Lord O' Pirates News

[p]This week is NextFest and the debut of our Steam Demo! The demo contains the entire first level and every unlockable that would be associated with it. That's quite a few hours of gameplay! If you dig it, throw us a wishlist so that you don't miss the release of Lord O' Pirates in July![/p]

Ahoy!

One Flow Man here. I just wanted to make it clear somewhere, since who knows when or if we will ever get the little green check (our game is likely too smol at present to be on Steam's radar).

I do most of my playtesting on the Steam Deck. If something runs poorly on the deck, it's a personal problem for me, so I've done as much optimization as I can for it to run smoothly there. It has full controller support with proper Steam Deck icons, everything should work very smoothly.

And there you have it, Steam Deck support! Arrrrgh!

Ahoy!

I don't currently communicate much via the Steam page. That will certainly change once a public release of the game is made. Until then, join our discord if you want to know what is going on with the closed beta / development of the game. I did want to post one update here now since our last update here is out of date.

Currently, the game is about to have its demo released on itch.io. Once I've accomplished that, I will begin to work on additional levels which will be released into the closed beta once each level reaches a state in which I am actually ready for it to be beta tested. Those closed beta releases will be used to hunt down any and all bugs, as well as tweak balancing. I feel though, that with the first level I've found a sort of process for balancing that I think will be easy to apply, resulting in few tweaks being needed with each release.

When will the full release / early access be? At the moment, I am not sure, but to give you an idea of the plan, we want to release almost immediately after a Steam Next Fest. The next one takes place in October, so if we are about ready for an early access release by then, then that will likely take place in November. If not, then we are likely not looking at a release until February. I should have a better idea of the timeline once I release the second level and see how long it takes. The goal will be to have at least 4 standard levels at early access release, which will likely amount to many 10s of hours of content in quests and unlockables. Each level will have a different theme, so far the plan is:

Bayou - Scary / Occult / Haunted / Undead / Edlritch
Space - Spaceships / Aliens / Space Debris
Cute - I told Moth, because she kept trying to sneak cute sprites into each level, that we'd make a cute themed level so that she could get it out of her system lol. I am not sure what this will entail yet.

In addition to needing to be almost ready for early access release at the time of a Steam Next Fest, we also need to be in a fairly good marketing position. This means a decent wishlist count, decent social media followings, etc. I hate that that is a requirement, and I mean at some point if it just isn't going well, I guess we will accept defeat and just release, and continue marketing afterwards. The reason it is important though is because a game's launch is the biggest opportunity it has for free organic marketing, and ending up high on the Steam Next Fest charts as well as the upcoming releases charts is a feat that can set us up to be able to continue being able to afford to release content for this game, as well as create more ambitious games in the future. We've much bigger dreams than Lord O' Pirates, but being able to achieve anything larger in scale will likely require us to first find success in something of equal or smaller scale. You can help us with our journey though by sharing our social media content, telling your friends, and wishlisting Lord O' Pirates!

Peace,
One Flow Man

Our store page has been updated with new screenshots and our first gameplay "trailer". I say "trailer" because it's more like a trap music video meets a 90s Saturday morning cartoon toy commercial. What can I say? With my burning passion and years experience making music video, sometimes I just can't help myself. It may not be aligned with every game trailer marketing blog I've ever read, but also there's no data on weirdos like me who have made this type of video, so who knows, maybe I'll be a pioneer!

This store page update is in preparation for the next Steam Next Fest! We'll be releasing a polished demo of the game available to all come this June.

Check out the new screenshots and videos, wishlist, and sign up for the beta if you haven't already. We've only granted a few people beta access so far, and the feedback has been super helpful! We will surely be issuing more keys here in March, there are just some developments in our backlog that I feel need to get done before we do that. Regardless, you should join the discord to see what's what! I've made our development process 100% transparent and automated. You can see what I am working on in real time and how we've prioritized our current backlog of tasks! Don't be shy! I'm shy too, and in your shoes I'd probably never join my discord, but darn it, conquer your fears! "Be a brave warrior of the seas!" - my man Usopp

Land ho!

We will be breaking new ground this February and opening the game up for our first wave of closed beta testing! You can sign up for the beta on our steam page and access will be granted come mid-February. There is a limit on how many testers we can accept (we want to be sure we can keep up with the community size), but this limit will likely increase as time goes on until we eventually reach an open beta or early access.

Since this is our first Steam post, I want to take a moment to introduce ourselves. We are a team of two! One Flow Man is our sole developer/designer and Moth is our dedicated pixel artist! Treestyle Studios is just the name of our LLC, and we are currently working without a publisher or funding. We both work other part time jobs to live, but our dream is to be able to do game development full time, grow into a larger studio, and make bigger and dreamier games.

We are anxious to start getting player feedback so we can begin shaping up what we have now into what will become our public demo. This beta phase will be focused on balancing the first map to make it feel both challenging and as fun as possible. We also want to get a feel for cross-run progression and whether that moves too quickly or slowly. We will be basing these decisions off of your feedback as well as anonymized data being collected about your play through.

Once that demo is released, the plan is to begin piling on more and more content, which we will also want feedback on! Phase 2 & 3 will each consist of adding a new level similar in playstyle to the first, but in different settings. One setting will take place in the "Underworld", which you'll find inhabited with pirates of the occult and various monstrosities and eldritch horrors. The other will take place in the final frontier, in the deepest regions of space inhabited by all sorts of strange other-dimensional beings. After we've introduced these two levels, we want to start thinking of new types of levels or ways to evolve gameplay. I don't want to get too into that yet because it's all very experimental at this stage, and will likely be influenced heavily by our community as well.

If you are interested in helping influence the development of this game, please join our Discord! It is the best way to communicate with us and provide feedback or bug reports.