Hello! This is a super short update because I forgot to dish out new tasks, oops..

UI/HUD

There’s some small UI tweaks. One is the aforementioned dialogue font change that's a pretty good contender. It's called Port Lligat if you're curious.

https://preview.redd.it/wdoln8za9sgd1.png?width=1163&format=png&auto=webp&s=c558f94ec6854be70c1c56d0aa1e7a47a468f943

The other notable change is the boss bar got slimmed down

https://preview.redd.it/3zcofirc9sgd1.png?width=515&format=png&auto=webp&s=84a81d8d9c5743bb21e20b4c9af7375f0ef6f3e6

Writing/Companions

Rasta did some work finishing up boat interactions for the last 3 companions. While sailing on the Sea of Greed, the player can stop when they please to freely explore their ship. This gives you the chance to see what your crew of freaks is up to in their own daily routines, get to know them more, learn gossip, or go fishin’.

https://preview.redd.it/tjai9sy3asgd1.png?width=442&format=png&auto=webp&s=3f63c2a9b8dbef9cd14f498d25742dce4842aecd

That’s All

Besides some random bug fixes and stuff.

She's getting her bug fix.

https://preview.redd.it/vndrcvvhcsgd1.png?width=410&format=png&auto=webp&s=09adbef6266f250f93e76bd39191e65f83469a63

Hope you’re having a good summer!

Stay cool and check back in October… scary…
-Tubs

Hey greeders, it’s June, which means it’s a very special month… That’s right, it’s update month! It’s also Sunday, so that makes this a Sneak Peek Sunday! Remember those? Expect these updates on the first Sunday of every other month.

Artwork Update

The most noticeable thing to show this time is the new boat artwork. It looks much nicer and actually complete than it was in those screenshots from last time.

https://i.redd.it/6z2ucuujn74d1.gif

https://i.redd.it/wjzio3iln74d1.gif

Maps

Our newest member of the team, Chara, has been making the map page of the logbook where you can mark down little icons to record anything of interest. Right now, you can only place parrots. This map Image is also temp.

https://i.redd.it/1l6fsw7gn74d1.gif

“Just as my grandpa used to say: ‘when you're lost, drop a parrot down to find your way’. Then he went out and we never saw him again.” - Bandit (programming lead) (true)

Interactions

Some more dialogue interactions were made for the new upper deck to help encourage exploration. In addition, we’re figuring out a new font for dialogue. The old one is fun but hard to read, so we’re testing some out and seeing what sticks. Maybe we’ll make our own who knows. Typography is no joke.

Real Life Stuff

Grant, the original project lead, just graduated college! Yay!

That’s All

Here's some little sketches to close out

https://preview.redd.it/wq617nw8n74d1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=d91c121a91cca2bd33bb07b0041beac0ef3e78fd

See you in August! Stay safe and have a happy pride month!

-Tubs

Hi! Ahoy! Howdy! April fools! Gotcha! We haven’t done this in a while!

I’m just gonna get right into it. I wanna start off with a big apology. It’s been a few YEARS since we shared ANYTHING. Even after we said we would. I know there’s quite a few of you who were genuinely excited for this thing, and for that reason I feel incredibly bad for our silence. It's not the best feeling to let down about 5k people. It's a good thing we didn’t take your money right?

The second thing I want to do is announce that Grant, the founder of this project, has stepped down as project lead. He’s currently finishing college, and simply hasn’t been able to put in as much time towards SoG as he wanted. Life’s taking him to some cool places, so wish him luck! He's still gonna contribute music when he can, but the role of project lead now rests in my hands.

Hi, I’m Tubs! I’ve been working on SoG since the beginning alongside Grant and many others originally as a concept artist, then as a pixel artist, then as art lead and honorary programmer. I’m gonna try to get things off the ground again so we can share cool stuff again no matter how small for real this time. We were working on a lot of technical stuff, so we felt it would be a little underwhelming to share. a lot of the really cool stuff was too spoilery sadly.

I wanna thank Grant for giving us this project. It’s given all of us something fun to do at the end of the day, and a goal to look forward to. Sometimes it's discouraging to be taking this long, but what keeps me going is the attachment I've grown towards the world and characters we’ve created, and the team behind it. I think if we ever did call it quits, I'd still be messing around with our little sea.

That said, I’d like to share some of the more interesting stuff we’ve been doing! Yes, we’ve been alive! Unfortunately, we simply refused to die.

Intro Segment

The thing we’ve been chipping away at as of late is the intro / tutorial segment of the game. In the segment, Wally learns how to walk, jump, attack, and chat aboard a dodgy vessel making a one-way trip to the ghastly Sea of Greed. Smooth sailing, surely.

Technical stuff we hammered out for this includes the cutscene system, boss fights, loot drops, ingame time, scene transitions, and button prompts.

