Seaworthy - A Pirate Adventure Roguelike

Kordanor sent me information about a game on kickstarter called Seaworthy. The developer Mildly Competent Games is asking for $44,000 to fund the roguelike game.

A pirate adventure roguelike featuring RTS combat and brutal 16bit graphics - inspired by great games like FTL and Sid Meier's Pirates.

More information.

Pirate, okay.
Adventure, good.
Roguelike? For god's sakes ask for several $K more and make a properly balanced game! What's wrong with these indie developers lately? Noone has skills to work out a balanced game?

I'm skipping this project.

Originally Posted by joxer
Roguelike? For god's sakes ask for several $K more and make a properly balanced game! What's wrong with these indie developers lately? Noone has skills to work out a balanced game?

I'm skipping this project.

While I see that calling it a roguelike >can< suggest it might be unbalanced because it might also work even if is not as balanced, to me this is like saying Games should not have good graphics because this can help to get over bad gameplay.
And while there are blenders, there are hardly any games which are good just because of the graphics.

And a rogue like might actually require better balancing and more effort than a "normal" game. Because if the balance is really bad, it will be frustrating instead of fun, especially if a walkthrough is longer than just a couple of hours.

While not a rogue like but having an Ironman mode (and this is basically the core thing about a "roguelike" like FTL or Seaworthy) Xenonauts for example had some serious bug and balancing issues in the very last mission at release. Now if I wasnt playing in a ironman mode that would have been fine. But this way the bad experience was amplified.

Roguelikes and Ironman modes make that your decisions actually matter.

According to Steam I put 118 hours into FTL. Without the roguelike aspect it would have been maybe 10 or 20 at most. Because if I made a bad decision I would have just reloaded. Or maybe I wouldn't even have realized it. Because if a bad decision leads to another situation where you can decide - and you fail after that, you might not even see that it's because of the first bad decision. You just reload the last spot where you think you can make it right. There is far less tension and far less learning without the Roguelike /Ironman aspect.

In addition Roguelikes also make great games to stream. It's more exiting to watch someone who can actually fail (and might show some emotions doing so) instead of just "well, let's hit the reload button".

A couple of days ago a talked with some collagues about Darkest Dungeon which I personally didn't play but backed already. And you know what me bothered me most? That I sounded like it might be possible to just "spam" until you beat the game, without being able to reach a state where you have to start over.

So I am a total advocate for Roguelikes and Iron Made modes. And if Seaworthy didn't have that, I wouldn't have backed it.

I'm still waiting for a turn-based pirate/sea-trading simulation. This game, roguelike or not, right now looks like crap.

Oh, I just realized that the linked video in the news doesn't have the cool music of the KS video. Which for me adds quite a bit to it's charme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtkKDtkpNjc

The song in KS trailer is called "Roll the Old Chariot" and i can't get it out of my head. This could be a nice little ftl-like game and if nothing else i can see myself singing old pirate shanties like this one as my crew tries to stay afloat.

Oh my god, that video is brilliant! Very funny stuff. The guy getting his leg sawed off and replaced with a peg leg, only to be killed by a cannonball to the face. Nice!