





🌟 Special thanks to our amazing supporters:
✨ $10 Tier: [Geeks Love Detail]
🌈 $5 Tier: [Arch Toasty][Benedikt][David Martínez Martí]
This post will be dryer than your mouth after three days at sea without water.
Due to recent Windows 11 incompatibilities, I ran The Caribbean Sail through GameMaker 2 and exported it. This was a painfully difficult process that involved resolving over 48,000 errors.
[previewyoutube=cygkThh2nrE;full][/previewyoutube]
Well hey there boys and girls!
Have you ever wanted to be a cartoon mouse pirate? Then have I got news for YOU!
After 95 years since first stepping onto the world stage, Steamboat Willie is now a playable character in the Caribbean Sail!
Claim your copy! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/victorianclambake/the-caribbean-sail-physical-release
The day has nearly come and only half my hairs are gray so that has to count for something!
With your help the campaign has been fully funded and only a day remains before I begin rolling in piles of doubloons while laughing maniacally and plotting out the production timeline before turning those meaningless paper slips into something far more egotistically satisfying; The Caribbean Sail - Physical Edition.
Nearly an entire year has passed since I first pitched my vision to you all like a fist full of bait to an overfilled koi pond. The final stretch is ahead and I'll work to deliver something above and beyond your grandest piratical dreams.
If your region isn't available for shipping, let me know immediately! We still have 24 hours to calculate the UPS shipping costs and add it as an option! Should be easier than shipping boxes via carrier pigeon.
Pledge today and help reach a milestone that will bring the Sea Dragon back!
If physical items aren't your cup of Kickstarted tea, climb aboard the Discord server and tell us your worst pirate jokes!
Time to send this thing off with a bang!
- The Captain
Not sure what's going on? Read the previous post.
After many many months of work, the Kickstarter is nearly ready to begin! Be sure to set your account in order and queue up for the notification here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/victorianclambake/the-caribbean-sail-physical-release
If all goes as intended (which it absolutely won't) then on the 15th you can open your wallets and dump their contents directly into funding the final development cycle and receive a glorious physical boxed copy of The Caribbean Sail!
In an immaterial age, why wouldn't you want one of your favorite games on a tangible medium?
There will be announcements, community goals that you can participate in achieving, and the goal of making possible my most ambitious project yet!
The time approaches!
All hands on deck! Ready to help your Captain out in our time of need? The only way to get exposure on Steam on release day anymore is if we can beat out the competition by sales and engagement! Shell Shuffle is our next title- I didn't make this one alone! With the help of two friends who created the artwork and soundtrack respectively, we've put together a polished game that's simply fun to play. You can let me know what you think in a Steam review after the dopamine high wears off at 4:00 AM when you're pushing your eyeballs back in place with a spoon because you haven't blinked in 8 hours. Just kidding, review it as quickly as possible to help it gain traction on launch. Happy Shuffling! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1395450/Shell_Shuffle/
Ahoy there lads! Soon you'll never have to leave your shanty collection behind when you stop playing The Caribbean Sail to do something significantly less important because the soundtrack is being released on the 11th! Wishlist now, worry about your coffers later: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1382140/The_Caribbean_Sail__Soundtrack/ Every track has been compiled using a painstaking process of individually recording each track rather than using the default Beepbox export method in order to have a higher quality sound than there is in-game. Many an intro and outro have also been added to various loops for your listening pleasure! There are four bonus songs that can't be heard in-game even though they were created, along with an album exclusive pirate metal song about the game created by Anchorsmashed!
Short patch poetry time! The lads noticed some oversights dumb, So I whipped up the fixes for some, Bugs were solved with insight, And the screenshots fit right, The soundtrack is next to come!
The Mac users all got the same crash, and since I don't want to sell trash, I fixed up the game, It's mostly the same, but the bottle messages all turned to ash. *Bottle messages were entirely removed from the Mac version for now to prevent a recent crash.
