We have reached 60% of our goal on Kickstarter! And we have also received more than $4,000 of support through our website. Huge thanks to all of you who supported us!
Also, several fans have asked us for our roadmap. So we prepared one right here: www.captain-of-industry.com/roadmap. Please note that we might be (and most likely will be) moving things around. And the section with ideas for the future is just complete brainstorming. None of that will happen before we get community feedback.
We have also set up a dedicated channel (ideas-suggestions) in our discord to discuss ideas & feature requests. It’s an open playground for brainstorming for our fans. And remember, there is no such thing as a bad idea!
You might be also wondering, what are we working on right now? Well, we are gearing up for alpha as there is no time for rest. We are implementing features and doing improvements.
We were also watching lots of videos about COI (if you didn’t see it, check the media page and pick your favorite language!). And it is an absolutely amazing learning experience for us.
The first thing I learned is that I will never send a key to JD again. Because he’s trying to break the game and I don’t like it (I am joking of course).
The other observations we made were in regards to balancing. Balancing is really hard because everyone has their own way of playing. Some folks rush. Some folks take their time. And that makes a huge difference in a game like ours. I would never believe I need to add a recipe to burn diesel. Am I a savage? But there are also other things. For example, we designed the beacon and early world map as accelerators for the early game. But some folks prefer to postpone this after they are done with everything else. Or they are just generally worried that they could get into extra issues to deal with. Well, they are not far from reality. In the later stage of the world map exploration, there is ebola waiting to be caught by your crew :) Nope, I’m just joking … maybe. So this is interesting because delaying things like beacon or world map was not something we did in our gameplay sessions. And I spent hundreds of hours playing & balancing the game (not just the early game though). So a few days ago we landed a patch to remove world map copper as a blocker for the maintenance as that was frustrating for some folks. And we will do several tweaks in balancing as well.
Another interesting observation was that some players are used to games where nothing can go wrong or games where everything is unlimited. However, we strive for realism. And in reality, one doesn’t waste resources on an extra blast furnace just because it might be needed later. Things have their cost. And not just one-time cost, but also running costs. I think that this is something that players will learn & get used to it and hopefully appreciate. In the meantime, we have to make sure we provide the best possible guidance to make sure there is a smooth learning curve.
And that’s related to another topic which is ... tutorials. We will be looking into how to simplify them. Because we’ve noticed that several folks just don’t read them as they are long. Or folks just skip the tooltips. This is a shame because we added lots of useful information to these. So hopefully we will evolve the guidance a bit more over time. One of the ideas I have is that if a player skips a tutorial a huge fleet of pirates comes to the island and tears it into pieces with a final message: “I told you to read the tutorials!”.
And the last thing I’d like to mention is that we are not going to land any new changes into the current press build until we have the alpha update. It would be just an extra overhead for us at this moment.
Don't forget to check out the roadmap
Thank you!
Captain Filip out.