Taking on quests and dealing with random events, you will end up engaging other ships in combat, having to employ their best tactics in order to out-manoeuvre and out-gun the enemy. The game focuses on “Age of Sail” ships in a Fantasy setting, framed in an Art Style inspired by classic Naval Oil Paintings.

Life on the seas is surviving on the edge; battles are hard fought, death is permanent and the world reacts to your actions. But you are the Captain; Ship destruction is not the end of your story. As long as the Captain is alive, there is always a way back to the top.

Abandon Ship is now available on Steam Early Access ($19.99 / £14.99) and has a main story mode lasting 8-10 hours that encapsulates exploration, combat and upgrading your ship., plus a separate replayable Combat Campaign.

We’ve tried to ensure the release is as stable and polished as we can, and ultimately we wanted to make sure that for people that play now, they can get several hours of fun, with high-quality production values. This was really important to us. We know that Early Access can have a bad reputation for buggy, clearly work-in-progress titles. We didn’t want to fall in that category, we wanted to fit into the “squint and it’s almost a finished game” category!

But that doesn’t mean we think we’re nearly done. There is so much more that can be added and refined to turn Abandon Ship into the best it can be. These include new content and systems, as well as improvements to what is already there.

Post Launch

Launching a game is an especially busy period. Even once we have released there will be a few weeks where we are fixing high priority bugs and implementing in-demand quality-of-life features.

While this is going on, we will be collating and assessing all of the player feedback and updating our plans. We have a good idea of what we’d like to do, comprised of our own plans plus reports from our pre-release playtesters, but we expect to refine these plans when the full community have access to the game.

Naturally, once this plan has taken shape we’ll keep the community updated with what we’re working towards.

Areas of Attention

Here are some of the things that we’re planning to tackle during Early Access. This comes with the usual caveats – development is a moving target and we may re-arrange priorities as we need to.

This is a non-exhaustive list in no particular order, so consider it a heads up of areas we want to work on:

• Expanding the gameplay of exploration mode. This is a big, on-going task that requires many new features and content.
• Making some of the player choices feed back into the game, so their decisions may come back to haunt (or help) them.
• Vast quantities of incidental events with varied gameplay
• Involved Side-Quests
• Unlocking more regions once those have sufficient unique islands, quests and gameplay modifiers implemented
• Improve boarding gameplay in combat
• AI improvements, including getting the AI to ram and board the player
• More weapons and upgrades. The Ship Section Upgrades in particular will receive a lot of expansion.
• More ship classes and more ship variety
• Offer the player more choice in how they can avert the negative-spiral that can occur when things go from bad to worse.
• Increase crew numbers, particularly on the larger ships.
• Improve Lifeboat and Stranded gameplay loop
• Saving & Loading Options. Permadeath will always be the primary way to play Abandon Ship, but we’ll offer saving systems that compliment this, as well as options for players that want greater flexibility in how they progress through the game.
• The rest of the main story
• Greater customisation options
• Steam Achievements, looking into Cloud Saves.
• More options for graphical settings and control key bindings.
• Balancing everything, but particularly ensuring that long-range combat is just as viable a tactic as close-quarters fighting.
• An on-going mission to bug fix, improve readability and add quality-of-life features across the entire game.
• Translations

I’ll be posting in more detail about some of the above in the Steam forums after release, so we can collate everyone’s thoughts.

Some updates will come in a hot-fix style. They’ll be updated directly onto the main version of the game. These will be released on an ad-hoc basis, and could involve one fix (if it’s important enough to get out there immediately) or multiple small changes.

We’ll hold back the big stuff for larger updates, the frequency of which we’ll talk about once we’ve done our planning. Because these will contain new content that will be seeded into the world, they will break your existing saves – but we’ll publicise when these are coming so you’ll have prior notice. You’ll also be able to hold off updating or go back to a previous version if you’re in the middle of a save game you’d like to finish.

These big updates will most likely be available prior to their official release in a separate branch of the game. This will effectively be the “bleeding edge” of the game where people can test the latest features, but will be a bit more unstable and rough round the edges until player feedback has helped us fix all of the issues that arise. For those that like to get involved with the development, this is where you’ll be able to make the biggest difference!

Abandon Ship Stories

One aspect we’d really like to try during Early Access is the concept of “Abandon Ship Stories” – we’ve already created a small-scale version of this with the Combat Campaign. This is a standalone game mode that focuses on combat and upgrading gameplay that takes about 30-45 minutes to play through. The story in this is separate from the main game.

We’d love to really expand on this concept with future large updates as it provides many benefits, both creatively and logistically.

Take, for example an update that unlocks a new region. This region could include the dreaded Spider Island, and have environmental modifiers that affect combat, and side-quests associated with this ominous place.

Some players will happily play through the main game to explore it, whereas the majority will likely want to jump in and immediately experience this new content.

That’s where an “Abandon Ship Story” would come in. We’d launch the update with a unique, standalone story accessible from the main menu that takes a couple of hours to play through and showcases all of the new features, so existing players can dive right in and get to the juicy new stuff.

We can have some fun with this format, too. Perhaps one story could have you as a Cultist rising up the ranks, getting a chance to control the Haliphron? Or how about unlocking the region called “The Haunted Seas” on the run up to Halloween?

We feel this is a good way to make being part of the Abandon Ship community continuously fun and exciting, as opposed to a traditional, dry “here is an update” format.

Key Features

• Tactical and Savage Combat. Each battle is hard-fought, always on the edge of defeat. Your only chance of overcoming the odds is to employ every advantage you can and utilise all the tools at your disposal.
• Ship Destruction is not the End. Life in the world of Abandon Ship can be brutal. Death is permanent. But the game doesn’t end if your vessel is destroyed. You are the Captain, and as long as the Captain is alive, there is always hope. By escaping to a Lifeboat, or even being stranded, alone in the water, there is still a chance to survive and fight your way back to the top.
• Explore a procedurally generated world from Tropics to Arctics. Engage in quests or deal with incidental events on your journey to save the world from a Doomsday Cult.
• A Personal Adventure. Customise and upgrade your Captain, Ship and Crew. Build yourself to be worthy of any foe, whether that be human or otherwise. But be prepared to make moment-to-moment life-or-death decisions for you and your crew.
• Take on adventures in a world that reacts to your actions. Quests may drastically change the environment. Make decisions that create friends or enemies that may later come back to help or hinder you.