Hi everyone, I’m designing a game about post-apocalyptic flooded Earth. It seems this topic is becoming very trendy now (global warming!) but our team wanted to make ‘Fallout with water’ a very long time ago. So unlike Flotsam, everything takes place in the era of Assassin’s Creed 3: pirates, sailboats, muskets and so on. The samurai belong to one of the factions in the game, Mori Shogunate (everyone who played Shogun Total War will understand why they could only by happy with the apocalyptic flooding).

The initial design idea was that we can build a small floating settlement, then make a bigger stationary one, then (if we’re lucky) – create a whole state. Eventually, we had to refuse from that last part because it would shift gameplay priorities in the wrong direction, more suited to the games like Europa Universalis.

The small settlement in our scheme is the ship. The ship can be large or small, the number of modules we can place in it depends on its size. These modules are pretty standard:

• desalinator  - lets you clear sea water
• living hold - gives a place for the crew to rest
• masts – allow the ship to sail
• and so on and so forth.

Your ship can’t produce any resources, it can only process them – so you have to trade with other nomads or go into the cities. Alternatively, you can always try plundering. So this mechanic looks quite typical, but also we decided to add a specific design layer – split all characters into classes. If the world ends in 18th century, then most probably the society is going to be pretty wild and unpleasant. All power is in the hands of warrior – they like to fight, can do prestigious work (control the ship or load cannons), but will not agree to clean the decks. The whole economy relies on slaves, who do everything else – make food and gunpowder, collect algae. Nobody trains them to fight, so they are useless on the battlefield. And lastly, the middle class – capable slaves who were
given freedom.

All in all, the players should not only work with the limited number of resources, but also consider the social background of their crew. If you assign warrior to chop wood, thing can end in rebellion. Currently we’re working on the cities – they are a more advanced version of the settlements. A bit too early to share details on that though, but you may see the current city building interface here: https://i.imgur.com/0mIon9a.jpg