Hello everyone!
It's been a fun ride at Lavaboots so far. We've made a ton of changes to Salt from when we first released on early access. We've revamped graphics such as the grass, water texture, GUI, pirate models, ship models, and even added stars. We've added merchant quests, a main story line, tons of lore, new NPC's, new island types, and a whole bunch of armor, weapons, and new items. We've also added new functionalities such as in-game cartographer, a quest and player journal, controller support, and a bunch of bug fixes and polishes along the way.
We finally feel like Salt is at a good state as far as a single player game. This was always our goal before we moved on to multiplayer implementation. Now, that time has finally come.
Implementing Multiplayer
Over the past couple weeks we've begun the process of multiplayer implementation. This is going to be a lot longer than the average update since it's going to require a whole lot of foundation work. There's a lot of technical work that has to be done to get something like multiplayer up and running, as well as a lot of game design choices to be made. We don't have an exact time frame for how long this will take currently, so our goal to keep you up to date as best as possible along the way. As we progress in the multiplayer implementation process, we'll be updating you and getting your feedback along the way.
We are very excited about multiplayer and we think it's going to add an entirely new element to Salt for those that want to play with others.
Updates During Multiplayer
Since the multiplayer implementation is going to take some time, we want to release small updates during the process so that you'll still have some new content to experience. We've got some neat ideas for these updates and are excited to share them with you. One thing we are going to be adding is a set of new NPC's that have quests and ranks for completing their quests. As you rank up, you'll get access to higher level merchant gear through that NPC. If you get through all the ranks, you'll then be able to do a repeatable quest for a random loot drop from a really nice set of items, potentially legendary and epic items.
Along with these smaller updates we also plan on doing bug fixes and polishes.
Keep an eye on our dev blog for more updates regarding multiplayer and the patches to release during the multiplayer implementation.