I want the art of Pirate Souls to remind the work of Eichiiro Oda, without being the same. So, when working on the Marines’ Base, I tried to make it so we could notice the inspiration.

There’s a zone for prisoners. The idea behind that is to put forward the fact that Pirate Souls timeline starts many years after a great pirate era. There are more prisoners, because more pirates started sailing.

I published a speed drawing video on YouTube about the prisoners. If you are interested on how I did them, you can check the video here: Marines' Prisoners Speed Drawing

Since there are more prisoners, Marine forces need more people. That’s why there’s a zone near the Marines’ Base where some officers can stay. Non-marine players that come near the base will have to fight them. Be careful, some are equipped with a sword.

Thanks for your time,
Shenmue

Disclaimer: This is an old topic, the original release date is Jan 24th, 2021 on indieDB

Hello everyone! And welcome to our first development log since the launch of the forum!

If you did not know, for the beta of Pirate Souls, we are going to have 2 new islands (Marine Fortress and Rhum Island). To make those islands feel unique and more exciting compared to Hajiwari, we obviously had to introduce new outfits and hairstyles!

We spent a lot of time working on those arts and we decided it would be fun to make a little video that shows some of them.

The music of the video was done by Erox, and the art you see there, by Fuze, Rosetta, Shenmue and me.

Hello sailors,

We have been working a lot on Pirate Souls lately and, for this development log, rather than talking about maps progression, we will talk about the game fighting system in general and more precisely, specializations.

You start as a villager without any specialization (class) until a certain level so you have the time to try all the different types of playstyle before choosing the one you prefer. Once you reach the required level to specialize yourself, you will be able to choose between 3 different specializations: Fighter, Swordsman and Sniper.

SPECIALIZATIONS

Fighter is the most energetic and fluid specialty of the game. It is filled with small cast time attacks and good combo opportunities. Its range is very small, and its techniques are mainly meant for 1v1 even if most of them can hit multiple enemies at once (AoE).

Swordsmen will likely trend to carry a melee weapon with them. Their abilities are mostly close-range and they have a cast time that will make it rather difficult to hit a moving target. In order to balance that, we made so it has a good combo potential when one of its technique lands.

Just like fighters, swordsmen perform very well in solo fight scenarios, but the difference between the two specialties is that swordsmen are more specialized on hitting one single target.

Snipers master any type of gun. They are professional in long-range fights, but do low damages. Even if they strike fast in a long distance, it will still be hard for them to hit a melee fighter as they move a lot.

SOUL FRUITS

To add more depth to the fighting system, there are soul fruits that can give special power. Soul fruits are completely outside of specializations. Each of them has its own skill tree so you will be able to combine your specialization with a soul fruit. However, you can play the game without them if you feel like it. People using it will be vulnerable to sea stone weapons.

Currently, we have Fire, Ice, Leopard, Light, Reindeer and Rubber soul fruit.

We still don’t know yet what will be the best way to handle the soul fruit system. If you have suggestions, please consider joining our discord.
 

Rubberband Soul Fruit

Ice Soul Fruit

Light Soul Fruit

Fire Soul Fruit

Leopard Soul Fruit

Thanks for your time,
Shenmue

Disclaimer: This is an old topic, the original release date is Apr 20th, 2021 on indieDB

Approximately 3 months ago we released the alpha version of Pirate Souls. It was a very nice moment, and we would like to thank everyone who played the game even if it was full of exploits and bugs. Thanks to them, we managed to make the game stable and pushed forward some quality-of-life features we didn’t think about. For example, the auto-aim range functionality, which was originally a player suggestion, helped us balance the sniper specialization and gave us more control over weapon mechanisms.
 

ALPHA

At this point, we feel like the alpha is complete and doesn’t need any more updates. We may update it if a major bug is found, but we expect next improvements to be released the same time as beta will. For now, the alpha is a good stable introduction to Pirate Souls. It has all the features we wanted for the game: some interesting PVP mechanisms, crew system, bounty system, ranking system, multiple quests, various maps, many bosses, etc. It was originally planned to shut down the server at this point, but as new players still join our discord, we decided to keep it online so they can still try the game if they wish to. However, from now on, we will focus our energy on the beta.

