Dec 30, 2023

Sea Dogs: Legendary Edition - Joruba

Ahoy!

… and a Happy New Year! It has been a super productive couple of months for us. If we double the same amount of effort for a couple of months more - the release is going to be something to remember.

This dev diary will be focused on the progress we have made recently, and even though we can’t show you the best part just yet, you are in for a treat!

But first, let’s go through the master schedule again:

Jan 15th: Release for the owners of the Early Access Edition.

Jan 15th: The third and the final pre-order push - last chance to purchase Exclusive Edition/Early Access.

Jan 15th: Steam page release for an unannounced title.

Jan 22d: ???

Feb 8th: Release for the owners of the Exclusive Edition.

Feb 12th: ???

Feb 15th: Caribbean Legend Release Day.

Notable Items:

UI fixes

The original game was quite notorious for obscuring important mechanics and stats. Well, that’s not the case anymore. No matter what perks you choose, what attributes you buff or what equipment you wear, you will immediately see the changes in stats of your build.

Two more experience bars added to allow better progress tracking. Skill Points never had their own bars, even though they are more valuable than level ups. One look at the character window and you will see everything you need.

Stealth System

Stealth was never the most fun and well thought feature of the series. We added a few adjustments to make it less reliable on save/load. First, check out the eye indicator on the character’s portrait at the top left. The closer you get to a hostile guard, the more intense it gets.

You still have options if they catch you. Stealth is now heavily dependent on: Stealth skill, character’s notoriety, clothes, amulets and social perks. Early game, when your character’s mug is not very well known, you can get by with amulets. But it will take either an expensive trading license or a much better prep in the late game though. The game will always tell you of your chances to pass a stealth dialogue check.

New Items

Originally we promised 9 new items to you. Welp, we got 29 , armament mostly . Some of which will be available only to the owners of First Wave or Exclusive Editions. We found a place for each in the balance, often introducing new and fun way to play the game.

Basse-Terre Expanded

As an experiment we increased the location size of the capital of Guadeloupe. After the release we will do the same to other cities in the game, thus giving you a better sense of townspace and colony life.

New jungle locations are a different story though. We managed to produce two of them, but they will require a significant improvement before we allow them into the release build. Maybe later?

Achievements

The game will have 98 achievements in total, and I guess we will need to add two more to make it a nice round number. Below are the 25 new ones - try to guess what lies behind each title, but rest assured that you will need at least two full playthroughs to get them all!

Dating Sim
My Soulmate
Very ******* funny!
My temple, my rules!
Vile Lil' God
Clean Hands
Caribbean Legend
Hi, dad
Pension and Benefits
Deadman
Hogar, dulce hogar
All your base are belong to us
El Comercio
Point Blank
First of many
No Regrets
So it begins!
Money do buy happiness
Live By the Sword
The Most Notorious Pirate
Lootbox Hunter
A*!
Honoring the Classics
Caribbean Virgin
Three's Crowd

Main Character’s Visuals

We promised you new skins for the main character, and now it’s time to deliver.
Added a second tier of the French Navy Uniform along with a new quest to make it.

Currently we are making a new model for the leather armor. The screenshot below is a WIP, but it represents the idea of having headwear for top-tier armor in the game, like helmets or hats, allowing a better feel of progression.

Old models will get an update as well, for example we plan to add leg armor to a heavy chestplate.

Animations

Thanks to super talented Antix we have more diverse animations now. At this moment, we focus on the combat animations and musket handling. Big one, really, something that was never intended to be included in the game, but the most welcome addition to be sure!

https://youtu.be/y-J7b28U8og
WIP. Will probably consider other variants of this one.

https://youtu.be/PUxO5xt8J28
New heavy strike. Musket handling should be more lively now.

https://youtu.be/H_zQL4m6Gto
WIP. Something to consider post-release, the game is super stubborn when it comes to real-time musket equipping.

https://youtu.be/bXJ3Y2w2zvo
The left one is the new dodging move.The one at the right is the old.

https://youtu.be/--ryIA5S0p8
More dodging. Feels more natural now!

