Seafarers Progress Update

This week’s update is primarily focused on the Towns of the game. I have received lots of feedback from players and beta testers, saying that towns did not feel fleshed out enough and were boring. To remedy this, I am adding depth and importance to towns by adding a Faction system to the game. The game has 5 factions, each currently denoted by a certain color:

There will be new World Events tied to these factions, periodically these factions will go to war with each other, and may embargo, ally with, or even declare war on other factions and can potentially take over towns from other factions. You, being in the middle of all of this, will also receive requests from each faction to do their bidding, they may even ask you to take over a town for them (hint hint wink wink, there are future plans for combat in the game), in exchange for money and upgrades of course. These upgrades/buffs that you earn from doing each factions bidding will replace the current Crew system (completing crew members’ quests unlock the ability to upgrade your ship and other buffs). This is a relatively big update and more information will be coming, but the important foundational work is done.

In addition to these updates, I have also updated the Shop system, as there were still various bugs that seem to keep popping up with the sliders in the shop in particular, leading to missing cargo and a confused game state, I have replaced these sliders with buttons. Now it is more obvious what is and isn’t being bought, and the UI should be clearer with what is happening, as lots of players found the sliders confusing at times. For reference, we have now gone from this:

To this:

There will be a few more minor updates to the shop UI, but the coming weeks will heavily focus on getting the faction system fully implemented, and then starting work on the AI and Combat updates I have planned for the future.