We don’t really have anything like that planned atm. But there will be floating forts which you can capture, customize and move around the map. There will also be sea creatures such as sharks and big angler fish and stuff. You won’t really be able to tame them but we have something planned that might let you control some of them such as a shark for a short time. The idea we have is like some sort of escape spell that you can find that lets you turn into a sea creature for some time to quickly swim to shore if your ship is boarded or sunk, while also giving you the ability to use the shark as a weapon to attack other players that are in the water. Keep in mind though that these are still wild ideas and unproven concepts, they might not make it into the final version of the game, but they are certainly interesting concepts that we will experiment with.
In other news, we have created a development blog where we will post updates very frequently. Most of the updates will be a bit more technical, but they will be very frequent. Have a look!
I was wondering, how many team members do you have on board, and how long you have been working on the project? Also, do you have a rough date in mind where a beta might be available? I’m really looking forward to trying it out!
In the meantime, I wish you to have fun while developing
Currently it’s just me and my brother working on the project as much as we can. However, in spetember we will get some help as we will join another game studio to help with the production.
A beta is planned in the near future, I can’t give any date yet, but it should be in the next 1-3 months. More info on when the beta will take place and how to get in will be shared on our website, social media and here as well. If you are interested please provide your email adress so we can send you an invite with a download link. As for now we don’t have a invite limit yet. We kinda want to get as much people as possible. We will be setting up a server or 2 with 50-100 slots each. We want to invite more people than we have slots for, the reason for this is because we want to do stress testing and if we see that it’s a great succes we might set up additional servers. Only when the game becomes too succesful (which would be awesome :P) we might close down invitations for a while.
The video gave a pretty good idea but the whole thing looked very confusing just in third person. Try give it another camera view like a top angle strategy game view ( give the option to change between third person and top view). That will make it more fun while attacking other ships or looking at the sea map world from top.
2 people making this game is just awesome for now.
A lot has changed since that video. Right now, when you are sailing a ship you can switch between first person and third person which allows for a 360 view around your ship which greatly increases the awareness when sailing around. There is now also a ship direction indicator and compass, wind direction and a personal player based compass. One of the things we will add next is a live map that players open at any time which should also give another boost to awareness and tactical planning.
We are preparing a closed beta to be ready soon-ish. Can’t give exact date, but we are constantly closing in on a playable version of the game. Still need a bit of work though. But it shouldn’t be too long anymore.
Been a while since we last posted an update here so a quick heads up on why and what’s up.
So, last 2 months have been pretty crazy as me and my brother had some other work on our hands, such as retake exams and stuff.
And also because we have made some major changes to our roadmap.
First of all, let me assure you that this project is far from dead. But we are taking a pretty different turn.
No worries, pirate fans among you need not fear, we are still making this very much a pirate game. As well as it will remain a third person shooter at it’s core with the ship combat that we showed in our previous trailer. So a lot of what we’ve shown so far will kinda stay the same, it will only become better basically. Although we restarted from scratch and are now working on a new prototype in 4.17. The graphical style will still be stylized, but it will be of a higher quality than can be seen in the trailer. All animations and characters will be redone.
As for the survival gameplay that we had originally planned, this is where things take a big turn. We are no longer making this a survival game. Instead we are making this something very different, more direct and fun. We’ve got quite a cool concept, but we would like to keep it secret for a short while longer until we have something awesome to show you guys. We don’t want to get hopes up just yet. The concept we have is pretty wild and we want to test it first to see if we can actually make it work.
All I can say is that if this works like we theorized it in our minds, it should be really fun and refreshing. And we think a lot of you will love it.
One more thing I can say is that there will now also be cross-server customization of your character and ship and you will also be able to play with female characters down the line.
Also, we are currently working on our first prototype of the new game mode. And starting from september 18th we join forces with 2 more developers and a professional game studio to go into full production of our game. So expect some big updates the coming months. The goal is to get our game to a pre-release state around christmas. This could be delayed depending on progress of course.
Looking good guys. Can’t wait to see the current state of it.
How did you handle the character movement whilst on the ship? Is there some custom “attachment handling” to stop the clients sliding around on the deck or does UE4’s native collision handling work for this?
I ask as I’ve been working on a similar concept and my initial implementation way back in 4.7.0 days had waay too much rubber-banding during networked tests. I ended up creating a very messy workaround where the internal and external perspectives of the ship were separated (see: Angels Fall First). Would love to pick your guys brains more on a few other topics.
The movement on board of the ships is actually done using pretty much all the basic Unreal movement and collision features. We’ve only tweaked a few things to reduce rubber banding / jittering. We are still working on it though, it’s not completely the way we want but for now it works well enough.
