Hi everyone!
Last time we talked, we told you Pirates Republic was back on course. This devlog is where we finally show you what that looks like. It's been a busy month with a lot to get through, so let's start with the part that ate most of it.
Building System
Most of the month went into building. You raise Nassau piece by piece, and the heart of that is placement you can actually trust. Walls, foundations, stairs and roofs snap together cleanly, so putting up a structure no longer means fighting the grid for every wall. Doors and windows open and close the way you'd expect.
Just as important, your settlement stays where you left it. Building persistence is working now, so structures are saved between sessions. Once you raise a base, it's still standing when you come back to it.
A good chunk of the month went into the parts you never see: tightening how pieces line up and sit together, so the whole system feels solid before we start stacking more on top of it.
A Living World
The island runs on a new lighting setup with a full day and night cycle. Dawn, midday, dusk and a moonlit night each give the place a completely different feel, and it changes how you read the world from one hour to the next.
Behind that, the procedural world took a real step forward. A single world now generates 50 islands spread across roughly 32 km² of open sea, which gives you somewhere to sail and plenty to find between landfalls. Those numbers are a starting point. We'll keep tweaking them as the world fills out and we see how it actually plays.
We also built the first prototypes for procedural rock formations. That's groundwork for the sea biomes we want to grow later, the reefs, outcrops and coastlines that should make each stretch of water feel like its own place. The first collectible items are in the world too. It's early, but they're physically out there on the map now instead of sitting in a design document.
Progression, Crafting and Cooking
Survival is only half the story. The other half is how you climb from a castaway with empty hands to something that looks like a republic, and this month we put the backbone of that in place.
Progression runs on milestones. As you gather resources and put up buildings, you unlock new technologies on a tech tree, and each one opens up more of what you can craft, cook and build. The two things you do most, gathering and building, are the same two things that move you up the tree, so progress comes out of actually playing instead of grinding a system off to the side. That loop is the base the whole game sits on, and the deeper systems will hang off it as we go.
Crafting is in. We wired our old clothing database into the crafting system, so there's already a real set of items to make instead of placeholders. Alongside that we built out the resource database, the full list of raw materials that the world and the crafting bench pull from.
Cooking is in as well. You can turn the ingredients you gather into proper meals, which feeds straight into the survival side of the game. Keeping your crew fed becomes something you plan for and stock up on.
Ships: First Iteration
The ship system took its first real steps this month. It's early and rough, but the loop underneath it is starting to come together. So far we've got:
Randomized ship builds, the first pass at the modular system that will eventually assemble hulls, masts and decks into hundreds of different vessels
Armament spawning on ships
Firing systems for cannons, mortars and explosive barrels
Basic ship interactions
Ships you can spawn from the dock
Ongoing physics testing
Multiplayer
Multiplayer runs over both Steam and LAN. On the Steam side we use Facepunch lobbies, which is what will let you invite friends and have them join straight through the Steam overlay once a build is in your hands. LAN sits right alongside it for local play. Up to four of you can share a world, and that's the setup we're building the whole co-op experience around.
Under the Hood
A handful of smaller things that still pushed the project forward:
First cleanup pass on the base UI so it starts matching the game's tone. It's an early iteration, so expect it to keep changing.
Started on the main menu and the full opening flow (in progress)
Reworked several in-game interactions and added new ones
Inventory and tech progress now save player-side
Network animator added to PlayerNet, so characters move correctly for everyone else in the session
Item icons brought over from the previous build of Pirates
That's where we are. The foundations are in, the systems that matter are starting to lock together, and we're getting closer to something we can actually put in your hands. More soon.
~ The Pirates Republic Team