WIP Spirit of Sail

[Tom Stevenson]

Ahoy mates and a happy talk like a pirate day.

I'm lead developer for a small indie studio based in the north of England currently working on an age of sail period tactical RPG. I've played games on the theme before and normally been left dissapointed either by lack of detail, historical accuracy or by the handling a vessel under sail.

We have undertaken several months of research and developed what we think is a game design that covers these gaps, though the level of accuracy we're aiming for probably won't be for everyone.

I don't want to make a shameless plug on your forums, but we would certainly appreciate any feedback and historical information that your members can provide.

If anyone's interested please visit www.spiritofsail.net for more information, I'll try to keep up with any questions in this thread but for detailed questions please ask on our forums and myself or another member of the team will pick them up. I'd like to point out that we are still very much in Alpha development and our main focus so far is on programming and developing systems to handle ship handling, crew behaviour and sailing factors such as apparent wind and changing forces on a sail based on angle of attack. We don't have a lot of eye candy to show off yet.

Thanks in advance for your help

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Very interesting. What kind of a game is it eventually supposed to be? Single-player? Multi-player?
What is the time setting going to be? Will there be a shore-based part? Or is it only at sea?

It seems there are quite a lot of games being developed in an historical Age of Sail setting these days.
Personally I'd always like to see the people working on them to work together to increase the chances of one actually being finished to proper quality.
So whatever happens, I hope that at least one of the project in development will make it through!

 

[Bava]

Just had a look at the FAQ, seems like you have a pretty nice concept, lots of promising stuff if you can pull it off.
Gonna watch this closely

 

[Tom Stevenson]

I suppose the oiginal post is a little vague.

It's pimarily a multiplayer game, though the planned design includes significant single player elements, though these are always carried out within the multiplayer envirnoment. Our early stress testing so far has indicated a likely limit of twenty five "masts" in each game zone, so twenty five sloops or eight ships or some combination between. Game zones are 200 square km each and our region is centered round the Caibbean, though we are keeping our options open on covering the eastern seaboard of the American colonies and mainland south America to some extent. There is shorebased play in instances separate fom sea based regions where players socialise, trade and explore some of the remaining uncolonised regions on islands and the mainland.

Our time setting is a vague 1720-1750, after the golden age of piracy but before the colonial powers completely pacified the Caribbean region.

In terms of what makes Spirit of Sail stand out, we've a few design elements we feel make the game stand out from the crowd:

Players don't control one character, but are represented by the ships company, and its this that tracks experience, notoriety and standing. A Player is always in control of one of the ships officers directly, the level of control the player has of the ship and of tasks on board ship depending on which officer the player is "possesing" at any time.

There's absoloutley no fantasy elements, its real-world based.

Vessels aren't a single stock model, a player combines a hull type, hull design and a sail plan to design their vessel, so one "Sloop" could be a fast raider, another a wide bellied coastal trader, the vessels are highly customisable right down to cosmetic decoration and fittings. Of course this means there aren't so many base designs to choose from, our current plan is for seven basic vessel designs from 45' single masted vessel to a 120' ship rigged 5o gun warship.

The player doesnt control the vessel diectly with WASD or arrow keys, if you want to steer to port you select a new heading and the AI controlled crew go about timming sails and setting the new course by hauling lines to re-set the yards, number and skill of crew defines how long this takes. The same system is used for all activities on board succh as hauling anchors and loading guns, its not a timer or bar that ticks by but a series of tasks that have to be completed by AI controlled crew.

A futher example of this would be tuning across the wind, you can't just steer the vessel from one tack to another but instead use a "Manouver" command to either wear or tack the ship, in a single masted sloop a simple enough thing to do buton a ship rigged frigate the crew would then go about letting go the main and mizzen, hauling round the spanker and backing the foremast to turn the vessel before setting her on a new course full and by. Of course the design is such that a player doesnt have to understand what any of that means to play the game, just that to turn the ship you eithe hit the "Wear ship" or "Tack ship" button.

There's no world map, everything is controlled from a 3rd person perspective on you currently controlled officer. To travel fom one island to another, or one zone to another a player sails to the edge of the zone and then "jumps" to the next, the travel between zones is instant but on longer journeys might cost povisions to represent a longe journey, you dont have to sail each zone between, so you could jump from Antigua to Trinidad by sailing to the edge of Antigua and selecting Trinidad as a destination, paying a few days worth of provisions to cover feeding the crew on the way.

Hope that gives you something more to go one, if you want to know more feel free to sign up to our forums and ask directly there, we'll keep regular updates posted.

@Bava: Thanks, this is an ambitious project and we'll be looking to launch a kickstarter campaign shortly to bump us to the next level of development. You can program in notepad if you have to but sadly the poduction of the kind of art assets we need requires some expensive thid party software licenses.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Sounds interesting for sure.

Just to be sure, are you aware of the Naval Action project as well? That's another seafaring multiplayer game being developed.
See here for more information: http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/naval-action-open-world-multiplayer-rpg.20616/
I think they're a small group of people trying to make it work as well, but they seem to be doing pretty good on the 3D models.
Perhaps your two projects are compatible? Might increase both your chances of success!

 

[Tom Stevenson]

Just a quick update, we've got some new screenshots up on the website.

All still WIP of course, but hopefully gives some idea what we are aiming for.

Any questions feel free to ask here or on our forums.

 

[Tom Stevenson]

Thought I'd put a couple of shots up here.

Everything is of course still very much WIP, but hopefully gives you some idea where we're at and what we're aiming for.

Thats an example of a simple single masted vessel, in this case a Dutch merchant sloop.

Spanish privateer running down a dutch merchant

Our character models aren't complete yet, so there's no crew and the running rigging is not completed. Vessels like these are the starting point for players.

Our range of naval artillery from 3lb to 42lb gun

Shore battery firing a 32lb rocket volley