Management / Sim Following Seas - an upcoming sailing sim.

[spectre]

I stumbled on this one by accident. Not a lot is known at the moment, but in essence, it looks like Sailwind with better graphics - you basically act as a one-man crew doing all the sailing
and sailing adjacent activities without combat. Probably a deal-breaker to some, but not gonna lie, after Naval Action turned out the way it has, and the Pirate games as a genre being fucking dead,
that's probably what I'll be setting for to scratch my Age of Sail itch.

The dev is supposedly very active on discord (not so much on steam yet), but I haven't checked there yet. Only specific bit of info I was able to glean is that a playable demo should come out this Octobers
during steam fest.

EDIT:
Dev's videos from yt with some gameplay:

 

[BadassNonbinaryPrincess]

Looks nice but I want to be a pirate and hijack ships and plunder booty.

 

[spectre]

Yeah, not being able to be a nautical gypsy filtered a lot of people away from Sailwind. Raw lion decided to stick to his guns and any violent activities are off the table and off the roadmap.

Will it be the case for Following Seas? Well, I reached out to the dev, but he's slow in responding on steam forums. Discord is apparently better, but I'm not a big Discord user.
It's a solo project which means he's still undecided about the scope, but seems to be aware that the genre's already as niche as it is.
He actually want to release this at one point and keep the pricing reasonable, so I would curb the expectation unless... I dunno it suddenly explodes in popularity, perhaps too much for its own good.
For what it's worth I've seen cannons in the linked vids, both on the vessel and on the ground, so one could be assuming they're not just there for show.
But, It would also entail some kind of a damage model to go with it and no signs of that. The game's tags are: sailing, trading, fishing,
so same as with Sailwind and would expect it aims to be another Euro Brig Simulator.
One key difference here (apart from purdier graphics) is that it's going to have more in-depth navigation, with pencil and ruler and compass scribbling on the map,
rather than just eyeballing everything as you'd typically do in Sailwind.

In any case, there's plenty of questions to be answered and I think it would serve the project well to take it in a slightly different direction than Sailwind which has significant headstart when it comes to development.
For one, not sure if it's going to catch up in terms of sail customization (to those who do not know, Sailwind is quite pornographic in that aspect, allowing you to recreate pretty much any type of configuration
you can see irl) because apparently it is quite demanding in terms of processing power.
The ships also seem to be bigger than Sailwind, so perhaps there's going to be some AI crew this time. Or perhaps the focus will be elsewhere. Too early to tell.

 

[Burning Bridges]

It would be great if someone made this game, but very unlikely he will ever be able to complete this. Over the years you see many such dreams come and go, but it would require a bigger budget and a bigger team.

Naval games are quite a trap for new and inexperienced devs because most 3d engines have great tutorials how to simulate waves, and it looks "enough" as long as no land is involved. But after that they get stuck.

 

[spectre]

Naval games are quite a trap for new and inexperienced devs because most 3d engines have great tutorials how to simulate waves, and it looks "enough" as long as no land is involved. But after that they get stuck.

Yeah, for some reason I've started seeing a bunch of those on my youtube feed just now. With all the ship models available, it's quite easy to get all euphoric - holy shit, like that's 2/3 of the game already done...
But hey, that's the rite of passage all the aspiring devs need to get past at some point. With the tech being advanced as it is, at least more guys will be trying and we might get a decent game out of it at some point.

Not holding my breath though, I mean, Sailwind was made in goddamned Unity and it took years of development time, still being in pretty much early beta, or alpha if you want to
be especially mean to its land physics and clipping issues.

I think the problem is that the subject matter is niche, and people don't really want into all those lanteen sails, gaff sails, sail plans, starboards and bowsprits, nevermind all the navigation business.
They just want to get on a boat and start blasting. Just sailing about, keeping a straight course with fuck all happening for more than half an hour in real time, where's the market for it...
As a result we get ubisoft-tier crap with ships having fucking stamina bars. But that's mainstream. I guess what I'm waiting for is a solo-dev passion project as something that just might deliver
a game like this. Could be this one, we'll see.

EDIT:
The devs seems rather prolific in putting out yt videos, haven't watched them all and I've only played a bit of this one without any sound. The second location gives me strong morrowind vibes.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I think he's just playing around with tech, but who knows, maybe something comes from this.

But it's certainly not "game development" in the classic sense. Reminds me more of a never-to-be-finished Morrowind mod.

 

[spectre]

New video. Noticeable improvements to graphics and more Morrowind vibes.

 

[spectre]

Demo is out. Don't have time for it at the moment, but I will get back to you with some impressions when I make some.
EDIT: first impression: buggy but pretty.
There's also a video to go along with the demo.