Everyone on BOARD!!!
An important day for our game is here! Today, November the 14th, we released Deadliest Catch: The Game in the Early Access on Steam! From now on you can purchase and play our game via Steam and participate in creating it by your feedback. :)
Like we’ve done many times before, we’d like to start with a huge thank you to our community - all the Kickstarter backers, pre-alpha testers, members of our Discord server. Your involvement, support, and feedback have been (and still are!) a tremendous help to us all. We are sure that we wouldn’t be able to do many, many things with this project if it wasn’t for you all! :)
That being said, let’s now focus on the Early Access release itself. So what has changed in comparison to the demo version that you were able to play up to this point? First of all, we implemented two important features that you were often asking about - save system and the full tutorial. As for the crew management system, the main goal of our successful Kickstarter Campaign, we are starting with the basic version of it and we will keep developing it during the Early Access period.
We expect the Early Access to last about 4 to 6 months, mostly depending on the progress with the development. Our main short-term goals for the first weeks will be polishing the current state of the game and fixing bugs reported by players and beta-testers, as well as looking into the matters pointed to us during the Kickstarter Campaign. From there on, we intend to focus on the equipment wearing off and the dynamic mechanics of the fisheries; as well as captain’s tablet that will help you manage your ship, crew, and skills (starting with the basic version of it).
But we have a lot more on the horizon. :) We’d like to bring your captain’s experience to the new level with a career mode consisting of the consequent seasons in which you will upgrade your ship and gain new skills while earning money and catching up to the AI competition. There will be a bunch of cosmetic changes, like setting the name of your captain, ship, and ship’s coloring presets; fully functional wheelhouse (with some changeable music on the radio); all the cool Kickstarter rewards (like hidden in-game messages); a pop-up information system, that will keep you posted on the situation on the Bering Sea and so on. In the meantime, we will be doing localization for various languages.
As we stated earlier, the crew system - probably the most anticipated feature - will get enriched in the future updates. We want to implement a fatigue system that will make managing your crew more advanced. Then the next step will be improving the employment system (for example allowing you to pay your crew a share of your income). Finally, we intend to make the Bering Sea more dangerous (and the catch more deadly). Waves, equipment malfunctions, ship damage … and possibly some accidents that can occur to the crewmembers.
You can check the planned Development Road Map for Deadliest Catch: The Game HERE.
Of course, we will keep you posted about the updates and the changes implemented in them. Please let us know what you think by leaving recommendations and comments on the Steam discussion pages. If you haven’t joined our Discord server yet - go for it :) It’s the best place to share your feedback or ask questions about games! Also, please report to us all the bugs you’ve encountered. The game is still in the development and some problems may (and probably will) happen at first - but we’ll do our best to deal with them as soon as we can.
See you at the Bering Sea, Captains!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/838630/Deadliest_Catch_The_Game/