Hello there traveler!
I know you've been awaiting a new devlog for quite some time, but fear not, your wait has ended!
Alpha is available in Discord
It's been a long journey but the alpha is finally in the hands of Discord members. If you haven't joined the Discord, this is probably the best time. You'll be able to grab a key and check out the game today!
Launching the alpha revealed some very interesting facts - there was no way to actually figure out the game. I went by popular internet opinion and didn't add a tutorial since for an alpha that makes less sense (it'll be obsolete soon, etc.), This resulted in very few people knowing how to play the game. One of the first things I therefore had to address was having the game be more intuitive & having a 'Challenge' section which acts as a quick tutorial into how to move around the map, how to trade & build businesses. Moving forward, I'll have to look into adding a kickass tutorial to explain all the game has to offer.
Here's the happy merchant I made for the challenges. A youtuber called him 'little pirate dude' which I thought was funny.
The power of sound!
Finally, after more than 3 weeks of curating music & sounds, the game now has an ambiance! There's chill medieval music in the background & cities have workers hammering away while dogs bark by the docks. Overall I feel it ads a lot of atmosphere to the environment. It's not perfect, but it's getting there. Adding sounds meant I also needed to add the settings to control them, so I went the extra mile and also added in controls & graphics settings. My french friends should also now be able to play using Azerty keyboards while multi-monitor folks should now be able to move the game around to their heart's content!
Ship upgrades, quality of life, tooltips and so much more
I've added so many little bits and bobs that it would be hard to write all of them here! I'll probably make some more detailed devlogs soon to get you up to speed with everything. Alpha testing has been great & provided me with incredible feedback on so many things that were either not clear, not working or just not at the right level of quality. I've already addressed a ton of them & more will soon hit the alpha!
Up next
I've started work on economy v3 - a big overhaul that'll make prices more intuitive as well as offer more replayability between games. After that I'm moving into reputation v1 & mayors. I'll probably wrap the session off with visuals v3 - a new graphical update - before the beta release in December.
Thanks for checking out the devlog! Remember to play the alpha if you haven't already (grab a key in discord https://discord.gg/7sKhteQv4w) and until next time, happy trading!
Lexy.