Cross Of the Dutchman Updates and Video

[Thagarr]

Triangle Studios has updated their Kickstarter page with a couple of new pledge levels since I first posted the original story May 1'st. So far the pledges are going ok, but have slowed down a bit from what they where the first couple of days.There is a new $15 and $25 level, and just announced today a new $150 level that include a one of a kind, hand drawn sketch of Grutte Pier, the hero in Cross of the Dutchman. The sketch is drawn by Triangle’s Art Director, Pascal Brander.

They have also released a recently recorded live action video of the motion capture that they did for the fighting sequences in the game that was recorded at Gameship. There is no actual gameplay footage as of yet, but that will be coming up at some point. They do have some animated gifs of the game environment on their CoTD and Kickstarter pages that are pretty cool ,although they are fairly big so i didn't post them here.

This game is not going to be the typical pirate game that we are used to, but from some of the pirate offerings some of the typical publishers have been offering lately, I am all for trying something new, and this game will be based on historical fact with as far as I know, no magic or mysticism anywhere in site! there will be boarding actions in the game, but I am not sure if there will be any ship to ship battles, as CoTD takes place in the very early days of cannon. As soon as they give me some details on the types of ships that will be used I will post it here. I have helped them a bit over on their forums with some ship research and a few other things. You can find the full details of all the pledge levels on their Kickstarter page HERE, and you can find out more about the full game and follow all the latest developments over at Triangle Studios official Cross of the Dutchman web page HERE!

 

[Keith]

That sword guy is awesome!

Good point about the state of pirate games now, time for a change. However with 22 days left I doubt they will get over the line (If they get close I'll whack in a $100 or so)

 

[Keith]

You know, we should start a kickstarter to project manager a developer to make a good pirate game......now that would be nice

 

[Thagarr]

It's interesting you should mention that idea Keith, I have been toying with a couple of ideas myself, but I haven't been able to convince myself that we could do it. A few years ago I ran across a game called 0 A.D. to put it simply, it's basically an open source Age of Empires clone designed by a dedicated modding community. The project had stalled for a while and there wasn't much progress until someone came up with the idea of taking donations to hire a programer to work on the game full time. The past year and a half they have really made some great progress and have put out some pretty polished beta's.

That idea combined with Kickstarter might just get us enough to actually do something. After what we have seen the past couple of years ourselves from Disney, 1C, Nitro and a couple of others, I am completely convinced that the only way that we are ever going to get the pirate game that we want is to build it ourselves. If we can some how figure out a way to fund it, we have more combined knowledge about pirates than almost any collection of people on the planet, not to mention we have some really fantastic modelers, artists and story writers. We also do have some really talented coders as well, but we do lack anyone able devote the equivalent of 40-50 hours a week to full time programing. I won't go into a lot more detail here, but maybe this weekend I will put my thoughts together a bit more coherently and start a new "PA should make it's own game!" thread and see just where it goes from there.

 

[Armada]

The concept of us making our own game from scratch is certainly an interesting one, even though it's no doubt been debated many times before.
As you said, we have the combined knowledge and experience to make a truly authentic pirate/age of sail game- we'd only need some serious programmers and a suitable game engine, then the sky's the limit.
There will always be the whole "we need to finish Build 14 and GOF first" argument, but no-one can even begin to estimate when that is likely to happen, at this rate. If we don't start planning what we want to do next, chances are nothing will happen, especially as modding dies down and people start to leave...