Another patch to delay obsolescence. I finally added the Discord rich presence. * Three achievements are new. Did some bug fixing too. Enjoy the new features with much effervescence! * There were bugs with the Linux and Mac builds I ported, so for Discord rich presence, only Windows is supported. TCS_Tophat
As we near the end of the year, I'm beginning to create a list of the most important and requested features and implement them before I start working on the Fantasy Toggle expansion. If you thought naming your crew "The Food Supply" or "Nobody important" was funny, you're going to love naming your ship things like "The Dingy Dinghy" or "Your Spirits" or anything else you can think of! Speaking of names, were your crew unfortunate enough to have the same name? They'll now be assigned some roman numerals to differentiate each other. This uncoincidentally also fixes the duplicate name invincibility bug. A common request for keyboard shortcuts has been met. On the sailing screen you can press "F" to fish or "I" to quickly access the inventory or "enter" to leave the logbook. There are some more keyboard commands for port and sailing but the game still isn't fully keyboard navigable. Finally, Iceland is now cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Make sure to wear your oilskins as winter approaches!
It's certainly been awhile since the last content patch but we're back on course. The world no longer contains eleven identical pubs around the world because some interior decoraters came in and spruced up all the taverns. Your logbook journal is also more than a single page to write on, now it's 99 pages to write on! You can keep record of your adventure, manually track your quests, create a lot of profane ASCII artwork or whatever else your heart desires. I know this isn't a huge content update but my attention is divided. There are plenty of suggestions and requests that I'll go through and prioritize but the final feature to complete the original Route Planning checklist is varying the Liars Dice AI around the world. After those patches I'll hopefully begin work on the free Fantasy Toggle expansion!
I'm glad to see you lads enjoying the trading cards. I haven't seen any potatoes yet so which one of you has been hoarding them all? It's been a while since I pushed an update on a Tuesday... brings back scary sleep deprived memories from last week... or was that last night? It's hard to tell when you don't sleep most of the time. The point I'm eventually going to make is that I'm wrapping up the marketing and taking a break from the heavy development push I've been on until I can get more hours of sleep than you have living crew members after defeating the Baochuan. (Inconsistently 1-5)
What's that Polly? Players can now turn their hard earned doubloons into virtual collectibles that have no real world value? That doesn't sound like a scam at all! That's right lads! Valve recently approved The Caribbean Sail for Trading Cards and there are now 10 ships with 99% historically accurate descriptions that you can collect! You can throw all those cards into your inventory crockpot to cook up a badge, background, and emoticon! The real question is; Whom among us will be the one to sell their cards to allow the collecting? I expect to find you all on deck fighting over the highly coveted potato emote by morning. - Your Captain, Evan
As usual, if my update isn't massive then it must be a limerick. This update is really quite small, but it's important so I couldn't stall. Narwhal art for amusement, and a frame rate improvement. You won't notice much change at all.
Ah... just look at Mr. Death guiding my little ship to safety.
These are the final touches until the major Route Planning expansion is complete.
+ Goods aboard ships now have a small delta of randomness in pricing
+ The British Grenadiers shanty got a bass drop
+ A new crew event that can end in flogging
+ More Particle Effects
- One potential bug
There was a bit more code cleanup but this log is already dry and boring enough. My attention is now on a slew of needed changes to the game structure that will make the new features possible. Thanks be to every one of you kind lads that alert me to bugs, suggest improvements, and populate the Atlantic with toxins- I mean, messages in bottles.
- Your Captain, Evan
Sing a tow, row, row, row, row, row, row, row, for the British Grenadiers. Enjoy the new "Shanty" available in the one and only London Harbor Shop. Where's V1.5.8.3 I hear you ask? I flogged it to death after it failed to fix a bug. What about the bug? I flogged it to death also- actually, I've been doing a lot of flogging on account of the new discipline system added to the game. There's only one event that makes use of it now but later crew relations and discipline will be integral to each voyage. The captains have decided that they would make a better profit selling items at sea than only in ports, so two items and a shanty will always be available aboard ships now! Fish are a bit more lively after being caught in the net, another achievement was added, the online bug is finally fixed (I'm 80% sure this time) and there are more particle effects! If all has gone according to plan then this will be the last update to the game before Route Planning. I'll share more details early February.
Small update that should have been there for a while now. One time tutorial windows have been added for things that some people have missed. This should help make people better shoppers, liars dice players, naval combatants, and solve all the problems in the world. The last update frustratingly did not fix the one bug in the game, I changed a line of code that will either cause more crashes, fix the bug forever, or do absolutely nothing.
