Our second playtest: sink or sail? | 'Below Deck' April 2025

Ahoy mateys,

We’re just slipping through in time for an April edition of ‘Below Deck’. What a month it has been! We ran our second public playtest and it has been amazing to see so many players truly enjoying our pre-alpha build. In this newsletter we’ll share a few cool insights and content from the playtest, and give you an idea of what’s next for Davy Jones’ Deckhand.

Some of our favorite playtest streams and videos

The Geek Cupboard

Watch on YouTube
Penge from The Geek Cupboard was an gentleman and shared his first playthrough with his massive following. We were especially excited to read comments like:

“I absolutely LOVE the counter-attack/stances mechanic. I've never seen ANY game where stances made sense like this!”

DeepSpaceMatt

Watch on YouTube
We were super impressed by how fast DeepSpaceMatt “clicked” with our game’s unique counter-attack/stance mechanics.

Dead3y3

Dead3y3 was back for his second (and third) live stream of the game, having taken part in our first playtest in January. It was awesome to see his response to what was a massive improvement on the earlier version.

Gameplay insights and analytics

We put together a detailed overview after the first week of playtesting which you can read on our itch devlog.

We had a total of 30 unique playtesters check it out, and saw some impressive mean playtimes, some brutal crab kills, and revealing stats about favorite cards and artefacts!

What’s next?

Our next few sprints are focused around new merchant encounters, which will offer players the opportunity to purchase cards and artefacts mid-voyage. This will give players more agency over their build, and help them to mitigate RNG by providing a greater and more curated selection of loot. Eventually players will also be able to access a workshop which will let them remove and upgrade cards, and to customise their stances by adding counter-attack modifiers like “PIERCING” and “STEADY”, and moving the NATURAL tag to a different stance card in their deck.

Tep has been developing a layout for the new merchant encounters.

We’ve also started working on new status effects, new artefacts, and new enemy systems that will allow for more varied and interesting enemy moves. There will be a lot to look forward to in our playtest 3.0!

Join the crew!

If you'd like more regular updates and to chat with the team then please join our public Discord server, we'd love to have you join our growing community. You can also follow us on social media at the links below.

Discord invite: https://t.co/sBqCnmZi9T

Previous editions of 'Below Deck' can be found on our Itch Devlog.

Playtester sign ups: Fill out this form to access the playtest

Until next time me hearties, yo ho!

Wishlist now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3544900/Davy_Jones_Deckhand/