POOP DECK Playtest · published
New
- Tug of War — a brand new game mode. Two crews, two island strongholds, one goal: tear down the enemy fortress before they tear down yours. Pick Tug of War in the lobby and the match loads the symmetric Twin Forts arena, with every ship starting berthed at its own team's fort.
- Fortresses and flanks. Each side defends three structures: a central fortress and two flank towers guarding the approaches. Smashing an enemy flank opens a lane; smashing the fortress ends the match on the spot.
- Forts shoot back. Every fort is armed. Fortress and flank guns track and fire on enemy hulls that come into range, so a naked charge down the middle lane is a bad idea.
- Forts repair themselves — until Sudden Siege. A damaged section that stays untouched for 15 seconds starts rebuilding at 5 HP a second. At the twelve-minute mark, Sudden Siege is called: repairs stop for good and the last three minutes belong to whoever can hit hardest.
- Forts come down in style. Destroying a section sets off a hard burst of dust and smoke, launched crew, tumbling masonry debris and lingering embers, leaving a smoking ruin in place of the intact stonework.
- Team banners on the forts. West flies a black crowned-skull banner, East a white burning-sun banner — readable at gameplay distance and even in grayscale. A destroyed section's banner comes down with it.
- Black and white team sails. Every one of the seven hulls flies West black or East white canvas in Tug, fleet ships and bonus sails included. The colour survives damage, repair and being assigned to a team late.
- My Fleet — buy ships that keep coming. A fleet spawner is a recurring purchase, not a single hull: buy one and it keeps sending AI ships down the lane you chose (north, middle or south) for the rest of the match.
- Fleet ships that actually have a plan. The fleet AI pushes its lane, engages what it meets and presses the objective instead of milling about in open water.
- A full Tug economy. You start with 500 spendable gold and a free Sloop, then earn a steady trickle of passive income plus payouts for kills, assists, sinking gold and rum picked up from wrecked fleet ships. Spend it in the port on your own hull and upgrades, or on fleet spawners to keep the pressure up — that choice is the heart of the mode.
- Flank bounty. Bring down an enemy flank tower and every open seat on your crew is paid a 100 gold bounty.
- Kill streaks and shutdowns. Build a streak and the whole match hears about it; end someone else's and you get the shutdown callout and a bigger reward.
- Objective HUD. A compact panel tracks the enemy stronghold's health at a glance, with tower health readable from the world healthbars near the forts themselves.
- Forts and lanes on the charts. Both the minimap and the full world map show all six fort sections as team-coloured marks — hollow once destroyed — plus the six fleet lanes as faint guide lines, with matching legend entries.
- Moment callouts, stingers and a match clock. Objective falls, bounties and Sudden Siege each get their own callout and sound, and the match clock is authoritative for every player.
- A real result screen. The winner screen names the winning crew, spells out exactly how the match was decided, lists both teams' fort health as percentages and shows every seat's kills and gold earned — scrollable all the way to the last row.
- Rejoin and keep your match. Disconnect and come back to the same host and your seat is restored: team, remaining purse, hull, upgrades, owned fleet spawners, captain, wizard and even a spell mid-cooldown.
- Uneven crews and solo practice. Teams no longer have to be even, and a host alone can press Set Sail to run a solo test match with both forts and both fleets live. A host plus a couch mate can play a straight 1v1.
- Tug help pages explain the mode, the flank bounty and rejoining right inside the game.
- Host-only End match. The host can settle a match early from the pause menu and still record a proper result.
- Pirate wizards. Alongside your captain you now pick a wizard, who replaces the first mate and casts with Shift / RT. Wizards are available in both Deathmatch and Tug of War; the Caribbean campaign keeps its first mates.
- Solar Lance. A 2.5-second charge, then a three-second beam of light that erupts from your bow for 200 damage. It pierces islands and ships alike, tracks your bow as you turn, and will chew through fort walls — but your rudder goes sluggish for six seconds while you hold it.
- Kraken Attack. Channel for three seconds and a 60-metre ring of tentacles rises around your ship for four seconds, grinding down every enemy hull inside it and cutting their speed and turning in half. Each hull gets its own fitted constriction, deck-slap and side-whip animations.
- Rimewake. A bow-fired ice bolt that races 100 metres downrange; the first enemy it touches sets off a 24-metre frozen bloom that damages and freezes everything caught in it for two seconds.
- Hellfire Broadside. Four seconds of roaring flame off one side of your ship, up to 160 damage on anything that stays in the fire. The game picks the side facing the nearest enemy when you cast, and keeps it there while you manoeuvre.
- Spell tells you can read. Churning water marks a ship slowed by the kraken, and a glowing bow marks a captain paying the Solar Lance's steering cost. Both follow the hull and clear the moment the effect ends.
