In the vain of Sid Meiers Pirates! here is my second alpha. You can plunder ships, run missions and rank up, buy new ships, upgrades, specialists, find hidden cities and cutthroat hideouts.

Oh and get your own estates once you hit the noble ranks! Not all ships and stuff are in the game yet but you can buy up to frigates.

Plz download and comment. Are the fights fun? Is the map confusing? Find all the controls (customizable) and "how to play" that explains all the basics from the ESC-menu ingame.

Download (60 MB no install, just unpack, works on windows only)
Plunder Horizon, Alpha 2 
 

Unfold the spoiler below to see more ingame screenshots.
More pics:

So noone tried it yet out of 350 visits? I really would appriciate some feedback!

Even if you run it only for a while, try some ship combat, map travels and city interaction. You dont have to level through the entire game obviously...

First, great game. I liked the sailing. After dying a few times I switched to easy but switched right back when I noticed the sailing was easier.

My biggest complaint is the small graphics. It hurts my eyes to play the game, the ship on the map wasn't even 64 pixels big. The word "64 Pixels" on this forum is bigger than the ship.

It's not only how small the graphics is but how much you are cramping these things together. The opening text when making choices looked like a wall of text and I skipped it at first. Only when I was getting into it did I read it and realize it was two sentences squished into 2% of screen space.

Yes it really is only 2%:

Yes I realize I can reduce the resolution then select full screen. I tried that, the problem is that it only allows me to got down to: 1360*768 that is less than 1.4 improvement. Meaning the text now uses a little over 3% space but is blurry now. This is on my old PC (1900*600); It should be even worse on my newer screen(1920*1080).

The small graphics even allowed me to find a bug - that I discovered while trying to reach a port- when the message for exploring pops up, I can click on a ship at the same time. This creates one of a few bugs. One allows me to engage natives advancing time and then pausing after when the other ship is far away, allowing me to attack it when it is nowhere near me.

The other message tells me there is nothing, then allows me to move around freely while the other ship is still selected. Allowing me to attack it when ever I feel like it. The message sticks; I can even go into port and repair before attacking it. If I select a other ship it all goes back to normal. Even attack from the port.

The game is really good. With a lot more to do than I was expecting.

I love the idea of stocking up to go on long exploring missions. Combat was super fun, especially after a smart ship noticed it was loosing and boarded me, I barely won that fight. Picking between food, wages ,and the crew is a very strategic choice. The ports have a lot of content.

I really like the game and the only problem I had is the small graphics.

Thanks for the feedback so far guys! Great stuff

@suliman do you have a blog post or something for the game? Usehally it is at this amount of progress that you should look into building a community for the game.

This game is a lot of fun and I bet with a simple blog and some marketing you could build a decent amount of support for it.

Uploaded alpha 2! (updated link in first post).

Larger units, fixed bugs, interface, loading screen, more starting goods and doubloons and some other stuff! Get plundering my harties!

@Scouting Ninja : Did you find the font too small in general? I have enlarged it before but not sure if needed further. About blog, I dont want to bother with that right now but maybe some time!

It looks very good congrats! :)

I also agree you should do some blog posts on it to get more feedback, and it would also be interesting for us to read. I found it very difficult (as someone who has played pirates years ago), and couldn't seem to get into profit very easily.

I agree with the size of the icons etc, I'd bump that up. I also found the icons for the cargo very hard to see, having dark icons with a dark background isn't good, so I would at the least change the blackish background to e.g. white so they stand out more, and maybe I'd change the colours a bit to be more obvious.

One thing I would say is the artwork looked very good (and sound), however I did a reverse image search for a few of the images in the 'photo' folder and quickly found them on google .. the photo of the sailor looking through eyeglass appeared to be from the tv show 'black sails', and I found some of the others used elsewhere (assassin's creed, dungeons & dragons etc). The others may be stock photos you have licensed but if not they should only be used for placeholder, make sure you are fully licensed up for a release, it is not worth the risk imo.

On that front, if they are placeholder, the microstock photo sites might be good for finding legit pirate photos (istockphoto, shutterstock etc) for a dollar or so each.  Also creative commons stuff can be good for photos / music / sound as it often only needs a line in the credits.