Hello again and welcome to the development log of

The game about sun-bleached desert, cold-blooded pirates and chaos-born monsters! We have made it to the production stage of our project and we are ready to carry it on to the very finish!

This week we moved our project from dirty prototype to clean development stage, we have remade everything but brought and polished the core mechanics which work now even better thanks to more testing. We also added new secondary features supported by new visuals that will make gameplay more fun!

First of all, we would like to present you the current controls layout for XBOX gamepads:

Now let's talk about new stuff we added to these buttons!

TurboDash: drift, escape, pursue!

In order to give the player more advantage in fighting sand-pirates, tornados and Kraken we decided to get a little physical. The player's ship can perform a TurboDash now! It allows the  ship to quickly move forwards with physics in order to dodge an enemy cannonball, flee from an unwanted battle or break out from tornado's consuming winds. 

At first we wanted to add continuous boost to the ship so the player has full control over the ship's speed.

Sand-drift!

But after some tests it became clear that such feature is overpowered and it breaks the game's balance. Moreover we encounter quite some bugs which could be easily exploited unless the rules of the game are much-much more strict.

The other variant was with actual dashes forward. It was working way more well and it was easy to tweak all the variables in order to get a decent a balanced gameplay mechanic.

Unlimited dash fun, could be a good anime!

We also designed a flexible resource-system for the dash that can be upgraded over time, as long as you have enough looties.

TurboDash bar, each dash takes 100 points

Chargeable cannons: get them from afar!

We also added physics to the cannonballs. The previous version of cannonballs was way to simple and straightforward, just like in bullet-hell games. But in order to make battles more interesting and challenging the cannonballs now behave as heavy objects made of steel, which they actually are. 

Maybe they are too heavy after all...

So the next challenge was to actually shoot those heavy cannonballs. But instead of just giving the same amount of explosive force on each press of the triggers, the player now has more control over strike-radius with chargeable cannons! In order to shoot further the player has to hold trigger for some time and release it whenever the time feels appropriate.

How much should you charge it - depends on situation. By the way, how do you like our new cannons?

You get used to charging speed and strike distances after first 2-3 shots so the naval-combat now can be handled on both short and long distances. We are also designing more ways of visual and sound assistance for shooting to make it even more enjoyable.

While programmers had fun with their cannons and dashes, artists got closer to the real shapes of our project!

We are close to merging the results of the artist's work with gameplay of programmers, but it requires more time and patience! 

That's all for now, see you next week with new awesome stuff!