The Inception

Seven Salty Seas is a game that I came up with when I was watching Pirates of the Caribbean. I imagined how fun it would be as a pirate; hijacking ships, pillaging towns, fighting in naval battles. So… I wrote down some of these ideas, and pretty much forgot about it.

Just recently, I was watching a Spiffing Brit video about Sid Meier’s Pirates (the remaster). It looked like a really fun game to play, and it reminded me of the idea that I had when watching Pirates of the Caribbean. I got the idea back out, and decided to start adding to it. I looked up a few games that were similar to the idea, and although I didn’t find many, I chose to make this game as a spiritual successor to Sid Meier’s Pirates.

Design

For the design of the game, I wanted something that was easy for anyone to be able to pick up, but still offered a lot of difficulty to hardcore players. I also didn’t really want to build a tutorial (because they are difficult to build). Finally, after watching some Dwarf Fortress gameplay recently, I decided to make the game have infinite replay-ability.

For all of these things to happen, when the player starts the game, the world will generate, and they can choose a guild. These guilds will be completely random and split into two sections: faction guilds and pirate guilds. The easiest guild to join would definitely be the faction guild. This is not because the difficulty would be changed at all, it is just because then the player would be able to access the faction guild’s towns, ships, and other benefits. The second difficulty level would be to join a pirate guild. This is because the pirate guilds have additional ships, but do not have the luxury of starting with towns.

The final option is create your own guild. This option allows the player to create their own flag, name their guild, and generally build the guild from scratch. This is by far the hardest option because the player At the start of the game, any guild can venture to the independent towns (because these towns are not owned by any guild). And, once the game starts, any guild can create or steal towns.