Corsairs Legacy News

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Today we will be answering your questions, and in today’s devlog you’ll get to know:

• How many people are developing “Corsairs Legacy”? Who are those people?
  
• Why are we developing the game in Unity and not in Unreal Engine?
  
• Do we contact people that were developing “Sea Dogs” (with the original team Seaward)?
  
• Why can’t our team unite with BlackMark Studio to achieve shared results?
  

Well, let’s start with the team. The project is currently being developed by a company called Mauris that was founded in 2013 and its current director is Volodymyr Bondarenko. Since 2013, Mauris has developed over 80 projects for companies like Bosch, Freedom Finance, Nomad Insurance, Hettich, Compendium, Bionorica, Teva, Sandoz, BI Group.

After talking to the art director of “Sea Dogs 4”, Yuri Rogach, we decided to make a pilot version of an RPG in 3D and understand the complexity of development. We decided that it’s entirely possible and Mauris started to search for specialists in a PC game dev field that would be responsible for developing the future game. We spent 4 months on market research, analyzing pirate projects, defining a movement vector, and forming a team. With the growth of the project, we started expanding our team, and here’s who works on the game today:

• three Unity programmers;
  
• level designer;
  
• lighting specialist;
  
• environment modeler;
  
• character modeler;
  
• editor;
  
• voiceover specialist;
  
• video editing specialist;
  
• designer;
  
• illustrator;
  
• two animators;
  
• back-end programmer;
  
• special effects specialist;
  
• translator.
  

Our team liaises with developers of the original “Sea Dogs”, but None of the Seaward members are contributing to the development of Corsairs Legacy at the moment.



Now, let’s talk about Unity and Unreal Engine. Mauris always emphasized high-quality development and the first 4 employees, including the director, are programmers. Having a lot of experience in development, we understand that it’s better to work with technologies that the team has competence in. Using those technologies makes it possible to make the best possible product. At the time of creating a project’s strategy, we were talking to the leading programmer of the “City of Abandoned Ships”, Eduard Zaitsev, who had long experience of developing in Unity. He thinks that to create a game similar to “Sea Dogs” it doesn’t matter whether to choose Unity or Unreal Engine. A good result can be achieved in both engines.



And lastly, we’ll answer why we can’t unite with BlackMark Studio to achieve the result. There are many reasons. The first one is – BlackMark team consists of modders, who develop a game on Storm Engine in their free time. Our team consists of Unity programmers who develop Corsairs Legacy full-time. As a result, we have different work inputs and specializations.

The second reason is that we make different games for different audiences. BlackMark Studio initially focuses on the audience of “Sea Dogs”, on people who know the game well and would like to see an interesting and complicated sequel. Our goal, on the other hand, is to attract many new audiences to Corsairs Legacy that would give a new life to the setting.

To find out all the details about the dev team of the game - watch the full devlog video :) Subscribe to our YouTube channels in order not to miss news about the Corsairs Legacy development!

Official Corsairs Legacy YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvxcqkgrIC3fHpSpKSeMnA/
Official Russian YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SaveThePirate/

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We’ve seen a few comments about flickering shadows and people asked how much are we planning to show the same part of the jungle? Today we’ll share our plans, show you the current result of working on locations, and let you know when you’ll see new locations.

In the game’s announcement, we told you that we’ll try to make the most of the purchased textures to speed up the development process and spend less money. However, with the growth of our team and level of expertise, we came to understand that hand-made buildings look more interesting and of better quality than off-the-shelf solutions. Currently, our team is in the process of creating unique buildings and locations that will be in the first game.

In Sea Dogs, the land gameplay consisted of space-limited locations with loading screens each 10-20 seconds while the character moves from point A to point B. If the character was outside the city, the player had no understanding of the island’s layout and they had to go on forums and search for maps of paths that look all the same. In fact, the island is a set of rooms that have no geographical relation to each other, and after the point of transition between locations is reached, the game teleports the character to another room with decorations that give the impression of a continuous path.

The solution chosen by developers at that moment was forward-looking, it allowed minimizing technical requirements of the game and reusing the same locations in multiple places.

In 2021, such an approach is obsolete and very undesirable. Due to this, we abandoned the concept of a set of locations and decided to design the island as a whole, making one location with a minimal number of loading screens. The task of creating a full-fledged open world has many complications, one of which is to ensure stable FPS and minimize the requirements necessary for the game to work. Shadow flickering seen in the game footage is due to the need for increasing shadow render distance, which leads to a high GPU load.



Currently, we’re concentrating on creating a single technologically efficient approach to making whole islands that would show good results for graphics and optimal use of PC resources. In the first game, Barbados will become our reference model. After the release of the game, we will collect player feedback, make additional changes to graphics optimization and after that, we’ll be able to use ready-made and well-proven technology to create new islands.

