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[mtarini]

Gorgeous work! WOW. Just, wow.
The animations will make the "frozen time" moment look even still-er, by contrast (mouth watering)

Results are so impressively good looking that it feels embarrassing to offer any suggestion at all, still, here is one:

Judging by the animated screenshots, all wind animations (ropes and sails) look maybe some 200% too fast.
I'm guessing a considerably slower rate would convey more the size of the ship (and make it look more ghastly as well).

As they are, the ship risks feeling like a "bottled" model rather than the real thing (or maybe feeling like it is sailing insanely fast or winds are super strong). Especially the skinned mesh rear view, but also the others.

[HolyMBison]

I am loving the all of the new additions to the ship. They make the ship feel much more lived in and lifelike than before, and I can't wait to look at them in game. However, they have also brought to my attention a part of the game that seems much more out of place than before - the implementation of the crew muster roll.

The way that the character actually reaches out and grabs things he wants to open/carry and has the watch in his hand makes the game feel very immersive. On the other hand, the crew muster roll has no physical presence once you obtain it, and when you open it the title page just sort of pops up on the screen. It seems a little out of place for a feature to be so decidedly video-gamey when the other parts of the game do not rely on additional interfaces. Do you have any plans in mind to turn the crew muster roll into something more physical, so that when you press tab it seems like you are opening a book rather than accessing an interface?

[dukope]

This is the 3rd best devlog of 2014


Congrats to #1 JLJac's Project Rain World, and #2 eigenbom's Moonman (currently Kickstarting)!

Also check out Willy Chyr's RELATIVITY at #4.

[dukope]

[...]Judging by the animated screenshots, all wind animations (ropes and sails) look maybe some 200% too fast. [...]

Good eye, but I think this is just the gifs. The wind animation combines some fast low-amplitude waves with slower bigger ones. It looks ok in-game.

[...]Do you have any plans in mind to turn the crew muster roll into something more physical, so that when you press tab it seems like you are opening a book rather than accessing an interface?

I may add something like this but it's not a high priority. Uncharted 1 shows an animation as Drake brings his journal up to read it and that slight delay, even though it looks cool, always bothered me. So if I put an animation in there it'd probably only show the first few times you open it.

[eigenbom]

Congrats Lukas! Great looking game and cracking devlog.

[dukope]

Story

The basic outline of the story is more of less decided and I'm currently doing some research to fill in the details. Reading this book for some inspiration:

A collection of naval disasters, published in 1813

I've learned two things:

 1. Life was cheap in 1700-1800
 2. If you want to survive a shipwreck, sneak off in the working launch boat ASAP before anyone notices.

There's nothing in here I can use directly but it's useful to get the tone of how shit hits the fan so spectacularly when a sailing ship runs into trouble.

Surprisingly the biggest problem I have now is how exactly to lay out the crew. I can't find a good list of specific crew roles for merchant sailing ships of the time. The muster role in the dev log is all just placeholder. Will probably just wing it and make something up soon.

[mtarini]

This is super interesting.
Yes, life was generally cheaper, especially for people hired in the sailing business.
These were recruited from the most unfortunate, most marginalized layer of society and treated accordingly.
Basically, the naval trade was a meat grinder for the lowest born.
The recruitment practices were also atrocious.
This helps explaining the piracy phenomenon, which should also be interpreted as an occasion for a glimpse of social equity of sorts.

If you haven't read it already, I suggest the seminar work of Peter Linebaugh
The Many Headed Hydra, even though it covers a bit earlier period.
Here's a pdf: [link]


Back to your amazingly promising game, it is great news that you have the story more or less sorted out. It means that you have a working plan for the entire game, dispelling my doubts.

