Snowbird Games has released a new satus update for Caribbean! on Steam.
More information.Status update #2
We have to let you know that the big July update we announced earlier won't be coming — instead, it's going to become even bigger and land in August. We'll share the reasons behind this decision, as well our current work progress, below:
Boarding. We think that boarding is the heart of combat gameplay, even more important than sea battles. The current version of the boarding fights stopped being satisfactory for us a long time ago, and as a result we're redoing it from scratch.
Graphic quality of the boarding locations was too poor compared to the character models so all ships are being completely redone. Besides the evident difference in textures, we redesigned level geometry: got rid off jamming on decks and unnecessary rooms, made the movement on ships more clear and free for the player. We also added crow's nests on masts, to provide riflemen with additional spots.
Plus we'll try to add some new animations, including the classic boarding jump rope.
Naval combat. The second most important element of the game. We're still torn between which path to choose: making everything more simple and arcady or adding more options for strategy and control. But our internal tests showed that either way we'd need to deal with current small locations. Right now gameplay functions well only with 2 vs. 2 ship battles. Our limit is 12 ships on the scene, and with that amount of ships there's very little room for everyone in the sea. Making the location bigger is a challenge as we have to work around the engine's limitations. So for now our programmer added a 'spyglass' option that many of you asked for. More significant updates in this area should be coming in September.
Trading and economy. Initially it was supposed to be a side gameplay element, but we want to increase its importance in the game. Actually, working on economy takes more time than anything else at the moment as we keep changing some basic things in M&B engine. For example, right now we separate player's personal inventory and his cargo. It's not very convenient and logical to carry not only a set of 12 breastplates but two tons of cacao as well. Another new element is building construction in the towns — there's so much to do here that we won't even dare to promise it done by August.
Strategic map. We got a lot of feedback on geography of our map and its flaws. Apologies for the inaccuracies — that was our first try to befriend realism with gaming. In August we'll do our best to finish the new world map, more accurate and, possibly, far more attractive.
The plans are pretty ambitious for us, and we hope we can implement all of this with no problem. After the August update we'll be ready to switch to the next big step — refining land battles and implementing city sieges.