Here’s some work-in-progress screenshots

And here’s what the boat sounds like.

Inventory

A while back, we got the Inventory built out with an action menu and a tooltip and to show Wally’s insightful thoughts about the junk he finds. It's part of Wally’s logbook, which also contains his quests, maps, and info about his crewmates. If you played the playtest all the way through, you'll know Wally can dual wield. What we didn't show is that he can have 2 extra weapons holstered which can be swapped out on the fly so you can achieve your dream of unloading 4 blunderbusses in quick succession directly into the face of some unsuspecting chump. We wanted to make the book feel more personal, so there’ll be little doodles made by Wally and his friends in the margins.

Mapmaking

Here’s a look at the area directly after the intro. Wally ends up here and tries to figure out how to leave as quickly as possible. If you’ll remember, this is a 3d game masquerading as a 2d game, so figuring out how to make that happen has been interesting. Did you know that Wally technically walks faster in the z directions? Since he’s walking along a plane viewed at a 45 degree angle, his up and down movement appears to be slower than his side to side movement. To make it appear like he’s walking in 2d space, his z velocity is multiplied by the square root of 2. This goes for many things too. There is a gap between each row of tiles that’s the tile size multiplied by the square root of 2 in order to make them line up properly. Anyways.

That’s All

For now. Whether you’re just dropping by, or stuck around with us this long, thank you and see you in 2 months!

-tubs

I don't want to be the guy to start a doom post chain, but last post was 10 months back and the sub in general only averages 1 post a year now. It's hard not to think it's dead when no updates or posts are being made by devs to keep interest alive.

Is the game dead? No post on this sub in 9 months

That is all. Thanks to our writing lead Rasta for picking up the pace like crazy and setting a great example.

(also we mean dialogue too not just the outline)

I've been following this game and subreddit for years and, all Waluigi jokes aside, I'm very very excited to play this someday.

I love pirate games and the demo I played was really promising. Just figured I'd gush a little bit, spark up some chatter, maybe cheer on the devs if they see this.

Keep up the great work everyone! No rush, just really excited to get my hands on the full game someday!

Bit of a ghost town around here these days. Is there still life in this project?

After nearly a year of woeful wahs of deck work and determination, we’ve found the captain’s log and its hidden treasure, ready to share some of that delicious booty once again. We’ll be starting these semi-regular diaries up again to keep everyone in the community up to date on the latest news as Wally and the gang get closer to setting sail in a real release!

A sea change from the dev team came in with the tides with the new SOGcast. The podcast creates a space for conversations around and about the game. The second episode really rocked the boat with Caldwell Tanner, the man behind the iconic image that inspired an entire Sea of Greed, joining the show for a couple hours of memes:

• SOGcast Episode 2 (feat. Caldwell Tanner)

The biggest general news for Sea of Greed though is how the team rewrote the entire code, shifting from 2D physics to full-on 3D. The conversation meant redoing a lot of work, but the effort is worth it for being able to make Wally’s adventure exactly what we want it to be.

The old systems were becoming a limiting factor, relying on perspective tricks and requiring close attention to what is layered on top of what. One mistake and nothing works. There was a ton of pressure and work just to make something “normal”.

To understand the problem, we first need to talk about parallel universes… or at least multiple dimensions. With 2D nothing can really overlap because there is no depth, there is nothing that can overlap. Everything is on a single plane with 2 directions and anything beyond that is visual sleight of hand.

The misdirection to convincingly make sprites jump is enough to cause a headache. Adding on the complications that come with advanced engineering like ramps leads to months of unpaid overtime just to solve the basic equation.

As these issues piled up, an obvious answer came into focus: 3D.

The switch instantly removed the need for a Vegas magic show and let everyone focus more on creating a good game.

However, and it’s a big however, that meant needing to recreate everything from the bottom up. the decision was difficult, but the inertia from the original code proved to not be worth the 2 dimensional hassle, and the team got to work on bringing depth to Sea of Greed.

For more insights into just how complicated things were and how nice it is to now be able to reach in new directions, check out Bandit’s post:

• Wally's Wider than Flatland

Stay tuned for more nuggets of news as we start to see a clearer and clearer image of the coastline ahead!

Hello!
For those who don’t know, I’m Bandit and am the programming lead on Sea of Greed. I wanted to share some of my thoughts behind moving from 2D to 3D.

The first problem with a 2D game is somewhat poetically the lack of depth.
Because, unless the game is visually simple, you're gonna have stuff in the background and in the foreground. Objects need to exist 'in front' of the player and maybe even something needs to sit in the back-background or even in the fore-foreground. The potential positions are infinite or at least go on for as far as the sea.

To get a better picture, imagine a simple platformer.
You have a character, you have a box, and you have a tree in the background. Gamers intuitively know you can walk in front of the tree and jump on the box without needing any depth information. It’s common-sense, an expectation, and something we have a lot of experience with.

