Journal
30.oct.2015
After making the overall update to ramming and AI behavior, I can see a grand improvement in AI aggressiveness. Mt. Nomad, who was a useless piece of shit until now, gets mighty violent and with the removal of the speed burst the last battle against it turned from a spank job to a desperate attempt to flee for my life. That's what I want!
Moving on to individual monsters, the balance will be to make the bigger monsters bulkier and faster. The small monsters have gained enough of a buff for now, as we wouldn't want the early game to turn into a nightmarish cling for survival (or do we, he he). The Sing attack will be rethought as to deal more damage at a reduced range.
AI ships will be getting more stuff to work with. More guns, more flares, more dakka. It should prove interesting and hopefully very, very painful.
The player-related buffs will have focus on general speed and maneuverability. True skill will be about moving in to firing range while staying out of the enemies'. That's why I am all in favor of giving more firepower to the AI but reducing their range so the player doesn't turn into a quick kill on sight.
The rationale behind the removal of the speed buff and addition of the Carnot engine is that the speed buff gave a percentage of the respective engine power, and a big one at that (1.75). It meant that even with the slowest ship you could get a boost in speed, and the faster the ship, the bigger the boost. It makes it too easy to outmaneuver beasties who didn't have neither the chase range, the speed or the power to deal with these maneuvers. It left the player to always choose his battles, the real fight was not about the monsters, it was about the resource management. Now, that's off, bitches! The player have to be more careful and resort to different tactics than just engine blasting his/her way out of every situation.
The Carnot engine is an addition that works great for new players that lack resources as well as moving an option from something spammable to something more situational. It makes the player's ship move at 35% speed while reducing fuel consumption to 1%. That means that the player can cross any distance, if the player is willing to move at the slow pace, making himself vulnerable to the new rape-beasts. Explosion of the "experimental" Carnot engine is still possible and it's a reasonable risk for getting home and not getting stranded near London, and the miraculous speed burst will also remain a possible event.
02.nov.2015
A recent reply to our modding effort has sparked a bit of a brainstorm; The aim of the mod, in order for it to be embraced by the community, should be to aim at two targets at once: reduce the no-fun mechanisms and enhance the fun ones.
As Dara O'Briain once (approximately) said "Video games are a unique storytelling medium because you can't be bad at reading a book, you can't be bad at watching a movie, but you can be bad at playing a video game and the video game will punish you by denying access to the rest of the video game". Let's have a look at the current mechanisms which deny access to the rest of the story in Sunless Sea. Until now, the biggest issue seems to be resource management. It's not fun to die because you ran out of fuel. It's not fun to die because you didn't have enough cargo space to begin with. Sunless Sea was supposed to be an exploration game, so why punish exploration so badly? Then there's buying stuff which requires tedious grinding because the developers never thought that playing a roguelike and needing to grind again and again is stupid as shit, never mind that the stories repeat themselves so eventually you'll end up just clicking through the same dialogue options again and again. It starts to feel like Zelda's Owl, and the thing is that in between the grind and the exploits that people do to squeeze some echoes out of interactions they have a dull combat followed by the same - damn - dialogue. Does this seem fun to you?
Let me explain the new meta for the mod. We have already envisioned mechanisms, but now they have a purpose. First off, the addition of the Carnot engine means no more running out of gas. You can get raped by monsters, but dying by monsters is way better than dying in swimming distance away from London because you ran out of gas. Can you even grasp the brain-freezing functionality fail that currently makes the players not buy better engines because they consume so much fuel? The target of the 3.0 release which will include the Trade Overhaul will remove the need to grind stupid exploits and stuff. The ships will get a sizable cargo buff so there will be no more supply issues due to missing storage because - yet again - the devs thought that putting quest items and precious resources in the same cargo would be kinda cool. Tell me, what do you do when you have some cargo to deliver to an island you haven't discovered yet? Your cargo is jammed, you can't explore because you don't have room, you're fucked, buddy. The Trade Overhaul release will put the new Freighter ships to good use as the eastmost islands will contain resources which can be sold in London for a fat check. High risk, high reward - you get a Freighter to the other side of the map and back in once piece, you'll get some good money which you can actually use to get better. And then you can switch to other ships from the same tier.
The tier-based system is simple and it's based on the observation that people will always use the best ships and disregard the others. This way, out of the 7 current ships I guess that only 4 are used. The other 3 are just wasted artwork. The mod will change that and will grant usage to every ship - as there will be a total of 9 ships to buy, they will be structured in 3 tiers. Each tier will contain a light ship (for exploration), a freighter (for money) and a heavy ship (for combat). Each ship will have the same sell value as it's buy value. Ships from the same tier will cost the same. This means that the player will be able to switch from light to freight to heavy of the same tier at any time they are in London.