We have all kinds of crazy plans for the animation department. Next ones in our to-do list are street musicians, gamblers and fishermen to spice up the colony life.

Uplifted Textures

Same as with animations, this was not planned, but thanks to our community we have a way to improve the oldest and the ugliest textures that had been with us for almost 20 years! Thank you so much, КА!

It is tedious work, but the effect should be noticeable in the release build.

Examples:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ebvl890DZaukH-YOMP-pmetSDvw1ySFU/view?usp=sharing

As bonus, we have also uplifted textures of the sails. Sea scenery is already looking fantastic and now it is even better. New sails complement the new sea, improved weather, updated sky so well!

Ship Gameplay

Now, what is the way to make the old naval combat formula a second life? How to make it more tactical and fun? Right, change some numbers!

The Caleuche (Ghost Ship) now requires 100 Navigation Skill. She is the strongest ship in the game.
You can’t hire Navigators with more than 75 Navigation Skill in taverns.
Helen McArthur and Longway are the best Navigators in the game now.
Ships get x2 to hull HP. Unique ships get x3.
Ships get x0.75 to max crew. Unique ships get x0.85..
Grapeshot loses all efficiency after depleting more than 50% of the target’s crew. Bombs don’t.
Bombs cost much more and you can buy or loot much less of them in game.
The game takes in account the rank of the player’s flagship and adjusts quest naval battles to it.
The heaviest warships in the game now cost a fortune to command.
1 and 2 rank warships can be encountered in the open world only after the player reaches level 30.

Therefore, the game encourages you to command lighter vessels until the mid-game. It makes naval combat more tactical, forgiving and more welcome to experiments. You don’t have to reload a game after a bad volley or grind from the start to get yourself a warship before the midgame. But if you do get a warship early, it wont auto level your enemies accordingly or punish you. You will have a fun time ruining everyones day as long as you can afford to operate such a monster.

OST

The OST is complete - over an hour of new music, making almost two hours in total. Fits the 200 hours of content we have. Check out the new national themes - playing for French, English, Dutch and Spanish towns!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53hIPEf5rL4

And… That’s all for today, folks! See you all soon on January 15th! ːauthorityː
Happy New Year

Dec 30, 2023

Gnorp News #10 — Hats And Rust

(the) Gnorp Apologue - mycomyco

I'm back from my break, and I am currently working on quite a few things. One of those things are hats. I have also written a lengthy piece about my experience with Rust.

You can read this post here, or on https://gnorp.dev/news/10-Hats-And-Rust/

Submit a Hat!

With hats being planned to be implemented, I have asked the Gnorp Discord to come up with some hat ideas. The top voted hat(s) will be implemented into the game, with the creator credited. If you would like to participate in submission or voting, go ahead and join the Discord. You can also post your hat on the Steam Discussions forum - just tag it with [Hat].

Here are the rules:
— Hats can also be expressions, or both
— Hats need to be pixel-perfect, so no sub-pixel shenanigans
— Hats need to be reasonably sized
— Hats can be general, or intended for specific gnorps
— Hats should fit with the game, which is a nebulous requirement, but also an important one
— I will compile the gnorps with hats, and you will vote for them (On Discord)
— Top voted hat(s) will be implemented with the hat update, and the creator(s) will be credited

Below you can find a couple of hats that I made, to give you an idea of what you can do. You can use something like Paint, Aseprite, or an online editor (search "pixel editor") to make your hats.

Writing a game in Rust

For those that don't know, (the) Gnorp Apologue is written in Rust. I have been asked a few times about my experience with Rust, and so I thought I would write a little bit about it.

Inception

I love games, and I had toyed with the idea of making a proper one for a long time. There's a graveyard in my filesystem of unfinished projects, concept art, ideas, and half-written prototypes. During this time, I tooled around with a lot of different frameworks, engines, and languages. Unity, Godot & Unreal did not appeal to me, due to their editor-centric nature. My preference is to live inside a text-editor, and that preference led me to LÖVE, a 2D game engine. I made a prototype with LÖVE, and LÖVE did not disappoint. My interest in the prototype faded, however, partially due to the game concept, but also because of a voice in my head saying "Lua is not fast enough".

