Blood and Gold: Caribbean! News

Hi everyone,

Today we'd like to announce this "farewell project" we mentioned briefly here not so long ago.

The project was developed by a young team from Omsk (Russia), called ORGS Studio. Some time ago, these guys approached us with a simple, yet intriguing idea — what if we turn "Caribbean" into its own post-apocalyptic world filled with constant danger, psychos and zombies? And we thought to ourselves — why not?

The idea resulted in this game, the full title of which sounds like this (inhale) — The Zombiest Adventures In The Perverted Age of Enlightenment With a Pinch of Woodpunk.



What would happen of zombie apocalypse occurred in 1650? The world now consists only of the settlements of the few surviving colonizers of America, band of marauders, the risen Aztec empire and wild hordes of the living dead.

Controlling a small group of survivors, you will have to do road robbery, hunting for gunpowder and constant search for food. As a bonus, you can also fly in an air balloon and shoot mobs of ghouls with a machine gun-musket.

Features:

• Survival and moral choice — hunger is able to kill off the player and his group in a week. Continuous search for food will inevitably face the player before tough moral questions. When it’s about surviving, is there any place for good and evil?
  
• Global threat and dynamic world — the zombie invasion isn’t static, it’s ongoing. If the player is not active enough, the world will see its end.
  
• Insane world — eighteenth century met with zombies and spawned crazy factions: neo-Aztecs, ultra-Catholics, psycho circus actors and marauding gangs will decide who’s most raving mad of them all.
  

Watch our trailer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdbGFVUWhko

The game comes out very soon — on this Wednesday 26th!

UPDATE: Not so soon actually, sorry! The release date's been moved to Friday 28th — see you then!

New team would like to give an update on the upcoming patch for Blood & Gold: Caribbean!

At the moment we're working on the update 2.070, which should be coming next week. We've looked through the most common problems players have with the game and want to offer our solution to them.

The update's going to include the following:

1) Troops staying in the air after the fortress walls they were on are destroyed. The bug is caused by Warband's engine inability to take building destruction into account, especially with people standing on it.
2) Fix for the error in troops number in your army, caused by incorrect calculating of the character's talents.
3) One of the main issues — pre-written economy conditions. We think it wasn't a good decision design-wise. In the upcoming update we're going to add a randomly generated system for natural resources. In addition, the welfare if cities will also be randomly generated from the start. Thus, players will have a new economic reality with each new game.
4) Fixes for the "Peddler" and "Entrepreneur" traits.
5) If a player managed to create a large business empire, his city list couldn't fit in the game's screen. This is fixed now.
6) Optimization — as we mentioned before, texture quality was excessive for a project based in this engine. This often led to game freezes on some systems. We'll do our best to make the textures more optimized and get rid of frequent crashes and freezes.
7) Finally, the achievements, which were promised earlier by the former team. As you could probably notice, the achievements are already finished and can be seen in Steam.

*UPDATE*: The update will become available this Friday, 28th.

New team would like to give an update on the upcoming patch for Blood & Gold: Caribbean!

At the moment we're working on the update 2.070, which should be coming next week. We've looked through the most common problems players have with the game and want to offer our solution to them.

The update's going to include the following:

1) Troops staying in the air after the fortress walls they were on are destroyed. The bug is caused by Warband's engine inability to take building destruction into account, especially with people standing on it.
2) Fix for the error in troops number in your army, caused by incorrect calculating of the character's talents.
3) One of the main issues — pre-written economy conditions. We think it wasn't a good decision design-wise. In the upcoming update we're going to add a randomly generated system for natural resources. In addition, the welfare if cities will also be randomly generated from the start. Thus, players will have a new economic reality with each new game.
4) Fixes for the "Peddler" and "Entrepreneur" traits.
5) If a player managed to create a large business empire, his city list couldn't fit in the game's screen. This is fixed now.
6) Optimization — as we mentioned before, texture quality was excessive for a project based in this engine. This often led to game freezes on some systems. We'll do our best to make the textures more optimized and get rid of frequent crashes and freezes.
7) Finally, the achievements, which were promised earlier by the former team. As you could probably notice, the achievements are already finished and can be seen in Steam.

*UPDATE*: The update will become available this Friday, 28th.

Hello,

New administration has completed revising of the Blood & Gold: Caribbean! project, the results are below.

First of all, we investigated the whole development's roadmap. It's worth noting that the team behind relaunching of the project (Blood & Gold) did fulfill their promises.

