Ahoy Shipmates!

Here at Blazing Griffin we’ve been watching the developments surrounding Valve’s refund policy announcement with interest (as have most indie devs). While there have been concerns raised about the policy, we believe the spirit in which it is intended is ultimately good for the games industry.

With this in mind, we’ve decided for The Ship: Murder Party that it is important that we re-iterate the state of the game and the wider franchise. We’ll keep this announcement up to date with new developments – the intention is that it contains the information you need to know before you decide whether to buy or not.

As a studio we are always open to suggestions and welcome any constructive criticism from our players.

Unfortunately there are a few technical issues with the game and these can’t be fixed in its current incarnation. The reason they can’t be fixed is when we acquired the rights to the game in 2011 it didn’t include a technical licence to make changes using the Source Engine (which the game is written in).

We’re open to suggestions from players about our games and happy to implement good ideas or even make simple fixes – not being able to do it is an incredibly frustrating situation for us as well!

There are summaries of the issues and fixes for them on the forums, but the key ones you might want to know about are:

• In-game server select doesn’t work. But this isn’t a problem because it’s still possible to connect to servers via the Steam client > View > Servers > The Ship. Here you can find and save servers as normal. You can still host LAN games and there are several other methods of adding servers manually posted on the forums.
  
• Game doesn’t run. For a very few players, the game doesn’t work at all (although some players have found workarounds for this). Our hope is that Valve’s refund policy will now give you the option to try it out and see how things work on your machine.

Again, if we possibly could resolve any of these issues we would, but the cost of the licence to even begin doing so is more than it would cost to rebuild the game from scratch. Being a small studio, it's just not a viable option for us.

You can see from Steam Charts how active the game is. There are usually a good number of active servers available and through busy periods such as the holidays and sales there are usually more people setting up new servers and posting the details on the forums.

There is a Ship SDK available and support via Valve’s developer site. You can make new maps for the game. No other modding options are supported.

There are a number of players working on new maps and have an interest in modding. This is something we’re keen to begin having a conversation about with players, and while we’re not making any promises about modding support, please drop by the discussion on the topic and let us know what you think.

If there's enough interest there, we can certainly look at helping out.

Yes, you read it right.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/383790

You might be wondering why you’ve not heard anything about this yet? The reason for that is that this is the announcement!



We’ve begun work on The Ship: Remasted (which as the name suggests will be a high definition version of The Ship: Murder Party multiplayer game) and it is expected to be released early 2016. Even better, we’ll now have complete control over the code base so the issues with the existing game won’t affect the new version and we’ll even be able to make the odd improvement or two.

We are fortunate to have been joined by two former employees of Outerlight (the developer of original HL2 mod, The Ship and Bloody Good Time) – Jason joined our team last year as Technical Director and Neil joined our team just this week as Lead Programmer. It’s fantastic to have their input on the project and we’re really excited about where we’re heading with it.

The reason we’re talking about this just now is that in the spirit of transparency, it might be information you need to make a decision about whether or not to buy The Ship: Murder Party - some people may want to wait until the new version comes out next year.

If you do – that’s fair enough. We hope you keep up to date with what we’re doing (check out our newsletter) and we’ll see you next year!

For everyone else, we hope you try out the original game – it’s a lot of fun! And what’s good for you, is definitely good for us! We’re a pretty small studio here and having just gone through a growth spurt to be able to take on The Ship: Remasted project, we are reliant on the revenue generated by The Ship: Murder Party to move forward with it.

All purchases contribute to funding the new project and we are very appreciative of this support from players – we're sure many of you have waited a long time for more ship-related things to happen! So as a thank you for those supporting us with purchases of the existing game (now and historically), there will be a discount for existing players when we launch The Ship: Remasted.

Over the next few months we'll be releasing more information about The Ship: Remasted project - stay tuned! In the meantime, if you have anything to say about any of this, please drop by the forums - we're happy to chat about it.

