Welcome!
Ladys and gentlemen, guys and girls! I am so exceted to welcome you to the 1.0 Hopeless Sea release announcement (hip hip ːsteamhappyːhuray!)
This Potato Cat as usual, I will introduce you the finally here 1.0 Hopeless Sea and what's next for Hopeless Sea future updates.
1.0 Release
First of first, let's talk about what we have prepared for 1.0, as we have said before, either here or other social media, the full version of HS has...
[[i]11 waves and ４ bosses (at wave 3, 6, 9 and 11), 5 unique characters, plus 4 main weapons and 3 sub weapons ]
It inherited the key elements of Hopeless Sea Demo 0.7 (3 waves + 1 boss) and expanded to a longer adventure. Clearing a run for a STG veteran will likely take 25 - 30 minutes to complete at normal difficutly.
Lore
Many of you lovely people have asked me about if there is any lore behind this game and the answer is clearly YES! There is, indeed, some story happened behind all this catastrophe, we are working closely to bring it to you in the next patch if not one afterwards.
To be honest, the idea of having story background for this game is from players! Have been asked about "what is behind" "why city is under water" millions of times, So thanks to you, I now have to give a formal and rational answer.
So basically, everything happens after 20 years from now, extreme heat melts all the remaining glacier causing massive sea level rise, all the big coastal cities like LA, NY, Shanghai, Rio... you name it, are all gone under the water. The world map has therefore reformed dramatically, which I will bring to you in the future later. As to the crazy sea monsters, they are caused by pollution and radioactive particales, which make them extremely dangerous and killing-frenzy.
Roadmap to 1.1
-bugs-
The top top priority is, of course, dealing with bugs! There are many of them hiden in the codes and I will pledge you to help me deal with it XD, so if you please, when you see them, simplely send it to me wherever you can find me!
-fragment story-
You will be able to find some notes/diary after defeating enemys and read them in teh store, they will help you to construct a broad scene of the background during that time. There will also be some self-talky dialogues of each characters, so you may found more interesting background of their own.
-more bosses-
There will be at least 3 more alternative bosses to be designed for wave 3, 6, 9. Some of them are drawn months before, but not complete yet in terms of timing.
Here is a sneaky peak view for two of the bosses:
(Flounder & manta ray)
-weapon case-
This will probably be of roguelike lovers looking for, so for now if you kill an orange ship, it will drop diamonds, but instead, the original idea is to have them drop weapon crates in very early demos. Like what we had back in 1990s, eating a crate will either increase weapon power immediately if timing is right or switch to another weapon if wrong (Raiden series, Demon Star etc.). So here you will need ask the mechanic (store girl) to help you swtich weapon when you need to, which I believe this method will be much more pleasant than those old day methods (personally, I don't really mind the Raiden way but let me know which one you prefer in the comments).
(weapon crates examples)
-more weapons, more traits, more power ups-
We are aware that to keep players engaged, game play must be engaging, so in STGs the enemys needs to be deadly, and players want to be even more deadlier than them. So there will be some ways to help players to build up their armory - charging melee weapons, penetrating laser beams etc. We will see what we will bring to this game. Oh, by the way, the privateer girl is associated with smuggler deal so she will likely become a in-game merchant later :)
-2-5 more characters-
There can be more characters and ships, we wanted to make 2 more characters/ship (or maybe a seaplane) at least as free update.
-endless mode & arena mode?-
This have to be in a later patches like 1.2 or even 1.3. We wanted to have a steam ranking system for endless mode and boss by boss fight arena mode. We can talk about that more later.
-Hopeless Sea 2??-
We are really considering a universe of Hopeless Sea and make a sequel for Hopeless Sea themed in rebuilding human society and cities (floating cities? duono :D), and that can be a STG + buildy genre mixture. But that will be a while later hehe.
Bundles
Last but no least, we bundled up with two other indie devs here, Divine Orders (STG + RPG elements) and Genome Guardian (vampire suvivor-like), they both very unique and fun to play games so if you fancy, why not buy them together with Hopeless Sea for better pricing?
We have already updated 7 patches till this is written, they are all for the annoying fatal bugs, we apologize for the inconvenience caused by our bug, our bad, we will work harder to eliminate them.
There is still a long way for Hopeless Sea, so let us know what you want to see in the future below. Thanks for reading!
I will see you in the next dev log!
The Potato Cat
