Some people seem to have figured out how to invest in shops, but I'm seeing a lot of players who haven't used that feature at all yet (so I assume they may not know how it works).

If you have the correct resources, many locations will give you the option to convince it to work for you.  It may be farmers needing stone to add a well to their property, a blacksmith in need of iron and coal, or a tavern needing more food to feed its customers.  As long as the location is not already loyal to another player, and you have the required resources, you will have the option to earn the place's loyalty.

Once the place is loyal to you, you will have an additional option to set the description.  This is like in the blazing game, and allows people to hopefully write some fun stuff for others to read.

The shop that is loyal to you will slowly generate resources each time you take a turn.  When you eventually circle the land and land back on the same spot, your loyal workers will reward you with all the resources they had saved up.  Once you leave, they go right back to saving up more for whenever you return.

No matter what, the loyal shop will remain loyal for 3 times that another player lands on it.  After 3 times, another player landing on that spot can choose to spend resources to basically capture from you.  The shop will then serve their new master.

These investment properties should be thought of as long term investments.  You may wind up circling the land 2 or 3 times before you're lucky enough to land on the same spot again, but as long as other players haven't captured it, eventually it turns into a nice boost of resources.

Traveling between lands is something you'll want to avoid until you've built yourself up a bit.  When moving around a land, you only use up 1 food each move.  Once you venture out into the open ocean, you and each additional crew member all use 1 food per move.  Having a small crew will use up less food, but will also leave you much more vulnerable to the many dangers you may run into.

I think the various crew skills are probably understandable enough, but the "skilled navigator" one might confuse a few people.  When traveling across the open ocean, each navigator you have on board will add 1 to your movement die roll.  If you find yourself with a handful of navigators, moving across the ocean will be very speedy.

The high seas,ahoy!
Since I love everything and anything that has to do with ships and seas, this is just perfect.

Tryed a bit of it,just now, and so far what I have seen are those buttons which just say choice. Are those just the placeholders for things that haven't been implemented yet?
Another thing I'd like to see would be games showing options for particular locations even if you don't have the gold to do something. I guess show what you can do at a location but dim the buttons if the requirements are not met.

Fun stuff!

grryf

Right now i'm stuck at a place because i have no button to roal the dice. Anything i can do?

I believe I found and fixed that bug.  Earlier I closed the server and launched it again (to fix something), and it seems there was a typo in my loading code, so it was mixing up scripts.  The Smeltery you were on Dark, had been partially overwritten with scripts for the Sea side tower.  The tower would normally require you to attack it before you could sail away, but since you cannot attack a Smeltery there were no button options.

If anyone runs into that again, be sure to let me know.

Okay, glad that nasty bug is fixed, thanks for catching that one.
The resources thing is rather fun, though it'd be nice to have a record of where your loyal settlements are, also like Grryf I'd appreciate knowing what resources were needed at which location to do what.

The only issue I'm having is twice now I've got killed by that bloody tower, even though my crew had three members, two with pluses to cannons. It'd be sort of nice to know how tough the tower is, especially since it's the only fight I've seen thus far, and trying to race past it does uba damagee, indeed unlike blazing since there is no explanation of how I died I have no idea what would or wouldn't be good stats against the tower.

Btw, I know the 7 lands currently are relatively similar, but it'd be nice if they had a little difference in terms of description, even if the encounters were pretty much the same.

For example, in menton the textile mill is described as lots of looms with women weaving (presumably cotton cloth), on another continent it could be a silk worm farm on a desert coast with people cultivating and drying silk, while on another continent it could be a rough village of sheepherds spinning fleases into wool with hand sticks, or a trappers camp in the frozen northern woods with men curing firs.

For practical purposes all give cloth, but have the idea of going somewhere different each time thus meaning sailing to other continents had some feeling of travel.

So I'm wondering, how long does it take to circle one land?

