Windward News

Just a little over a year ago Windward launched on Steam Early Access. What did I do to celebrate, you may ask? Why, I was completely absorbed working on the then-upcoming Fall update to even notice. Shame on me!

Well, no matter! Now all of you guys can celebrate by feasting on the changes brought forth by the now-live update including new ships, improvements in questing / trading, adjustable amount of pirate towns, ship stat rebalancing, changes to how ships are unlocked, and more importantly -- a great deal of modding improvements.

Ship customization has reached a new level with the addition of support for colored symbols and customizable pennants. Server admins can upload an assortment of custom symbols and pennants using the new /upload command making truly custom looking factions or creating custom rewards for players via the /createSymbol and /createPennant commands.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=540057846
Better yet, it's now possible to upload entire new ships, easily making them a part of the game without requiring your players to download any mods. Those willing can even replace all existing ships with custom ones set in a completely different era.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=537065620
Those were quite fun, by the way!

If modding is to your liking, definitely check out this update and watch the step-by-step video that shows exactly how to add custom content to Windward.

Git to da choppa!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE40pLt1VLw
As usual, the full patch notes can be found on Google Docs.

If you have a powerful Android device such as NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet or console, you can now take Windward with you wherever you go. Better yet, since it's the same game code, you can use your tablet to play cross-platform with your friends on PC, Mac and Linux! If you are unsure if your mobile device is up to the task, you can check the PassMark benchmark to see where it ranks, but keep in mind that it's truly meant for the NVIDIA SHIELD Console, so your experience may vary!

Speaking of mobile games, two years ago I launched a fairly simple co-op multiplayer strategy game called Starlink on Android. You can also play it freely in your web browser here. I have been thinking of spending some time updating it to Windward's much more stable net code, adding achievements and the ability to create custom maps, then releasing it on Steam. Do you think adding another co-op multiplayer game to your Steam library may be worth pursuing? Let me know in the comments below.

-ArenMook

The crazy rush of the release is finally behind me, and now I get to look back on the whole experience and wonder how I lived through it. I can see it now... telling my kids years from now, "ARR! Back in my day we used to release indie games and sleep maybe a combined of 10 hours in the first week! Uphill! Both ways!" Which... honestly wouldn't be far from the truth.

There are times when being a lone developer of a project like Windward is a great blessing that makes me giddy with the thought of how clever I am not having to deal with a corporate structure and anyone breathing down my neck. I know how everything works, so I know what to do in order to fix something or add a new feature in the shortest amount of time possible. Then there are times, like actually releasing the game, when I wish I could clone myself a few times over; the times like when I just put up a patch and hundreds of people suddenly ran into a problem that simply didn't exist when I tested everything. I am left running around panicking and frantically trying to track down the cause of the issue and fix it in the shortest amount of time possible without going insane from being awake for over 30 hours straight. On that note, have you ever tried to lose weight? I recommend releasing a game. I lost 8% of my body weight in the first week simply because I didn't have time to eat!

So yes -- fun times!

Well, let's get down to some numbers. The first week of release has seen a concurrent peak of nearly 3500 players, with roughly 15% of them playing online on public servers. One of those servers that had a peak of maybe 25 players throughout all of beta and was deemed "rock-solid" quickly stated having issues once the number of connected players passed the 200 mark, leading me to spending the first few days almost exclusively focused on fixing the server stability. Fortunately that went over well, and by the end of the weekend there were over 300 players connected to the server -- which happened to be running on my own computer. In my home. With a typical household cable modem connection.

Needless to say, I blew through my 500 GB monthly bandwidth cap in about 3 days.

Well, no matter! There were more important things to worry about, like discovering that most players who played online seemed to prefer to play it as an MMO on one densely populated server, rather than spreading out like I thought would happen. Now keep in mind, the game was designed to be a co-op game for LAN parties, ideally meant to be played in groups of 2 to 12 players. I never expected that I would have over 300 of them on the same server; dozens of them in the same regions. In fact, one of the first few days of release there was a Heroic Instance running with over 50 players in it, which was using twice as much bandwidth than the rest of the 200-or-so players combined. Needless to say, player limits were one of the first changes I had to quickly implement.

Another thing that quickly became obvious was that the server back-end was really lacking important administration features -- banning trouble-makers in particular. Yet another thing I had to scramble to implement in the first few days, keeping me away from the one feature that has been bothering me since the first day -- the chat window's lack of scrollable history. With everything else going on I didn't get to implement that one until the second week...

Fortunately as the influx of players started going down, I was able to relax a little and work on features that I felt were missing from release. Among them were the ability to design your own factions, create much larger world maps, and even the most recent one -- the addition of PvP battleground instances.

Hell, I was even able to get a proper night's sleep -- all 9 hours of it for the first time in weeks! Ahh... let's never do this again. Next time -- clones. I swear.

For a full list of patch notes, click here. The patch notes since release are the first 9 pages. Not bad for 3.5 weeks!

See you on the high seas!
-ArenMook

Windward is Now Available on Steam and is 15% off!*

Windward is an action-filled sandbox game that puts you in control of a ship sailing the high seas of a large procedurally-generated world.

*Offer ends May 19 at 10AM Pacific Time

Terrible puns aside, Windward has reached a major milestone today, officially leaving Early Access and hitting version 1.0! ARR!!

Getting to this day has certainly been one interesting experience... From the day Windward was conceptualized as more of a jest at GDC 2012 when I walked up to a certain legendary game designer and asked him a mischievous question to today, it certainly hasn't been a straight run by any means. Some of you may be aware that Windward was actually started in 2012, only to be put on hold due to various reasons. Between the success of a small side project of mine (NGUI) and me joining Unity Technologies for a year I had no time left for poor ol' Windward. Back then it seemed that the game was going to become just another one of my started but unfinished projects that would sit on the back burner and haunt the deep blue depths of my dreams until the end of days...

Well, thankfully that quite obviously didn't come to pass! On the 1st of August in 2014 I simply woke up and decided that it was time to start finishing the things I left undone, and I sat down and looked at Windward's code again. I could continue where I left off... but the 2012 version of the game felt too static to me; too rigid... I wanted something more -- something epic and procedurally generated. I also had to completely redo networking part of it anyway, so scrap it I did.

It only took a few months to redo the game and turn it into a moderately fun playable state, and so Windward launched on Steam Early Access in October last year. The feedback I got from early players reinforced my idea that I was on the right track this time, but also that I still had a lot of work ahead of me. I originally thought that Windward would only need 1 to 2 months in Early Access, if you can believe it. Well, that quite obviously turned out to be very wrong, as here we are 6 months later! Lesson learned... don't make any plans until you get players involved and hear their feedback!

Speaking of feedback -- the feedback I got during Early Access have all been truly invaluable in the game's development. Had I not gotten the comments, suggestions, bug reports and in general just other players to play with throughout the beta process, Windward would be but a shadow of the game it is today.

And so from me to all the beta players: Thank You! You guys are awesome. Enjoy the game, and please continue to offer your feedback!

See you on the high seas,
- Michael "ArenMook" Lyashenko

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhASte-REy4