've just added a video of the first five minutes of gameplay from Ships and Scurvy, featuring the intro, character creation, a fight with some angry natives, a little raft adventure and some recruiting at the local tavern. The framerate of the video isn't great thanks to my PC not being powerful enough to screencap the game at 60FPS - rest assured the game runs a lot smoother than you see in the video, but it should give you an idea of how the game starts.

Yuu can find it below, please vote for the game if you want to see it on Steam!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=498890824

 

[Whiskeybarrel Studios]

September approaches and our wondrous ocean voyage continues!

I find it interesting how events in your life shape the outcome of your creative projects. For example, just this weekend past I completed a 100km charity hike for OxFam with three other friends. Over the course of 33 straight hours we journeyed through beautiful forests, mossy valleys and dusty fire trails, stopping briefly to rest and checkpoints and then continuing on our way. It was the toughest thing I've ever done but immensely rewarding.



During this epic hike, I found I had a lot of time to think and my mind often wandered to the game and the whole experience of building it this last 8 months. The experience itself is not unlike a long hike. You start out full of energy, a little daunted but with a sense of huge purpose to what you're about to do. As you keep going, you see other game developers on the figurative trail. Some fall away and abandon their projects, undone by one thing or another. Others power ahead of you and release their game to rapturous applause while you plod along.

The sun sets and the night falls and you start to question why you're doing it. This hike was to raise money for the poorest people on the planet, for whom's problems are greatly more significant than the luxury of will people like my game, so in that respect motivation was easy. When you're building a game, your motivations are a lot more murky. Sometimes it's financial, sometimes it's for the glory, sometimes it's just because you have a great idea and you'd love to share it with anyone who will play. To be honest, mine falls somewhere in between the three. If you had told me I would make this game, many people will play it and love it but you'll hardly make a dollar, I would honestly not even commence develop. I've had those accolades with Swords & Sandals. Millions of plays, no money for me. Thing is though, you just don't know- you'll never know until the game is out there.

Anyway, that brings me to the specifics of today's Ships and Scurvy update! Firstly, *** huzzah *** we're up on Steam Greenlight! You can vote for the game below - we're hovering at 42% of the way to the top 100. Every vote and positive comment helps!



Secondly, duels have been added to the game! This was an interesting one - originally I had planned to make them a lot more in depth, with heaps of options for attack and defence and so on... but as the game expands, duels have become less and less important to the game and also less frequent. They basically serve as the 'mini-boss' battles where you chase down other ships, board them and defeat their sea captain.

How they function now is you have two seperate attacks: The thrust that does half damage but pushes your enemy twice as far, and the cut that does double damage but doesn't push your enemy far. You can also vault over your enemy to switch sides with them, or if you have bandages, heal yourself.

You can see a little duel in action here:



Another really useful addition to the game is an improvement to the main map, and a new minimap system. The main map now has darkened squares to show you areas of the map you haven't visited yet. The new minimap shows you nearby islands on your main UI panel, so you don't have to keep going and checking the map the whole time. I combined it with the compass to make navigation more straightforward. Little tweaks like these make a big difference over the course of a game's development.



I also spent a bit of time adding visual upgrades to the ships. I always love it in a game where if a character gets a new magic weapon or helmet, it shows on their head. Same with a ship - you upgrade the sails, you want to see them appear.You upgrade the hull armour or the crew quarters, little panels and windows appear. It's just a small way to make the player feel more connected to their ship.

Other less interesting additions to the game include some optimisations to make run better full-screen, a 'load game' selection screen, and so on. The to-do list is getting shorter and soon I'll be able to get stuck into the dungeon-crawl section of the game, which is the last major area still needed to add.

Happy journeys to you all!

Cheers, Oliver Joyce
Whiskeybarrel studios.

 

[Thagarr]

Looks like you have definitely got your priority's straight Oliver mate, that hake does indeed sound epic!

Oh, and swordplay on a yardarm!!

 

[Mask]

That's a great gif. I'm looking forward to this game. It really does look like a lot of fun.

 

[Whiskeybarrel Studios]

Mid September and the journey continues through the swirling oceans of Ships and Scurvy. I've well and truly got my sea legs now, that's for sure. Whether I'm a decent mariner or not the jury remains deep in discussion about. I keep making change after change to the game. Iteration is the one of the keys to successful game development, I believe. You have to know when something is working, when to cut something from the game and so on. Channel your inner pirate and be ruthless on your code!

To tell the truth, I'm actually pretty far from your average game developer in terms of my process. I'm always breaking the unshakeable commandments of game dev. I tend to ignore 'best practice' stuff all the time with my own work. What do I mean by that? Here's a few game development confessions:

Confession: I rarely write design documents, and when I do they are pretty vague. I scribble stuff on notepads while coming up with ideas, but only if I'm away from the computer.
Justification: Every game I've ever made has ended up so far from the original design, I feel like I won't know what the game is going to be until I'm a fair way along. Game dev is a very liquid process for me. I hate cookie cutter games.

