It’s been a while since the new iteration of the game was released into open testing, I suspect that most of the active players are on the open testing track, but if you aren’t – well, good news. After a ton of bugfixing, and lots of other improvements, the current release is now nearing a state where I consider it stable (or as stable as I can reasonably get it).
In other words – the big rewrite is almost ready for release to the general channel. I am going to leave this cooking for a few days more, but – absent any new surprises – the current test version will be released for everyone at the end of this month.
Apart from bug fixing, the past few weeks have been work on the Duel (single character combat) module and – in parallel – work on the Land combat module. These systems have been one of my main design headaches wrt the StoryBytes (as I call it) game system. I always found the combat system in Pirates and Traders 1 too simple, but on the other hand, combat which is too detailed and complex is a poor fit for a narrative game. But then… I also want combat to feel grounded in the historical period – I would like a character wielding a cutlass to feel at least a little different from another character using a rapier.
That’s a tall order to handle in a design and I certainly do not claim to have solved it, but after many years of playing around with different design options, I think I have now found a system that I feel works for this game engine. At heart it’s a “card-based” engine (though the current game setup just shows buttons); you have a pool of actions based upon your equipment, traits, and circumstances, and you get access to a limited number of those actions each turn.
It’s a system inspired from a lot of different places – from every tabletop role-playing game under the sun to actual card-based computer games like “Slay the Spire” through combat survival RPGs like “A Legionary’s Life” to board games such as “Up Front“. If any system deserves special mention, it is perhaps the latter – it was the one that finally made the whole system click into place for me by demonstrating how the same core ideas translate from sea to duels to land combat.
The Land Combat has been the main missing piece for me in the game system – how to make something that is both narratively and game mechanically satisfying, without going overboard in complexity. The solution is the same core gameplay – a pool of actions and stratagems available to you based on the balance of your forces and the battlefield – and limitation to a subset of those each turn. The limitation is what makes this work, IMO – it means that a weapon can have many different types of attack and defensive moves (adding period and narrative richness) – without the player needing to pick between 20 options every turn (a meaningless number of choices, since such combat systems almost always have one or two dominant strategies).
I expect adding the land combat system will go quickly from here. I already many of the core actions defined and the basic game loop coded, what remains is adding the user interface and converting the player’s forces into combat units and back again. In fact, the work is going so smoothly that I’m strongly considering creating a new “mini-game” just to test out how it works. I have some ideas for a small game – built on the Storybytes engine, of course – where it would slot in perfectly. If I find some time in-between all the other work, I just might write up a few storylets and publish it as a free game.
If the duel and land combat engines falls into place this summer, then we’re finally closing in on Pirates and Traders 2, version 1.0 (i.e., FINAL version). There is one piece of the game engine which is still a mess – the inter-faction relationships. But I don’t expect that will take too long to fix (it’s mostly been languishing because there is little point to it, while land combat is nonexistent in the game). And if that is fixed, then it is “only” the narrative bits remaining for the game to be feature complete. And probably some upgrades on the art front as well – once I find a new artist to work on the game (that’s a lot harder now than it was when I started working on this game – too much AI slop around).
Bottom line – the goal is to (finally) hit v1.000 before the end of this year. We’ll see how it goes.
Update May 1:
Some enterprising beta testers found a new set of bugs just as we reached the end of the month, so the schedule gets pushed out a bit as I don’t want to release known major issues on the general channel.