We use a dynamic sun that changes its location based on time of day and creates unique lighting. We also implemented dynamic weather that adds nice visual and sound effects to the gameplay. These features don’t allow to programmatically calculate the location and appearance of each object’s shadow on a map once, which leads to high GPU load. However, we think that those seemingly little things create an atmosphere for the player and increase engagement in the gameplay.

To find out all the details about the open world in the game - watch the full devlog video :) Subscribe to our YouTube channels in order not to miss news about the Corsairs Legacy development!

Official Corsairs Legacy YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvxcqkgrIC3fHpSpKSeMnA/
Official Russian YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SaveThePirate/

Since the announcement of the game in April 2021, our team has published development diaries, informing you about the progress. This year, teams from two more projects related to the pirate setting have joined the Corsairs Legacy project team. To date, 15 people are working on the project.

Mauris has invested additional funds in the project to improve the quality of the product. At the moment, ground gameplay and a dice game have already been implemented, and work is actively underway on a sailboat simulator.

We are trying to be as open as possible with players, for 48 hours a marathon will take place on the game's page on Steam, during which the project leader, Volodymyr Bondarenko, will present the current state of sea gameplay, Perudo mini-game, locations of the temple ruins in the jungle, and the port of Bridgetown.

The goal of the marathon is to tell players about the progress of development, draw the attention of Steam users to the product, and answer questions from the audience.

We will answer the questions, received during the marathon, in the new development video. Our team plans to continue to regularly inform you about the progress of development on Steam and on the YouTube channel of the project.

Our team asks everyone who wants to help the Corsairs Legacy game - keep the tab with the open game stream on Steam as long as possible so that the stream has a chance to be noticed by the Steam audience.

Hello everyone! We analyzed all the feedback and spent a few days polishing the run animation chosen by you, but it was worth it. We got the result that our development team is happy with and we think that it finally looks great. You can see it in the new development diary:

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Are you happy with the result? We’ll be waiting for your feedback on the new video!

Because of the long process of making this run animation, we’re a little behind schedule. We understand that in the first game character movements could be rough at times, but we think that right now it’s more important to finish all animations for the game and then polish them over time.

Nevertheless, an outside perspective allows us to better understand how good the animation is. We make every character movement from scratch for the game. In the new video you can see some combat animations that are already in the game:

• Cutting attack version 1
  
• Cutting attack version 2
  
• Thrust
  
• Circular attack
  
• Striking attack
  
• Block
  
• Parry
  
• Feint
  
• A couple of idle combat animations (3 of them)

We can’t wait for your feedback in the comments on the new devlog.



Now, it’s time to talk about the growth of the Corsairs Legacy community. On our official website, we plan to post a catalog of all items from the game with their descriptions and the ability to leave comments underneath. Every quest will also get an official page with a short description and the ability to discuss it. In this way, the players will be able to find all information in one place, and we’ll be able to promptly make changes to the game while analyzing feedback from the website.

To find out all the details about all animations in the game - watch the full devlog video :) Subscribe to our YouTube channels in order not to miss news about the Corsairs Legacy development!

Official Corsairs Legacy YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvxcqkgrIC3fHpSpKSeMnA/
Official Russian YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SaveThePirate/

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Hello everyone! It’s been another week and you’re reading a new Corsairs Legacy devlog.

Last week we finished modeling cold weapons, and now it’s time to talk about our plans for weapons in the first Corsairs Legacy game. There will be 21 cold weapons and 6 mass-production pistols in the game. We also plan to add unique blades but it hasn’t been decided yet.

Each class of cold weapons will have 7 blades. We had to study many sources to collect a credible list of weapons of that time with their accurate characteristics. While analyzing Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships, we found out that the weight of blades doesn’t correspond to the weight of real weapons. For example, in the game, the falchion weighs 4.8 kg, but in reality, it weighs from 0.5 to 0.9 kg.

In Corsairs Legacy, weapons preserve their historical characteristics, appearance, and weight. For each blade, we tried to find photos of real analogs and compared the results with them.

• Light weapons include blades with a weight of no more than 2.4 pounds, that’s equal to 1 090 g.
  
• Medium weapons include blades with a weight between 2.4 and 2.8 pounds, an upper bound corresponds to 1 270 g.
  
• Heavy weapons include blades with weight no less than 2.8 pounds.
  

To find out all the details about weapons in the game - watch the full devlog video :) Subscribe to our YouTube channels in order not to miss news about the Corsairs Legacy development!

Official Corsairs Legacy YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtvxcqkgrIC3fHpSpKSeMnA/
Official Russian YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SaveThePirate/