Anchors Aweight! The Pirate Roguelite! (Announcement)

[FernGilly]

Welcome to the Bermuda Nacho!

You’re the kobold Liv Rogers, the (soon-to-be) famous pirate captain of the Jelly Roger! At your first mate’s suggestion, you’ve decided to prowl the Seven Delicious Seas in search of rare artifacts and heaps of gold. So long as you can weather the massive storms and the appetites of your crew, you can become the greatest pirate the Bermuda Nacho ever saw!

AVAST YE SCALLYWAGS!

There’s just one problem with your goal to win fame and riches: your crew. For whatever reason, they’ve decided a portion size is somewhere in the range of three plates full, and they’re coming back for seconds. Will your crew sink your ship underneath the sea of foam? Or will you manage to toss overboard enough to stay afloat? That’s the challenge of Anchors Aweight! It’s a fast-paced trolley problem sailing out of control!

BOOTY APLENTY!

Over twenty different kinds of artifacts are designed to help you survive your trip across the Bermuda Nacho! Each class of artifact focuses on a different sort of build, and you’ll be able to exchange your loot with nearby ships to tackle the dangers of the Seven Delicious Seas. In addition, after each win or loss, you’ll be able to earn new artifacts that can even change gameplay entirely! So what’s not to like about all this treasure?

BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES!

The Bermuda Nacho is filled with peril and strife! An island filled with ghosts, giant sharks the size of a whale! Seven pirate chefs roam the seas, looking to serve your crew-- whether you like it or not! You’ve got to keep those waistlines under control and pick up some artifacts to handle the extra weight, or you’ll be sinking before you know it!

OUR CREW!

FernGilly is our lead writer, programmer, and director! She’s an author with a trending magical gal novel, Don’t Get It Tangled!!! In addition, she’s worked in television and is a Vtuber with a whole team behind her!

DawnsJunk is a talented illustrator and character designer with an expansive character portfolio of her own! She primarily draws character art commissions on her Twitter page!

HOW MIGHT AYE HELP?

Bookmark this page, keep up with development, and follow us for free on our Patreons (FernGilly, DawnsJunk)! FernGilly provides a monthly raffle where you can win 3000-word story requests for free (just follow, no need to sign up!), and our artist Dawn puts out plenty of fantastic art each month. So keep us fed, and we’ll keep this ball of blubber rolling!

You can also be a part of the game! Contact FernGilly personally at FernGilly#0083 to see about becoming a crew member in the game. You’ll be able to get your custom stats, art, a story blurb, and your chance to be recognized for your contributions! Otherwise, donate to our Patreons (FernGilly, DawnsJunk) to help us stay afloat! Don’t let the weight of capitalism sink us to the briny deep!

If you’d like to see our progress to this point, you can examine our extensive game design document! We’re sitting at about 64 pages of preparation right now, not to mention all the code we’ve worked on during the Jam. We didn’t make it in time, ahaha. @w@ Expect a demo soon!

[FernGilly]

Devlog 8/31/22 - Design doc mostly completed! We’re doing a survey of the jam code to figure out what worked and what needs to be ripped out and redone. All of the music and sounds are present, and we’ve got the system for triggering story events in place, but a number of other systems are sadly broken. Have a gif to show off some of what we have!
https://twitter.com/i/status/1565010737780740098

[FernGilly]

Reserving for a different kind of devlogs!

[AlexKay]

Welcome aboard, me bucko!

Again, such a shame this couldn’t quite make it in time for the Jam, but on the bright side that might suggest that a demo could be on the horizon? It all depends on how much you want to strip out and redo now that you have the time to assess 'er in drydock. Finger’s crossed that she’s still mostly salvageable!

[FernGilly]

Aye, we be but a few weeks away from a quality demo! I won’t have to strip out much to drain the bilgewater, but it all depends on how many blasted bugnacles I have to scrape off the underside. We were so close!

[Parnash]

[phoenixfelix101]

Hey wait a minute-

[ffsoul]

Ooooo, now this looks interesting! Can’t wait to see your progress!

[FatAzureDragon]

Now this is something I’m interested in. I can’t wait to stuff my crew and push every poor ship to near sinking with my crew of butterballs.

[Lord-Numpty]

Still say it was one of the more promising ideas for the Game Jam, but after looking at the document… well bloody hell, no wonder you didn’t manage it! Suffice to say that’s a lot more content that one typically finds in games that can be nutted out and properly developed in a fortnight.

Doesn’t change my stance on it, still very much looking forward to what you do with it. Also, apologies but pretty sure you meant ‘Insubordination’ in the aforementioned document.

[FernGilly]

(goes on a furious spree looking for the typo)
Thank you so much ;w;

[FernGilly]

We did some character work today, redesigning the first mate Newt and doing work on minion bodies and shapes; I’ve been working on the scripting side of things to make adding characters easier! Just thought I’d share some art Dawn did!

[Brpdchainsaw]

Pirates, Kobolds, and Vore?!
This is going to be good!

[WulfieJunk]

Hey all! Dawn here, lead character artist for Anchor’s Aweight! Hope you’re enjoying the progress so far. I have some updates for you all, notably how I’m going about with sprite work for the motley crew of characters that are to be in this game.

I’ve been working on getting 5 base character shapes down, one for Social minions, Fighting minions, Seafaring minions, Healthy minions, and Repairs minions. I’m doing my best to ensure that the character silhouettes look distinct. Hopefully they’ll be even more distinct as they get fatter!

With that started I’ve also begun testing animations for the characters. Every character is going to end up with their own unique sprite sheet. It should be relatively easy to superimpose character designs on top of a base silhouette sheet, meaning outside of special characters with their own unique figures, making character after character should be a breeze!

Here’s a little beagle sailor for your troubles. Hope you’re all looking forward to future updates on this ambitious project and are excited as we are!!!

[FernGilly]

These look sooo good Definitely work all the effort to figure out how much effort each one will take.

[Parnash]

I am looking forward to failing the mechanics just to see all these cute models become huge.

[Lord-Numpty]

All these girls are adorable thus far. Particularly looking forward to seeing more of the Sharks and Bunny, personally.

[erichtofen]

This all looks really promising so far!! Artwork is pretty dang adorable.

[FernGilly]

Just a quick update! My graphics card is kicking the curb, it went kaput for just a bit last night and locked me into ‘safe mode’. I couldn’t even start up Steam! I’ll be working on as much code as I can, but during the jam my computer kept crashing; I imagine things are only going to get worse before they get better. I should be getting a new graphics card before the year’s end, so I’ll have time to figure out how I plan to code things and work on the databases/story, but the demo might not be here as soon as I’d hoped. ;w;

Right now I’m figuring out all the classes and their abilities; we have 12 classes right now, ranging from captain to sailor to dancer to merchant, but we want to make each crewmate feel like an individual so players don’t just go tossing their crewmates overboard to make room for another of the same class. As it stands in the current code we have working, there’s no incentive not to toss your crew overboard and immediately replace them all at each island, and we want to discourage that behavior.

[LupusGamer]

An idea is that there could be a semi hidden morale system. If you toss crewmates overboard, the other crew won’t like it and could lead to a mutiny, which could just be losing your current party. There could also be the possibility that you could just be an asshole to that cremate through interactions that could lead them to leaving themselves.