Here are early preview screenshots of the Ancient Area of the game world. This area is a touristic attraction spot that the NPC customers would ask you (the player) to take them to. It represents only a fraction of the entire game world, which is composed of luxurious places as well as humble tropical villages.

First Part of this article is here. Here’s the second part of the post mortem of Days of Sail: Wind over Waters. Listing the things that didn’t work exactly as expected definitely has a more educational value for our readers. Hopefully you will find the analysis and insights reasonably sound and will be kind enough to share your own opinions.

Top 10 What Went Wrong

1. One man show: development, art and marketing.
Coming from a programming background, the developer easily failed to reach deadlines when it came to level design and concept art. Especially for a game like Days of Sail, the environment needed be entirely outdoors and a surface of 15,000 square meters should be designed on paper and then on the computer screen. The task to fill this area with natural elements was very time consuming. Admittedly, the level design ended up taking half of the entire development process.

2. Not as many levels as one would expect.
When it became evident that time was running out and that a release date should be, after all, announced, we started to limit the number of levels that would be included in the release version. The game was eventually released with 5 simulation levels and 4 races. This limitation ignited the most severe critics the game received up to date.

In the recent HGDA conference held in Greece at 9 and 10 of October, immersionFX Games was invited to participate and talk for its upcoming title, Days of Sail 2: Venture, and therefore I had to prepare a speech.

As it turned out, the presentation that was picked up was full of nostalgic references to our first title, Days of Sail: Wind over Waters but it also contained some, presumably, valuable points about what can go right and what can go wrong when making a game. So, to help all aspiring developers out there, I decided to publish a slightly altered version of the presentation here, in our blog. This is basically a post mortem of a title that was first introduced in the public on November 10th, 2006 and which required approximately two years of part-time work to complete, from start to finish.

A few more things to take into account:

• The development team was only one person, me. I was also responsible for the initial distribution of the game (mainly online), up until German retail publisher IceBytes came into play. The only part that was assigned to someone else was the music score.

• The time taken to grasp the development platform (Conitec’s Gamestudio) is included in the two years period I mentioned above.

• The game was a fairly successful title which made considerable online and retail sales.

So, without further ado, here’s a Top Ten list of what went right:

We’ve been swamped these past few weeks with a variety of things related to our new game - including a participation to a Game’s conference, held by HGDA - so we din’t have the time to write many blog posts lately. We’ve got quite a bit to write about in the months ahead - but in the meantime, I wanted to share the new website link that we have put up for the game:

http://www.immersionfx.com/aquaventure

Just a welcome page with a small eye-candy teaser for now, as the development is currently focusing on new and exciting gameplay issues and hopefully there’ll be a lot more to show in the months to come. The music track is a kind and generous offer from Levan Iordanishvili @ vel9studios.

Enjoy!

Some more screenshots of Aqua Venture are now publicly available for your viewing pleasure. You can see below two (out of three) of the available sailboats of the game. These boats will be available in the game’s “Career Mode”, where sailing will be combined with time management and selling/buying of goods. Each boat comes with its own advantages/disadvantages, like speed, number of passengers, maneuvering etc.