Here's the list of what's been done:

- City locations for different factions
- Natives faction
- New captivity system and multiple ways of escaping
- Caravan trading
- Smuggle trading
- Criminal missions
- Underground horse races
- Storyline
- Multiplayer
- New system of controlling player's faction
- Card game
- Brothel system - including protection tacker, diplomatic options etc.
- Naval sieges

In in its current state the game should be considered feature complete. On the other hand, feedback from users is not positive enough and they may disagree with this statement.

We've taken this situation into account, our analysis has shown the following reasons for that:

- Incompatibility between the engine and the visual ambition. Models and especially textures were created with an excessive quality, that Warband engine had trouble supporting adequately.

- Too much of in-game content. The game takes up to 2.25 GB of RAM, which is too much for its stable work and can cause constant crashes on lower-end PCs.

- Lack of focus. The game tries to be a tactical simulator, an economic strategy game, an adventure, an action RPG and a naval battle simulator all at the same time. As a result, players looking for more ships in naval battles and those players who're looking out for economy and trading in this game will be equally unsatisfied.

- Incorrect promotion. The game is not part Mount & Blade series, but tried to attract its audience. The difference in interface, balance and the setting frustrated the players who wanted the things as they were before.

We came to the following conclusions:

- The new administration has factually no complaints against the old development team. A very complicated and content-heavy project was based on the outdated technology. The problem in this case lies with the management who took decision regarding the game's concept and its engine.

- Further development of the game on its current engine is not possible. Adding even a little portion of content (like a new ship) would lead to complete instability of the application. The game could only be worked on without having any new content added into it. But even in that case, with years, the game's code turned into a mess after many different programmers got their hands on it. Things such as code optimization and refactoring would require many months of work.

Snowbird Games investor can offer players the following:

- A brand new project about naval battle, based on a newer engine. New team is already doing some experiments with Unreal Engine 4.

- A farewell project based on Warband/Caribbean technology. This is a small spin-off game that will be available at a very affordable price. The project is being developed by a third party team, ORGS Studio.

- Next week, Blood & Gold players can expect a new update which would include the promised achievements, as well as fixes for some gameplay bugs (like troops hovering in the air after the walls are destroyed).

Hello,

New administration has completed revising of the Blood & Gold: Caribbean! project, the results are below.

First of all, we investigated the whole development's roadmap. It's worth noting that the team behind relaunching of the project (Blood & Gold) did fulfill their promises.

Here's the list of what's been done:

- City locations for different factions
- Natives faction
- New captivity system and multiple ways of escaping
- Caravan trading
- Smuggle trading
- Criminal missions
- Underground horse races
- Storyline
- Multiplayer
- New system of controlling player's faction
- Card game
- Brothel system - including protection tacker, diplomatic options etc.
- Naval sieges

In in its current state the game should be considered feature complete. On the other hand, feedback from users is not positive enough and they may disagree with this statement.

We've taken this situation into account, our analysis has shown the following reasons for that:

- Incompatibility between the engine and the visual ambition. Models and especially textures were created with an excessive quality, that Warband engine had trouble supporting adequately.

- Too much of in-game content. The game takes up to 2.25 GB of RAM, which is too much for its stable work and can cause constant crashes on lower-end PCs.

- Lack of focus. The game tries to be a tactical simulator, an economic strategy game, an adventure, an action RPG and a naval battle simulator all at the same time. As a result, players looking for more ships in naval battles and those players who're looking out for economy and trading in this game will be equally unsatisfied.

- Incorrect promotion. The game is not part Mount & Blade series, but tried to attract its audience. The difference in interface, balance and the setting frustrated the players who wanted the things as they were before.

We came to the following conclusions:

- The new administration has factually no complaints against the old development team. A very complicated and content-heavy project was based on the outdated technology. The problem in this case lies with the management who took decision regarding the game's concept and its engine.

- Further development of the game on its current engine is not possible. Adding even a little portion of content (like a new ship) would lead to complete instability of the application. The game could only be worked on without having any new content added into it. But even in that case, with years, the game's code turned into a mess after many different programmers got their hands on it. Things such as code optimization and refactoring would require many months of work.

Snowbird Games investor can offer players the following:

- A brand new project about naval battle, based on a newer engine. New team is already doing some experiments with Unreal Engine 4.

- A farewell project based on Warband/Caribbean technology. This is a small spin-off game that will be available at a very affordable price. The project is being developed by a third party team, ORGS Studio.

- Next week, Blood & Gold players can expect a new update which would include the promised achievements, as well as fixes for some gameplay bugs (like troops hovering in the air after the walls are destroyed).