BETA

I am glad to inform that the beta is progressing well. There are still a lot of work to be done, but we are consistent in our progression. We don’t have any date in mind about the beta release, but we are pretty sure it will not be this year. Our main goal for the Beta is to expand Pirate Souls Universe. We definitely want more islands, quests, techniques, soul fruits, clothes and mobs. We also want to improve the crew system by making so marines’ players will be part of one big organization in which they could create their own crew and pirates will be able to form alliances and create a big organization. We may also add a rebel/revolutionary organization, but we still have to think more in depth about it. We also want crews to be able to use their own ship to navigate between islands. However, this will probably be the hardest feature to implement so we will probably do it last.

To summarize, we will no longer update the alpha version of the game, but we are still working on Pirate Souls. We will make sure to post screenshots and videos on social media in order to keep you updated. Thanks to all the ones who played the game. The adventure just begins!

Disclaimer: This is an old topic, the original release date is Oct 11th, 2021 on indieDB

It’s been a while since we released the beta. The game has gone through a lot. We improved the login process, the tutorial, the early game experience and more. See the article below for more information.

Now the game is in a low activity period. In order to increase activity, we decided to be more present on social accounts (Twitter, TikTok) and to focus on player retention.

Below is the road map we shared few months ago

• Automated events.
• Improve maps.
• Smoke fruit.
• New weapons.
• New cosmetics.

It is progressing well: we implemented some auto events like Hidden Spy and Battle Royale, we improved some maps like Lonely Road, we already released a new weapon (fighter boxing gloves) and the Smoker Soul Fruit will release this month with new techniques and cosmetics.

Below is what we have planned for the coming weeks

• 3 Dec: Battle Royale Auto Event
• ~10 Dec: Village Invasion Auto Event.
• ~17 Dec: Smoker Boss
• ~24 Dec: New Cosmetics & Sales
• ~31 Dec: Release Silver Soul Role & Wanted Poster Template

As you can see, we try to be as constant as possible with updates. Hopefully the holidays period is going to be a nice one for Pirate Souls. Thanks again for your support. See you in game!

Hello everyone, welcome to our latest roadmap. We're excited to share our plans for the coming months and the features that we're working on to improve the game and to enrich your gameplay experience. As always, we value your feedback and suggestions, and we're committed to delivering a game that meets and exceeds your expectations. So let's dive in and take a look at what's in store for Pirate Souls in the next months !

Cosmetic Slots
This week, we added a new feature to the game - cosmetic slots for equipped items. This will allow players to customize the appearance of their characters without affecting their stats or abilities. We added a new interface for players to access the cosmetic slot and we will make adjustments to the inventory system to accommodate this new feature by adding bags that will contain extra slots.

Mob Gears
We will complete the mob gears system. All mobs in the game will now have a gear that players can loot and use for to have extra stats. We will add a new crafter NPC that will allow everyone to craft gears (even non crafter). Crafters will be able to destroy gears to obtain note sheet parts.
 

Main Story Line
We plan to add a main story line so players with new quests to enhance the player experience. The new quests will help players to progress through the story and unlock new areas and features in the game. If you want to help us with the creation of new quests, feel free to reply to this post with your suggestions of story. It will be very appreciated!
 

Referral System
A referral system is definitely something needed. We want to reward players for inviting new players to the game. This system will give rewards such as in-game currency or rare items to players who successfully invite new players to the game.

While we're excited to bring new features to Pirate Souls, we also want to ensure that they're implemented properly and with the best possible user experience in mind. As such, some of the features we have planned may take some time to develop and fully integrate into the game. We appreciate your patience as we work to create the best possible gaming experience, and we're confident that the end result will be worth the wait.

Due to time constraints, some of the planned features may not be completed for 2023, so we will provide brief summaries of those that are unlikely to be finished this year.

Improve Professions
We want professions to be more engaging and complex. We plan to do so by adding quests tied to professions and a levelling system.
 

Achievement Titles Bonus
Each title will give players a specific bonus, such as increased experience gain, bonus stats, etc.
 