Habits must be hard to break because here we are, one week after weekly updates ended and i'm pushing an update. This should resolve the game crashing bug a few of you have encountered. The short version: Rarely some data would fail to be retrieved or decoded from one of the online features and it would cause a crash. The long version: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! If you were feeling like you hadn't achieved much after sailing across the Atlantic on a raft then today's your lucky day because I decided to ad three new achievements! Apart from that you can also catch clams in your net near reefs and a small bug where players would only encounter one type of ship was resolved. Glad to see so many new sailors! The bottle messages have been swarming the ocean and I'll need to work on a new way of collecting bottles to show players, until then- you'll probably see bottles only near the start. May your spam remain ever buoyant.
Habits must be hard to break because here we are, one week after weekly updates ended and i'm pushing an update. This should resolve the game crashing bug a few of you have encountered. The short version: Rarely some data would fail to be retrieved or decoded from one of the online features and it would cause a crash. The long version: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! If you we're feeling like you hadn't achieved much after sailing across the Atlantic on a raft then today's your lucky day because I decided to ad three new achievements! Apart from that you can also catch clams in your net near reefs and a small bug where players would only encounter one type of ship was resolved. Glad to see so many new sailors! The bottle messages have been swarming the ocean and I'll need to work on a new way of collecting bottles to show players, until then- you'll probably see bottles only near the start. May your spam remain ever buoyant.
Last year I made The Caribbean Sail and passed it through greenlight in the nick of time then released it on talk like a pirate day. I followed up with weekly updates for three months solid. I'd call that a productive year- so what's next? The game is pretty solid right now, it's nearly bug free and has as many particle effects as I could fit in- so the weekly updates are over. There will be one more content patch and then i'll focus my efforts on the free Route Planning expansion. My thanks to each and every one of you jolly tars that support me and my game. We've come a long way and have so much farther to go. Good health and fair weather to you all as we sail into the new year! - The Captain, Evan.
Yet another miracle of pixel art and code wizardry has been performed and in about a days time I've been able to bring you another update! Three new ship variants have been added as random encounters for your pleasure and torture! The Cutter: a small and quick vessel. The Schooner: a large and fast ship with few cannons... and The War Galleon: a massive ship with unreasonable hull integrity and enough cannons to sink anything in a few seconds- to give players a sense of accomplishment. Trying to bring it down with a frigate has been the most fun I've had while playing yet. I can't wait to improve on the combat even more! Another update to make use of those new ship types, changes the "Avoid" button to "Flee" in those awkward situations where your ship wore an English flag to a Spanish party. The final change lowered the spawn rate of crates... also I think some more particle effects got added to the game somewhere. Enjoy your new enemies! :D
It's not a big update but I found the time to implement the most interesting thing you can give someone; An unopened box. While sailing you'll have the chance to encounter a box that you have the choice to open. Inside may be an item you've already seen in the game or it may be the new "Medicine" I added which will improve the health of your crew! Unfortunately medicine in the 1700's didn't exactly cure people... On another note, last week I was interviewed by Gamelyst about The Caribbean Sail and independent development! Here's a link to the interview: Bam On another other note, IndieDB is holding the voting period for the top 100 indie games of the year! If you'd like to show your support then swing aboard indieDB and give it a vote: Wha-Bam For the few of you still avidly following progress, my sincerest gratitudes! I wish I had the time to get as much done as I want right now but within the first week of January i'll hopefully have completed my goals for TCS V1 and begin that first expansion. Let the Jolly Holidays commence!
Now, you may be asking yourself "What happened in V1.5.4?" Nothing and don't worry about it. As the holiday season approaches and the most unavoidable enemy (our families) take away our most precious and valuable asset (our time) the content updates are going to slow down, don't be too surprised if I can't push one next week. As for this week, I'm attempting to bring challenge back to the Atlantic by stat balancing. The career and ship stats have been wildly unbalanced since the first week I began working on the game. The entire list is too long and boring for a patch log and probably won't be the final balance patch, so climb aboard a ship and fire some feedback at me. While not a content patch, this will significantly impact the way you play and for some- make it far more enjoyable.
