Bug Reporting

The major feature being added to 0.8.10 is the ability to directly send bug reports while in the game.  To do so you click Menu then the Report Bug button.  This will be the most direct way of reporting an issue with the game. 

You'll be asked to explain the issue, such as a description and steps to reproduce.  Please be as descriptive as possible, as that will increase the likelihood the problem can be found and fixed.  If you don't know some of the information, that is fine too. 

Providing a Contact Email address is optional.  You probably won't be contacted, but it can be helpful if I have some questions about what you're reporting (such as if I'm unable to reproduce the reported problem).  Your contact email won't be used for any other purpose.  Yes we already ask for your email address when creating the account, but we don't want to contact you at that address for any reason other than related to your account, and many people sign up for games on email addresses they don't actually check that often. 

In addition there will be some other minor improvements, such as a bug fix for the recent resource gathering feature which prevented you from clicking on the same resource a second time, replacing the Sailing Quick Crew Button with a Gathering one, and some other minor performance improvements mostly on the server side. 

In the Future

The next major feature work is expected to be on the main City window.  I've gotten lots of complaints that it is unintuitive since it was added, and it has been planned to be replaced.  It will be broken up into several different windows.  There will be a window with primarily your city storage, one for outfitting your ship, one for managing all ships at the dock, and the Market window will be separated from all of them so you can move the Market window around freely. 

This will make the buttons on these windows make more sense, and free up some real estate for some new feature work coming later, specifically adding the option to change ship skins, finally name your ships (the feature is implemented everywhere for years except actually assigning the name doesn't currently work), some functionality specific to a new Missions feature (quests basically) where you'll carry specific people or items that are unique to that Mission.  Another similar feature I want to add is adding Lieutenants to your ships.  These will basically provide different bonuses to your ship, which increase with experience. 

After that I want to finally add the Trade Company feature, and expand the territory covered by the game.  The goal is to cover the West African coast and the North American east coast first, then expand out towards India and South America, and then finally to get to the starting positions for the 3 East Asian nations.  Last will be Australia and the west coast of the Americas (which I'm excited about as I live on the US west coast). 

Gunboat!

Currently adding the new Athens Class Gunboat!  Gunboats are small Corvette/Caravel sized vessels which have been fitted with a small number of over sized guns off a Ship of the Line.  The Athens Class, slightly smaller than a Baltimore, will be fitted two large cannons on each side, while still being fast and maneuverable like its small cousins.

The purpose of a Gunboat is to challenge much larger vessels with small relatively inexpensive craft.  Ideal when used in swarm tactics or augmenting additional firepower to a light fleet.  The Athens Class makes possible a fast moving fleet of small ships able to take on Ships of the Line and large Frigates.

The biggest vulnerability of the Athens Class is they are no more resistant to incoming ordinance than other ships of their size.  Use its small size and nimble nature to avoid shots rather than going toe to toe exchanging fire with large ships.  A lucky shot from a large ship may spell the end otherwise.  Fortunately they are very inexpensive compared to the large ships they are meant to take on.

Additionally coming in 0.8.9, already implemented is the new Christopher Class Heavy Cog.  This new ship is ideal for beginning captains, as it is an improvement over the Bremen Class Cog in practically every way, is pretty inexpensive, and has low skill requirements.

Fishing

Finally got around to adding the fishing mechanic.  Fish appear as a natural resource, and are depicted on the minimap as a turquoise circle.  When you approach the fish they can be seen swimming around in the water.

To collect the fish you go to the top right Resources tab and give them a click (same place you click on item drops).  This will open the Gathering window, which will tell you how many fish are available to gather.  Click on the Gather button to start catching the fish.  Make sure you assign crew to the Gathering role in the lower left Crew tab, or you won't catch any fish.  You're reminded of this in the instructions on the Gathering window. There will not be a quick crew button for assigning crew to the Gathering role, so you'll have to manually assign them.  EDIT: After testing of the feature on the live server since its release, it was decided to replace the Sailing Quick Crew button with a Gathering Quick Crew button for 0.8.10.

As you catch fish you'll get an event alert with how many you caught (an event alert is the kind of message you see when you're hit with a cannonball), and you'll see them appear in your cargo hold assuming you have enough space available.  Once all the fish have been caught the resource will disappear.  Pretty simple.  You're then free to sell them at markets, and eventually you'll be able to craft them into fish meat or other products.

To start with there will be Salmon and Great White Shark spawns.  More will be coming later.  This will all come in 0.8.8 which will be pushed to Steam in the next few days.  In addition 0.8.8 comes with some minor bug fixes, a rebalance to the Stone Cannonballs, and all new characters immediately have the skills to sail at least a Latina Class Caravel.

Edit: Also adding Bass fish spawns at launch now.  In addition, the Fishing and Advanced Fishing skills now apply a 10% speed boost to catching fish per level.  Broadopedia has been updated to state this.

Fire!

Ship Fire Mechanic

For 0.8.7 I'm now almost done with implementing the ship fire mechanic.  Primarily fires are started by shooting ships with the Heated Shot ammunition type, which was added in the current 0.8.6 build.  Similar to creating a leak on impact or injuring crew, the chance of creating a fire is based on the stats of the ammunition fired.  Larger heated shot have a higher chance of causing a fire, but even the smallest has a pretty good chance.  Some other ammunition types also have a very small chance of starting a fire as well.

A ship can have up to 3 fires at the same time.  A fire at the bow, midship, or the stern.  To fight fires you assign crew to the firefighting role, which functions similarly to the other damage control roles.  work is applied to fighting a fire every few seconds automatically.  Similar to fixing leaks, your crew focuses on fighting 1 fire at a time, working on them in the order that they appear.  Fire pumps can be installed in your ship's equipment slots to improve the efficiency of your crew fighting fires (competing currently with the bilge pump equipment, which is used for improving efficiency of pumping out water from leaks)

While leaks start at a specific size, where larger leaks take more crew effort to fix than smaller ones, fires instead all start off small.  Fires though grow in size, requiring more crew effort to put them out.  This means that while your crew is fighting the first fire, if a second fire is started it will grow in size unchecked until the first fire is put out.  You will find it is important to quickly put out fires. 

Fires randomly spawn additional damage to your ship, with worse damage the larger the fire.  At launch of the feature with 0.8.7 this will be limited to spawning new ship leaks, but it is planned to also destroy equipment and cannons installed in the ship when that feature is eventually implemented.  It is not yet decided if fires will result in crew injuries, but that is a possibility as well in the future.

Your ship will only have up to 1 fire for each of the 3 locations, so unlike leaks you can't get inundated with large numbers of fires (beyond the 3).  The player will be able to see the fire and smoke at the correct location of the fire, both for your own ship and other ships in the game.  These fire and smoke effects grow in size with the intensity and seriousness of the fire, so will be a good visual indicator.

So this should look cool and add a bit more depth to the combat in Broadside: Perilous Waters.  Have fun with it.

Lots of small improvements

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. 

Texturing

Some experimental texturing.  This is Norway, how does it look?