Hello everyone!
I am releasing today another Playtest update! It introduces some more side content to polish the ambiance and experience of Shipolis.
The first addition is a minigame: treasure hunts! You might sometimes find a bottle in the sea instead of a lost crate with resources. It will contain a map to a treasure. Your goal is to find the marked place in the world. Once you are at the exact spot, you will be able to interact and complete the hunt. The reward is either a bunch of resources, or new exclusive blueprints you will not get anywhere else in the game. Treasure hunts are completely optional content, but if you enjoy it, you will be rewarded with extra content (those exclusive buildings can have pretty nice effects!).
The second addition is lore! In the form of journal notes. Sometimes, after a quest or after performing certain actions, you will get a new note in the journal. These notes will give some background narrative. You are in a big empty world, yet there are areas ready to be built on everywhere. And lost crates are appearing in the sea all the time. And the seas expand in every direction with more empty regions. Where did we even come from? Isn't that a bit mysterious? I hope those notes will feel engaging and will make you more attached to the world. Really, their goal is to add a little adventure tone to all of this.
If you like having lore, great! If you don't, no worries! I included a checkbox in the settings to disable the journal note popups. The notes will still accumulate in your journal tab, but at least you won't be interrupted each time you get a new one. Similarly to treasure hunts, interacting with the lore will be optional. You will just miss on extra side content, which is fine if you are only interesting in the city building aspect.
That's it for the main changes. The rest is mostly bug fixes.
I am now happy with the current state of the Playtest and will call it here in terms of content. So, in the next couple weeks, I will do only some polishing and bug fixing, and then I will replace this Playtest by a proper official Demo page. Which means editing a new trailer, and then also reaching out to press and content creators to promote the Demo release.
I would like to thank everyone who sent me feedback and bug reports, this does help a lot! The Playtest median playtime went from 11 minutes to 24 minutes, which is a great sign that we did improve things and made the onboarding more engaging. Thanks for your support, and I hope the game will continue to appeal to more people once the Demo page is up!
See you next time!
-Radiant Sloth
Changelog v0.4g:
Added treasure hunts
Added new buildings
Added journal notes with background lore
Completing a quest with a new blueprint as reward will now be followed by a quick popup to show the details of the newly available building
Added more information to the quest tooltips about buildings:
Mentions if requires an island with a specific resource
Mentions if can be built on empty tiles, or is an upgrade to another building, or settles a new city
Tweaked clay and coconut icons to make them less similar
Tweaked the upgrade tables (number of tiers, values, and costs)
Fixed map showing the wrong tooltip from another sector when hovering a city icon
Fixed wonder base effect applying again when loading a save
Fixed crate lasting forever instead of disappearing
Fixed starting island generating without hemp
Fixed once again the docks not facing the water correctly in some cases (I really hope it is definitely fixed now...)
Fixed some other rare visual glitches around buttons
Changelog v0.4f:
Added crates randomly appearing in the sea. Interacting with them gives a few resources
Fixed unable to create an export route between two cities in different sectors
Fixed unable to create a supply route from a sector different to the one the player is currently in
Fixed ships markers on the map being visible in sectors they are not
Fixed routes ships doing some weird visual teleportation when going from one sector to another
Fixed routes ships showing the idle icon when they should not
Fixed some rare visual glitches around buttons
Fixed supply ships having weird teleportation during their return trip
Fixed again the docks not facing the water correctly in some other rare cases
Changelog v0.4e:
Fixed quest about supply routes with the wrong goal