Major Update 3.24Apr 5, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsHello again everyone! For this quarter I focused on improvements to the existing systems that have been causing confusion and instability. The main focus was around the Drydock and Marketplace mechanics. As Trading and looting items is one of the core ways to get rich and build your fleet and armies, it was important that I spend some time rebuilding these systems. I added a few new features and rebuilt these two mechanics from the ground up. It is now much easier to traverse and manage your ships inventories and crews, as well as purchasing items and hiring crewmates to fill them. Testing has intensified and a great amount of bugs were reported and fixed as a result. This is a non-stop effort and I appreciate all involved. Reflections within Rise of Piracy bugged out early last year and was neglected since. I finally figured out what was wrong there and fixed it up. This has made a great improvement to the visuals within the game and its something I'm very happy with. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41557572/3411f8c45893553db4e4742896a80c920d8ba783.png Tutorials were improved, and a dossier / encyclopedia was created. The dossier will make it much easier to find information on all the various mechanics, without having to complete an entire tutorial. I have enlisted some help on the artwork within the game. We have worked towards improving the visual feel of everything UI related. All of our tradable items now have proper artwork associated with them, and many other bits and pieces have been improved upon. Everything Loot related has been improved and a lot of the systems that were in place have been redone. This will effect how you capture ships or prisoners, and how you gain resources if victorious in a fight. In the case of defeat or retreat, the punishments have also been re-imagined. I also invested a bit in tooling over the past few months. These were mostly around generating scenarios and re-balancing. Main Items Here is a full list of the main items that were worked on during these past few months. There is a much more exhaustive list available on the discord for those interested - discord.gg/kBq6C2bBZh Redone the spawning on the battle maps. A lot of the bugs reported by testers were actioned. Redone Drydock & Marketplace. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41557572/c9d3ce2a609e7a768305630ef599ef5382eec228.png Added a dossier / encyclopedia holding all the tutorial information - hopefully will get that cleaned up a * bit more before release. All the tradable items and perks have proper artwork now. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41557572/f1aa12d006d2bee7d92535caf1ae7ca453ed80c0.png Redone the Loot Screen / Return to campaign screen. Prisoners & Pressing captured units to crews, also capturing ships & end game logic/data stuff was all * redone. Re-added win condition to the campaign map. (contains placeholders) XP / Bonus system was re-balanced a bit. Added Abandon Ship logic & non-occupied ships claiming mechanic. Fixed some options screen stuff. Missing options, broken prefere...Development Update: 2023 Development ReviewJan 21, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsHi all! My name is John - I am the developer behind Rise of Piracy. As this is my first steam announcement, let me first thank you all for following along with the development so far! Over the past year we have hit a number of major milestones. We started working with a publisher, added a tonne of features, refactored and cleaned up basically every aspect of the code base, and filled in some missing mechanics. Rise of Piracy is on its 3rd development iteration and is in a very good position now. We are in a closed testing phase with thousands of issues/bugs and suggestions being actioned in 2023. Ideally I put out a major patch every 2-3 months, packed with improvements to the base game and QOL. I will try to put out a steam announcement with each of these patches in the future. As Rise of Piracy now enters its 5th year of development - I am excited to see it coming closer to an Early Access release. Here are some of the major elements we have worked on in 2023: The Ships and Characters AI has all been worked on heavily. Changes and improvements to these systems are much easier now. We have added a new pipeline for adding and improving ships within the game. Our publisher is cleaning up our pool of ships and creating beautiful models for you to hire and command in Rise of Piracy. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41557572/6ed13186b96cc5f2dd6957282cb697d29401a383.png Our animations for the soldiers have all been redone. The system that was in place initially was clunky and difficult to change/manage, so that has all been completely revamped. I'm very happy with where that is now. I feel like the soldiers and civilians move in a much more convincing way. There is still a lot of improvement possible with these animations but for now I feel its in a great spot. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41557572/5c05330d4e8f0f3d7a9595ff94d7c26e6adfdf51.png We have redone some illustrations within the game, improving the UI across the board. We have also started to clean up the legacy parts of the code & modernizing the UI so that everything is presented in a more user-friendly way. We have fixed hundreds of issues every iteration, thanks to our testers. Interactions with Mayors of Islands and captains of other fleets has been redone completely. Special missions and options are available to allow for cleaner action/reaction and consequence driven mechanisms. I am constantly improving on the Audio aspect of the game and trying to make real ground on that in the coming months. Many of the mechanics and features within the game have been crafted in part by the community feedback, so please do let me know what you think of the current progress, and the updates you receive. I have tried to keep the community across a number of social media platforms up to date with everything going on and have neglected steam quite a bit. It is something I am trying to improve upon this year across the board. Please do feel free to reach out any time to me on Discord, or by creating a steam discussion post with...
