Uncursed Devlog #0

The side project of the side project of the side project

Every developer knows the feeling of jumping from one idea to the next, spawning countless side projects. It was no different with Uncursed’s ancestors. Almost all of them were built around ship travel and exploration, but none of them got further than steering the ship and landing on shore. Aside from the pirate theme, they all shared a top-down or isometric perspective. None of those early projects had a strong concept behind them or any real intent to finish them, so they remained as prototypes for testing mechanics — and eventually gathered dust on a virtual shelf.

Being side projects, they naturally had cliché, two-word names like Pirate Heart or Legendary Sails. That’s why Uncursed's original working title or codename was “ (Yet) Another Priate Game ”. And yes, I wrote it right — it really was “Priate” for quite a while. I made a typo when creating the project and we just stuck with it until the actual name was decided. In fact, the Unity project still shows that title to this day (as a reminder, not out of laziness — seriously!).

Artificial Inspirgence

In late 2022, publicly available and free-to-try large language models and generative “artificial intelligences” began to surface. Like everyone else, we immediately started playing around with them. Before long, we found ourselves asking it to write pirate-themed stories and trying to stitch them into something coherent.

Of course, the raw output wasn’t really usable in any medium where quality mattered. After a while, you start to get fed up with AI-generated content — even with diverse prompts, the recurring motifs wear thin. But it was great for sparking creativity and planting idea-seeds in our minds. Only we could shape them into something coherent. We started pinning tiny bits of story, the main character’s personality traits, motivations, and a few gameplay mechanics onto a whiteboard. For weeks — even months — we added new ideas, with decreasing intensity, until the board was full.

Winter Child

On December 6th, 2023 — St. Nicholas Day in Hungary — as a gift we bought Lethal Company for a fun, scream-filled evening. After a few hours of gameplay, we realized the game was built on simple but entertaining features — stuff we could totally put together ourselves. And hey, we already had a pirate idea just waiting to be made real (side note: we’re huge Sea of Thieves fans — but you probably guessed that already). That was the moment the idea for Uncursed took root in our minds — and we’ve been working on it ever since.

The very next day, we created the Unity project (under the name Another Priate Game), set up the Git repository, and uploaded it to one of the online version control platforms.

December 7th: Uncursed’s birthday.

To be continued…