Each month we take a moment to talk with you about the development process and progress from the past month, while also highlighting contributions from the Ahoy community.
Last month, we reflected on the results of our 2023 Community Survey, and shared with you our plans to redirect all of our development focus towards the Sailing & Combat prototype. With this, the past month has primarily been spent reorganising the team around these new goals and establishing some new internal timelines for everyone to follow.
As you will know by now, our first planned sailable ship will be Veloce (HMS Speedy), however in the background we have been working on bringing our other ships up to the quality set by Veloce. We really appreciated the kind words and feedback on our first ship showcase video, and would like to introduce you to our second ship showcase – Nemesis (French ship Tapageur)!
The music featured in today’s video is a new composition for Ahoy. “Marche des rivaux” was composed by Nicolas Wohlleben with some harmony inspiration from “Marche Pour La Cérémonie Des Turcs”, composed by Italian naturalized French composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632 –1687).
The video follows much the same format as our previous Veloce showcase video. We hope you enjoy this close look at Nemesis, and the surrounding landscape of Pointe des Châteaux, on the south-east coast of Guadeloupe.
The Nemesis showcase music is now available on music platforms!
You might remember that in our very first monthly Journal we showed some initial sculpts of the sailor’s uniform. We’re happy to show you how this is looking today, and nearly ready to be worn by the NPC crew, and any players who might choose the less formal attire. This set went back and forth many times to settle on the correct look.
As you can see, we’re going into just as much detail with costume as we are with ships and locations. All of these individual elements are part of this larger vision to create an authentic experience of the 18th century. If one area lacks, the overall authenticity is diminished.
There is still some work to do on the above “sailor’s garb”. Predominantly, this is establishing the material pipeline for all future clothing to ensure everything feels as equally detailed. Additional work to separate the dirt layers to enable dynamic ‘grubbiness’ for our crews will be another important step in ensuring all clothing works the same!
We were pleased to see that most of the community in our recent survey wants to see only authentic clothing options available within the game. This is something we’ll keep in mind as we move forward. You can expect many more clothing sets like this in the future, which will aim to provide significant amounts of variety among your own crew, but also all of the crews you might come across.
Work continues on our process of moving our development team spaces onto our own in-house servers. The hardware has arrived! We’ll be making the necessary changes to our own workflows over the next month to ensure we can start the year as we mean to go on. We want to thank the Patreon supporters, as always, for their financial contribution. This has been vital in securing the necessary hardware to make this change for the team, which will serve to reduce our monthly outgoings and increase our storage and organisational capabilities further.
2023 has been a very busy year for the team, and we’re so happy with the progress we’ve made this past year. There are many areas which we want to see progress further in 2024 (not least, the Sailing & Combat experience). However, we feel that considering the team ultimately remains a volunteer effort, it has been an achievement to build out our technical capabilities, grow the community significantly, and broaden our opportunities to acquire funding in the New Year.
We’re looking forward to sharing more progress with you throughout 2024, and we’ll be starting off the year with our “Year In Review” video. A chance to look back over the progress of the last year, and talk about the year to come.
In addition, we’ll be answering community questions within this video. If you have questions for the team, please send them to us below…
Submit your Questions for “Year In Review”:
https://forms.gle/dGcrtxL6SoHviJdx8
As always, please join in with the discussion about this month’s update on the Discord server as well!
Until next time, good day!
Our Journal updates are often discussed at length in the official Ahoy Discord server. Whether you have questions about the topics covered in this update, or you would like to leave your own feedback or suggestions, please join our Discord server to discuss!
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