Arena Battles
We plan to add an arena system that will allow players to compete against each other in PvP battles. This system will have different modes, such as 1v1 and team battles.
 

Skill Tree
We would like each technique to have a skill tree. It will allow players to choose and unlock new abilities, passive bonuses, and perks as they progress through the game. The skill tree system will provide players with more customization options and enhance the overall player experience.

Thanks for your continued support throughout our early access development journey. We couldn't have made it this far without your feedback and encouragement! Don't forget, if you want to give ideas for the main story line or new quests, feel free to do!

Hello everyone! Today we worked on a lot of big updates to make sure that the new players experience is as smooth as possible and that every specialization looks appealing!
It is important to understand that we are building an open world PVP game where we want team works to play an important part. But for an open world pvp game where team work is important, it is obvious that people who want to play alone to relax a little bit might have a hard time enjoying the game. So we added a new feature called Peace Mode!

PEACE MODE
Peace mode will allow anyone to completely go out of combat for 1 hour, and then wait 2 hours to go in peace mode again.
Once Peace Mode is enabled, the person won't be able to go out of that mode until his timer is over, and he won't be able to do PVP either.

We believe this change will allow people who enjoy PVE to have some time where they can enjoy the game while still keeping the open world aspect of Pirate Souls.

A content update will come really soon to reward people who do PVP in danger zone.

SNIPER SPECIALIZATION
We realized that the sniper specialization was underwhelming compared to the other professions so we buffed their weapons, and increased the travel speed of the metal balls.
We are very open to suggestions concerning every specialization, but we are not ready to change techniques yet since the PVP is in a very young stage (no one is level max).

END GAME CONTENT
Marine fortress will be the end game area for now. Where players will be able to do events and pvp starting with the bank race event!
We plan on adding a big alliance/Faction battle event soon too, once the new player experience is very positive!

BUG FIXES
Fixed some bugs, not that interesting to players tho!

More content coming soon. And keep in mind that we are very open to suggestions in the idea section of the forum:

https://piratesouls.org/ideas/

Hello sailors,

Here are some previews of the first island. You may think everything looks the same, but each island has its characteristics so I prefer not to create a big map with a lot of variety everywhere, because in a bigger scale all maps will look the same.

For the first island, I focused on basic nature. It is mostly covered by trees, bushes and cliffs. However, there are special zones like the Marines Base, caves and some secret places.

I tried to make each map in a way players can guess what's going on in the island by just exploring them. There will be quests that will help on that, but it's always interesting when quests are related to maps.

Thanks for your time,

Shenmue

Disclaimer: This is an old topic, the original release date is Jan 20th, 2021 on indieDB

Hello everyone, we want to share with you some exciting news about upcoming features that will be added to the game in the coming weeks. These features are designed to enhance your gameplay experience and add more depth to the game.

Battle Injuries Replacement
Battle Injuries has been criticized since the beginning of the game. We decided to try something new. We will be replacing it with Peace Mode. When a player dies, they will enter a 2 min Peace Mode, preventing them from going straight back to PvP or fighting a boss. This will prevent "BI warriors". It's an experimental feature and we may change it later. For example, by adding BI and Peace Mode on death.

Player will also lose 1 to 2 % of their berries on death.

Cosmetic Slots
We will be adding cosmetic slots to the inventory system, allowing players to hide equipped items and customize the appearance of their characters. At the same time, we will add bags to the Event Shop that will contain extra inventory slots.

Crafter Items Symbol
A new symbol will be added to identify crafter-only weapons in the item description window. This will make it easier for players to identify items that require a certain profesion to use.

World Fortune
A new cash shop item called World Fortune will be added. This item will increase the drop rate of items for all players online, giving everyone a chance to find rare items.

Mobs Gears
We will continue to add new gears in the game until all mobs have one. We already did approximately half of them.

We hope you are as excited as we are about these new features and we look forward to seeing you in the game. Keep an eye out for further announcements as we continue to work on improving gameplay experience.

Next week, we will be talking about long term game plan.
Thanks for your time and support!

In our latest article about the alpha release, we wrote about the fact that we still need to work on end-game content and that bounty system is going to be one of our main concern. We are finally ready to show off some previews of it. However, before going into the bounty system, we would like to thank everyone who played the alpha. We had a lot of positive feedback and great criticisms.

