Hello Merchants!
The day we've been waiting for has finally come! Today we are fully releasing Merchant of the Skies! We haven't published any game updates for the game for quite some time. This is because we were working on a Campaign mode, which contains all previous objectives together with a new ultimate goal. We wanted to deliver the Campaign mode without separating it into pieces, so that our players can have a full experience of the game, as we wanted it to be.
In final version of Merchant of the Skies, you will be able to find out a more about Fieri and its inhabitants. You will come across new islands, events, and creatures as well. During the campaign mode, you will be meeting different characters and helping them out. We have updated some resources and added the new ones. There are also numerous QoL fixes. Overall we have polished the game further and made some balance changes in the gameplay.
Here's the full changelog:
New Features
- Campaign mode overhaul. Campaign mode now inclues >15 new missions and new characters. The overall length to complete the campaign should now be 6-8 hours.
- New mechanic: water.
- Lakes are generated on the map. You can store water on ships (based on your storage size).
- New building: water tower. Build it on plant-based islands (apples, wheat, spices, tea). You need to bring water to it, with your own ship or with the help of caravans. The water is taken daily. While water tower is there, the island output is increased by 50% * (tower level)
- Improved save backup system creates up to four save file copies (every 15 minutes); should make save file recovery easier if things actually crash
- Added special object and letter pages to the quest book, mostly used in campaigns
- Added resource index in the quest book, should help out with figuring out the resource icons
- Added ambient sounds on some of the islands
Adjustments:
- Have to actually give water to the Giant Fish now [PLEASE START THE FISH GOD PLAYTHROUGHS ANEW if you were playing this mode, I'm sorry]
- Can now donate goods at a trade guild (an alternative to requested feature to jettison items from your cargo)
- Autocharger module now also reduces fuel price by 25%
- Post office will always give letter delivery tasks (unless you always have one) - should help you out at the early game
- The central district guilds won't be giving you the quests targeting other districts while you have a small ship
- Max simultaneous quest amount upped to 4 (from 3)
- Improved ship purchase window
- Renamed spices into rainbow flowers
- Crew / Ship Storage will now reopen automatically if you had them active while you closed the bottom info menu and then reopened it again
- Slightly altered the trade guild / bazaar sprites
- Game mode adjustments:
- campaign mode fully reworked and is based on the plot now
- lighthouse restoration won't have access to caravans (until lighthouse is actually restored)
- all other modes get access to caravans right from the start, as it used to be
- Mansion Builder: changed camera movement a bit (both with gamepad and mouse)
- Changed storage container tooltip positioning (should not hover outside the screen now)
- Swapped ship 5 and ship 8 sprites
Bugfixes:
- Various translation adjustments / improvements (keep reporting them, thank you!)
- "Not Visited Yet" panel in island info at map view won't be covered by pending quests anymore
- Fixed game mode description not fitting in properly in some cases
- Fixed captain's hat sprite order position
- Fixed captain's walking coordinates on some island
- Fixed oven bread production description
- Taxation display during trading is no longer faded out
- Fix the bug when produced items did not seem to stack occasionally (on player-owned islands); autosorting goods every day now
- Fix the bug when lightning catcher / crane would gather _all_ resource points at the map at the same time
- Fixed flipped brick and gem images
What's next?
We've been testing the game for the last two weeks so there should not be any major bugs, but if something comes up - we are monitoring things live over this weekend and will try to answer all the questions while we are awake. :)
After 8 months of constant updates, the game is finally ready! It has all the content and features that we imagined when we started making it. Thanks to your suggestions we were able to make it even more fun to play. We don't plan any major updates soon. The development has been really intense so we wanted to take some time off the gamedev after the release is done, but we agreed between ourselves that we'll make a bonus "thank you" content update if we hit 25k sales. You can help us reach this goal by spreading the word wherever you can. 😎
A special thank you goes out to our community translators. Without your help we'd never be able to make the game available in multiple languages. To our Early Access adapters: thanks for your support over the course of development, the game is significantly better because of you.
Regardless if you got the game just now or 8 months ago - thanks for playing it. This is what drives us forward.
Best,
Vladimir & Helen