I felt a bit worried by the general implant of this game: naturally I know nothing else than what the demo gives away, and we (your players) came to trust your ingeniousness in the apparently impossible tasks of cramming complex, interesting storylines into games with completely innovative gameplay (Papers Please); but for this game the task seemed even more difficult.
Let me explain: the demo seems to indicate a long story covering the demise of a huge number of people, and how the game system would scale up to that is bit of a mystery. For example, the story must account for a large number of corpses left unattended in the spot they fell (for the game hero to find them--presumably a lot later, as they turned into skeletons). Moreover, the corpses must be presented to the player in an order that makes story-reconstruction interesting, with unexpected turns of events and everything.
For example: at the beginning the entire deck of the ship (conveniently) presents a single skeleton, but, how is it possible for a complex story to unfold without anything else happening there. Unless corpses are be made to appear later or something.
(And that's isn't but one of the challenges you'll have to face; another one would be how make a complex story intelligible only by means of a presentation of sill moments captured at times of someone's death; or how to make the game measure/detect the level of player's understanding of the story).

All this just to say that I'm looking forward to see how you'll stab all these problems.

[plauk]

...Uncharted 1 shows an animation as Drake brings his journal up to read it and that slight delay, even though it looks cool, always bothered me.

Uncharted is an action game though, right? I think you can get away with this in a slower paced game such as this. I'd use Alien Isolation as an example, where the bulky and slow interfaces make the game more tense. I think little things like this could work in the context of solving a mystery. You're meant to be thinking about things, so even during little breaks you're not doing nothing... your brain gets a chance to mull things over for a few more seconds. Same as any spare time you have during a flashback... there's time to ponder the scene some more. I've never actually wanted it to hurry up. It's not the kind of game where you'd want to do a speed run.

[dukope]

[...observations...]

You've basically hit on the two main challenges with the design.

1. Where are all the corpses?
2. How can the story/revelations be structured in a way that makes sense.

#1 is tricky because any dead body would've been quickly pitched overboard. So it's inherent to the setting that there not be a bunch of bodies around. I have a relatively simple solution for that. It requires careful sequencing of events but not much beyond that.

#2 is a lot harder. People don't give a lot of exposition in the ~15 seconds before they die. Well, not in good stories they don't. But that dialog just before dying is all I've got to communicate anything complex to the player. This is a nut I haven't cracked yet. I first want to focus on the mechanical requirements - the player has to piece together the identities of the crew. Once I'm confident with that I can weave a larger narrative into the functional parts.

I'm still worried about both of these problems though so no promises. 

If you haven't read it already, I suggest the seminar work of Peter Linebaugh
The Many Headed Hydra, even though it covers a bit earlier period.

I'll check it out, thanks!

Uncharted is an action game though, right? I think you can get away with this in a slower paced game such as this.

Yeah, you're right. I've sorta bitten off more than I can chew with this game though, and this is one feature that would only get in if I had time to spare.

[marcgfx]

I played the demo a while ago, so my memory might not be entirely accurate. how about a log book that can be accessed in the past world, that could give more insight. maybe it could even be possible to replicate it (taking might cause paradoxes and you likely dont want to go there)? this could be interesting, as you could maybe get a key or other important things that are not available in the current time. if you have to rely on corpses, maybe a dead rat could also tell a story (on the other hand, why should it still be lying around). or maybe you need an inception like mechanic, where you can go deeper by using a corpse in a flashback, giving you 225 seconds

[dukope]

References

Researching the period, the ships, and the sailors for this project has been a lot of fun. It's not so much a dedication to accuracy as it is having no idea where to even start and needing the reference. The only problem is most of the information covering these topics is in books and most of those are old and/or expensive. And whereas there's a ton of information about Ships of the Line and Nelson's Big Heroic Whatever, there's much less on the merchantmen. Where I can, I try to dig up PDF or Kindle versions online.

Digital reference

If I can't find a digital version then I have to look for a physical copy. All the good ones are no longer in print so I've been buying mostly used books.

Actual books, made of paper

Reading through the really old books is enlightening. Some are proto-OCD material, where every detail is listed in the driest possible tone. And there were a lot of details about the East India Company and their ships. Better books have a little flavor that chips away at the EIC's shiny exterior. All the ship porn is great. When this is all over I kinda want to buy (not make) a big wooden model ship.


