Ahoy mateys, welcome Below Deck!

We have exciting news to share this month. Cass Bay Games have received another grant from CODE NZ, this time it’s to fund a trip to Cologne, Germany to pitch Davy Jones’ Deckhand at Gamescom, the biggest games event in the world!

Ben and Tepene will be flying over in August with a pitch deck and a dream. We’ll be attending the business area from Wednesday to Friday, hanging out in the CODE pavilion and meeting publishers.

NZ CODE pavilion in Gamescom 2024 business area

What are we working on?

Following our April playtest, we have been getting to work on our next set of updates. We’ve been making general bug fixes and some juicy improvements like additional sprites for our counter-attack animations. Plus the art team is now focusing on our first cut scene, which will be the opening of the game - at least for our first public Steam demo! As a newsletter subscriber you get to have a sneak peek at our private pre-vis animation, voiced by our very own game director Ben! 🤣

Sneak Peek: Davy Jones' Deckhand - Intro cut scene previs

And we’ve started to build out a major new feature: voyage selection! In the full game, players will have the freedom to explore an open world map by completing voyages. The voyages are procedurally generated based on factors like distance from your current location, and the biomes you travel through along the way.

Sneak Peek: Freely “travel by roguelike” in Davy Jones’ Deckhand