The Caribbean Sail V1.5.8.5

This is it lads!

These are the final touches and last patch until the major Route Planning expansion is complete.

+ Goods aboard ships now have a small delta of randomness in pricing
+ The British Grenadiers shanty got a bass drop
+ A new crew event that can end in flogging
+ More Particle Effects

- One potential bug

There was a bit more code cleanup but this log is already dry and boring enough. My attention is now on a slew of needed changes to the game structure that will make the new features possible. Thanks be to every one of you kind lads that alert me to bugs, suggest improvements, and populate the Atlantic with toxins- I mean, messages in bottles.

- Your Captain, Evan

V1.5.8.4

Sing a tow, row, row, row, row, row, row, row, for the British Grenadiers. Enjoy the new "Shanty" available in the one and only London Harbor Shop. 

Where's V1.5.8.3 I hear you ask? I flogged it to death after it failed to fix a bug. What about the bug? I flogged it to death also- actually, I've been doing a lot of flogging on account of the new discipline system added to the game. There's only one event that makes use of it now but later crew relations and discipline will be integral to each voyage.

The captains have decided that they would make a better profit selling items at sea than only in ports, so two items and a shanty will always be available aboard ships now! 

Fish are a bit more lively after being caught in the net, another achievement was added, the online bug is finally fixed (I'm 80% sure this time) and there are more particle effects!

If all has gone according to plan then this will be the last update to the game before Route Planning. I'll share the full details early February.

V1.5.8.2

Small update that should have been there for a while now.

One time tutorial windows have been added for things that some people have missed. This should help make people better shoppers, liars dice players, naval combatants, and solve all the problems in the world.

The last update frustratingly did not fix the one bug in the game, I changed a line of code that will either cause more crashes, fix the bug forever, or do absolutely nothing.

The Caribbean Sail V1.5.8.1

Habits must be hard to break because here we are, one week after weekly updates ended and i'm pushing an update. This should hopefully resolve the game crashing bug a few of you have encountered.

The short version: Rarely some data would fail to be retrieved or decoded from one of the online features and it would cause a crash.

The long version: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Apart from that you can also catch clams in your net near reefs and a small bug where people would only encounter one type of ship was resolved. 

Glad to see so many new sailors! The bottle messages have been swarming the ocean and I'll need to work on a new way of collecting bottles to show players, until then- you'll probably see bottles only near the start.

The Caribbean Sail V1.5.8

It's finally here! You can finally ram any ship in the game at full speed with the Raft! You can also ram using any of the other ships but I know what you real hardcore players were waiting for- and yes, it probably will sink your Raft if you attempt it. Simply click "Full Sail" while in combat to initiate the ram, and if you get cold feet hit "Half Sail" to pull back. The acceleration speed of your ship is determined by that ships maximum speed and the damage is determined by the size of your ship... and theirs.

I've had a few reports of a rare bug that crashses the game when it fails to retrieve online data, I've tried to ad an extra safety net but can't be positive it will work since I can't recreate the bug myself. If anyone encounters this bug please paste your crash log on the forum or email it to "ContactClambake@gmail.com"

Christmas is close and the seasonal easter eggs are in so don't forget to down a pint of dice at the pub and listen to the holiday banter after the 23rd. 

YO HO HO!

The Caribbean Sail V1.5.7

Yet another miracle of pixel art and code wizardry has been performed and in about a days time I've been able to bring you another update!

Three new ship variants have been added as random encounters for your pleasure and torture! The Cutter: a small and quick vessel. The Schooner: a large and fast ship with few cannons... and The War Galleon: a massive ship with unreasonable hull integrity and enough cannons to sink anything in a few seconds- to give players a sense of accomplishment. Trying to bring it down with a frigate has been the most fun I've had while playing yet. I can't wait to improve on the combat even more.

Another update to make use of those new ship types, changes the "Avoid" button to "Flee" in those awkward situations where your ship wore an English flag to a Spanish party. The final change lowered the spawn rate of crates... also I think some more particle effects got added to the game somewhere.

Enjoy your new enemies! :D

 

The Caribbean Sail V1.5.5

Now, you may be asking yourself "What happened in V1.5.4?" Nothing and don't worry about it.

As the holiday season approaches and the most unavoidable enemy (our families) take away our most precious and valuable asset (our time) the content updates are going to slow down, don't be too surprised if I can't push one next week. 

As for this week, I'm attempting to bring challenge back to the Atlantic by stat balancing. The career and ship stats have been wildly unbalanced since the first week I began working on the game. The entire list is too long and boring for a patch log and probably won't be the final balance patch, so climb aboard a ship and fire some feedback at me.

While not a content patch, this will significantly impact the way you play and for some- make it far more enjoyable. 

The Caribbean Sail V1.5.3

Let's get straight to the updates.

The default names auto clear while your unique names can be changed without being completely rewritten. French and Spanish ship's captains are less shy and will talk to you now. When apples spoil they are no longer thrown overboard but are added to your inventory instead so you can force your crew to eat them anyway! The sloop's hull integrity was debuffed to balance the small hitbox that made it almost impossible for enemies to hit. A badge link to the Victorian Clambake twitter account (@Tophat_Scallop) was added to the main menu- plugo plugo.

The biggest update this week is gamepad support. The game wasn't designed to be controlled by a gamepad but there have been a few requests and even I'd like to play it from the couch. I've rewritten as much of the button code as I could do without rebuilding the entire game (No joke). The second hardest part was trying to fit a virtual keyboard in for writing crew names and bottle messages. Xbox controllers work and your PS4 controller will probably work.

So here's how it works: Use the analog sticks to move the cursor and the right shoulder buttons or "A" as a left click on any screen. The d-pad can be used for swapping characters and ships on the start menu, and portion control while sailing. The d-pad can also be used in battle for aiming the cannons and "B" can be used for firing them. You can pause the game any time during play with the "Start" button. The virtual keyboard isn't great but it can get the job done, some helpful alternative keys for typing are "Y" for space, "X" for delete, and the left analog button or left trigger for capitalization. 

I know it isn't great but I just didn't consider controller support until far too late- I won't be making that mistake again on my future games. Thank you for the support and I hope you enjoy the updates as development continues!