Today we'd like to announce this "farewell project" we mentioned briefly here not so long ago.
The project was developed by a young team from Omsk (Russia), called ORGS Studio. Some time ago, these guys approached us with a simple, yet intriguing idea — what if we turn "Caribbean" into its own post-apocalyptic world filled with constant danger, psychos and zombies? And we thought to ourselves — why not?
The idea resulted in this game, the full title of which sounds like this (inhale) — The Zombiest Adventures In The Perverted Age of Enlightenment With a Pinch of Woodpunk.
What would happen of zombie apocalypse occurred in 1650? The world now consists only of the settlements of the few surviving colonizers of America, band of marauders, the risen Aztec empire and wild hordes of the living dead.
Controlling a small group of survivors, you will have to do road robbery, hunting for gunpowder and constant search for food. As a bonus, you can also fly in an air balloon and shoot mobs of ghouls with a machine gun-musket.
Features:
Watch our trailer here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdbGFVUWhko
The game comes out very soon — on this Wednesday 26th!
UPDATE: Not so soon actually, sorry! The release date's been moved to Friday 28th — see you then!
New update status
New team would like to give an update on the upcoming patch for Blood & Gold: Caribbean!
At the moment we're working on the update 2.070, which should be coming next week. We've looked through the most common problems players have with the game and want to offer our solution to them.
The update's going to include the following:
1) Troops staying in the air after the fortress walls they were on are destroyed. The bug is caused by Warband's engine inability to take building destruction into account, especially with people standing on it.
2) Fix for the error in troops number in your army, caused by incorrect calculating of the character's talents.
3) One of the main issues — pre-written economy conditions. We think it wasn't a good decision design-wise. In the upcoming update we're going to add a randomly generated system for natural resources. In addition, the welfare if cities will also be randomly generated from the start. Thus, players will have a new economic reality with each new game.
4) Fixes for the "Peddler" and "Entrepreneur" traits.
5) If a player managed to create a large business empire, his city list couldn't fit in the game's screen. This is fixed now.
6) Optimization — as we mentioned before, texture quality was excessive for a project based in this engine. This often led to game freezes on some systems. We'll do our best to make the textures more optimized and get rid of frequent crashes and freezes.
7) Finally, the achievements, which were promised earlier by the former team. As you could probably notice, the achievements are already finished and can be seen in Steam.
*UPDATE*: The update will become available this Friday, 28th.
Blood & Gold plans and revision
Hello,
New administration has completed revising of the Blood & Gold: Caribbean! project, the results are below.
First of all, we investigated the whole development's roadmap. It's worth noting that the team behind relaunching of the project (Blood & Gold) did fulfill their promises.
Here's the list of what's been done:
- City locations for different factions
- Natives faction
- New captivity system and multiple ways of escaping
- Caravan trading
- Smuggle trading
- Criminal missions
- Underground horse races
- Storyline
- Multiplayer
- New system of controlling player's faction
- Card game
- Brothel system - including protection tacker, diplomatic options etc.
- Naval sieges
In in its current state the game should be considered feature complete. On the other hand, feedback from users is not positive enough and they may disagree with this statement.
We've taken this situation into account, our analysis has shown the following reasons for that:
- Incompatibility between the engine and the visual ambition. Models and especially textures were created with an excessive quality, that Warband engine had trouble supporting adequately.
- Too much of in-game content. The game takes up to 2.25 GB of RAM, which is too much for its stable work and can cause constant crashes on lower-end PCs.
- Lack of focus. The game tries to be a tactical simulator, an economic strategy game, an adventure, an action RPG and a naval battle simulator all at the same time. As a result, players looking for more ships in naval battles and those players who're looking out for economy and trading in this game will be equally unsatisfied.
- Incorrect promotion. The game is not part Mount & Blade series, but tried to attract its audience. The difference in interface, balance and the setting frustrated the players who wanted the things as they were before.
We came to the following conclusions:
- The new administration has factually no complaints against the old development team. A very complicated and content-heavy project was based on the outdated technology. The problem in this case lies with the management who took decision regarding the game's concept and its engine.
- Further development of the game on its current engine is not possible. Adding even a little portion of content (like a new ship) would lead to complete instability of the application. The game could only be worked on without having any new content added into it. But even in that case, with years, the game's code turned into a mess after many different programmers got their hands on it. Things such as code optimization and refactoring would require many months of work.
Snowbird Games investor can offer players the following:
- A brand new project about naval battle, based on a newer engine. New team is already doing some experiments with Unreal Engine 4.
