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Ship maneuvering rework - 2 days until Early Access release!

Cursed Crew · published 24 Feb 2024, 20:36 UTC

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Ahoooy, mateys! 2 days remain until Cursed Crew releases in Early Access!

In one of our last feature blogs, we’re going over our ship maneuvering rework since we received player feedback from Steam Next Fest. Ship movement in general was a highly discussed topic among our players and we’ve made some significant changes.

Challenges of ship movement

Implementing ship movement during combat was among the toughest design challenges we’ve faced. It’s extremely challenging because our game is entirely 2D and ships are shown from the side - so any perspective you see is just artwork trickery. Because of this 2D side view, it makes it impossible to “steer” the ship in any direction because our 2D art doesn’t support that.

In FTL (a spaceship sim and one of our inspirations), the 2D art problem was solved by fixing the camera on BOTH spaceships, and never depicting any of the spaceships moving/flying through space. FTL doesn’t show any flight maneuvers, which allowed them to keep the gameplay focused on the spaceships themselves.

In a naval setting, the FTL approach is too restrictive. For example, the broadside cannons need to point at the enemy ship (you can’t have cannons firing from the wrong side). Therefore, we need some sense of direction, otherwise you wouldn’t know which cannons would face the enemy. In Cursed Crew, you can watch the incoming enemy ship through your spyglass, and you can see the enemy ship’s positions and rotations on a minimap. But there’s still a problem: if you can view the ship from the captain’s spyglass, what happens when the enemy ship turns? We already know our 2D art doesn’t support turning, so what do we do?

Old ship maneuvering

In older builds and our Steam Next Fest demo, we tried to solve our 2D art turning issue by making any ship turning happen OUTSIDE of the captain’s spyglass view. For example, if you entered combat with an enemy ship, you’d initially see them approaching with your captain’s spyglass, and once the enemy retreated out of the spyglass’ view, that enemy ship would do any turns they needed to outside of the player’s view.

Any ship maneuvers, player or enemy, were restricted to only 180 degree turns and strafing, otherwise the ship would enter the spyglass at an angle (which would look strange because of our 2D art limitations). This limited maneuvering felt clunky, artificial, and quite slow because it took a long time for ships to complete their maneuvers and re-enter combat, especially if there was a difference in ship speeds.

New, reworked ship maneuvering

After receiving player feedback on our demo, we’ve completely reworked ship maneuvering where you can steer your ship in ANY direction.

To make this work, we had to completely abandon the idea of the player viewing the enemy ship through the captain’s spyglass. Now, the spyglass acts like a magical camera that floats above the enemy ship. We returned to FTL as an inspiration, where the “real direction” of your ship isn’t important.

But unlike FTL, we have a minimap that shows where the ships are relative to each other and the direction they’re facing. When the enemy is at an angle from the player’s ship, the ship just appears as a normal side view in the spyglass. However, when the player fires at an enemy on an angle, the cannonballs will fire at the angle that matches the player’s position on the minimap. This smoothly connects the minimap and the enemy ship’s side view and it is far more free and dynamic than our previous version of movement!

Boarding

So what happens when we want to board another ship? Boarding refers to when the player and enemy ships collide with each other (via harpoons and ropes to draw them together), and crew members can jump over to fight on the other vessel.

In Cursed Crew, boarding happens when the enemy and player ship are close enough to each other on the player’s screen. It gives both the player and the enemy’s crew members to throw boarding hooks, fire close-ranged cannon shots, or shoot each other with pistols.

With the new changes, it’s possible that the enemy enters the player’s screen perpendicular to the player (which we know our 2D art doesn’t support)! Our old system didn’t have this problem because it restricted the angles at which ships could appear. With the added freedom of the new system, we decided to sacrifice some realism to enhance gameplay. So, when enemy ships enter the player’s screen perpendicular to the player, the enemy simply gets rotated to the closest side view so they enter the screen parallel to the player. Done!

Key takeaways

We hope this post was fun to read and helped share some techniques about using 2D art in game design. We realised how using 2D art seriously forced us to make hard decisions on how to handle ship movement, which is inherently a 3D action. Ship movement in a 2D space took us a couple of tries to get right, and with our new system, we’re much happier.

Our new maneuvering system still has some workarounds to handle the 2D limitations, but they’re little tricks that don’t impact the player’s experience. For example, letting the enemy magically be parallel to the player upon entering the screen doesn’t impact the gameplay - in fact, it makes it better for everyone since combat can happen quickly and smoothly! Our feedback showed that it wasn’t a big deal if the captain’s spyglass view wasn’t realistic - players simply wanted to know what was going on with the enemy ship.

Overall, our new maneuvering system is a great feat for us and was a great challenge to make us think outside the 2D box. A nice analogy to this is musical instruments: each instrument has their notes laid out in a certain way, and that restricts the musician, but that has resulted in a tremendous amount of variety between different instruments.

Thank you for reading! 2 days remain until Early Access release, so we’ll be right back with more updates!