Marines x Pirates First Teaser

Hey everyone,

This is a teaser for the One Piece inspired game I'm currently developing. Here are some details about the project:

The world map originally used a turn-based grid system that relied on movement points to represent different ship speeds. While it worked, the system had several limitations, so I experimented with free movement instead. The result feels much better, especially when it comes to showing the differences between ships. To keep things simple for the first release, only the player's ship will be able to move freely. Other ships will remain stationary for now, with full ship movement planned for a future update.

Ship battles currently use a typing minigame for attacking and an arrow-sequence minigame for defending. At the moment, damage is calculated primarily from ship stats, but I plan to expand the system with features such as combo multipliers, different cannon types, and additional combat mechanics so it'll feel more engaging and more RPGs.

Character battles will follow a similar approach, using a typing minigame for attacks and an arrow-sequence minigame for defense. This system is still under development.

The story structure is inspired by Bethesda style RPGs, featuring both main quests and side quests. Main quests will recruit the core crew members, which currently include Nami, Robin, and Tashigi. Side quests focus on individual stories for other characters, with Perona and Alvida currently planned.

I'm also planning to add additional systems such as resources and bounty hunting. These features will start simple and be expanded over time as development progresses.

There are a few lessons I learned from developing Pan Hero that have helped with this project.

The first is the combat system. While I'm happy with how Pan Hero's duel system turned out, it became extremely complicated behind the scenes. Because the combat was based on action versus action, every new action I added had to be programmed against every existing action. As the number of actions grew, the complexity increased rapidly and became difficult to maintain. Since combat in this game is built around typing-based gameplay, I can avoid that problem and keep the system much more scalable.

The second is about the story structure. In Pan Hero, character events and main story events were interconnected. Character events could affect the main story, while the main story could also affect character events. This created a few possible scenarios that I had to track, and it can be overwhelming.

For Marines x Pirates, it'll be something simpler. Side quests can still be influenced by progress in the main story, but the main story itself won't depend on the side quests. This should make the story progress easier to manage.

Thanks for reading, and thank you to everyone who continues to share positive feedback and encouragement after all this time. Your support keeps me motivated to keep developing my games. I'll have more to share as development progresses.

Marines x Pirates Teaser 1.mp4 (Google Docs)