The last few months have focused on nice to have and quality of life added features, bug fixes, some visual improvements, and overall polish of the game. Going forward for the next few months will be more of the same. Adding somewhat minor features which make the game a more rich environment, add to the complexity of the gameplay, polish menus and the combat system, and fix any important bugs.
In the next release (0.8.6) currently there are fixes checked in for a major bug with ship flooding and a minor bug with the teleport feature. More known bugs are being targeted for this release, as well as some additional feature development. Specifically the bug where on ships with multiple side gun decks sometimes when you switch decks it switches back to the previous deck is the next to be worked on (this was looked at over a year ago and unfortunately not correctly fixed).
As far as feature development, ship fires, selecting ammunition types at sea, and adding the Heated Shot ammunition type, are the next features being worked on. When that is done additional resource types and resource gathering will be added, specifically fishing. 0.8.6 will be released at some point during these features being added.
After that, focus will switch back to the City UI, which while I thought it was somewhat innovative, play testers have reported it to be an initially confusing interface. I'm going to experiment with switching the listing and moving of items to a drag and drop interface and replace tables of items with icons of items.
Additionally the ship outfitting and customization part of the City UI (basically the current left size of the window) will be broken out into its own window. Naming of ships will finally be added (the back end has supported it for a long time, but the UI interface for it was not implemented correctly). Some additional ship customization features will also be added, such as Lieutenants assigned to ships which can be trained and provide ship bonuses.
This is all in preparation for the start of actually promoting the game, raising awareness, and a eventually a possible crowd funding campaign to support eventual marketing and finishing its development.
Sail the world in this exciting MMO by Joe Censored Games.
Under active development, ETA late 2021
Internal development builds available on Steam by request for a Steam beta key. Note that many features are currently not implemented, buttons may exist but do not work, there are no tutorials available.