Let's get straight to the updates. The default names auto clear while your unique names can be changed without being completely rewritten. French and Spanish ship's captains are less shy and will talk to you now. When apples spoil they are no longer thrown overboard but are added to your inventory so you can force your crew to eat them anyway! The sloop's hull integrity was debuffed to balance the small hitbox that made it almost impossible for enemies to hit. A badge link to the Victorian Clambake twitter account (@Tophat_Scallop) was added to the main menu- plugo plugo. The biggest update this week is gamepad support. The game wasn't designed to be controlled by a gamepad but there have been a few requests and even I'd like to play it from the couch. I've rewritten as much of the button code as I could do without rebuilding the entire game (No joke). The second hardest part was trying to fit a virtual keyboard in for writing crew names and bottle messages. Xbox controllers work and your PS4 controller will probably work. So here's how it works: Use the analog sticks to move the cursor and the right shoulder buttons or "A" as a left click on any screen. The d-pad can be used for swapping characters and ships on the start menu, and portion control while sailing. The d-pad can also be used in battle for aiming the cannons and "B" can be used for firing them. You can pause the game any time during play with the "Start" button. The virtual keyboard isn't great but it can get the job done, some helpful alternative keys for typing are "Y" for space, "X" for delete, and the left analog button or left trigger for capitalization. I know it isn't great but I just didn't consider controller support until far too late- I won't be making that mistake again on my future games. Thank you for the support and I hope you enjoy the updates as development continues!
I've been building a lot of content for the expansions in the background while working on these updates and soon the time will come when weekly updates stop and I begin working on the "Route Planning" expansion. I'll share more details soon! The first i'll let you all decide on keeping: I changed the Hunger status to read "Hunger 30/30" from "Hunger 30" to clarify what your maximum hunger is. Making use of those new flags? Fantastic! Now you can go and fool the new Spanish ships I added to the game or just sink them because of the war and all that... New artwork has been added for the Captains cabin and you can now play Liars Dice with English Captains! Tired of all the leaking? Purchase a bucket of Pitch and Tar from the Shop for just four easy payments £9.99! Fling it against the wall to repair a few points of damage- sorta like I do with these updates! The pause key will also pause your adventure now, and dice have a simple animation when lost to better display when a round is lost/won, and you guessed it- MORE PARTICLE EFFECTS! The feedback has been great and I'm paying close attention to all your ideas and requests! I started a forum thread where I can reply to them all in the community hub. On to the updates!
Welcome aboard sailors! Since the sale and update last week, I've seen an Ocean of new messages in bottles. They always make me laugh when play testing so I've decided to start posting my favorites to the Victorian Clambake twitter: @Tophat_Scallop Another week another update! Tired of being a loyal Englishman? No more must you serve the Queen! After raiding a ship you can now take their flag and fly it proudly! Use the new Spanish, French, Danish, Dutch, and Pirate flags to show your true colours or just trick the enemy into letting you board. The way ship encounters work has been changed so you can use your spyglass (Now given to you from start) to determine the approaching ship's banner and then raise your own. Use this to board the French ships or just gain first strike in battle. Pirates still don't care who you are and will attack anyway. Also, more particle effects. Being such a big and complicated update accounting for so many different combinations of ship types and flags, I wasn't able to ad Spanish, Dutch, or Danish ships yet- but i'm working on it! There have been quite a few bug fixes this week too. The apples are no longer so terrible they somehow make scurvy occur sooner. You can't surrender your sinking ship. You can catch the fish from the frenzy event in the net. A few other small bugs which I brushed under the rug and hopefully nobody will trip over... I MEAN FIXED! Yeah I definitely fixed them. -Side note, I'm using Google Translate to have the dialogue of ship captains be in the appropriate language, I'm well aware the translations may be inaccurate so if someone has a correction then call it out in the forums for me. Thank you!
Happy Halloween! With new Halloween easter eggs and all kinds of dark whimsy, now is the perfect time to play The Caribbean Sail and die from losing your bowels- whether that's from the spooks and scares, or just dysentery again. - Fixed a few rare crashes and changed the net strength to be more balanced, also set default rations to adequate and most importantly - More particle effects.
