The game has potential, but...

[Scrungus]

In it's current state it is very clunky, unintuitive, and not very fun.
I have been looking forward to playing this game for a while, I was looking forward to a game where you could manage a crew while exploring the ocean.
I know this is an early demo, but it has a long way to go before it is playable.

Exploration of the seas was a bit of a letdown as what you have is more of a choose your own railroad to a set end goal. I know it worked for FTL, but I would much rather be able to plot my own course through a known map. Have events just happen naturally every couple minutes of sailing, depending on the region you're going through.

Ship to ship combat is a big pain. I understand that the ships always have to maintain a lateral orientation for boarding, but that severely limits the freedom of sailing. We need to be able to steer the ship manually in whatever orientation we want, and just have the enemy ships magnetically orient themselves together when they get close. Either that, or have simplified distance meter like Abandon Ship. This left to right sailing thing is really annoying.

Crew to crew combat is also definitely lacking. The hitboxes are way to small to be able to reliably anything with a flintlock. Crew are somewhat effective at fighting on their own, but if they are manning a canon, they will continue to do so even if they are being hacked to peices.

I also feel that having a journal page block out the screen every 10 minutes really hurts the flow of game-play. I feel I feel if it was just a small pop up on the side of the screen that paused the game, that allowed a selection that would work better. Even better, the option to un-pause the game and let it expire if it's an event that can be ignored, or have it happen if its an event that happens anyway.

Having a tutorial quests that cover all basic mechanics of the game that also doesn't stop the game until you do it would help as well.

Any way this was realy lengthy, but I'm realy hoping this game turns out to be good.

[Smash Phil]

Thanks for the feedback! We're reworking the combat controls right now so it's a lot less clunky. The melee and ranged combat is already in testing so it should be a lot smoother in the near future.

As for ship to ship combat, it's also undergoing some renovation, we've definitely heard everyone's feedback about the ship controls and captain commands, so we'll also be looking into how we can make it feel a lot better to use.

Edit: In regards to your other suggestions about the captain's log and world map, I can't really say that will change in the future but it has been heard.

[Veselar]

But... without translation, I don't really understand mechanics tho.

[Smash Phil]

Originally posted by Veselar:

But... without translation, I don't really understand mechanics tho.

Localization is at the top of our priority list, we'll be adding them shortly after release once we can look into hiring some translators. As for the tutorial, we're actually looking into improving it so it isn't just reading a bunch of popups. Rather, we'll be making it a tutorial by example.