Here are some pictures of the exploration side of the game. A side we didn't put forward so far.

PIRATE SOULS BOUNTY SYSTEM

After a certain level, everyone can put a bounty on the head of everyone. Putting a bounty on someone is a way to convert berries (game currency) into reputation points. Those points are used to rank pirates and marines. The highest-ranking players will have specific titles such as supernovas, warlords, etc.

People who want to obtain great rank don’t have to be scared to lose their bounty because it is the reputation points that matter and you can’t lose them by dying.

Reputation Points

• You kill one person in a danger zone; his level is added to your current reputation point and bounty.
• You get killed in a danger zone; you don’t lose your reputation points, but your bounty gets halved.

Bounty

• You put a bounty on the head of someone; You get half of the bounty you put as reputation points.
• Once the person with a bounty on his head die and you are online; you get the other half of the bounty you put as reputation points. The person who killed him get half of his bounty as berries and the bounty of the person who died is halved.
• When X days pass after you put a bounty on the head of someone, you don't get reputation points if that person dies.
• You cannot add a bounty to a member of your crew.

The best strategy is to put a bounty on the head of someone you are going to kill. However, if you don’t like PVP but want a great rank, you can still grind berries and put bounties on the head of active players who are most likely going to die.

We thought about possible ways to abuse that system and here are the restrictions we implemented in order to fix those exploits.
　
Exploits Fixes

• Limit the amount of bounty that can be added in someone head per day depending on the one getting the bounty level.
• Limit the amount of time you can add a bounty to someone head per day depending on the level of the one who is putting the bounty.
• You can only get reputation points once every X time when you kill someone. If you kill him again before the X time is completed, you won’t gain the reputation points, but you will still get his bounty / 2.
• If someone has battle injuries and you kill him, you won’t gain anything (no bounty and no reputation points). It doesn’t even count as a PVP kill if the killer or the victim has battle injuries.

With all of this added, it will be more efficient to just play the game like intended. There are still some exploits that need to be fixed, but that's what we thought about for now. If you have suggestions or any feedback, please consider joining our discord.

Have a nice day and thanks for your time,
Shenmue

Disclaimer: This is an old topic, the original release date is Aug 17th, 2021 on indieDB

Hello everyone! This week we really focused on the end-game content and we are pleased to announce that we managed to add a Territory War in game!
That event will allow the winning faction to choose which island's Faction House they want to control.

What are Faction House?

• Faction house are houses that your faction has the choice to unlock after winning a territory war.
• Each Faction House has different perks.
• One Faction house will allow you to trade keys for reputation points and upgrade the rarity of your key. And the other one will allow you to "trade" achievements for Soul Power (a force that will allow you to overcome your limit)!

How does the territory war works?
There are two rocks protecting each faction's flag in Marine Fortress.

Once the first rock is destroyed, everyone is alerted.
Once the second rock is destroyed, the attacking faction have 15 minutes to successfully destroy the enemy flag. If after 15 minutes the enemy flag is still there, the defending faction win and will not lose their previous territory (Faction House).

If the attacking faction manages to destroy the enemy flag before 15 minutes, they will have the option to choose which island they want to control, giving them access to that island Faction House.

A successful defense gives the territory war a 30 minutes cooldown before another attack can begin.
A successful attack gives the territory war a 6 hours cooldown before another attack can begin.

This event is still in its early stage so we can't wait to have your input on this!

We also pushed other updates along the territory war like:

BALANCE CHANGES

• Zoan transformation energy drain reduced from 5 to  3
• Ice Spikes technique now throw 3 ice spikes in addition to the trap

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

• Player's faction is now displayed by a logo on their target box

NEW CONTENTS

• Added 3 new cash shop items! Chop Hat, Chop Pant and Fire Hat!

Last year has been a rich year for Pirate Souls. In July, we released the alpha version of the game and the community answered to the call. Thanks to them, we found major bugs and improved the game experience. In October, the alpha was finally stable and we decided to focus on the beta. With all the progress we have done, we are glad to announce that we target this summer for the beta release.

