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[rebellion534]

Edit : Discontinued 

[Wilson Saunders]

I like the customizable age of sail idea. Have you given any thought to modeling weight and displacement? A ship must displace its weight in water to stay afloat. So if you assign a weight to all the blocks you put on the ship you can determine how high the ship sits in the water. When the ship takes damage it could take on water become heavier (sit lower). If part of the ship gets blown away/dumped overboard the ship would become lighter (sit higher/not sink).

How high the ship sits in the water could effect other game elements like sailing speed, sinking and capsizing. Unity has a very powerful physics engine, take advantage of it if you can.

[RyanT]

I like the building aspect of the game, nice work!


I'm not sure how feasible my following suggestion is, but I will pitch it anyway.

Originally, this idea was geared towards a space game I was making, which has since been dropped. But it would certainly work here. Basically, each block on the pirate ship has a damage threshold. If that block exceeds it, then it will be destroyed. Of course, this would cause problems for you. Flooding could occur, perhaps sea life can enter large holes, and storms will cause even more damage.

Players will be given avatars in which they can use to walk aboard their ship. When damage occurs, the player can walk towards the damaged area, enter his/her inventory, and then replace that broken block with a new one. This obviously means that you are left vulnerable as no one will be controlling the ship or attacking the enemies. So, I propose either having AI shipmates in which you designate jobs to them and/or actually having online friends become your shipmates.

[capnramses]

I love the way the cannons fire one after the other!
I wouldn't worry too much about resource gathering - unless you mean taking cannons off defeated ships!
I like the ship designer and I think your cove/coastal building fort idea is great.
I agree with the earlier posters - some slightly more realistic physics would be cool. Have a look at some basic sailing direction& speed vs wind direction stuff - that'd be really neat if you implemented it and it was easy to see what was going on - sailing ships have various wind and sail strength indicators (luffing on the sails etc). Your ship battles would be great if you could change sails tactically.
You need little pirate dudes running around. Just one or two would be cool - you could have some fun with the animations. Sailors do lots of interesting things (see how they change sails on those old ships). An avatar for exploring your own ship would also be cool.
Also if you're thinking about damage maybe you can consider changing cannon shot types during the battle (chain shot, grape shot etc) to damage different parts of the ship.
A great touch would be if you could hear the commands you give being yelled at the crew by the first mate.
Re: a full game - you might find it easier to come up with a plot if you have the ability to put some background scenery/islands in - then you could make missions with background stories.
You've been programming for half a year?!!! Holy crap. Love it!

[Wilson Saunders]

The physics modeling does not have to be too computationaly expensive. On game start you set two counters: position, and mass. You itorate through all the blocks of the ship first adding the the blocks position to the counter position using the weighted average of the block's mass to the total mass. Then you add the blocks mass to the total mass and move on to the next block. When you are done you have the ship's total mass and center of gravity. You can set Unity's "rigidbody.centerOfMass" to the position and use Rigidbody.AddForceAtPosition  to simulate bouyancy and cannon impacts. The block iteration only needs to be done when the ship gains/looses pieces.