Sunless Sea - Kickstarted! From the creators of Fallen London

Sunless Sea

Navigate, survive, explore! Roam a vast underground ocean in a customised steamship. Trade with strange new lands. Battle sea monsters. Smuggle souls. Seduce your crew. Go mad and hallucinate lizards.

I had been keeping an eye on this ever since the kickstarter last fall and today I received a email , this game will be on available via Early Access on June 17th. The game is up for pre-order via the Humble store HERE , at 15% off.

Website:
http://sunlessseagame.com/

Steam Greenlight Page:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=235256256

Trailer:

Kickstarter from last year:

Tom mentioned it on the front page back in July 2013:
http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/07/30/ten-things-you-should-know-about-sunless-sea/

I’ve played a little. It’s really cool. Reminds me of Fallen London meets Pirates and FTL

There’s an island or something named after me in the game!

I think I might really enjoy this game…

When they get around to putting it on the appropriate platform (iOS/Android) as a tablet app.

Why is it that folks are still developing all these indie, relatively minimal requirement games on PC first. The PC is for AAA blockbuster graphic spectaculars that need a mouse or joystick(gamepad) to play and a full blown quad core processor to run. Stuff like this seems exactly like what a tablet should be for (or, if you want it on a big screen, an android/iOS based console box that throws it on the screen like Amazon’s FireTV or Apples’… err… get with the program here Apple!)

SO UNTRUE.

Think we had some talk going on in the Kickstarter thread about this, but it’s good that it has its own thread now. I have dipped my toes in the water, so to speak, of the beta release and it’s been fun. I really enjoy the Fallen London world and it’s nice to have a little more exploration to do, plus it’s always great to have your own ship to crew. Looking forward to the final release. Now that I think about it, my name is in there on something too - can’t wait to find it, whatever it is!

To expand, the problem with mouselock’s assumptions are that the mobile market isn’t open to games that simply play well on a mobile platform. Getting noticed on a mobile app store is a huge hurdle for any game, especially an underdog indie.

Fair enough, and I understand the difficulty.

On the other hand, I don’t give a fuck as a consumer. The question comes down to “Can you get noticed enough on the app store to leverage a huge market” vs. “Can you be compelling enough to make people sit behind that PC on their desk that’s getting less and less appealing every year.”

At some point the convergence of “People aren’t buying new PCs” with “It’s hard to get noticed on the app store” will serve to make the former more important than the latter. For me, that day is more or less today: If I’m going to go park myself in a physically different location to play games, it’s not going to be a casual time waster but a big, meaty, juicy explosion type of game. Probably also something with multiplayer.

It’s not like Steam is a whole lot less crowded than the iOS App store anyway. I wouldn’t have interest in this game if folks weren’t posting about it here, and when they are who cares if it’s on iOS or a PC?

My ipad is out of room - so me. I’ve stopped buying games altogether on iOS.

To back that up, note that more games have been released on Steam in 2014 so far than all of last year.

“You have a lot of games hitting the store that are… meh,” he answers. “They may have been greenlit, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be any good or that they’ll actually succeed when people are asked to pony up $10-30 for it.”

“I feel like we’re already approaching iOS App Store-like saturation on Steam,” he adds. “Sure, it’s not quite as bad, but it’s heading in that direction, and we’re also starting to see some of the issues that mobile devs and marketers face, like low pricing, difficulty standing out, etc.”

Umm… not sure what your point is here. The incremental cost of additional storage on PC is a huge factor in whether or not you’ll download a new, pseudo-casual game on PC or iOS?

(That seems like a reasonable concern, but I’m not sure how pressing it is. I guess it depends if you bought a 16GB iPad 2 or a 128GB iPad Air, which is more to say ‘What does it cost to own a competent PC replacement tablet vs. the PC itself’?)

There are some of us who abhor gaming on mobile devices. Input on my iPad and iPhone are horrendously inaccurate and they tend to cramp my hands if I try doing anything on them for more than 5 minutes at a time. I hate the shift to mobile, which has in fact kept me from backing some projects.

I can’t imagine wanting to play a game on tablet over playing it on PC. Certain things that deal with the horrifying inadequacy of touch controls well might be okay as an interim gaming solution for travel (though my 3DS and Vita are far more capable in that role), but there is simply no comparison once I get home. I haven’t touched an iOS game in months. I have only backed Kickstarters for mobile primary games that also promised a PC version, and even then unenthusiastically (I still don’t have PC versions of any of them). I would have been really heartbroken if Sunless Sea had gone that route and I can’t imagine they would have gotten much traction, especially as their fanbase is primarily PC-based.

You just literally can’t imagine it? Not at all?

Me wanting to? Nope. Not at all. I understand that other people have structured their lives differently and sometimes that means other platforms make more sense for them despite their glaring flaws.

We had such a nice thread for a brief, shining moment. Maybe someone could make a platform war thread so I never have to click on it.

So you’d rather play 2048 or Candy Crush Saga on PC instead of on the mobile platforms?

Sorry. My point was really just that this seems the type of lightly involving game that would make me want to play more games on my tablet, and it’s a shame it doesn’t exist on there. :(

Fake double edit: I am still playing Fallen London on mostly a daily basis and lurve it. Getting to play this as a stand-alone, non-time limited experience is going to be awesome.

Although the question wasn’t asked of me, I can provide the answer: While there are games that I can play on mobile platforms, there isn’t a single game I would rather play on a mobile platform. The iPhone/Note2/iPad for me are poor substitutions as gaming platforms. The flipside of that for me is I would prefer to read books on those devices as opposed to the PC. I generally prefer actual books these days, really but of the two platforms, mobile for me is much better in that space.

I am sure there are whole generations now in the last 7 years that missed the desktop as the primary gaming vehicle and couldn’t imagine my point of view, either, but thankfully, they aren’t me and I ain’t them.

Edit: I guess my experience with all of the above mobiles is transient; those devices occupy the interactive computing space between times at my desktop. I can’t imagine playing something on a tablet for any real length of time, though, ergonomically.

Look on the bright side, they’re toying with a Linux port. Maybe they’ll move to Android and/or iOS if the game is popular.

Probably? I have less than zero interest in either of those games, though.

What it would take to get me to want to play a game specifically on mobile would be a game that delivered an experience that a) takes unique advantage of touch (and only touch) controls, preferably while also requiring other aspects of the mobile platform and somehow managing to make the touch controls not flaky, inaccurate, and painfully obtuse, and b) that appeals to my tastes in gaming. I’ve seen very few if any games that meet criterion A (as far as I can tell, anyway), and none of those games met criterion B.

Anyway. Sunless Sea is a game I’m very much looking forward to. I so far haven’t tried the beta though I do have access, because I am mostly with Tom on it being better to wait for final releases, but I am definitely tempted, and very much looking forward to that release.