As an end to this piece of mind, the meta will change from "you die because gas and cargo space" to "you die because the monsters are hard". When the player restarts his journey, he'll know good trade routes that don't need horrible grinding, he'll be able to get back on his feet easier and enjoy the story as well as the difficulty of the zee itself.
11.nov.2015
As the first milestone has been reached and the second one is in close proximity, I've taken the liberty of asking a couple of questions to Failbetter in order to help understand the modding apparatus' limitations and its dependencies.
The first thing that is to be noted is that mods overwrite each other in alphabetical order. That means B overrides A and Z overrides both B and A. Since Failbetter plans to release a DLC named "Zubmariner" which might have it's own add-on folder, the choice was to rename the Unnecessary Overhaul mod's folder Zz_UnnecessaryOverhaul. The second thing is that Failbetter has concluded that the modding equipment does not warrant any future upgrades. This is unsettling, and I'm going to explain why.
Sunless Sea's base appeal are its stories. The text, the flavor, probably the decisions. Its basis is Fallen London, in a nutshell. And even though both Sunless Sea and Fallen London have received critical acclaim for the text itself, it's not the critical acclaim that's going to push their sales up. Hell, there are a lot of "cult classics" which have the exact number of 3 die-hard fanboys. If Sunless Sea is to succeed at selling (although I think that the respective train has already started to leave the station), it needs better gameplay mechanics. You can see from the Steam reviews that there are some who praise its text while others just bash on its mechanics. That makes the game meh, not wow.
Do you remember those games which had such good storylines? Legacy of Kain, Morrowind, Half Life? They all had something else other than a fine ass story - they had good gameplay mechanics. The only game which didn't have good gameplay mechanics but it was still regarded as being wow due to its story is Planescape Torment. But Planescape Torment had more than just good stories - it had philosophical reach. Dude, that game was deep as shit. Sunless Sea has good stories, but it doesn't have any consistent philosophical reach. You can trade that red honey all you want, if you choose to ignore the text it's just a bargain commodity. You won't get to pay for your actions, or to be forced into thinking. What I'm saying is that if you change a commodity from, let's say, "Wool" to "Tears of a dying baby panda", but it trades like wool, sells like wool and doesn't make you watch a baby panda being killed so the tears can be collected, don't have to have an argument with a crew member and have a chance of losing him due to your horrible commodity trading, lose status with some factions or impact the game in any way, depending on how good or evil you are, it's just fucking wool with a different picture or tooltip on it.
Adding philosophical reach to the player's decisions in Sunless Sea is a way harder task than just modifying some json files. I can't do that, I'm not a writer and if I were a passionate enough one to spend days thinking of clever ways to move the player's heart and make him think about his actions, I wouldn't add it to someone else's game. The Philosophical Overhaul mod is never going to come around. What can come around is a betterment of the gameplay mechanics. But you can't add new animations. You can't add new sounds. You can't add new ships other than reuse the same models and give them different stats. You can only play around with the poor set of tools which is given to you, and that is change some pictures, some text, some stats.
The delivery of this mod will encompass the full extent of the modding capabilities, and even so I feel it's lackluster. If the players won't be satisfied with this content, the least they should know was that it wasn't because we didn't want to bring more, it's because we couldn't.
26.nov.2015
As we're nearing the 1.0 release, I've done two things that I've considered important for the development of this mod: I've done an Alpha release and asked for the Reddit post to be made sticky.
The Alpha release was made mostly to gather feedback and make adjustments before moving forward. The main noticed issue was that I haven't received any feedback nor was my Reddit post sticky. I haven't received a single message and the traffic scores are very low for this mod, which makes me ask the question: Will this mod be played at all? The answer is, well, maybe, but if the total hours played don't add up to the total hours worked on, it's mostly a waste of resources. Could've spent this time working on other stuff.
I cut down on future releases and ongoing support. We're delivering the 1.0 release as we committed to it, but we're not committing to any more work for now.
22.dec.2015
We've reached the fourth milestone and approaching the last before the Beta release. Since there won't be enough time to thoroughly test all the possible interactions that the overhaul modifies, we'll be on the lookout for feedback provided in the time between Christmas and New Year and in January we'll be releasing a patch. Updates found in Milestones.