And here's the teaser trailer for The Ship: Remasted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mAk-O67VcA

Thanks for taking the time to read this rather lengthy post!
- The Blazing Griffin Team

• 29th July 2015 - Scope of the Project
  
• 19th June 2015 - Player feedback discussion
  
• 26th Nov 2015 - Lucy's Diary
  
• 25th Dec 2015 - The Ship: Remasted Closed Testing Signup

http://store.steampowered.com/app/2400

• Twitter
  
• Facebook
  
• YouTube
  
• Newsletter
  
• Website

Ahoy Shipmates!

Here at Blazing Griffin we’ve been watching the developments surrounding Valve’s refund policy announcement with interest (as have most indie devs). While there have been concerns raised about the policy, we believe the spirit in which it is intended is ultimately good for the games industry.

With this in mind, we’ve decided for The Ship: Murder Party that it is important that we re-iterate the state of the game and the wider franchise. We’ll keep this announcement up to date with new developments – the intention is that it contains the information you need to know before you decide whether to buy or not.

As a studio we are always open to suggestions and welcome any constructive criticism from our players.

Unfortunately there are a few technical issues with the game and these can’t be fixed in its current incarnation. The reason they can’t be fixed is when we acquired the rights to the game in 2011 it didn’t include a technical licence to make changes using the Source Engine (which the game is written in).

We’re open to suggestions from players about our games and happy to implement good ideas or even make simple fixes – not being able to do it is an incredibly frustrating situation for us as well!

There are summaries of the issues and fixes for them on the forums, but the key ones you might want to know about are:

• In-game server select doesn’t work. But this isn’t a problem because it’s still possible to connect to servers via the Steam client > View > Servers > The Ship. Here you can find and save servers as normal. You can still host LAN games and there are several other methods of adding servers manually posted on the forums.
  
• Game doesn’t run. For a very few players, the game doesn’t work at all (although some players have found workarounds for this). Our hope is that Valve’s refund policy will now give you the option to try it out and see how things work on your machine.

Again, if we possibly could resolve any of these issues we would, but the cost of the licence to even begin doing so is more than it would cost to rebuild the game from scratch. Being a small studio, it's just not a viable option for us.

You can see from Steam Charts how active the game is. There are usually a good number of active servers available and through busy periods such as the holidays and sales there are usually more people setting up new servers and posting the details on the forums.

There is a Ship SDK available and support via Valve’s developer site. You can make new maps for the game. No other modding options are supported.

There are a number of players working on new maps and have an interest in modding. This is something we’re keen to begin having a conversation about with players, and while we’re not making any promises about modding support, please drop by the discussion on the topic and let us know what you think.

If there's enough interest there, we can certainly look at helping out.

Yes, you read it right.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/383790

You might be wondering why you’ve not heard anything about this yet? The reason for that is that this is the announcement!



We’ve begun work on The Ship: Remasted (which as the name suggests will be a high definition version of The Ship: Murder Party multiplayer game) and it is expected to be released early 2016. Even better, we’ll now have complete control over the code base so the issues with the existing game won’t affect the new version and we’ll even be able to make the odd improvement or two.

We are fortunate to have been joined by two former employees of Outerlight (the developer of original HL2 mod, The Ship and Bloody Good Time) – Jason joined our team last year as Technical Director and Neil joined our team just this week as Lead Programmer. It’s fantastic to have their input on the project and we’re really excited about where we’re heading with it.

The reason we’re talking about this just now is that in the spirit of transparency, it might be information you need to make a decision about whether or not to buy The Ship: Murder Party - some people may want to wait until the new version comes out next year.

If you do – that’s fair enough. We hope you keep up to date with what we’re doing (check out our newsletter) and we’ll see you next year!

For everyone else, we hope you try out the original game – it’s a lot of fun! And what’s good for you, is definitely good for us! We’re a pretty small studio here and having just gone through a growth spurt to be able to take on The Ship: Remasted project, we are reliant on the revenue generated by The Ship: Murder Party to move forward with it.

