Dev Log 1 - Starting on the journey

A CAPTAIN, THEIR SHIP, AND THE CREW

Back in 2021 I was reading the Tales of the Ketty Jay, a fun and pulpy fantasy series about a captain and his motley crew of misfits, that through shared struggles become a family and learn to trust each other. Being a fan of Rimworld, the idea struck me of taking the social simulation popular in story generators, and put it on a ship. Another reference was the Space Western Firefly. Here we also have a captain and his crew taking on odd jobs and trying to make ends meet. Firefly really excels at making the crew feel like a found family under the guidance of the captain, and the ship being a shared home. Therefore having some crew management ala FTL also entered the mix.

The gameplay inspirations for the game

Yes there was also some inspiration from Failbetter’s excellent Sunless Sea but I wanted to lean more into simulation and procedural techniques to create a dynamic world for the player to explore and discover stories in. Being a fan of tabletop role playing games probably also carried an influence there. I thought using the player’s imagination to bring the world to life was very enticing, so I also decided that a lot of the game would be conveyed through text and abstract systems.

THE FIRST PROTOTYPE

But what should this game really be about? What should the pillars be? Even though I decided to prototype the idea for fun, I also wanted to make sure I created something that would stand out among other games out there. One of the first things I made, was therefore this diagram to compare existing games with each other and see if the concept would stand out.

Comparing the concept with existing games

From this it became clear the social simulation of the crew and exploring the world were the most important features. Afterwards I also made this yarn ball of a diagram to get an idea of all the systems and features in the game, and how they would relate to each other.

This was just a sketch of what I thought the game would be at the time so take it with a grain of (sea)salt.

Normally when making games you focus on the core loop, that is the actions the player do all the time, first and keep Iterating until that feels right to play and then you add more systems on top of that. However since the game was going to be so systems driven, I decided to go a different tack and go broad instead. I needed to see how systems would interplay with each other, before I could get a better picture of how the whole game would play. I therefore often only did a single iteration on a system and moved on to the next part of the game even though I knew it wasn’t working exactly as intended.

I’m glad I did it this way because it has turned out that some systems could be quite shallow, but I could only figure that out once they had been put in and started to interact with the rest of the game. After a couple of months I had a ship that could move around, the basic world generation working and a ship inhabited by crew members.

There was crew before there were harbours. No time ashore for these poor sods!

In coming blog posts I’ll explain more about how various aspects of the game works. I think the procedural world generation and storytelling systems for instance are pretty cool, so they will defo get their own posts later on.

If you have made it this far please help us out with wishlisting the game. It helps with visibility on Steam so we can reach more players :)