Time moved on, but I still wanted to make games. One day I decided to try out Rust for fun, which was a programming language I'd heard about but never looked into. Reading about it, I was drawn to the idea of writing fast code, comfortably. I'd heard about Rust from the yearly Stack Overflow poll, and also through an AMA on reddit about a project written in C++. The question was "What do you think about Rust". In the response, the developer stated that he didn't see the point of using another language if C++ can do the same and more. There was also the following line "[...] and I have very few issues with [C++]". That piqued my interest at the time, as I thought it impossible to have very few issues with C++. It could only mean his opinion was wrong.

It turned out, even with my silly, flawed logic, that trying Rust out was a terrific idea. I loved the language, the documentation, and the tooling. I clicked with the language within the first few hours of playing around, and I decided firmly that I wanted to make a game with it. And so I did, by reading the Rust book.

After reading the Rust book for 12 minutes, it was time to put all the nothing I knew into practice. I researched frameworks and game engines I could build something with. Now, with Rust being a fairly new programming language the selection is not nearly as wide as more mature languages. But that was okay — I was willing to deal with that in my excitement to work with Rust. I found GGEZ, Coffee, Amethyst, Bevy (which was just published at the time), and many others. In the end I chose Tetra, created by Joe Clay. It is a fantastic, well-documented framework built on top of SDL2. It draws fast, and had support for everything I needed.

Now it was time for Test Project 1. It would serve to help me familarise myself with building software in Rust. Test Project 1 was based on a small game I had made for my girlfriend (now wife) in the span of 12 hours. It features creatures dubbed Gnorps, and a rock that output smaller rocks when struck by the gnorps. I finished a prototype and it was surprisingly fun. It was enjoyable to watch the gnorps go about their business, and it was satisfying to see the a huge number of smaller rocks, "shards", on the screen. My girlfriend (now wife), played it and enjoyed it, and so did my friends.

That's when I decided to make a real game out of it of Test Project 1, and it turned into (the) Gnorp Apologue.

What did I like about Rust

My absolute favorite feature of Rust is enumerators, and by extension the pattern matching that comes with it. It's an incredibly powerful system, which has allowed me to write reliable code that can be easily extended when new behavior needs to be introduced.

The compiler has also been a fantastic tool. When designing a game, refactoring is a given, and a part of the process. You protype something, you extend, now there are modifiers, now this unit needs to be able to do this, etc. You rip out code, and replace it with something else, introduce new systems, smash modules together, split them apart — it doesn't matter — when the compiler is happy, it. just. works. I have found that being able to focus on *just* writing the game has been tremendously productive. The cost of context switching is high, and there have only been a few occasions where I have been distracted by the language or mystifying compiler errors.

Gameplay behavior

The game loop is a fixed timestep loop. This means that the game runs at discrete steps, with no considerations of a delta time between updates. I have found this to be the best way to write games, as it allows you to write physics-based behavior with very few bugs. The drawing is interpolated between the steps, so that the game looks smooth regardless of framerate.

There are many different units within the game, and they all have different behaviors. Writing this behavior in Rust was a surprisingly smooth ride, partially thanks to the power of enumerators.

When creating a new unit, I would generally follow a compositional approach:

I've never been a fan of inheritance, and found composition in Rust to be a much more flexible approach.

User Interface

The worst experience of writing (the) Gnorp Apologue was no doubt the user interface. I decided against using a UI library, and instead rolled my own to have full control of the behavior and appearance. This might have been a mistake, and perhaps I should have reached for something like Egui or some of the other UI libraries available.

Some parts of the UI follow the immediate mode paradigm, and some parts are only redrawn on demand. Drawing text can be expensive, and I have tried to minimize this, but that is an ongoing process as I update and refine the game.