All purchases contribute to funding the new project and we are very appreciative of this support from players – we're sure many of you have waited a long time for more ship-related things to happen! So as a thank you for those supporting us with purchases of the existing game (now and historically), there will be a discount for existing players when we launch The Ship: Remasted.

Over the next few months we'll be releasing more information about The Ship: Remasted project - stay tuned! In the meantime, if you have anything to say about any of this, please drop by the forums - we're happy to chat about it.

And here's the teaser trailer for The Ship: Remasted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mAk-O67VcA

Thanks for taking the time to read this rather lengthy post!
- The Blazing Griffin Team

• 29th July 2015 - Scope of the Project
  
• 19th June 2015 - Player feedback discussion
  
• 26th Nov 2015 - Lucy's Diary
  
• 25th Dec 2015 - The Ship: Remasted Closed Testing Signup

http://store.steampowered.com/app/2400

• Twitter
  
• Facebook
  
• YouTube
  
• Newsletter
  
• Website

The simple way to find a multiplayer server is via the Steam Client > View > Servers > The Ship. Hey presto, you're done! :)

Here's a more detailed way of adding a server manually: http://steamcommunity.com/app/2400/discussions/0/613940477638201994/

On behalf of the team at Blazing Griffin, we hope you enjoy The Ship.

We have a couple of other games on sale this week that you might be interested in:

A quirky little turn-based rogulike puzzler, currently reduced to £1.67 / $2.03.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/310070/

A frantic local coop game, currently reduced to £1.74 / $2.49.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/253570/

Also our new roguelike meets space-RTS:


http://store.steampowered.com/app/335830/

- the Blazing Griffin team

The simple way to find a multiplayer server is via the Steam Client > View > Servers > The Ship. Hey presto, you're done! :)

Here's a more detailed way of adding a server manually: http://steamcommunity.com/app/2400/discussions/0/613940477638201994/

On behalf of the team at Blazing Griffin, we hope you enjoy The Ship.

We have a couple of other games on sale this week that you might be interested in:

A quirky little turn-based rogulike puzzler, currently reduced to £1.67 / $2.03.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/310070/

A frantic local coop game, currently reduced to £1.74 / $2.49.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/253570/

Also our new roguelike meets space-RTS:


http://store.steampowered.com/app/335830/

- the Blazing Griffin team

Hi everyone,

We've made a few changes to The Ship packages on the Steam store, which I've outlined below.

The single player game was previously sold as a separate package, as well as being included in the Complete Package. However, a number of users reported problems with the single player as a standalone game and as we were unable to resolve these issues, we've remove the option to buy the single player by itself.

Anyone who purchased the single player game without the multiplayer game, now should be able to claim the Complete Package for free (which should resolve issues playing the single player).

If you have any problems with this, the please leave a comment here.

Previously, if you purchased the Complete Package, you received additional gift copies to send to friends. While we understand that some people made full use of these, our stats show that most people didn't.

For this reason, we've removed the free copy promotion from the package - when you buy The Ship now, you'll only get 1 copy of the game.

To reflect these changes, we've permanently reduced the price of the Complete Package from $19.99 to $9.99.

UPDATED - 19/12/14

Hi everyone,

I've read through your comments and passed them onto the team. We appreciate your frustrations with this and will certainly try to give you more heads up if there are changes in the future.

Just to explain, our goal for 2015 is to do what we can to improve the experience players have with The Ship. There's a lot of things we can't do - see here for a background on our licencing constraints.

But one thing we can do is to try to increase the average number of people playing at any one time (and if you check Steam Charts, this has been improving lately). This improves the experience of the multiplayer game for everyone that's playing.

The main feedback we had from players was that the price was too high, so that's why we've dropped it by 50%. It wasn't an easy decision as this could siginificantly impact our revenue, but it was the right thing to do and we're confident that the price is a good one.

