Dev Update: Pirate Crew!

This week we've started work on a new feature! We've been looking forward to working on this since day one.
As a pirate captain, you'll need a hearty crew of pirate lackeys to do your bidding, right? After you secure your first boat, you might find someone willing enough to join your crew! Although, chances are they'll need some convincing.
Once you've earned their trust, you'll be able to give them some commands. Have them follow you or wait at your ship. Set them to work, or have them carry your burdens.

A development screencapture of your crew coming to your aid from the ship. They follow you!

Later in the game, you'll need a substantial crew to be able to pilot some of the larger ships. Bigger vessels require more upkeep to stay afloat. You'll need to set teams to bail bilgewater, rig the sails, or even man the crow's nest.

Concept art! Showing the crew busy at work aboard one of the in-game ships.

In order to create a wide variation of characters on our limited indie budget, we've designed a system to generate semi-random characters that still have personality and style.
Our artists have created a bunch of body-part modules. With a small amount of programming, each new crew member will generate with a random selection of features. Kind of like a kids' mix-and-match flip book.

Grab the book here :P

We've already made a fair amount of progress. We hope to wrap up this feature addition in about two weeks. We'll be posting updates on our Twitter as always!

Bug of the Week: Breakdancing Pirate Crew

The huge Crew Update has all hands on deck (ha ha) with most of the programmers working hard on creating functionalities for the crew and improving their AI.

Creating a responsive pirate crew has been one of the biggest updates we have done so far, therefore we were bound to stumble upon a few bugs here and there. Luckily (for you), a couple of those bugs were so goofy that we had to show them off.

They're meant to be a pirate crew, not a breakdancing crew.

Creating crew member interactions with objects in the world proved to be a guaranteed concoction for bugs. Once the crew members are ordered to board the ship and fulfill certain duties they seem to suddenly panic and begin to breakdance. And float. And have mild seizures.

A poor crew member suffering from severe OCEAN MADNESS...

Rest assured that this'll be all fixed by the time we push the update. :P

Last week's bug: click here.

EDIT: Louis has just told me to inform you all that the model we're using for the crew members is a placeholder that we've borrowed from the Unity Asset Store. Consider yourselves informed.

Meet the Team: Part 1

We're beginning a new series of posts: Meet the Team! Every few days we'll make a new post to give you a better look at the people behind Tortuga Games and A Pirate's Life.

Let's start with the head honcho, or more appropriately our dutiful captain, Louis Van Dyke. Louis' influence on the game covers every stage of development. He holds the positions of head designer, programmer and all round spiritual guide.

After playing and loving Nintendo games such as Animal Crossing and Zelda for the majority of his life, Louis has found a way to channel these influences (plus whatever goes on in his brain) by developing games; often as an homage to the games he loved as a child.
Thus the birth of A Pirate's Life was brought about from the loins of Louis' imagination!

When he is not working on the game, Louis is a collector of retro games. He's beaten every Mega Man game on the NES (without cheats, he swears) and proudly owns every installment of the Zelda main series.

Louis focuses most of his gaming time towards indie games. He has fallen in love with the unique boldness that independently developed games tend to have and is passionate about supporting them for it. Lately, he's particularly enjoying playing Minecraft (which means he helped Notch buy his sweet mansion), Hotline Miami (he listens to the soundtrack on repeat as he programs) and of course, Animal Crossing (which he says is mostly for research).

If it wasn't for Louis, A Pirate's Life would not exist and the Tortuga Games' team members would never have had the opportunity to get together every week and have tons of fun game jamming! He is our leader and every member of the Tortuga crew would be happy to sail across the Seven Seas under his command!

Bug of the Week: Landshark

The swimming update has taken us a while and we have had a few setbacks in the process. Including our favourite bug from this week!

Landshark

We've discovered that we didn't have our beaches extending low enough into the water, therefore the player character can swim straight through the island instead of walking up the beach like a normal pirate. The bug was an easy fix for our modelers but we all got a laugh out of it and we think you guys will too :)

Check out last week's Bug of the Week here!

Dev Update: Swimming and Floating Objects

Now that our pirate has taken a few lessons we are proud to show off his swimming skills!

This update has been prolonged for a little while, because we didn't realize what a struggle it would be to have the character be able to swim. The complex generation of the waves we have created made it harder to have the swimming working well. Nonetheless, we have reached our goal and it looks damn fine!
We've also included a stamina meter, so that you can't swim across the entire ocean without needing a ship :P

A smaller update: Our programmers have made it so logs interact with water in a realistic way. When thrown into the sea, the logs will experience buoyancy and float back to the beach with the waves, washing up on the shore.

