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Paper Pirates News

Custom Games and Quality of Life Update

Ahoy swashbucklers!

The latest update for Paper Pirates has just gone live, and with it, we bring you a host of bug fixes, quality of life improvements to improve rejoining a game in progress and to help deal with rowdy pirates, and a new feature that lets you chart your own courses - that’s right, custom games with a host of custom settings!



[h2]Custom Games[/h2]
Gotten used to your regular Paper Pirates voyages? Looking to mix it up a bit, and try something more adventurous? The new ‘Custom Games’ option lets you change a number of settings to customise the game to your liking. Not only that, but there’s a brand new achievement for completing a custom game - there’s no excuse not to try one!
[h3]Number of Players[/h3]
Custom games raise the maximum player count to ten! Stranded on a desert island and not got enough mateys to join you? Whatever number you set here is the number of pirates you’ll have aboard your ship, so if you don’t fill up the lobby with fellow sailors, we’ll throw in some bots to set sail with you!
[h3]Number of Ghosts[/h3]
More players means more ghosts! Custom games allow you to set how many ghosts come aboard your ship at the start of the game. How spooky are you feeling? Remember that the stowaway can’t start the game as a ghost, so you can never have a full ghostly crew!
[h3]Distance from Shore and Number of Treasures[/h3]
Hoping to sail home in time for tea? Perhaps chart a longer voyage for maximum chaos? In a custom game, you can set how much booty your boat starts with, and how far away from shore the boat starts.
[h3]Event Frequency[/h3]
Do you love events? Do you wish they happened all the time? Now they can! With a custom game, you can set how many events occur in your game. Should you decide that you’re more detective than pirate, you can even turn events off completely to significantly reduce randomness in your game.
[h3]Custom Games and Achievements[/h3]
To keep things to the pirate code, some achievements aren’t obtainable through custom games. If you’re looking to score one of the following (and its associated hat), make sure you play a regular non-customised game:
  • X Days at Sea
  • Treading Water
  • Greedy for Gold
  • Ocean Pacifists
  • Pieces of Hate
  • Sworn Loyalty

[h2]Quality of Life[/h2]
[h3]Rejoining a Game in Progress[/h3]
Been thrown overboard a little too violently and found yourself disconnected from the game? We’ve made some improvements to make it easier to reconnect to a game in progress. Players who have been disconnected will now try to reconnect automatically without needing to refresh their page, and in instances where a manual reconnection is still necessary, players will bypass the room entry page removing the need to re-enter a room code.

What’s more, if you reconnect to a game when you’re expected to vote, you will still have the option to cast your vote in that round!
[h3]Muting a Rowdy Pirate[/h3]
If you’ve got a pirate aboard who’s not playing by the rules, and you need to give them a temporary gagging order, you can now click on them to mute them. Any messages they send from their device will not be displayed while they’re muted. Think they’re ready to be trusted again, or mute them by accident? Simply click them again, and they will be unmuted!
[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
  • Audience player vote buttons now appear in the same order as pirates appear on screen
  • Fixed a bug where the game doesn't end if the stowaway/hostage event occurs with one distance/treasure left respectively
  • Fixed a bug where the captain job selection screen sometimes doesn't change to the captain truth/lie screen
  • Fixed a bug where exiting to the main menu would sometimes not close the server connection cleanly

Don’t forget that you can join us on Twitch every Saturday at 8PM BST for a developer stream. This week we’ll be celebrating the update by trying out some custom games - come join them, or join the audience and help pick the events and vote for who you think is a ghost!

Chat and Hats Update

Calling all ye landlubbers!

We've been working hard the past two weeks, in quarantine nevertheless, to bring you an awesome new update - Chat and Hats!

Hats! That's right! We saw that your pirate outfits were looking a bit... lackluster, so this update brings 30 new unlockable hats! Each achievement will unlock a new hat for you to customise your pirate with in the lobby.

We've also listened to your feedback and added an audience mode feature so that people who watch you play can have some agency in the game. Don't worry, if you don't want people to spectate on your game, you can disable spectators completely - but where’s the fun in that?

[h2]The full list of awesome new content includes:[/h2]
  • Missed out on a game? Don’t panic! Now you can join as a spectator! Jump into a game in progress, using the Room Code, and you’ll be able to observe that game - plus you’ll be able to play along, using our new spectator mode features!

  • And we would have got away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling spectators! Between rounds, the spectators can vote on a choice of events. The more popular the event, the more likely it is to happen. It could be bad news for the Captain if things don’t go their way...

  • Spooky sensations! If the audience has a feeling for who might be a ghost, they can get in on the voting action! Make a vote, and the players will find out who the audience suspects after their voting has completed...

  • How many people are in your audience? Check the top right of the screen - we’ve added an audience tracker, to show how many people are spectating your current game!

  • Ability to turn off the in-game chat features, for when you’re playing with less sea-worthy crew members!

  • Earning an achievement is its own reward, but we thought we could do one better. Each achievement now unlocks an extra-special, never-before-seen, cosmetic hat to add more variety to pirate customisation!

  • As if that wasn’t exciting enough, some of the most extra-special hats come with an added bonus: animations. That’s right, these hats really move! Time to get working on completing that achievement list!

  • And better yet, hats that follow the motion of the ocean! We’ve got some physics going on to make some of the new hats extra special!

  • Unlocked all of the new hats? But where do I put them on? Hats are just where you’d expect them - on a pirate’s head! When customising your pirate in the lobby, keep tapping the ‘head’ button on your device until you get a hat you love!

  • But how do I know when I’ve unlocked a new hat? Don’t worry, keep an eye out for any Steam achievements, because they’ll also come with the new “Hat Unlock” popup!

  • Did we mention hats? We’re very excited about the hats!

  • We also added Paper Pirates as a recognised game on Twitch, so if you’re livestreaming you’ll now be able to select it as your current game!



We’ll be moving this week's livestream over to the Iteration Games YouTube channel, so make sure to go check that out for some fun playing with us!

Iteration Games YouTube channel

Streamer Update

Hey pirates!

After last week’s dev stream, we realised that Paper Pirates was missing some cool features that could make life so much better for playing while streaming. So, we added them! There’s a full list below, but headline features include the ability to turn down the voice acting (so you can add your own commentary), and letting pirates send their own messages which will display above their heads – it’s super cute!

You can check out our first dev stream on Youtube!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxzqKL6SUOw
Keep an eye out for more opportunities to play with the devs in the near future. We’ve got more updates coming soon, so if you have an idea for something that could make Paper Pirates more fun, let us know on the Discussion forums!

Full changelog:

- Added options menu both in-game and in the main menu
- Added options for turning down the voice acting, music and SFX
- Added option for extending timers to help with stream lag
- Added chat functionality so that pirates can talk to each other in-game!
- Added a profanity filter for the in-game chat…
- Added an option to turn off the profanity filter!
- Added an option to skip the intro