With regards the gift copies, our data shows that very few of them were redeemed. It wasn't having a significant impact on the number of people playing the game - in fact we believe that the higher priced "5 pack" was putting off more people playing than it was attracting new players.

We'll look at introducing an additional 3 or 5 pack for people who want that option. (Valve needs to set this up so it's unlikely to be before January).

Thanks,
- the Blazing Griffin team

Hi everyone,

We've made a few changes to The Ship packages on the Steam store, which I've outlined below.

The single player game was previously sold as a separate package, as well as being included in the Complete Package. However, a number of users reported problems with the single player as a standalone game and as we were unable to resolve these issues, we've remove the option to buy the single player by itself.

Anyone who purchased the single player game without the multiplayer game, now should be able to claim the Complete Package for free (which should resolve issues playing the single player).

If you have any problems with this, the please leave a comment here.

Previously, if you purchased the Complete Package, you received additional gift copies to send to friends. While we understand that some people made full use of these, our stats show that most people didn't.

For this reason, we've removed the free copy promotion from the package - when you buy The Ship now, you'll only get 1 copy of the game.

To reflect these changes, we've permanently reduced the price of the Complete Package from $19.99 to $9.99.

UPDATED - 19/12/14

Hi everyone,

I've read through your comments and passed them onto the team. We appreciate your frustrations with this and will certainly try to give you more heads up if there are changes in the future.

Just to explain, our goal for 2015 is to do what we can to improve the experience players have with The Ship. There's a lot of things we can't do - see here for a background on our licencing constraints.

But one thing we can do is to try to increase the average number of people playing at any one time (and if you check Steam Charts, this has been improving lately). This improves the experience of the multiplayer game for everyone that's playing.

The main feedback we had from players was that the price was too high, so that's why we've dropped it by 50%. It wasn't an easy decision as this could siginificantly impact our revenue, but it was the right thing to do and we're confident that the price is a good one.

With regards the gift copies, our data shows that very few of them were redeemed. It wasn't having a significant impact on the number of people playing the game - in fact we believe that the higher priced "5 pack" was putting off more people playing than it was attracting new players.

We'll look at introducing an additional 3 or 5 pack for people who want that option. (Valve needs to set this up so it's unlikely to be before January).

Thanks,
- the Blazing Griffin team

A quick update on the goings-on with Blazing Griffin!

Our team has expanded over the past few months, with several new team members joining us.

Fans of The Ship will be excited to know that one of our new recruits is Jason Kocemba, who was Technical Director with Outerlight and worked on The Ship (including the original Half Life mod) and Bloody Good Time! :)

More info...



We've also just launched alpha access to our new space RTS and we're now on Steam Greenlight. You can check out the trailer and game info over on our Greenlight page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=341433138

- Blazing Griffin

A quick update on the goings-on with Blazing Griffin!

Our team has expanded over the past few months, with several new team members joining us.

Fans of The Ship will be excited to know that one of our new recruits is Jason Kocemba, who was Technical Director with Outerlight and worked on The Ship (including the original Half Life mod) and Bloody Good Time! :)

More info...



We've also just launched alpha access to our new space RTS and we're now on Steam Greenlight. You can check out the trailer and game info over on our Greenlight page: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=341433138

- Blazing Griffin

Come on, you know this is the perfect weekend to troll your friends, you may as well do it with a well timed bomb on the toilet!

The Ship (Complete Package) comes with both multiplayer and single player games, and each purchase gives you two additional gift copies for friends, and they each get another gift copy! That's five copies in total - a great deal!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/2400

Come on, you know this is the perfect weekend to troll your friends, you may as well do it with a well timed bomb on the toilet!

The Ship (Complete Package) comes with both multiplayer and single player games, and each purchase gives you two additional gift copies for friends, and they each get another gift copy! That's five copies in total - a great deal!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/2400