We have been playing Shipped for years now, and during that time, we have noticed some things that could be improved upon, but the game was done, the sales were low, and we were busy working on new titles. It doesn't make sense to get back to it, but... we just couldn't help ourselves!
A part form a TON of small balance and fixes, these are the biggest changes and additions to Shipped with this v2 update:
⭐ CHALLENGES MODE ⭐
A new single player mode with 50 time-trial varied challenges to complete. Navigate serpentine courses, destroy target ships or find the fastest route to complete your objective. These challenges are fairly advanced! You will come of of them sailing like a pro!
⭐ PRACTICE MODE ⭐
Handling your ship is tricky at first, which can be confusing for new players, that's why we decided to add a practice mode where you can respawn instantly to get the hang of it before you start a proper match. You can also use it by yourself to test or hone your skills.
⭐ CANNONBALL STEALING ⭐
A player with cannonballs has too big of an advantage versus a player without them. The parry mechanic was added to minimize this gap, but the armed player could still choose to play it safe and shoot at point blank range.
This was not ideal, so we have added a new game mechanic: If a player without cannonballs touches a player with them, it will steal one crate. This way, an armed player is forced to risk a shoot form a certain distance or risk having their cannonballs stolen.
⭐ TIP PUSHING ⭐
Because of how physics worked previously, trying to push your rivals rarely worked that well.
The overall physics of the game have been reworked so they work and feel better, particularly regarding pushing. In particular, pushing with the front tip of your ship will now push other ships harder, so you can use it as a more reliable form of attack.
⭐ ISLAND GRAZING ⭐
Before, making contact with an island made your ship explode, no exceptions. This was a clear and clean way to handle it, but it didn't feel that good to be eliminated because you slightly grazed an island.
We have changed this to allow a bit of margin. Now your ship won't explode if you touch an island at a very low speed.
⭐ MAPS REWORK ⭐
Before, there were 6 types of maps. Balera and Tirimo were pretty similar to each other, and Nonopi was so difficult to navigate it was rarely ever played.
Now the maps have been reduced to 4, and we've added small visual differences between them (not much more can be done in that regard without ruining the color palette or complicating things).
The Mix mode now mixes the different map styles inside a single match instead of just choosing one single style at random.
Also, the map creation algorithms have been rebalanced so they create faired stages, particularly on Yincana mode.
⭐ FASTER, MORE RESPONSIVE CONTROLS ⭐
Originally, we went for a bit of a slower, more realistic kind of controls that made the ships a bit harder handle. The assumption was that with enough practice, this could be overcome and you would have perfect control of your vessel, but this didn't really happen; the turning was too slow and the inertia too strong to allow for risky and bolder plays.
We changed the controls to make play faster and ships more responsive.
Controller support has also been improved, with the downside of removing controller rumble. To allow controllers to rumble you must use XInput, but XInput can only detect 4 controllers. All the solutions we came up with felt too convoluted for such an irrelevant feature, so we decided to remove it and let things stay simple.
⭐ IMPROVED IA ⭐
The script that controls the bots has been completely remade. They play way better now.
⭐ NEW SIDE ART ⭐
For gameplay reasons, Shipped is played on a square 1:1 screen. This leaves two black bars on the sides of your usual screen monitor, that could be filled up with some side art. This was an afterthought made at the end of development and the options available were... pretty lacking.
You can now fill the sides of your screen with more pleasing (and animated!) backgrounds.
⭐ NEW MUSIC ⭐
3 new tracks and an extended main menu theme.
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That's it! As stated before, there are a ton of other small improvements making Shipped more fun than ever, but those are the biggest ones. We hope you enjoy them!
Even though we didn't add an online mode (we would need to basically remake the entire game to make it work), remember that you can play online with your friends using Steam Remote Play Together (only one copy of the game required!). We do it often and it works pretty well as long as all the players are from the same general region.
A PRICE INCREASE?
Because local multiplayer games are not a particularly hot genre on Steam, Shipped was priced on the lower side. Counter-intuitively, a lower price doesn't necessarily attract more sales, since people might expect it to reflect lack of content and/or quality. Getting extra money from this update was never the plan, but with the new single player content added, a price increase might better reflect the current value of the game. We might apply it the following days/weeks.
Thank you for playing Shipped!