NEW FEATURES

The beta will add new maps, quests, bosses, techniques and features. One of the features we are the most excited about is the crew alliance one. With crew alliance, pirates will be able to join their forces to compete against the marines. Marines will have a global organization, which is like one big alliance. Some of the features we were considering for the beta may not be done in time if we want to release it this year. As we were progressing on the game, we realized that the boat navigation system will be a big challenge. We don't know if it will be done for this summer, but we will try to.

IMPROVEMENTS DONE

The beta does more than expanding Pirate Souls' universe. It also improves what is already existing. For example, NPCs logic has been improved. They can now cast projectiles in 360 degrees and fighting them is more intuitive as they give hint on when and how they will attack. Techniques’ logic has also been improved. We now have more freedom over what kind of technique we can create. For example, the leopard Soul Fruit Claws Strike technique now moves forward the player and then cast the attack. This is just one little example of what we made possible. We cannot wait to show you more!

The alpha version of Pirate Souls is still available.
Thanks for your time,
Shenmue

Disclaimer: This is an old topic, the original release date is Jan 7th, 2022 on indieDB

Hello everyone. It's been approximately two months since the release of the Beta/Early Access version of Pirate Souls. We had some issues during the first weeks, but we are glad to say that we overcame most of them.

Login

On the day of the release, the only way to play the game was by using an Hitspark (Nin Online) account. It was a bit confusing as people were expecting to use a Pirate Souls account or a steam one. We decided to add an option to create an account using Pirate Souls website and the use of the Hitspark one is now optional. Our plan is to make so that all players have a Pirate Souls account as first login method so if there is an issue with Hitspark login, they will not be affected.

Tutorial and Early Game

We had a lot of complains about the tutorial being "bare bones". The lack of guidance once outside of the Formation Center was not giving purpose to new players to continue playing. To make things more obvious, we added explicit icons to important locations and tutorial cards to important steps of the game. We also changed some early level quests and added a new low-level item, so the leveling process is more fun.

Some new players were discouraged by higher levels being real pirates and killing on sight. As an open world PvP game, this is something to expect. However, it doesn't match our vision of the game as we want Pirate Souls to be more about team PvP and exploration. Someone starting the game doesn't have the chance to form a team nor to explore. Quitting the game without seeing all what it has to offer is a bit sad. To bypass that issue, we introduced Peace Mode, a white flag disabling all kinds of PvP, so players can progress through their journey without being constantly killed.

Rubber banding

Some players were having rubber banding/lag issues that was making the game unenjoyable. After a lot of tests and resolution tentative, we finally found out what was causing that issue and the game is now much smoother running with high ping players.

Crashes Period

During approximately one week, a lot of players experienced some crashes. Those were caused by some rework we did to how assets (items, sounds, music, etc.) are loaded in the game. We wanted to fix micro freezes some players were experiencing when playing the game. Unfortunately, the tests we did were not complete enough to detect all the possible crashes. To apologize, we increased experience rates by 15 % for one day. We understood our mistake and next time, we will make sure to test with a small group of players first before pushing any major updates.

Main Focus

Our main focus is to increase the player’s retention before expending Pirate Souls Universe. We did a lot of updates having that in mind. The most notable ones are probably the ones regarding the early game experience, but we also pushed some updates for high-level players. The Marines's Fortress war event is the best example of that. It introduced a way to use achievements to gain more stats. It also made it possible to trade keys for higher tier keys or some reputation. Providing more long-term objectives.

Another vision we have for the game is for it to be a team game about hanging out with friends, exploring, finding treasures, and doing bosses together. Just like a pirate crew or a marine division would do. The first big update we did was the introduction of the higher-level boss Sauro. Who can only be fought by players on a crew.

Near Future Roadmap

• Automated events.
• Improve maps.
• Smoke fruit.
• New weapons.
• New cosmetics.

Long Term Road Map.

• Ship system.
• New Islands.

Thanks for playing Pirate Souls, your support does mean a lot to us! We will continue to work in order to make this a nice free to play game without pay to win mechanisms!

We decided to create this topic to log every update we do. The same information is also available in our different social account!