But from the game's perspective all those objects are in the same dimension, or rather on the same plane, there is no front or back, it's all flat.

You can't place a box in the background, because there is no background.

All you can do is disable collision on it to imply it's in the background.
Other tricks like changing it's draw order to place it in the foreground also help, but it’s about finding a more convincing trick at the end of the day. If you’re interested in the general concepts, I recommend watching Flatland (2007) to understand dimensions better.

Now, for a platformer that's just a thing to consider when making the game. Not very hard to comprehend or account for. But for a top-down game it quickly becomes much more difficult. Lets take the simple action of jumping as an example.

Think about it for a moment. If you look at the character from a top-down perspective and there is no Z axis to move him up to, then how does jumping work at all?

Seems impossible right?

Well technically yes, but it's actually all an illusion!

What you see as a character moving up and down is actually just Wally disabling the collider, playing a jump animation, maybe then drawing him on a higher layer, and finally enabling the collider again.

He doesn't actually move a single pixel. The jump, or rather the depth, is all in your mind.

If you thought that wasn't too hard of a problem, I'd like to see someone try to tackle this one in the comments: Ramps.

Specifically horizontal ramps.

Imagine a top-down game, let's take SoG as a prime example. You have Wally and to the right of our hero you have a ramp.

All you need to climb up the ramp is to press 'right'. That’s common sense, right?

Well, in the 2D world if you do that you’ll hit the edge of the ramp.
From game's point of view it's not a ramp, it's a skewed pentagon with a diagonal hole going through it. So in order to travel up the ramp you need to hold 'up' + 'right', moving diagonally on the screen. It’s all highly unintuitive to the player.

Even if you solve that, there’s another level of complexity waiting at the top of the ramp.

How do you make Wally jump off the edge instead of just stepping off? Because depending on how you solved the ramp question, you might have to throw it all away now and rethink it from the start.

Those kind of questions accumulate over time and the answer to them becomes obvious. Move to 3D.

Of course I'm not implying that the issues are unsolvable without moving to 3D, or inherently require moving to 3D. There’s a solid 10-20 years of experience and knowledge put into doing all this without any 3D games. There are tons of solutions ranging from complicated math, visual tricks, to straight up changing the overall design.

But when you have the easy option why not take it? When nobody will ever notice the difference anyway, it’s an easy decision to make.

And so we decided to do it.

The 2D sprites are now 3D objects (think of the sprites in DOOM). The physics are also 3D, which solves the ramp question along with hundreds if not thousands of others.
The biggest difference is how we don't have to fight with sorting layers so much anymore. That’s another caveat of 2D development that becomes hell when you have to manage several height levels.

Plus, as I said, there is no noticeable difference for the player. Since we still use an orthographic camera (opposite of perspective), it still looks like a flat 2D game. If we didn’t mention these changes nobody would've suspected otherwise.

That’s not to say the switch didn't come with its own batch of problems. Making maps is now 33.33% harder. We now need to consider another dimension when doing everything: height! And we had to really strain the built-in 2D tilemap system to make it work for our case. (And by 'we' I mean Tubs. Shut-out to Tubs, he really be whipping those tiles)

Terrain colliders are also a bit more complex now, requiring some 3D modeling knowledge to get right.

In general, you have to pay more attention to object placing. The orthographic camera doesn't scale objects with distance so you can sometimes place a barrel on what looks like the ground only to find out it's actually thousands of meters in the air or even deep underground.

And on the coding side there is also a difficulty that comes with the 45 degree angle of the camera. It's mentioned in the podcast, but one example of it is that we need Wally to follow the mouse in a circle around himself. But with a tilted camera the circle you trace on the screen results in an oval shape in the game.
Imagine shining a light on a ball at an angle and think about the shape its shadow would make.
Because of that, what happens is when you aim straight right, the game sees it as aiming a bit upwards, so your shots now go in a completely different direction.

The solution to that may be obvious to some, but most people in the dev team slept through that lesson in trigonometry class. So we had to basically reverse-engineer the square root of 2, which is the length of the third side of an isosceles right triangle.

If you’re allergic to math the magic number is 1.41421356237.

But while there are some sore spots and speed bumps, in general everything is easier and smoother now that Wally and the rest of Sea of Greed are in 3D.

The proof of that can be seen in how we decided to rewrite the entire code of the game last February. Redoing everything seemed like an impossibly large task, but using more sensible solutions has already been worth the effort and we have managed to redo 2 years of progress in 5 months. Somewhere around a 400% speed boost.

I Hope you learned something new and if anyone has any more questions about any of the technical details behind Sea of Greed don’t be afraid to ask!

(and if you think that some of that stuff could be done even better then, hey, maybe consider applying to the team. We could use some people who know how to wrangle Unity)