In terms of Rust, it's hard to say if the language was a help or a hindrance. Depending on the architecture of the software, the borrow checker can be a bit of a pain when dealing with a user interface, but I managed to navigate the issue after reapproaching a few times.

Performance

As an avid player of games, I have always been interested in performance. When I was a kid, I didn't have the most powerful computer, so the performance of the games I played was always a concern. It's always impressive when a game will just run on anything, and that was one of the goals I had with (the) Gnorp Apologue.

Here are some of the things I did to achieve that goal, some of which may have been overkill:
— I tried to write solid code, with few hacks
— I did not use dynamic dispatch
— I did not use reference counting
— I tried to keep units light in terms of memory usage
— I tried to keep the number of draw calls when rendering the UI low (it's still too high)

The game logic runs in a single thread, and I have no reason to make the game multi-threaded, even when there are thousands of units and objects active. I have also not used any unsafe in my own code, with the exception of one, entirely safe but unnecessary, unchecked unwrap.

The game runs well. Not much more to say than that. SDL2 allows the game to draw fast, and Rust makes the logic fast and reliable.

Compilation

Just a small section here. Rust compile times are relatively slow, but at the same time I find that constantly compiling to be unproductive behavior, so I strive to compile only when testing is required to proceed.

Summary

My Rust journey has been a good one. I have learned a lot about the language, but there are still plenty of features that I haven't taken full advantage of yet, mostly because I didn't need to. Would I recommend Rust for game development? Yes, absolutely. When it comes to game design, the hardest part is not writing code — it's coming up with the right ideas. Rust allows you to implement those ideas with confidence that things will work as intended, and that the code will be fast.

Aftermath

On the 14th of December, I released my first ever game, with the release build being finalized 20 minutes before release. The game has to date received over 1500 reviews. It has been a way bigger success than I could ever have expected, with tens of thousands of copies sold (I try not to check). A big part of that success I attribute to Rust, and the community around it, and to Tetra, made by Joe Clay.

Thank you for reading!

Dec 30, 2023

Dev Diary II

Sea Dogs: To Each His Own - Joruba

Ahoy!

Notable Items:

UI fixes

Stealth System

New Items

Basse-Terre Expanded

New jungle locations are a different story though. We managed to produce two of them, but they will require a significant improvement before we allow them into the release build. Maybe later?

Achievements

Dating Sim
My Soulmate
Very ******* funny!
My temple, my rules!
Vile Lil' God
Clean Hands
Caribbean Legend
Hi, dad
Pension and Benefits
Deadman
Hogar, dulce hogar
All your base are belong to us
El Comercio
Point Blank
First of many
No Regrets
So it begins!
Money do buy happiness
Live By the Sword
The Most Notorious Pirate
Lootbox Hunter
A*!
Honoring the Classics
Caribbean Virgin
Three's Crowd

Main Character’s Visuals

We promised you new skins for the main character, and now it’s time to deliver.
Added a second tier of the French Navy Uniform along with a new quest to make it.

Old models will get an update as well, for example we plan to add leg armor to a heavy chestplate.

Animations

Uplifted Textures

Ship Gameplay

Now, what is the way to make the old naval combat formula a second life? How to make it more tactical and fun? Right, change some numbers!

The Caleuche (Ghost Ship) now requires 100 Navigation Skill. She is the strongest ship in the game.
You can’t hire Navigators with more than 75 Navigation Skill in taverns.
Helen McArthur and Longway are the best Navigators in the game now.
Ships get x2 to hull HP. Unique ships get x3.
Ships get x0.75 to max crew. Unique ships get x0.85..
Grapeshot loses all efficiency after depleting more than 50% of the target’s crew. Bombs don’t.
Bombs cost much more and you can buy or loot much less of them in game.
The game takes in account the rank of the player’s flagship and adjusts quest naval battles to it.
The heaviest warships in the game now cost a fortune to command.
1 and 2 rank warships can be encountered in the open world only after the player reaches level 30.

OST