As some of you might know, I've been on an epic month-long vacation. It's a first for me, and it has been incredible. The time of vacation-ing has ended. The time of building is now upon us!
In this post I'll present the game's Roadmap. It's a pretty long read. Strap in!
Loose ends (June-July)
There are many tinier features that were planned, but deprioritized for the release. There were other, more important things that needed to be in the game. It’s now the time to tie all these loose ends.
- remaining difficulty modifiers
- winter mode!
- big list of QoL features
- rebalancing ships perks + pirate encounters
- trade routes: statistics + more advanced management tools
- mayors: election process, player managed city-owned shops, auctions, more mayor quests
- notification / warning system for broken ships, businesses missing resources, pirate attacks, etc.
- ship customization
- the Sarnis campaign (FINALLY!)
- mark campaigns as completed (major oversight, sorries)
- free-play goals
- new warehouse building
New UI + localization (July - September)
The most consistent complaint I’ve seen is that the font is hard to read. You’re absolutely right. Additionally, the biggest feature request (BY FAR) I’ve received is support for other languages. These 2 areas are actually connected. The font that the game uses won’t allow a bunch of the characters that other languages need. If we also add in all the awesome feedback you gave about what the current UI does terribly, we have ourselves a full UI-centric update!
- new UI system that’s cleaner, has a better font & nicer overall aesthetic
- improve many of the windows (looking at you trading window, buy 1, buy 5 shenanigans)
- more tools to manage fleets, trading routes, global inventory view & upgrades
- localization for the first language set: german, spanish, french, russian
The sandbox (September - November)
It’s no secret that the biggest inspiration for High Seas has been Patrician 3. I just love that game. I do however want High Seas to also further develop its own identity. I always felt that with the procedural map, this game is a bit more open to a sandboxy environment. Moving forward, I want to lean a bit more into that.
- fully featured map editor with a land painting tool, allowing the exact placement of cities and hand-crafting economies, setting up goals.
- steam workshop integration so that you can share your custom games + find new, interesting ones.
The future (November +)
I will always be adding more and more things I find fun to the game. Reality is however, I won’t always be able to dedicate my full focus to it. At some point I will prototype some more cool games, and I hope you guys will be along for the ride!
- improve robot trader AI: robot traders will have goals, build their own businesses and more ships, allowing for a more immersive world, as well as making strategic use of them.
- v1 of mod support, probably in the shape of a demo mod, allowing new buildings, ships, UIs and hooking into the game’s event system
- a bunch of other stuff I have probably promised but am forgetting right now.
Maybe-land (2026 - 2099)
These are all random ideas and hard to implement features that people would like to see in the game. I would also love to have them! No promises though.
- extract the game core and open source it
- use the game core as a server and package it with the visual client, in order toooooo
- allow multiplayer
- add a pirate combat minigame (and becoming a pirate ofc!)
- church focused free DLC with new buildings, quests, economies and more stats to track!
- politics focused free DLC allowing you to influence elections or become the actual mayor
- community crowdsourced localizations for other languages or even a system to load localization packs from the workshop
- female captains & mayors
Goodies (all the time!)
Some of the updates above will be slow. I want to give you guys something fresh to try out from time to time! That’s where the goodies come in!
- more custom maps before the map editor is released (in fact, I have one in the works right now, and it has a crazy amount of cities in it)
- improved captains - be able to find captains in special places, earn them through quests or remove bad traits from existing ones. I also heard rumors about some kind of academy…
- creating new settlements
- building dwellings and becoming a landlord
- more quests! in fact as soon as we have at least a decent pool of them, I should be able to re-enable quests in the free play since they won’t be as repetitive anymore. Keep a look out in the Discord for some kind of quest-creation competition
- more campaigns!
- more achievements
- more city sizes (larger cities)
Lastly
I plan to start a let’s play series on Youtube! I am not a Youtuber and Lord knows how consistent I’ll be with actually uploading, but I’d love to do at least a 30min - 1h episode a week. I think it could be cool to see how I imagined playing the game, as I’m sure everyone will have their very own style. The channel's here https://www.youtube.com/@lexydotzip although I haven't uploaded anything to it in 4 months, and it has a grand total of 38 subs :)
Thanks so much for all your support & your patience during my vacation! Please keep the awesome feedback and suggestions coming in either the feedback form or the Discord!
Happy trading!
Lexy.