GD Notes #7. Wind, Cannons and Boarding.

Ahoy!

This is Joruba, head of BlackMark Studio.

Caribbean Legend: Age of Pirates is coming soon — next week, March 13th! A must-have, totally worth a purchase.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3549020/Caribbean_Legend_Age_of_Pirates/

In case you missed it: it's a remaster of City of Abandoned Ships. A standalone game developed by ReCon Team with a focus on open-world sandbox gameplay, featuring colony capture, letters of marque, and a female playable hero. BlackMark Studio acts as publisher, providing the engine and the best features from Caribbean Legend.

Sorry, Kirill, had to be said. The mic is yours. Break a leg.

Hoist the topsails — set a course for the Bay of Creativity!

Kirill here.

These notes go with 1.8 Maritime Update. Today we’re polishing some of the oldest sea-faring systems: heading to the wind, boarding, and naval gunnery.

But first — a few answers.

Q&A

The previous GD Notes sparked a bunch of questions about Seasons and the systems around them.

Here are the ones that came up the most.

Q: The Season of Storm with increased storm damage sounds terrifying.

A: Storm frequency will indeed go up — but not by much — and storm damage is being completely reworked. Storms will stop ruthlessly sinking ships, and you’ll be able to fight in them as an interesting weather event, not a “die or die” scenario. In the absolute worst case, with every debuff stacked, you’ll still end up with a storm effect slightly weaker than what you get right now.

Q: The size of the bonuses and penalties looks scary.

A: The goal is for Seasons to actually push you to change habits or take advantage of new opportunities. If we see a lot of complaints about a specific effect, we’ll adjust it.

Q: New events and changes to generation will make questing harder.

A: We want the effects to be noticeable, but not frustrating and not “chore-like”. Everything here is tunable, and we’ll adapt it based on player feedback during the open beta.

Q: Season of Storm and Season of Shade will turn the Caribbean into waiting out bad times.

A: The effects shown in the notes were just 2 variants per Season. In reality there are many more — they can be positive, negative, and sometimes unexpected.

At the moment, the total number of variations lets you live through roughly 3–4 in-game years without seeing a single repeat — and we can expand that further later.

Q: The icons at the end of the diary — are those new fast travels?

A: Yes — many of you guessed it. We’re continuing to improve convenience and decided to expand the list of places you can reach with fast travel.

Heading to the Wind

We already reworked sails, wind, and heading-to-the-wind behavior back in 1.5, and since then it’s been improved multiple times.

All this time we’ve been collecting feedback on how the system works (and especially when it doesn’t) — and we’ve finally landed on a real fix.

The technical side

Ship speed at specific angles to the wind is probably the most complicated and confusing system in the game.

Besides the obvious parameters like wind strength and the actual angle, the calculations also involve physical properties of specific sails on the model, ship class, and results from formulas full of magic numbers.

The end result was a system that was hard to read and hard to trust — and we’ve been carefully patching it