Dark I've tried to add some helpful descriptions to those enemy encounters.  A few of them give you very specific details, while others give you an estimate.  For example, it may say there are about 7 thieves when there may be 6 or 8.  This is me trying to pass a bug off as a feature, in true programmer fashion.  Some locations can customize their description as needed while others can not based on how things are designed.  When it cannot alter its description I had to be vague because the conditions of the battle are a bit random and there is no way to display what those values will be.

Customizing the locations for each land is definitely something I want to do.  I almost blocked off 6 of the lands before making the game public, just because they were all still flavorless copies of the first.  A few differences in prices and amounts of certain shops, but they all sound alike.  That's one of those things that will just take time to sit and write out new descriptions for everything.  Looks like you've given me a small head start on that. 

Smoothgunner, haha sorry about that!  I believe it was late last night or early this morning (depending on time zone) and I was watching you and a few others circling the land.  I think you had at least 6 shops loyal to you, which is pretty good in my opinion.

Baruch, at the moment I believe each land has 124 spaces.  To move you roll a 1D6 die, so we could say on average you move about 3.5 spaces per turn.  I guess that means it will take, on average, about 35 rolls to fully circle a land.

Mayana, prices are still going to be adjusted further, but it is true that prices differ based on which land you're on.  Each land will be pretty close to average on 5 of the game's 7 resources.  Each land has 1 plentiful resource that it sells for cheaper and pays very little for.  Each land also has 1 scarce resource that it charges more for, but pays more when you are selling it.  The gap between "cheap" and "expensive" is what I still plan to mess around with.  I want there to be a lot of room to make money buying and trading resources between lands, but I also don't want to totally screw over players to where they cannot get a particular resource without traveling somewhere else.  It's a balancing act.

Mayana, yeah all of your lands reset when you die.  I thought about making them stay loyal to the new you once you've started over, and that may be a change I make in the near future.

Crew morale is what tends to kill me off too, so I may need to make it a little easier in that regards.  What I personally do is hire new crew whenever I can, and hope one or more is an entertainer.  Those guys gradually raise the crew's morale as you sail around.

Aprone, do your web games use the Kaldobsky account or can I just create any name and password? I'm just wondering whether I need to use my paid account or not.

Chris for the time being, neither this game nor Blazing use the actual Kaldobsky gamer accounts.  You can just fill in whatever you like.  Down the road, I do intend to switch them over to using the official gamer accounts, but I have to do a lot of back-end coding to get the official ones compatible with how I made these web games.

Firefly, sorry I didn't answer your question sooner.  When looking back, I noticed your comment and I must have somehow missed it the first time.  My apologies.

If the game were to get very popular, like popular enough that it was worth taking time away from other projects to make a dedicated Seven Shores client, then I might.  Even if I did, I'm sure it would not be what people are hoping for though because it would be a windows client, not a phone/tablet one.

Getting a client app to run nicely on the different platforms is a bit of an undertaking.  Yeah I know there are shortcuts to make it work by using engines and libraries written by other people, but with a few exceptions I only use code I've written myself.  The exception is that I'm willing to use Microsoft's Direct X library for loading in sound files, adjusting volume, and adjusting pan.  To me those features are so basic that I don't feel like I'm riding along on someone elses work by using them.  I never use any of the other direct X sound, positioning, or direct input features.

The simplistic nature of Seven Shores and Blazing were done this way because it meant I didn't need dedicated client apps for the games.  The same game will run in someone's browser on windows/mac/linux, on any tablet, and on all the smart phones.  So working across the board is a huge plus, and the price for getting that so easily is that it is limited to the webpage themed design.  I hope that made sense.

I never put sounds into Blazing, but I really should sit down and work the bugs out of that code.  Even simple sounds would probably liven up both games and make them feel more professional than they currently do.

@Aprone, drop me an email on alternative descriptions and some notes on the different lands (eg, culture and climate so I don't have a description of snow bound woods in the desert kingdom), and I'll see what I can do.

That's the sort of project I love putting time into.

As regards clients and such, personally I'm very happy with the browser version myself, indeed when the game is a bit more complete you might consider linking with some of the gamebook sites for games like Age of fable since fans of gamebooks would probably enjoy this sort of game as well.