Hi everyone,

Time has come for us to share what we've been working on since the last status update.

Firstly, boarding locations seem to be complete. While we were working on the scenes with the battleship, we had some ideas on how we could improve the whole boarding process, but in the end decided to hold off implementing until later development stages. Battleships were the most powerful means of destruction in XVII century, really huge ships. Adding them into the game took us some time. Anyway, we really hope you'll like this ship.

Next, the old global map is no more, and the new one is in the works. It's a bit hard to read at the moment, but the world should get prettier soon. If you remember, initially we wanted to include not only local tribes, but Brazilian colonies, Maia's and Apache Indians' towns, even cities of New England as well. This idea proved to be too ambitious, so instead we decided to focus entirely on the Caribbean region, territories of Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and other states have been taken out from the game.



The new troops hiring system is now finished. Our main goal was to distance it from the system familiar to you by M&B games. Now the troops aren't hired with a series of questions and answers ("How many Spanish musketeers would you like?" - "I would like 5 Spanish musketeers"), it's now done with the system of icons and sliders. It's working very similar to the current trading screen.



Finally, we began working on the new quest system. Quests have been untied from the dialogues and lords. To be honest, dialogues in M&B sometimes seemed quite routine to us — especially when a lord that assigned a quest, decided to go to war, then lose it and be jailed for a couple of weeks. Now quests are assigned by cities and factions in a single quest panel.

Plans for the following month:

- Making more quests (possibly some special ones with smuggling involved);
- New rank system to replace the current one;
- Adding trading renown - as we mentioned, we'd like to make trading and business a full-fledged activity for roleplaying;
- Finishing the global map and the new version of the city screen, which we'll show you in a separate post once we have some pretty screenshots on hand.

Also please be sure to 'like' our little Facebook 'Caribbean!' page if you want to stay up-to-date with the game's news at that place and if that's your thing. Thanks!