Confession: I develop in a very scattered fashion, whatever interests me at the time. For example, before I've even got a character on the screen, I might have written a full list of descriptions for all of the islands in the game, complete with what sort of resources you will find on the island and what background will be used. Or, I might add in sound effects and music way before I've even got a game loop happening.
Justification: This is a hobby for me. The projects are long. I have to do what interests me to stay interested for the long haul. Mix up the fun stuff with the tedious stuff.

Confession: I'm a total spaghetti coder. I've always been a creative first, programmer second. I taught myself many bad habits. My classes start off all nice and structured and then end up full of spaghetti code, with references to each other all of the place. Global variables all through the place etc.
Justification: Nobody else is going to see this code. There's a reason I can develop so rapidly. I just get shit done. I'm prolific and all my stuff works, despite the purist who may sneer at it behind the scenes. Client projects of course are more structured, but for my own stuff, just get it done.

Confession: I've never played any of the games I've built all the way through from start to finish. When I released the Swords & Sandals games, I'd played each of the individual stages and battles over a thousand times each, but I'd never sat down to play through the entire game.
Justification: By this time I'm totally sick of the game - however I've got a pretty innate sense of game balancing, so I'm pretty aware of how the whole thing plays out.

Confession: I do a bit everything, so there's nothing in the game that is done particularly skillfully. I do everything except create the music and some of the art. I'm an average coder, so the game doesn't run as fast as a skilled programmer could make it. I'm an average artist, so there's plenty of rough looking art and characters in the game. However, I think I'm actually a pretty funny writer, so at least I can say the writing is always fairly good in my games.
Justification: A game is the sum of all its parts. Great art doesn't make a great game necessarily. Nor does amazing programming. The skill is in bringing all this stuff together into a great big melting pot and forging a fun experience for the player. That's a total intangible, you either have it or you don't.

Anyway, that's enough time in the confessional for one day. I'm sure I'll do a follow up with more of my terrible habits later!
So what's the latest from the game? It's been a crazy busy month actually. I'm about to start a new job in just a few days ( building kids games and activites for an awesome educational publisher here in Sydney ) so unfortunately game development is going to slow down somewhat... nights and weekends for the foreseeable future. The game's roughly 75% complete now , the lion's share of the development has been done ... the trick now is to stay focused and keep developing even after a long day's work.

VOICE OVER
I commissioned the wonderful voice over artist Rosko Lewis to narrate the game and he has delivered in spades. One part grizzled sea captain, two parts English Gent, his voice over gently guides the player through the game and acts as a terrific companion on the high seas. It's amazing how just having some human voice work in a game can totally transform the experience. If you're interested in getting some done for your game, I highly recommend him. Check out his stuff here: http://www.roskolewisbritishvoiceover.co.uk/

QUESTS
Finally, the quest system is in the game and works well! I've opted for simplicity with only one available quest at a time. There's more than enough games out there with 'busy-work' sidequests - I don't want to waste the player's time. You can opt to follow the main quest line, or if you choose, to sail around having adventures and exploring as you like. Certain dungeons and areas will of course be locked off until certain parts of the story - there's no way a player will accidentally enter a late game dungeon and spoil the story, but there's definitely a great amount of freedom available.

Quests themselves appear in the form of a short dialogue cutscene and then a 'quest panel' where the objectives and reward are displayed for the player's info. Usually it's something like 'track down this pirate', 'explore this dungeon', 'kill this sea monster' but each chapter will have a unique quest too ( the first chapter its to raise a crew and a war chest, the second is to build a fort on an island etc)

BIRD'S EYE WORLD VIEW
The camera has been zoomed way, way out to a 'birds-eye' view of the game. Islands have been shrunk and you can now see so much more of the world; you can see little ships sailing to-and-fro and get a better idea of where you're going. I loved how fast the 'zoomed in' version felt but you just were sailing blind most of the time (even with the addition of the minimap). A lot of people suggested a zoom-in/out feature, but the way I built the game made that just impossible. Textures are generated when the world is created and it just struggles to zoom in and out technically.

LOADING AND SAVING
You can now load and save your progress in the game, for as many characters as your heart desires. This isn't the sexiest feature, but when playtesting the game it's a massive timesaver. It was actually a bit of a bastard to add in, a lot of bytearrays and deep-cloning of objects. Adobe AIR allows you to do filestream writing as such but it still required a fair bit of manual labour.

PARLEY
You can now converse with other vessels at sea in the form of parley. You can trade with, threaten or avoid conflict depending on your ship's alignment versus the alignment of the other. For example, the Royal Navy is more likely to trade with you if you are not evil.... though pirates will just as soon attack you either way. Parley can be a great way of getting resources for hungry crewmates on a long sea voyage.

There's a stack of other little upgrades and balances to the game and I'm very close to starting work on the dungeon system , which is a huge part of the game.

Until the next update, may the oceans sparkle for you!

Cheers, Oliver Joyce
Whiskeybarrel Studios