With my attention turning towards Dwarf King (and the Small Battle system), I will – of necessity, since I’m only one person – be doing less work on Pirates and Traders in the future. Some of you who have contacted me in the past weeks may already have noticed this – as there have been one or two blips in my responsiveness (though part of that is also simply due to having a newborn in the house again… ). I won’t stop updating Pirates and Traders, but the pace of updates will slow down somewhat (as it already has, to some extent).
One of the sad things about working on Android, is how difficult it is to create modifiable apps. On a PC, it is easy because one can simply place the data files in plain text, and anyone can then modify them as they like and run the game off them. Gaining access to Android resource files, on the other hand, is quite difficult. I have some ideas that I’d like to pursue for future games (perhaps have players enter URIs to new content?), but adding to the existing game… not so easy. However, packaging and releasing new versions is not that time consuming, so in the absence of the time required to rebuild the app, I’m considering another option.
Do you have a starting character background that you would love to see in Pirates and Traders: Gold? A short adventure idea that you’d like to write? Specific player items or ship modifications that you think would be cool (and which do not unbalance the game)? If you’re willing to do the work involved in writing them up and testing them, you’re welcome to pitch your idea on the Facebook page or on the forums and we can take it from there (ideally, prefix the title with [Mod Idea]). If the idea is practical to add (and doesn’t contain objectionable content), and the resulting writing can be wrapped up in story script without too much work, I’ll package it and put it into the game as optional content in whatever update comes next.
Note that I’ll require you to release any writing done in this context as Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (or similar). Any contributions (except player backgrounds), will go into both the free and Gold versions; for player backgrounds we’ll have to see. Any mods will be attributed/credited on the credits page.
So that’s basically it. TLDR; if you’re interested in doing some modding on Pirates and Traders, contact me and let’s see what happens.