- A farewell project based on Warband/Caribbean technology. This is a small spin-off game that will be available at a very affordable price. The project is being developed by a third party team, ORGS Studio.
- Next week, Blood & Gold players can expect a new update which would include the promised achievements, as well as fixes for some gameplay bugs (like troops hovering in the air after the walls are destroyed).
Studio status update
This is an update from the new Snowbird Games administration.
This week, main investor of Snowbird Games studio took decision to dismiss the development team. Reasons for this being the unsatisfactory results of Eador. Imperium, as well as the slow development rates of Blood & Gold: Caribbean! — two primary projects of the studio. Right at the start of 2017 the investor did an independent code examination and had a talk with developers. As a result, it was decided to let go of the people behind both of these projects and invite new specialists.
New administration is not yet ready to announce its immediate plans on further development. It is also unclear whether the Snowbird Games brand itself will be preserved. At the moment people from the renewed team are preparing their own feedback on Eador and Blood & Gold. After agreeing on what's the next step should be with administration, new plans will be posted in this blog, as well as in Steam community hubs of both projects. This blog will be kept as means of communication with the audience for the time being. New information should be provided during the next week.
http://snowbirdgames.com/blog/?p=2660
Farewell from Snowbird Games
Hi everyone,
Today we’ve got probably not the most exciting announcement for you, but nevertheless — a very important one.
It doesn’t take much to see that with Eador. Imperium, our latest project, we faced an unusual amount of negative feedback. Much of that is justified — the troubled development of Imperium for the past year took far more time than needed, and the end result, understandably, didn’t really meet expectations of our players. Even taking technical difficulties of the engine behind Eador into account, it’s pretty clear — we could’ve done much better, something’s just not working out.
As it is, tough times call for tough decisions: the investor group which took part in forming Snowbird Games has decided to let most of the team go.
So for us it's the last chance to properly say goodbye. On the behalf of the people leaving Snowbird Games — thank you, everybody!
However you decide to look at it, it’s been a real journey for us. We love Eador and love Blood & Gold. All the work that went into both of these projects by our tiny team was 100% sincere and passionate. You can be absolutely sure of that.
But, when it’s clear it’s time to move on, it’s best not to hesitate. Best of luck to the renewed team. And see you around!
Pirate Bundle
Hi everyone,
Historically, gamers from CIS region always had a special type of appreciation for games that featured pirates. We're not quite sure how that ended up to be the case, but it is a well-known fact!
Some of these people went on to make games with ships and pirates, and now some of those can be found in one handy bundle called "Pirates Unite!".
Tempest by HeroCraft, Sea Dogs: To Each His Own by Akella and yours truly, Blood & Gold can now be purchased altogether with a special bundle discount.
Look for your pirate games no more!
What is there to achieve?
Hi everyone,
Finally, the technology is here!
With the new upcoming update you can expect the long awaited achievements to appear in Blood & Gold.
While we do have achievement ideas of our own, we thought it'd be also fun to try and ask the players themselves — what would you like to achieve in Blood & Gold?
Was there something you always wanted to do, but lacked enough motivation to get down to it? Let your creativity run wild and see what you can come up with!
Please leave your achievement ideas in the comments. We'll pick the most interesting ones and do our best to integrate them into the game.
Thanks!
Blood & Gold & Zombies
Hi everyone,
If you happen to be a fan of both pirates and zombies, today is your lucky day.
Because today's update for Blood & Gold is featuring the spooky scary Halloween event called, you guessed it, Blood & Gold & Zombies.
For a limited time, during the Steam's Halloween Sale only, Blood & Gold offers a unique zombie flavored experience in the Caribbean: travel the sea with your fellow dead men and uncover the mystery behind Baron Samedi.
Launch the game, accept the mission and just dare to see where it may take you.
The game will be on 70% discount during the next four days as well — so don't miss out!
Soundtrack released
Hi everyone,
Today we'd like to make a couple of small(-ish) announcements.
Firstly, Blood & Gold is at the deepest discount it's ever been right — 75% off on Steam until tomorrow. So grab it while you can!
Secondly, we often saw people expressing their love for the music you can hear in-game. And now you can listen to it wherever and whenever you want with the separate Blood & Gold Soundtrack, now available on Steam!
We dedicate this to the composer of the most popular tune from Blood & Gold (cover of "Drunken sailor"), who tragically passed away last year — Vladimir Kochetkov.
Update Notes (September 12)
Hi everyone,
New small update for Blood & Gold is now available for download.
Update notes 2.066:
- Corrected water shader for the sea siege locations.
- Fixed an error with incorrect number of paddles for towers during sea sieges.