Also if you were wondering, stone will sink just like it should, so don't go throwing it into the ocean! (Stone hasn't been discussed before so yes. Stone confirmed.)

Stay tuned for more progress updates!

Dev Update: Concepts and Ideas

This week we have been working relentlessly on a new update for A Pirate's Life. The update will add a few of the important gameplay features we've teased at in the past. By the end of this week, we hope to have plenty of great screenshots, GIFs and gameplay footage to show off.

In the meantime, we wanted to show off some concepts we have been mulling over that have helped to inform the game design up to this stage.

It's important for us to concept a lot of cool islands, because we want to fill our sandbox world with only the most interesting places to explore. The above picture shows the idea for an island that features a high unreachable town segment. However if you return at high tide, you'll gain easy access using your ship.

(What's that? High tide? Maybe that's something that'll make it into the game after this week's update! :P )

Here are some character designs drawn by the devs for a very important character (excuse our drawing skills). 

Because you'll be interacting with this guy so much, we wanted to make sure we chose and refined a really great character. Each of these guys has their own personality and backstory- maybe we'll save that for another post. Which do you like best?

Hopefully that whets your appetite for development news for now! We can't wait to get back to you when the update is done.

Bug of the Week

From now on, we're hoping to give you guys a weekly view of the not so pretty and chuckle worthy aspects of game development!

Our artists have been working diligently on the animations for the player character and a slightly demented bug has arisen.

A stomach turning bug

It seems that when the character's wave animation is triggered the bottom half of his body decides to rotate 360 degrees.
Also, check out the beautiful new ship that makes a cameo in the background!

Dev Update: Title Screen

A title screen isn't something you'd think a lot of work gets put in to. However, considering that it's the first impression for players of your game, you really should be putting some thought into it. For A Pirate's Life, we wanted to capture the feeling of the game in a single screen. After a fair amount of trial and research, we've come up with a design we're happy with.

We'd like to share our plans with you:

A quick mockup of our title screen.

Instead of using a static image or concept art, we've elected to run a visualisation of gameplay! Upon starting the game for the first time, the title screen will feature one of the game's most expensive ships (not the one picture above!) sailing endlessly across a blue ocean. The ship will be piloted by an impressive crew, who you will see scrambling across the decks.

After you've played the game, returning to the title screen will feature your own character and crew, piloting the last ship you used in-game. Not only is this a neat little easter egg, but it will help give the player a sense of progression, which is an important aspect of the game.

Given some spare time, it'd be easy to further develop the title screen- a day/night cycle could be added, you could have the ship sail past other vessels or maybe some islands every so often! It all depends on how much time we have.

The life of an indie dev is a busy one, though :P

Weekly Dev Jam

Once a week, everyone at Tortuga Games gets together with one thing in mind: to get as much work done as possible. We find that working together in the same space is really motivating- you're simply less inclined to get distracted when the guy next to you is working hard.

Donald, hard at work.

We run the weekly jams alongside our regular meetings. By separating the work from the management/design side of things, we're able to concentrate on issues like integrating our work and establishing conventions etc outside of the meetings. This frees up the meetings for important, straightforward issues and makes everything run smoother.

Sneak peek of what we'd achieved about halfway through today's jam.

Having the programmers and artists work side-by-side really helps with team building, too. Plus, things run so much smoother when it's time to import new models/textures if the artists and programmers both work on it at once.

Working in jams really establishes a sense of ownership among the team. The artists get to see their work in action, the designers see the bigger picture coming together, and the programmers get to work with something prettier than the grey cubes they've been using as stand-in models.

Feels good when it all starts to come together.

In short, dev jams are great! They work really well for us as a team and we'll keep doing them until the game is done!

Dev Update: Waves and Buoyancy!

A wave is not a greeting but a GIFt ;)

After hours of work and a few headaches, our team has achieved a smooth ocean swell that we're happy with! We've been working toward this for a while. Our artists are currently working on a prettier water texture.

By tweaking the parameters of the waveforms, we can change how rough or calm the seas are in real-time. Our script allows for some really complex waves- we're very pleased with the end result!

Additionally, the boat physics now react neatly to the waves' motions and have some pretty accurate looking buoyancy. Note that the boats that can be seen in the GIF above may not end up in the final game.

A fancy new ship is in the pipeline, and we hope to share our finalised sailing system with you in a Dev Update in the near future!

Dev Update: A First Look at the Player Character

The new year is among us but we've been working hard over the holidays....

Here's the first version of the player character. Still working on animations though!

He can change his face depending on what emotion we want him to have, and can wear different kinds of hats! Stay tuned as we refine him :)

~Expect more updates soon including a sweet GIFof vessel buoyancy on the ocean waves and more fresh hot memes~