Hi!

I've been developing this project in my spare time for around 10 months. I've mostly focused on making videos showing individual features up to this point, but since I've now produced a more comprehensive overview of (current) features, I thought it was time to register here and start posting updates.

A little about the game:

I'm a big fan of ships and age of sail. I feel there should be more games in general with this setting, and even the most popular ones don't scratch the particular itch I have. This isn't a sim, but I intend for a fairly authentic 'feeling' experience. Ships are slow and cumbersome, the sea is vast and lonely. Raw Lion's excellent SailWind is the closest current product I'm aware of -- but Following Seas is not a survival game.

This video has me through scuffed audio, describing many of the features, and showing two of the current ships. (Caravel and Xebec).

Feedback, thoughts, and feedback welcome.

Redid interior lighting. Was a bit complicated to do on a moving object, but makes use of prioritized and/or exclusive reflection probes, particles, and prioritized lighting.

Also added godrays, dust, and a few other things.

Oh this looks promising! 

I'm glad to see that cargo is placed "neatly" and not haphazardly like in Sailwind. In that game there is a little bit of fun in just picking up a crate and throwing it on your ship, but more often than not I find it frustrating trying to get the crates in optimal positions. It also frequently causes the player to get "snagged" on the crate geometry. 

What is the main focus of the game going to be? I feel like there is a HUGE void in sailing games that focus on exploration. Trading and combat are only fun for so long (especially by themselves). I really think it would be awesome if a sailing game let you circumnavigate the Earth, explore other cultures, etc.

Let me know if you need a beta-tester!

Thank you. 

I've got a lot of idea for how I'd like it to go, but do have to temper it with what's realistic for a solo dev with a full time job.

Right now exploration is a heavy focus. It's not planned to be a massive world, but pretty big. It's set in a grounded fantasy setting that is set after a major cataclysm. Most islands and areas will be unknown at the start.  Rather than trading for $, much of the focus will be on providing materials to a hub island to help the people who live there. (So early game would be finding a source of wood for example, and later would be delivering that wood to the home island) I'd like to implement something like Ashen where the 'home' town is improved and built up over time.

New ships can be gained by finding wrecks in the world, drafting plans, and bringing materials to a shipyard. I'd love to add ruins and cools things to find everywhere -- but again, not sure how I can realistically get that much content. We'll see.

There will not be hunger, sleep and thirst meters because I hate them. (And no vitamin deficiencies, thanks Atlas.)

Last week I've been mostly focusing on backend stuff like menus, quests, and persistence -- which are all too wip to show at the moment. I have added a ships launch however -- thought I'd show it off.

Pumps, drowning, changes to water system, ropes, weather, and more.

Wanted to post an update, has been a while but progress has been significant -- just not showy. Most objects now have lods, and building prefabs have been split up considerably, allowing quick adding of new buildings from various pieces. Not shown, but cargo system has been overhauled, allowing automatic placement of cargoes of various sizes and orientation's, providing your ship has room. Lots of new props and visual interest items have been added as well, including a few purchased assets for environmental things like rocks and bushes. Also showing the start of the last large ship planned prior to early release. The Saettia, a Venetian cargo hauler with a unique, highly canted foremast. This will be a highly decorated ship with multiple decks, with similar rigging to the Xebec.

Ongoing progress.

Ignore the bandicam watermark -- I had issues with my usual recording software, and haven't decided whether to stick with bandicam or not. Does seem to have better quality than my usual soft, so will probably pull the trigger when I have more than three dollars.

Other than the Saettia, there's not much to show visibly, but I've been making solid progress on the back end works of the UI and options panel.

Been ill so progress has been a bit slower than I'd like. I've overhauled ship and water interaction to hopefully be a bit more dynamic. I've added animations to the static parts of the rigging, and more cloth for visual interest. I've added runtime mesh generation for 3d ropes, thought it's heavier than I'd like so not sure to what extent it will be used. I've also started on a trimming system that's a bit anachronistic, but I felt it might be a more interesting gameplay system than constant rudder adjustment. We shall see. Progress on settings, UI, and persistence continues, but that's not much fun to see.

I've reached the point where a basic game loop is possible. You can take on missions and complete them. The ability for longer play sessions has shown me that there were a lot of little things adding up to prevent it from being much fun -- so my focus has been on improving these elements. This means I've made the ships faster, improved handling, and made some edits to the geometry to improve visibility. Currently islands are much closer together than they were -- this may change eventually -- but I aim to find some way to make the time spent at sea fun. I recognize that this is one of the biggest challenges of any pseudo realistic sailing game as there's always a bit of slowness involved. I've got some ideas. A big visual change is proxy meshes for cloth objects. This allows for considerably greater detail on the sails, including thickness and better shader support. I've also converted the caravel from tiller to whipstaff, as part of the changes to improve the player experience. You will have much better visibility now

So in this update I want to go over reefing. This is one of the features I've struggled with, as there's a lot of complexity to it. The current (Previous?) system uses spring joints and a distance based series of modifiers for ropes and cloth particles. This works relatively well, but visually comes up short, and has some major issues with persistence and collisions when dealing with compressed meshes.

My new solution is much more script based, and digs into particle based manipulation of the cloth meshes. Visually I feel it's much cleaner, and better shows the act of progressively folding the big lateen sails. I've also added brailing lines to help with the visual side. The cloth does tend to bunch up excessively, but it's an iterative process, and I feel it's much improved over prior systems.

This is Unity URP, using a mix of Obi and my own code for cloth physics, Modified Crest URP for the ocean.

NOICE! I love the setting, love the graphics, and love simulation games. Sailwind is cool, but I'd rather explore and build up a colony or other various different tasks. You plans for this game are making me excited.

Yes I know. Lightmode. The horror. Based on a couple comments I got, I would like to clear up a bit how the sailing system works. I've locked the hull in place for this, so that's why were not moving. In some similar games, the control of the sails is fairly rigid, meaning, if you control the position of the sail at all, it's a matter of rotating the sail or yard until it's positioned optimally to the wind and your done. Please don't take this as critisism towards these games -- I am just looking to build a system that feels a little different. In this game you have both more and in some ways less control, as you must control the ropes and lines rather than the larger parts of the rigging. The position of the yards for example, can not be controlled directly by the player. Instead, the center mass of the sails will attempt to align themselves with the force of the wind, assuming that there is enough slack in the ropes to allow this. Also something other than lateen sails are in the works.

I may be stopping future updates here as I'm not sure it's worthwhil.

If anyone watches these -- you are welcome to follow on youtube, or join the discord: discord.gg/KX9FA7F7eq