Sorry to string you along another day. I was at the end of my rope last week while caught up in making a net. The tensions are still high as I haul in another line of updates.
No update this week because I'm working on some big features that will need time to be tested and polished after being made- namely the inventory system. Having so many different items with unique effects will take another week or two to implement and then some time to test. There will be fruit to cure scurvy, new flags to fool enemies, a trawling net to catch fish, and more! Until then, feel free to mention what other items you'd like to see. Happy sailing!
It's been a stressful first three weeks but things have calmed down as I've patched out the last few bugs and discrepancies found. This means I can start designing and building content for "Route Planning" and share the details with you all when ready. There are still a few updates i'd to introduce while preparing the framework for the expansion so this week you'll find a completely redesigned logbook, it now has an index with five sections: Crew Log, Ship Log, Supplies, Journal, and Inventory. The journal is more of a personal notepad for you that is saved between voyages. The inventory tab empty right now but necessary for preparation of new items that will help you on your journey in an update soon. The Frigate art was redone (again) to have two masts and be less of an eyesore. Hull depth of large ships was changed for accuracy and reefs are less dangerous now- but still deadly. I corrected the terminology as to no longer call St. Georges Cross a Union Jack. (Dev Tip: Write dialogue after making the art) A lot of behind the scenes work is going on but you'll see more updates next week!
After a hectic first launch week I've taken some time to rest, plan ahead, and do some important code clean up for the expansions. I've also made a few updates worth mentioning. Continuity has been improved by making it rain during battles or reef crossings when appropriate, praise the rain! No longer will you have to be confused about the currency you're using because i've extended the font library and changed "E" to "£" - they were pounds all along! Not the weight, the UK currency. To my surprise, the lowest achieved achievement is still "Reel it back" so get out there and catch 100 fish with one harpoon without taking a break! I added an achievement stat counter for it- but Steam updates it rather slowly. I've enjoyed reading all your messages in bottles! Plenty of messages even saltier than the water they're in but it's really spiced up play testing. One day, our 8-bit ocean will just be a surface of bottles and corpses border to border. - ON ANOTHER NOTE - A friend and I participated in the Gamejolt Dreamhack Jam and made a game in 48 hours. It's called "Captain Cutter's Last Stand" - a punchy melee combat game where your goal is to survive as many waves of Squid's as you can. It's completely free so if you'd like, check it out: https://gamejolt.com/games/Cutterslaststand/286681
You asked for it, I delivered! Messages in Bottles can now cross over between players! You MUST opt-in by going to settings and enabling online bottles. This was one of the trickiest features to make and may need work but with a large player base now, i'm sure you'll help me find any problems in no time. Another change has been to the profession menu, no longer must you dream of what the glorious pixelated face of a fisherman looks like- You can view every occupation and it's perks in the menu! Not enough? Well now you can be a Surgeon! The RNG also had a few small adjustments to lessen the absurd Influenza epidemic during storms along with more common food spoiling and battle injuries. Wondered what your hull integrity was while sailing? It's been added to the logbook and while at very low hull integrity the leaks will continue on main sailing screen- that won't get annoying for Raft sailors i'm sure. Defeated ships will have more than just food now, sometime's they'll have cannonballs or harpoons. The feedback has been fantastic and I love hearing what you all have to say! Lot's of great ideas.
After a glorious release i've been able to work on the steam integration, the patch was small and boring so I wrote it in limerick form to spice it up. Today when I opened the hatch, I got feedback from the first batch; "We want screenshots not gimmicks- and achievements on Linux!" So I fixed that and put out a patch. Thank ye kindly fer all the support!
Ahoy there everyone! I'm Evan, and I'll be yer captain today as we set this game sailing onto the treacherous waters of Steam. Working hard we may be able to keep this game afloat instead of sinking into the depths of obscurity but it'll be a hard fight. The development cycle of community feedback begins as I'll be working hard to actively improve the game for the pleasure of ye all. Together we can make something great! Now stop reading this drivel and go purchase or pilfer me game so we can start preaching the piratey gospel! Happy talk like a pirate day to ye all!
[ 5953 ]
[ 1507 ]
[ 1901 ]