Pirate Twist · build 24864226 · published
Three updates have been riding at anchor waiting on one another. Enough of that — they all come ashore today.
A word on why they queued up. Pirate Twist is made by one person: me, in the evenings, around a wife and two kids who can now identify a cannon reload by ear through a closed door. So the work lands in waves rather than a steady drip. The playtest crew has been prowling the Sea Cave and learning the ropes on the rebuilt tutorial for weeks while the main game sat quietly on v1.1.1 — that ends here.
And they do not arrive alone. The whole fleet has been repainted, plank by plank. If your last voyage was v1.1.1, there is not one line below you have already read.
From the playtest right through launch, every pirate lord you fought has been the same sloop wearing a different tint, and it bothered me a little more each time one sailed on screen. Six of them now have hulls of their own — a horned figurehead, a ram's skull, a blood-red raider — and you will know which one is bearing down on you long before you can read her name
The rest of the fleet got the same treatment. Sloops, brigantines, galleons and elites are painted in layers now, with real rigging, and they run out more guns the deeper you sail. What you see on the deck is what fires at you
This is the one I am most pleased with: sails furl. Turn a ship into the wind's eye and watch her rig go slack — yours too. You can finally SEE a hull lose the wind instead of inferring it from the speed bar. It is a small thing and I stared at it for an embarrassing amount of time
And anything burning now wears painted flame that leans downwind, instead of the orange confetti it used to throw
An apology first. Someone refunded the game today and left a reason: "I was not even able to finish tutorial, game is too difficult, not for me." That one stung, and it is fair. Whoever you are — I am sorry. You should not have to fight the teaching part, and if you're seeing this reach out, PLEASE!
So the tutorial stops the world now. Every lesson holds the sea still until you have read it, because I was asking you to read a paragraph while a pirate closed on your stern, which is a ridiculous thing to ask of anyone
It points at what it is talking about. It lets you put a note back up if you skimmed it. Most steps can be skipped if one simply refuses to click. And if you go down mid-lesson you can retry it — the old build showed you the door, which I think is how I lost some of you
It teaches the whole thing now, not just the basics: gears and steering, reading the wind, every ammo type on a live target, raking fire, ramming, docking for plunder, and the entire port. If you bounced off early, this is the build to come back to. And Deckhand difficulty is right there on the captain screen — it is not a lesser way to play the game
You hear it before you see it now. Gusts rise, the swell builds, thunder rolls in from upwind — then the sky closes over you. No more bolts out of nowhere
Squalls cover the whole map in a cloud deck that drifts on the real wind, and it darkens as it matures. The blacker it gets overhead, the faster and harder the lightning falls. Pale cloud is scenery. A black ceiling is a warning
The heavy strikes brood inside dense cells that crackle before the whole thing goes off at once. Sail out from under them. Sitting in one costs hull, and it will cost it quickly
A new stop on the chart where your fire shot stops being ammunition and becomes a torch. Lanterns on the shore are your relight points, and the way out is forward — through the treasure chamber — not back the way you came
The hoard trains your captain as well as filling your hold, so a cave run is worth the nerve it takes
The harbour is a real place now: two piers, a quay joining them, moored hulls that burn and sink when they are hit, houses that face the water
The besiegers stopped duelling you and started doing their job — they work the docked ships first, then the port itself, and they route around obstacles instead of shoving through them
A running log beside the status block tells you what the harbour is taking, even when the shot lands somewhere you cannot see
Come back and the voyage is where you left it: the squall still overhead, your torn sails and thinned crew, fires still burning, a siege still mid-wave, every enemy where it stood. This one took a while and nobody will ever notice it, which is how I know it was worth doing
The leaderboard. It was fetching your scores correctly and then clipping every single row out of view. It has been showing an empty board to everyone. Sorry — it works now
Burning ships kept their colours instead of washing out to white for the length of the fire
The compass needle stopped hiding the treasure and the enemies sitting underneath it
Notifications stopped landing on top of each other at the start and end of a fight
If you have not taken the tutorial since it was rebuilt, take it anyway. The raking lesson alone will change how you fight.
This is the drop I have been most excited to hand over. Come tell me which of the six captains has the best ship in the Discord — I read all of it. ⚓