I am posting this because those of us who purchased 10,000,000 will eventually get this game free. (:)
Hey kids, remember April 2008? Remember You Have To Burn The Rope? Remember how we laughed? Well, You Must Build A Boat has absolutely nothing to do with that. A new game with an imperative in its title just sent me all nostalgic. Look at the stuff we were banging on about back then. Blueberry Garden! Demigod! Jetpack Brontosaurus! Possible Deus Ex 3 concept art!
Man. Man. No, no, I’m fine, I’m just… sniff. I SAID I’M FINE. It’s just been raining on my face.
You Must Build A Boat is the sequel to wonderful RPG/match-3/endless runner mash-up 10000000. It’ll also be free to existing 10000000 owners.
YMBAB began life as an expansion to 10000000, but dev Luca Redwood found it eventually deviated so far from its parent game that it made sense to spin it into its own thing.
As far as I can tell, there’s now much more focus on having an adventure of your own, rather than simply striving to beat the thing. For instance, you get to capture monsters to, er, perform special services on your quests, recruit crew members to bolster you base and make snap decisions such as whether to try and translate ancient runes or smash open the thing they’re inscribed onto.
This is all I know. I got it all from looking at this webpage. I’m sorry. I’ll find out more soon. Oh, wait, he told us this too:
“It still has the same frantic-fast paced running and matching from 10000000, but each run is preceded by a period of exploration where you come across lots of choose-your-own-adventure style choices. You’ll be going on missions to get more crew for the boat you must build, find artefacts and the like, so what is a good choice for one mission, might be a bad choice for another, and there are always cool risk analysis based tradeoffs or choices to increase the rewards in exchange for making things more difficult.”
I’m also going to go out on a limb here and predict that at some point in the game, you must build a boat.
I loved 10000000, so the idea of a more fleshed-out, varied, player-personal take on it is enormously appealing.
Also, the plan is for anyone who bought 10000000 on PC to receive a free copy of You Must Build A Boat, given that was the original promise back when it was only planned as an expansion. Which is jolly nice, isn’t it?
There’s a little more detail on the whys and wherefore of YMBAB’s genesis here. It also has a link to buy 10000000 if you like, as it’s currently discounted to $1.50.
IMPORTANT DECLARATION OF INTEREST: YMBAB dev Luca Redwood lent me his Oculus Rift a while back, after Twitter-seeing me agonising over whether to buy one. While I have never actually met the fellow (he posted the Rift to me), it is my opinion that he is A Good Egg and therefore it’s theoretically possible that anything I might say about his games is monstrously distorted by gratitude. YOU DECIDE.
How I ended up building a boat
By Luca | January 23, 2014 | Uncategorized
You Must Build A Boat
I just put up a page introducing You Must Build A Boat
What’s all that about then?
Choo Choo
So, when 10000000 released, people, to my surprise, really liked it, and asked for more content. It seemed to make a lot of sense so I started doing that.
For lots of reasons; no small part due to my bad project management, that small update kept growing. To “Big Update” to “DLC” to “Expansion Pack” and still growing more
At the same time I was struggling with the design; I make games from the perspective of the experience I want to give to the player, and everything that goes into the game tries to make that experience happen.
In this case I was working with the experience “More Content” which doesn’t really make sense and is led to a runaway update – I didn’t have that fixed point to aim for, so I guess I didn’t know where i was going, and wouldn’t even be able to tell when I got there
Resolution
I took a step back and realised I’d added and removed so much stuff. There wasn’t much that remained from 10000000. To get back on track I decided “OK, this is a new game, and this is the experience, and I’ll take it from there.” The game has become way way better for it
Unfortunately for me I’d promised a really big update, but now didn’t have one, and to be honest, I don’t want to have one. I really like what 10000000 was as a standalone experience and I don’t want to mess with that.
It’s important for me to keep my word so, If you’ve got 10000000, you can have the sequel, the whole shebang, for free too.
For PC, I’ve spoke to Steam and Humble and there a pretty easy way of doing this – If you’ve got 10000000 when You Must Build A Boat launches, you’ll get have it automatically added to your relevant account.
I’ve not quite worked out a good way to do this for Google Play/Appstore yet. If I can’t come up with a better idea – I’ll just launch it free for a day, and then anybody who is a fan can grab it.
And here is a humble widget for 10000000 because y’know… marketing