Ahoy!
I wanted to take some time to talk a bit about my ongoing video game project, Lord of Pirates. This game spawned from a weekend long Game Jam (Kenney Jam 2022). The theme of the game jam was Growth, and the restriction was that we had to use free assets available on the Kenney website. In looking over the assets, I was drawn to the pirate ships, and ended up creating a very rough rougelite action auto-attacker game in the vein of games like Vampire Survivors, sprinkled a little bit with the feel of ship battles from the early 2000s PC game remake Sid Meier’s Pirates. The game placed 85th overall out of 300 entries, which I was pretty happy with given how janky the build was hahaha. I’d been struggling with sticking with a game idea for awhile, and the feedback I got on this game motivated me to adopt it as my new full time project. The scale of it in terms of concept was simple enough that I felt I could turn it into something neat within a reasonable time frame, and scope was something I’d really been struggling with minimizing up until this point. Thus I decided this would become my full time project.
The gameplay loop basically consists of surviving a level for around ~25 minutes. During your run, you will level up, choose from a pool of a few random upgrades to your ship, and collect gold which can then be used in between runs to purchase new ships and captains. The availability of ships and captains to buy, as well as new levels, will be unlocked via completing different achievements on a run. If you die on a run, the run is over, your upgrades reset, but you keep your gold.
My development strategy is to first focus on adding new attacks to the game, then new enemies, then trying to create a really fun and “balanced” first level. Once I feel like the gameplay loop is polished, then I will begin adding new levels to the game. Each new level will have a new theme, but as to what exactly those themes are, I am keeping that top secret for now!
Once I feel I am ready to start adding new levels, that will likely be the beginning of the game’s beta phase. I am considering doing a Steam Early Access release at that point, because while I am adding new levels, I also want to begin collecting feedback from the community so that I can continue improving the core of the game. I’m expecting to reach this milestone within the next few months. I am really hoping I’ll be ready in time for the 2nd Steam Next Fest which is likely going to take place in June. Following that will ideally be my early access release.
Anyways, that about sums up the overall concept of the game and the plans I have mapped out for it thus far.
Happy Sails!
OFM