Hammocks

I'm working on the lower decks now and every once in a while, the stupidest things take forever. On ships like this sailors slept in rows of hammocks hung from the ceiling. I wasted a bunch of time modeling these.

Exhibit A: Ship hammock

My first mistake was ignoring this basic structure and trying to model a more complicated hammock, with support bars. Second problem was trying to use dynamics to form the hammock naturally. Maya's dynamics are pretty good but as usual trying to use their editing UI is an exercise in rage control. After some poorly-controlled rage:

Not using this hammock

Finally I threw all that shit out and just modeled a banana-shape that's much simpler, way fewer polys, and looks better in context anyways. The dynamics hammock was cool in some ways, but too much work to set up, and too many polys. I may go back and hook up the simpler hammock to dynamics if I find it hard to add the sleeping sailors by hand.

Bad, bad, good.

[Panurge]

You probably don't need any more book recommendations but 'The British Seaman' by Christopher Lloyd (not that Christopher Lloyd) is pretty good, as is 'The Wooden World'.

[oldblood]

Your attention to detail is what sets you apart from your peers (Also the fact that you're still on TIG and devlogging your work after finding success). Cheers!

[plauk]

Your attention to detail is what sets you apart from your peers (Also the fact that you're still on TIG and devlogging your work after finding success). Cheers!

This.

[dukope]

You probably don't need any more book recommendations but 'The British Seaman' by Christopher Lloyd (not that Christopher Lloyd) is pretty good, as is 'The Wooden World'.

I'll grab both of these, thanks Lee.

Your attention to detail is what sets you apart from your peers (Also the fact that you're still on TIG and devlogging your work after finding success). Cheers!

<3

[skeletorso]

You've said before that you're interested in the capacity of the player's imagination with this game. You referenced this when talking about your approach in contrasting the low fidelity visuals with high fidelity sound. All of which I think is excellent. This agenda coupled with the commonly repeated experience of death as 'life flashing before your eyes' might hold some key to how you deal with your exposition problem. It's true, as you noted, that people don't tend to vocalize a narrative in the remaining 15 seconds of their life, but it's reasonable to believe that thoughts of these narratives would be occurring within the mind of the doomed. In fact, the experience of the snapshot of their death that you've created is an inhabitation of the very same kind of flashing thought. These similarities suggest a potentially interesting solution.

On an unrelated note, this work is truly inspiring. Thank you for it.

[ZoidZilla]

2. How can the story/revelations be structured in a way that makes sense.

#1 is tricky because any dead body would've been quickly pitched overboard. So it's inherent to the setting that there not be a bunch of bodies around. I have a relatively simple solution for that. It requires careful sequencing of events but not much beyond that.

How about documents? Logbooks, diaries, accounting books, memos, carvings in the wood, stuff written in blood and so on. All those could shed some further light in the earlier deaths (were corpses would have been gotten rid off by now). So you would not have to force all the informations in the flashback scenes. That way, you also could give the player the opportunity to interact with the ship some more. When I played the demo it irked me a bit that I could not open any cupboards and drawers to search for documents or objects. Also one would think that finding the logbook or any written witness accounts would have high priority for an investigator.

Some details on the ship could be used for clues too, a damaged or missing dinghy, a noose on a mast, some ropes that indicates that someone was keelhauled and so on.

[Tuba]

Thanks for keeping that devlog, it's very informative

Out of curiosity, have you tried talking to a historian about the game? I'm sure there must be some out there willing to help...

Anyway, keep the good work, game is looking awesome!

[gambrinous]

Have you read the Master & Commander series of historical fiction novels? Apart from being super reading they are also set in the same time period & go into lots of carefully-researched detail.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B00CM6GIU6/ref=dp_st_0393307050

[barneycumming]

working hard... researching hammocks...