- New wizard artwork and audio. Every spell has its own illustrated portrait for the picker, the cooldown display and the scoreboard, and Solar Lance's beam got a full visual pass — reworked plasma, fragment and accent effects — plus cast audio for the new spells.
- A new captain model. The player captain has been rebuilt game-ready with proper facial expressions and materials, and stands the helm on every hull. Deck crew got the same treatment.
- Sail pass two — fugitive canvas. Frigate, fourth rate and brigantine stunsails are real sails now, with head yards, lower booms and working rope lines instead of hanging flags.
- Full-dress galleon. The galleon's fugitive kit is era spectacle: an enlarged spritsail, a new sprit topsail, fore and main topgallants on mast extensions and a much larger mizzen topsail.
- The bomb ketch gets canvas. A storm fore staysail and flying jib over the mortar deck plus a small square mizzen topsail — its first bonus-sail kit.
- Refit Caribbean sloop. The sloop has been rebuilt with a cedar hull, tarred wales, brass and wrought iron fittings, hemp rigging, proper gun carriages and new deck textures, wreck debris included.
- A Caribbean sky. Every map and every couch viewport now sits under a shared sky with broad, two-tone clouds in the game's own palette and a sea-teal horizon.
- Shaped wakes. Ships stamp a proper V behind the stern while under way and settle into a hull-aligned oval at rest, scaled to the beam of the hull that made them.
- Foam is back. Wake wash breaks into graphic clumps of foam tinted to the sea palette rather than a flat white smear, and wakes are stronger and more visible overall.
- Cartoon cannon smoke. Guns cough opaque rings of smoke sized to the hull firing them, with ring-to-ring variation and inherited muzzle velocity; cannonballs and chain shot now trail the same rings instead of a pixelated billboard.
- How to Play, with a front door for the tutorial. The tutorial has moved out of the map list and into the How to Play panel, where a fixed Play Tutorial button sits on every page.
- A tabbed port menu. The port hub is now organised into tabs you can cycle with a controller — Upgrades, My Ship, and in Tug of War My Fleet — with rum controls always on screen.
- A real credits screen replaces the old placeholder.
- A new main menu. The title screen has been rebuilt around the Caribbean Chaos identity: crooked hand-set pirate lettering, a parchment rail of menu actions, and a live battle playing out behind it — a fourth-rate firing all twenty-five starboard guns through incoming hits, near misses, splashes, smoke and launched crew.
- Lobby music. The lobby has its own track while you wait for a crew.
- Gold makes a sound. Purchases, ordinary rewards and bonus payouts each have their own distinct chime, and gold gains pulse on screen, scaled to whether it was an ordinary gain, an assist, an NPC kill or a player kill or shutdown.
Changes & Balance
- Bow and stern chasers are now standard equipment on every ship instead of something you buy. They fire round shot that scales with your cannon level.
- Chain shot became a single 250-gold large-port upgrade that converts both chaser mounts at once, for half hull damage plus heavy sail damage.
- Chaser reload is now derived from your broadside reload rather than tracked separately, so every upgrade and effect that speeds up your battery speeds up your chasers too — chasers now cycle at two and a half times your broadside reload.
- The bow chaser now reaches 1.2× your ship's upgraded cannon range; the stern chaser stays at 1×.
- The Deathmatch capital ship arrives carrying chain shot as standard.
- Tug of War starting funds are 500 spendable gold plus the free Sloop, passive income runs at 1 gold every 2 seconds, and Sloop and Schooner fleet spawners cost 350 gold each. Player hull prices are unchanged.
- Trading in a ship in Tug of War now refunds the upgrades you bought for it.
- The ship health bar hangs beneath the hull instead of floating at the masthead, and is twice as large so it reads from the chase camera.
- Wakes hold their shape as they age instead of smearing out.
- Muzzle puffs vary in opacity instead of rendering as one uniform slab, and shot trails fade out as a ball reaches the end of its range.
- Free and NPC purchases no longer play a purchase sound; the flank bounty does.
- Free and neutral ports now play their own music track.
Fixes
- Deathmatch's Auto team button can be un-picked again, and the lobby roster shows team colour dots.
- Shipyard rows in the port keep mouse hover and complete clicks across refreshes instead of dropping the press.
- Combat rewards no longer stop paying live assisters when the attacker's hull has already been destroyed.
- Joining a match already in progress now loads the world before ships start replicating, so late joiners see every existing hull — and their own new one — with no missing or duplicated ships.
- The sloop's collision footprint was corrected to match its as-built hull, so it no longer bumps into things it should clear.
- Hits on a fort section now read as stone rather than water, at the point the shell actually lands, and remote players see the impact too.
- Only the living enemy fort root takes damage from a hit — shooting a ruin no longer counts.
- Rejoin tokens survive a fast disconnect and reconnect, so a brief drop doesn't cost you your seat.
Behind the scenes: extensive engine, tooling, test and build-pipeline work supporting all of the above.